All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [419]
Many German convicted mass killers served jail sentences of only a few years, or even escaped by paying a fine of fifty almost worthless Reichsmarks. The Germans and Japanese were not entirely mistaken in regarding the international war crimes trials of 1945–46 as ‘victors’ justice.’ Some British and Americans, and many Russians, were guilty of offences under international law, the killing of prisoners notable among them, yet very few faced even courts-martial. To have been on the winning side sufficed to secure amnesty; Allied war crimes were seldom even acknowledged. British submarine commander ‘Skip’ Miers, for instance, who in 1941 distressed even some of his own crew by insisting that German soldiers struggling in the Mediterranean after the sinking of their caïques should be machine-gunned, was awarded a Victoria Cross and eventually became an admiral. American, Canadian and British troops who routinely shot snipers and Waffen SS prisoners on the battlefield, usually in supposed retaliation for similar actions, went unindicted. The Nuremberg and Tokyo trials and sentences represented not injustice, but partial justice.
In both Europe and Asia from 1945 onwards, the confrontation with the Soviet Union created new strategic imperatives which were perceived to demand the enlistment of thousands of German and Japanese war criminals in US, British and Russian intelligence organisations and scientific research establishments. With notable cynicism, the Americans amnestied the Japanese biological warfare Unit 731’s commander, Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii, in return for his secrets. After investigation, US scientists at Camp Detrick declared Ishii’s data worthless. But as a result of a personal decision by Supreme Commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur, most of the 20,000 scientists and physicians engaged in Japan’s wartime biological warfare programme were able to resume comfortable civilian careers, despite having been responsible for unspeakable murders in China. The only retribution for their atrocities was extracted by the Russians, who convicted twelve leading members of Unit 731 at a trial at Khabarovsk in 1949. The guilty received long terms of imprisonment; Gen. MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo denounced as propaganda both the trials and well-founded Soviet allegations of an American cover-up of Japan’s biological warfare crimes.
Who was to blame for the catastrophe that had befallen Japan? Petty Officer Kisao Ebisawa shrugged: ‘The brass – the people in charge.’ But then he added: ‘Really, though, one must include the whole nation, because its mood had been dragging us towards war for so long. There was a horrible inevitability about the way we just plunged deeper and deeper into the mire.’ After 1945 the Japanese people renounced their militarists, and indeed the soldiers who had fought in the war, with a fervour that distressed the nation’s veterans, many of whom remained impenitent. Colonel Hattori Takushiro, former military secretary to Japan’s war minister, wrote proudly in 1956: ‘The Japanese army had no peer in its terrific fighting capacity, which is a separate issue from the fact that Japan lost the war.’ The Japanese people embraced the post-war United States with an enthusiasm that won the hearts of most Americans who served in the occupation army. Japan’s campaigns of conquest, and its treatment of its subject peoples, notably including the Chinese, became forbidden subjects of political or social