By Adolfo Quizon Paglinawan

 

Part Two of Two: Who should take the blame for the Death March?

On September 1945, Homma was arrested by Allied troops and brought to a court martial for war crimes, permitting members of his command to commit “brutal atrocities and other high crimes”, mostly related to the Death March.

The prosecution rested its case on January 21, 1946.

Turning to his defense, Homma’s attorneys sought to establish that Homma had been ignorant of what his men were doing. Surprisingly, the defense also called several of Homma’s men to try to show that the march wasn’t all that bad — an impossible position in light of the harsh conditions that numerous survivors had already described. In the light of prevailing emotions. These witnesses for the General were considered all having a motive to lie to avoid being charged with war crimes themselves.

On February 4, Homma himself stood as witness to insist he had not learned of the march’s horrors until hearing the survivors’ testimony. He portrayed himself as preoccupied with the invasion of Corregidor.  He expressed shame for the atrocities but claimed he had relied on his subordinates who did not appraise him of mistreatment to prisoners of war.

On the same day Homma took the stand, however, the defense got bad news when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene in the case of General Tomoyuki Yamashita that was earlier tried. Since that case raised the same issues as Homma’s, it was now unlikely the high court would have the objectivity to hear his lawyers’ motions.

As the trial neared its end, the defense tried to humanize its client by calling Homma’s 42-year-old wife, Fujiko, to testify that her husband wasn’t the kind of person to countenance atrocities.

“I am proud of the fact that I am the wife of Gen. Homma,” she said, as Homma wept at counsel table. Mrs. Homma, described by a reporter as a tiny, kimono-clad woman who spoke “animatedly and earnestly,” was such a sympathetic figure, prosecutor Meek later remarked, that he was “never so glad in all my experiences in court to have a witness get off the stand.”

After only a week after his testimony, Homma was pronounced guilty by chief judge, Maj. Gen. Leo Donovan on February 11, and sentenced to be “shot to death with musketry.”

That same day, the Supreme Court refused to hear Homma’s case, which removed the last legal obstacle to Homma being punished by military judges operating under the rules set by MacArthur’s headquarters.

Two SC justices, Frank Murphy and Wiley Rutledge, disagreed and condemned the proceedings. “Hasty, revengeful action is not the American way,” they stated, and compared the trials of Homma and other Japanese officers to “blood purges” and “judicial lynchings.”

Homma’s fate now rested with Douglas MacArthur. As supreme commander, he would decide if Homma would be executed or spared.

Fujiko Homma traveled to Tokyo to plead for the last time for her husband’s case, and MacArthur met with her on March 11. She was a “cultured woman of great personal charm,” he said, and he called the meeting “one of the most trying hours of my life.” He promised to give “the gravest consideration” to what she had said.

Notwithstanding Mrs. Homma’s pleas, MacArthur affirmed the conviction and death sentence 10 days later, saying “If this defendant does not deserve his judicial fate, none in jurisdictional history ever did. There can be no greater, more heinous or more dangerous crime than the mass destruction, under guise of military authority … of helpless men.”

The sentence was carried out at one o’clock in the morning of April 3, 1946, at Los Baños, a former internment camp south of Manila. The military police accompanied Homma, hands bound behind his back, into the yard and tied him to a post.

He was “calm and stoical,” a reporter noted, and refused to make a final statement. A black hood was placed over his head, and an army doctor put a four-inch round target over his heart. On command, 12 soldiers standing 15 paces away fired.

“Army precision marked the grim, nearly silent drama,” the Associated Press reported.

Justice served?

Historians and legal commentators have had harsh words for Homma’s trial.

The evidence was heavily tilted to allow the judges to conclude that Homma knew what his troops were doing, so the outcome might have been the same regardless of the circumstances.

But MacArthur’s pervasive role, however, created an unsettling appearance of unfairness and bias, leading to a preordained result.

Homma had beaten MacArthur on Bataan, the only time the Japanese had defeated the U.S. Army in a major campaign and the only battlefield loss MacArthur had ever suffered.

The judges answered to MacArthur, and MacArthur’s rules of evidence wouldn’t have passed muster in an American court. An experienced prosecutor was pitted against a courtroom novice, and just one person — MacArthur — had the power to spare Homma’s life.

The deck was obviously stacked. D. Clayton James, a respected biographer of MacArthur, called the trial a miscarriage of justice, and William Manchester, another prominent MacArthur biographer, went so far as to conclude that Homma was convicted by a kangaroo court “which flouted justice with the Supreme Commander’s approval and probably at his urging.”

The question was why was MacArthur in haste to try (Yamashita and) Homma in Manila? Why were they tried outside and ahead of the Tokyo trials?

By January 19, 1946, MacArthur had already announced the establishment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, and a few weeks later selected its eleven judges from names submitted to him by the governments sitting on the Allied Far Eastern Commission. He also named Joseph Berry Keenan the chief prosecutor and Australian Sir William Webb the tribunal’s president.

Was this not a clear exemplification of “victors’ justice”. Could not the fate of Yamashita and Homma wait for the resumption of the Tokyo trials began on May 3, 1946?

One of the more authoritative studies condemns them strongly: “We have found its foundation in international law to be shaky. We have seen that its process was seriously flawed. We have examined the verdict’s inadequacy as history.” (Peace and Justice by Rachel Kerr, Eirin Mobekk}

Two of Homma’s subordinates, Major General Yoshitaka Kawane and Colonel Kurataro Hirano, were prosecuted by an American military commission in Yokohama in 1948, using evidence presented at the Homma trial. They were sentenced to death by hanging and executed at Sugamo Prison on June 12, 1949.

Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, who had directly ordered the killing of POWs and atrocities related to the march, fled to China from Thailand when the war ended to escape the British authorities. As a Pan-Asianist, he returned to Japan in 1949 and was elected to the Diet as an advocate of renewed militarism.

Through the 1950’s he worked for American intelligence alongside Colonel Takushiro Hattori, who alternately served as the chief of the Army General Staff’s Operations Section and Secretary to Prime Minister Hideki Tojo. In 1961, Tsuji disappeared on a trip to Laos and was confirmed dead in 1968.

Same justice for an American general?

What happened to the person who should have been made responsible for the Death March?

Major General Edward King faced a court martial. You can read about King’s details from this US Army War College Strategy Research Project https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA309256.pdf

Judge for yourself. His defense was there were situations in which an officer had the moral duty to rise above his professional duty, even if that caused him to disobey his orders. It argued General King made the extremely difficult but correct decision to obey his conscience and not his orders, which would have led to meaningless slaughter of his men and the achievement of no military gain.

Well, tell that to the almost 75,000 men, mostly Filipinos, who walked out from Bataan defeated without a fight, 20,000 of whom would not survive the 105-kilometer march. I can only conjecture how many more Japanese they could have killed without a self-righteous commander surrendering their arms.

As we speak, King’s cowardice has served as the surrender of the biggest force in American history.

I puked when I found out that he was instead celebrated as a hero when they were finally freed, with King being awarded by the President of the United States as authorized by Act of Congress, a Bronze Oak Leaf Cluster in lieu of a Second Award of the Army Distinguished Service Medal, “for exceptionally meritorious and distinguished services to the Government of the United States, in a duty of great responsibility in the Philippine Islands from 1 December 1941 to 11 March 1942.”

The rest of the citation read: “He coordinated the employment of all field artillery units in the defense of the Bataan Peninsula, and the allocation of available munitions. The effectiveness of his planning and supervision was demonstrated by the superior performance of the artillery units throughout the operations. The singularly distinctive accomplishments of Major General King reflect the highest credit upon himself and the United States Army.”

There are those who think King took the sword for his boss despite public disavowals. At the end of the day, it was this man who threw a fourth of helpless 75,000 gallant men, mostly Filipinos, to their graves.

As we have explained earlier in Part One, Maj. Gen. King did not just have the option but ample time to regroup the Luzon forces for a protracted defense of Highway 3 which was the solitary corridor from Lingayen to Manila.

He did not object when MacArthur ordered him to withdraw the forces defending the beaches of Pangasinan and the roads to Manila, and concentrating them in Bataan.

As a result, what Homma predicted as months to capture Manila took only 12 days. And when Manila had already been occupied, on April 3, 1942, Homma launched his offensive on Bataan, and his troops sliced through Allied lines. What he predicted one month to overtake Bataan, only took six days as thereupon, in defiance of orders from his superiors, MacArthur and Jonathan Wainwright, Edward King surrendered a force 15x the strength of the enemy, against their will.

A Reddit vlogger commented, “McArthur really fucked up the defense of the Philippines when he refused to counter attack the initial Japanese landings in Luzon. He had the numerical advantage but instead he retreated his men to Bataan after just a few days of fighting. His men were then cut off and forced to surrender once supplies ran low.”

One day after King’s fainthearted decision, the Death March began, with Homma wanting to put the prisoners out of the way as he began his assault on Corregidor.

A month after, Corregidor would also fall.

There was hardly any report of any atrocity and willful recklessness resulting to death, as the about 12,000 POWs from the fallen rock were transported to Manila by sea, and eventually railed to Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija for their incarceration at Camp Pangatian.

Obviously, this was not factored in Homma’s trial.

And King’s decoration as a war hero.

Author’s Postscript: I gathered a treasure of information on World War II issues in the Pacific theatre as I assisted Ambassador Nicanor Jimenez, who was the first veterans affairs officer of the Philippine Embassy in Washington DC in my capacity as press attaché.  Acknowledgment is due to then surviving WWII veterans Patricio Ganio and Guillermo Rumingan who had first-hand knowledge of the historic rescue of the POWs at Camp Pangatian by the Sixth Rangers Battalion in close collaboration with Filipino guerillas. We unearthed a lot of photographs and films from American, Philippine and Japanese perspectives, as US war historians compiled all available materials in the Navy Archives along Pennsylvania Avenue. I also facilitated many of Hampton Sides’s sources in the Philippines when he was writing The Ghost Soldiers. After my tenure as a diplomat, I served as consultant to Secretary of Tourism Richard Gordon, initiating the project to film Side’s book by Sony-Columbia in Hollywood. The movie “The Great Raid” was finally released by Miramax in August 2005 starring James Franco, Benjamin Pratt and our very own Cesar Montano.

   

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