Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [210]
By the time the last of 419 witnesses were heard and judgment made, the trial transcript filled 49,858 pages. The verdict came in the form of a 1,218-page opinion, which was signed by nine of the eleven justices assigned to the tribunal and rendered on November 12, 1948. It sentenced seven defendants to death, sixteen to life imprisonment, and two to shorter prison sentences. Two defendants died during the trial, and one was removed to a psychiatric hospital for treatment. Those condemned to die were dressed in U.S. Army salvage work clothing and hanged on December 23, 1948. These included Prime Minister Tojo and Lt. Gen. Heitaro Kimura, who as chief of the Burma-area Japanese Army in August 1944 approved orders to use Allied prisoners on the railway project.
According to the testimony of Tadakazu Wakamatsu, the head of transportation and communications for the General Staff, the decision to build the railway was made in the summer of 1942 by Chief of Staff Hajime Sugiyama, Minister of War Hideki Tojo, and Vice Minister of War Kimura in response to a request from the Southern Army.
United Press Tokyo war crimes trial correspondent Arnold C. Brackman wrote, “To observers in daily attendance at the tribunal, the prosecution’s evidence always appeared to sink from bad to worse. Whenever I thought we had hit rock bottom of Poe’s indescribable pit, we descended, to our shock, to a lower level of depravity.”
Gen. Ryukichi Tanaka, the former chief of the Military Affairs Bureau, testified that Tojo had ordered “all prisoners of war to engage in forced labor” at a meeting of War Ministry officials in 1942 at Ichigaya, in the very building where the Tokyo tribunal sat. There was British testimony of coolies being forced to wear weights tied to their privates to amuse their captors; Chinese patients had glass rods inserted into their vaginas; “sick coolies were used for the practice of judo and thrown over the shoulders of Japanese.”
On March 26, 1946, Prime Minister Tojo testified under cross-examination: “The Japanese idea about prisoners is very different from that in Europe and America. In Japan, it is regarded as a disgrace [to be captured]. Under Japanese criminal law, anyone who becomes a prisoner while still able to resist has committed a criminal offense, the maximum punishment for which is the death penalty.”
A document from a Japanese agency known as the Central Investigating Committee Concerning Prisoners of War detailed the chain of responsibility on the Death Railway that ran from the NCOs and junior officers who ran the work camps to the Fifth and Ninth Railway Regiments, the Railway Inspection Office, the South General Army, the Imperial General Headquarters, and the Ministry of War itself. Sir Arthur Comyns Carr, the associate prosecutor for the United Kingdom, stretched rhetoric only slightly in calling this unofficial document “the confession of the Japanese Army with regard to the Burma-Siam railway.” If it fell short of that, it certainly at a minimum revealed that Prime Minister Tojo’s high command, and perhaps even the emperor, was in the loop regarding the use of prisoners as slave labor.
Some justice had been meted out privately, by the ex-prisoners themselves, after hostilities ceased. In Saigon, some Australians caught up with a guard who had been particularly cruel on the railroad, killing several of their countrymen in cold blood. They found him in civilian clothes, his distinguishing scar visible on the back of his neck. Afterward, all they would say was, “Well, he ain’t going back to Korea. He’s not going back.”
An American survivor of the Death Railway told an interviewer:
I had