The Life And Death Of A Japanese General

John Deane Potter

• Publisher: Verdun Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786259394
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

LEYTE…LUZON…MANILA...places where thousands of Americans died, bloody battles that finally turned the tide for America in World War II. Who was the man who led the Japanese to fight so tenaciously in the face of certain defeat, who cost the Americans such a hard-won victory?While Manila was being razed and raped by Japanese troops, while his soldiers were dying of starvation in the hills, Tomoyuki Yamashita finally bowed to the orders of his Emperor and surrendered to American forces. Official historian Robert Ross says of the brilliant general, "No one can ever dispute the fact that Yamashita executed one of the most effective delaying actions in the whole history of warfare."Yamashita was the first Japanese to be tried as a war criminal; as general he was held responsible for the atrocities committed by the soldiers under his command. Was his conviction in accordance with the code of American justice? Or was he a scapegoat of war, was he sent to the scaffold in vengeful retaliation for overwhelming American losses?Foreign correspondent and biographer John Deane Potter interviewed General Yamashita in the military prison near Manila and later spoke at length with the general's widow, who gave him access to her husband's papers, books, and photographs.

 

CHAPTER 1—An Interview with General Yamashita

I met Japan’s most famous general, Tomoyuki Yamashita, in a cool, clean cell block of the New Bilibid prison, twenty-five miles from Manila, where he was awaiting trial as a war criminal.

Dressed in a white silk shirt and high, brightly polished jackboots, he was sitting on a wooden bench outside his ten-foot cell. In the cell block were sixteen other Japanese generals and admirals, reading or writing at a long, scrubbed wooden table.

Yamashita talked to me at length about his career, from the time he left the little mountain village to when he became Japan’s foremost general—a career that was to lead him to the whitewashed cell where he was sitting.

He was homely, and one could see how he got his Filipino name “Old Potato Face.” But when he took off his glasses, his rugged face looked almost benign.

He waved his spectacles toward the twenty-one-page file which contained the indictment against him. Moon-faced General Muto was carefully reading the charges while we talked. Muto, the perfect staff officer, unmoved and efficient although he was also being held as a war criminal, rapidly covered sheet after sheet with notes as he read, trying to refute the allegations against his commander in chief.

What was Yamashita’s own view of the charges? “Let me put it like this,” he said. “My command was as big as MacArthur’s or Lord Louis Mountbatten’s. How could I tell if some of my soldiers misbehaved? It was impossible for any man in my position to control every action of his subordinate commanders, let alone the deeds of individual soldiers. The charges are completely new to me. If they had happened, and I had known about them, I would have punished the wrongdoers severely.”

He paused to light an American cigarette, then said with resignation: “But, in war, someone always has to lose. What I am really being charged with is—losing the war.” Then he added with a smile. “It could have happened to General MacArthur, you know.”

We talked of the end of the war. “Japan would have lost,” he said, “even if the atom bomb had not been developed. We were too weak—we started with too few resources. Of course, the bomb and the entry of Russia had a tremendous effect on our civilian population. But all it did was to end the war a little more quickly. It would have made no difference in the long run.”

Yamashita readily discussed his Malayan campaign with me, drawing neat, soldierly maps of the country, with arrows showing where he had hooked behind the British forces to cut them off.

“Malaya gave me quite a lot of worry,” he admitted. “Some of the soldiers from Britain and Australia fought like fine, brave men. I cannot, unfortunately, say the same thing about the Indian troops, who—well, the kindest thing to say about them is that they disappeared into the jungle when they saw us.

“What beat the British troops, I think, was our tactic of landing behind them in little ships and cutting them into small sections.”

Yamashita revealed a significant piece of secret history to me. He said that after he had taken Singapore, he wanted to discuss with Tojo a plan for the invasion of Australia, and sent him a message: “Singapore, the great British bastion in the Far East, has fallen into our hands. The Allies are effectively sealed off....” Instead of an advance farther west into Burma and perhaps India, his plan was to leave a strong garrison in Malaya and Burma and strike down the Pacific to the coast of Australia.

Tojo turned down the plan, making the excuse of lengthened supply lines, which would be precarious and open to enemy attack. But his real reason, apparently, was that he wanted to keep driving west to try to effect a junction with Hitler. In those days when the Axis seemed unbeatable, this meeting was probably scheduled to take place somewhere in the Punjab.

Yamashita’s plan to conquer Australia was practically identical with his successful campaign in Malaya. He intended to land on each side of the major Australian cities and cut them off, first making a series of dummy landings to draw off the pitifully few Australian troops.

“Why, there were hardly enough Australians to have organized an effective resistance to the Japanese Army,” Yamashita said. “All they could ever hope to do was make a guerrilla resistance in the bush.

“With even Sydney and Brisbane in my hands, it would have been comparatively simple to subdue Australia. I would never visualize occupying it entirely. It was too large. With its coastline, anyone can always land there exactly as he wants.

“But it is a long way from anywhere and I could have poured in enough troops to resist effectively any Anglo-American invasions. Although the Japanese General Staff felt my supply lines would have been too long, so would the American or British lines. They might never have been able to reach the place at all. We could have been safe there forever.”

In my possession is a long, blue note engraved with the words: “The Japanese Government. One Shilling.” After the surrender, stacks of these were discovered in Tokyo, ready in the event of an invasion of Australia. There were pound notes, shillings, and sixpences, all in paper money.

The government machinery for ruling Australia was also prepared. Several Japanese diplomats who had represented their government in Canberra were briefed to follow the Japanese armies into Australia and rule the country for the Emperor. One of them, whom I met later in Osaka, had been nominated as governor general.

If he seemed a little wistful about the invasion of Australia which never came off, Yamashita was philosophical, as a good Japanese should be about what he regarded as his inevitable execution. His face was unrevealing as he said to me: “My death does not matter. I know nothing except being a soldier and now I am no longer young. My usefulness to my country is over. I am too old to fight another war, so if the Americans wish to kill me, they will not be harming my country.”

When I rose to leave him for the last time, Yamashita bowed politely and walked with me to the door. Several other generals were sitting in the corridor, playing a game with hundreds of counters which looked like checkers gone crazy. When I asked him what this was, he replied, blank-faced and unsmiling: “That is a typical game of ours, called Go. It is very Japanese indeed. The idea of so many counters is so you can take as much territory as you can from your opponent in the shortest time.”

With that, he left me. I still do not know whether or not Yamashita had a sense of humor. I never saw him again, except in the dock.

CHAPTER 2—A Village Far Away

The village of Osugi Mura—”Great Cedar”—lies in a valley where the Yoshino River flows through the mountains of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four islands. Its name is derived from the ancient giant cedars which surround the village. They rise to over two hundred feet and are believed to be the tallest in Japan.

The Japanese are very proud of these trees and protect them as a national treasure. They also have a folk song about them: “The cedar is a life from olden times. It is already three thousand years old. It is a symbol of our ancient country. O great cedar, the noblest in Japan.”

One winter’s day there was a ripple of excitement among the women in the tiny village of Great Cedar. They came clattering down the frozen, unpaved street in their wooden sandals, pulling their kimonos tightly about them against the snow which hung frozen along the branches of the mountain pines. In spite of the cold, they twittered gaily like parakeets when they heard the news. The village doctor’s wife had had a baby, another boy, whom she had called Tomoyuki.

It was November 8, 1885. Few of the villagers of that isolated mountain village had ever crossed the Inland Sea to the main island of Honshu, where, at Tokyo, reigned the sacred emperor who was descended from the Sun Goddess “in a line unbroken for ages eternal.” Few of them had even ventured as far as the provincial capital, Kochi, twenty-five miles away along a rocky track through the mountains.

The village had a centuries-old calm, undisturbed by the outside world, and its people lived as their ancestors had for thousands of years.

Their life was frugal and hard, but they had no wish to change it. In winter their wooden houses, each warmed only by a handful of charcoal in a brazier, were always a little cold. But in summer, when they slid back their wooden walls and the small breezes rippled through the house and the crickets sang their happy song, they envied no one.

They tilled their rice fields, caught a few fish from the river, drank a little sake—the warm rice wine—from straw-plaited barrels, and then lay down to sleep on the futons, straw mattresses which were brought out of the cupboard at bedtime and laid on the floor. If they lived like that, did not offend their neighbors, and prayed to the God-Emperor in Tokyo every day, they would not be afraid to meet their ancestors when their time came.

As the doctor’s youngest son roamed the tree-lined mountains near his home, he grew taller and more muscular than most Japanese. But he never went far from the ancient cedars, which always seemed to beckon him back. When he became older, he sat under the dark branches of the tallest tree and swore an oath that he would always try to make his life as great and tranquil as the tree itself. Later, when he began to write poems and essays, he signed them, with boyish bravura, “Great Cedar.”

But he was not a diligent student, and his elder brother, three years his senior, often reprimanded him for playing truant from school. Tomoyuki admired his brother, a typical studious Japanese, who constantly nagged him to concentrate more on his studies. In later life, Tomoyuki was often to comment ruefully: “If I had only been cleverer or had worked harder, I would have been a doctor like my brother.”

His brother had always wanted to follow their father’s profession, and the old doctor was pleased that one of his sons would succeed him. Wearing straw sandals and a gray cotton kimono in the summer, and in winter a padded black kimono against the blizzards, throughout the years he had walked the rocky paths to visit his patients in the mountains. But the twentieth century was just around the corner and change was slowly coming even to the little lost Japanese village of Great Cedar. One of the first harbingers of the future was the doctor’s elder son, who suddenly announced that although he still wanted to be a doctor, he did not wish to waste his life among the mountain slopes, visiting remote villages. He refused to learn the profession as his father’s apprentice, but wanted instead to go to Tokyo to study and later practice there. To defy one’s father is against all Japanese tradition, but the boy stood firm in spite of parental opposition to his wild scheme. When he left home on his long journey to Tokyo, he had only a hundred yen in his pocket.

The doctor confidently predicted his son’s return as soon as the boy realized the foolishness of the scheme or ran out of money. But he did not come back. Helped by small sums sent secretly by his mother, he worked his way through college—a most unusual procedure at that time.

The father’s eyes turned then toward young Tomoyuki. He decided it was time for the boy to stop roaming the mountains and have some proper education. The youth’s mother, very proud of her descent from noblemen who had built a castle on Shikoku three hundred years before, thoroughly approved of her husband’s decision to send Tomoyuki to his uncle at Kochi, where he would attend the Kainan Middle School.

This institution—the School of the Southern Sea—had been founded by a feudal clan chief to educate local samurai children in knightly discipline. The school and others like it had been taken over by the state on the orders of Emperor Meiji, who was trying to bring Japan out of its isolation and understood the need of the emergent nation for well-educated boys as future officers in the new armed services he was creating.

The headmaster, a descendant of the samurai knights of Shikoku, was noted for his skill at kenjatsu, the traditional fencing with a bamboo sword and protective mask. Drill and military training were as much a part of the school curriculum as study. The small boys were divided into companies and platoons and drilled for a least an hour every morning.

Tomoyuki Yamashita was only twelve when, for the first time, he proudly took his place on the parade ground under the watchful eye of the headmaster, who sat on horseback to watch his pupils drill. The boys wore a uniform consisting of a blue kimono with a navy-blue kilt underneath, heavy boots, and a soldier’s knapsack. The older boys were given rifles, which they carried everywhere with them. All the pupils were constantly exhorted to be modest, polite, and frugal—the classic virtues of the soldier.

For two years, Tomoyuki paraded, drilled, and studied at this Spartan school. At the end of that time, his indoctrination was complete. When he came home for the summer holidays to his mountain village, he confided to his mother, with whom he had always been very close, that he wanted to be a soldier.

It was perhaps the best time in Japan’s history for a boy to make such a decision. The country was gradually becoming modernized and increasing its contact with the outside world. Her army was evolving from semi-feudal bands of henchmen serving the local lord into a European-style force. It was still largely officered by the old samurai families, but the shrewd liberal Emperor Meiji was beginning to throw the higher ranks open to selected candidates from the middle class.

To further this scheme, the Emperor had formed six cadet schools in Japan. At one of these, in Hiroshima, just across the Inland Sea from Shikoku Island, the fifteen-year-old Yamashita was enrolled as a cadet.

This was the time of the Boxer Uprising in China, and the commandant of the school, Colonel Katsura, kept the boys excited with reports of what was happening there. The Chinese mob had attacked public buildings and temples and the government had requested Japanese troops to help quell the rebellion. They had also asked European countries for help, and this was the first time Japanese soldiers had served on equal terms with Europeans.

When, in June, 1900, the Japanese and other foreign troops entered Peking and put down the rioting, the whole Japanese nation followed their progress. Among the troops sent to China was the 11th Regiment from Hiroshima. After the rebellion was over, they returned to the city, swaggering proudly along the streets in their black jackets and French kepis. They were splendid figures, the infantry in red trousers, the cavalry in green, and the artillery in yellow. When they came to lecture the cadets on ...