Robert Steuard Report from Manila – Pacific War Crimes Trial In Manila – General Yamashita – October 31, 1945 – Mutual – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
Tomoyuki Yamashita, formerly Commanding General of the Fourteenth Army Group of the Imperial Japanese Army in the Philippine Islands, was arraigned before a United States Military Commission and charged with unlawfully disregarding and failing to discharge his duty as commander to control the acts of members of his command by permitting them to commit war crimes. The essence of the case for the Prosecution was that the accused knew or must have known of, and permitted, the widespread crimes committed in the Philippines by troops under his command (which included murder, plunder, devastation, rape, lack of provision for prisoners of war and shooting of guerrillas without trial), and/or that he did not take the steps required of him by international law to find out the state of discipline maintained by his men and the conditions prevailing in the prisoner-of-war and civilian internee camps under his command. The Defence argued, inter alia, that what was alleged against , Yamashita did not constitute a war crime, that the Commission was without jurisdiction to try the case, that there was no proof that the accused even knew of the offences which were being perpetrated and that no war crime could therefore be said to have been committed by him, that no kind of plan was discernible in the atrocities. committed, and that the conditions under which Yamashita had had to work, caused in large part by the United States military offensive and by guerrilla activities, had prevented him from maintaining any adequate overall supervision even over the acts of such troops in the islands as were actually under his command.
The evidence before the Commission regarding the accused’s knowledge of, acquiescence in, or approval of the crimes committed by his troops was conflicting, but of the crimes themselves, many and widespread both in space and time, there was abundant evidence, which in general the Defence did not attempt to deny.
The Commission sentenced Yamashita to death and its findings and sentence were confirmed by higher military authority. When the matter came before the Supreme Court of the United States on a petition for certiorari and an application for leave to file a petition for writs of habeas corpus and prohibition, the majority of that Court, in a judgment delivered by Chief Justice Stone, ruled that the order convening the Commission which tried Yamashita was a lawful order under both United States and International Law, that the Commission was lawfully constituted, that the offence of which Yamashita was charged constituted a violation of the laws of war, and that the procedural safeguards of the United States Articles of War and of the provisions of the Geneva Prisoners of War Convention relating to Judicial Proceedings had no application to war crime trials.
Yamashita was executed on 23rd February 1946.
Here is a report via shortwave from Mutual correspondent Robert Stuard, who was covering the trial in Manila – Day 3, as presented by Mutual on October 1, 1945.
