Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [209]
The Allied War Graves Registration determined in 1946 that the total deaths among Allied POWs in the Pacific numbered 12,399. Of the 270,000 native laborers or romusha on the line, 72,000 were counted as fatalities, although the actual number of deaths may be three times that high. More recent estimates put Allied POW deaths at 16,000 and romusha deaths at more than 200,000.
If the scale of these numbers does not approach, say, Russian losses in World War II or the number of Jewish victims murdered in the Holocaust, the horror that underlies them matches anything in human annals. When the war was over, a sweeping effort was made to gather evidence and bring to justice those responsible.
The proceedings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East began on May 3, 1946, in Tokyo. The indictment brought fifty-five charges against twenty-eight defendants, all of them high-level generals and ministers, including Prime Minister Hideki Tojo. Absent from the indictment was the very figure who seemed to animate Japanese wartime decision making with a divine imperative, Emperor Hirohito himself. Though Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Herbert P. Bix has inferred the emperor’s personal approval behind Japan’s use of poison gas in China, the experimental use of bacteriological weapons in China in 1940, and the annihilation campaigns against Chinese communists in 1941, General MacArthur lobbied that the first grandson of Emperor Meiji be left out of the indictment in order to stabilize the delicate process of postwar reconstruction and reduce the risk that Japan might look to the Soviets for friendship after the war.
With Prime Minister Tojo left as its highest-ranking target, the indictment accused the defendants of conspiring to wage aggressive war and “murdering, maiming, and ill-treating prisoners of war [and] civilian internees…forcing them to labor under inhumane conditions.” Chief U.S. prosecutor Joseph B. Keenan said to the press: “It is high time, and indeed was so before this war began, that the promoters of aggressive, ruthless war and treaty-breakers should be stripped of the glamour of national heroes and exposed as what they really are—plain, ordinary murderers.” The earliest American articulation of the legal-moral basis of Keenan’s vigor had come from Secretary of State Daniel Webster, who said in 1842: “The law of war forbids the wounding, killing, impressments into troops of the country, or the enslaving or otherwise maltreating of prisoners of war, unless they have been guilty of some grave crime; and from the obligations of this law no civilized state can discharge itself.” These principles were codified in the Hague Convention II of 1899 in an annex entitled “Laws and Customs of War on Land,” and supplemented by the Hague Convention IV of 1907, signed by forty-one nations, ratified by twenty-five including Japan. During World War I, in 1917, the U.S. Department of State held that Hague was not contractually binding because all warring nations were not signatories to it, but that “in so far as the rules set forth in the convention are declaratory of international law, they are of course obligatory as being part of the law of nations.” This would be the legal interpretation that made Japan’s calculated refusal to ratify the Geneva Convention of 1929 a moot point.
As the Allied prosecutors argued at Tokyo, Japan had committed itself to the Geneva Convention of 1929 on January 29, 1942, when Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo responded with these words to American and British inquiries on Japan’s intentions: “Japan strictly observes the Geneva Convention of July 27, 1929, relative to the Red Cross, as a signatory of that Convention.