Word Celebrity Blog

Who Was To Blame For The
Atrocities OF American POWs?


Masaharu Homma

Who was to blame for the atrocities perpetrated on American POWs in the Philippines? While there is no easy answer to that question, one of the men who was charged with war crimes was Japanese Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma.

Lt. General Masaharu Homma was the commander in charge of the Japanese Imperial forces during the first battles for the Philippines. He served in the Philippines from December 1941 through August 1942. It was Homma who forced and accepted the surrender of the Americans at Bataan. Homma also ordered the evacuation of American and Filipino forces from Bataan.

The irony, according to author Hampton Sides, is that Homma was not a fanatical militarist. Rather, he was a compassionate moderate with a love for all things English. He had a passion for the arts, and was keen on American movies. A sensitive, principled intellectual with pro-Western leanings, he had been schooled in military academies as well as at Oxford. He was friends with Japan's leading writers and artists. Dubbed the "Poet General," he liked to paint and write poetry during battles.

Masaharu Homma His military strength was his mind. He was considered a brilliant theoretician. His weakness was delegating authority and overseeing the practicalities of his command. Perhaps it was that weakness that allowed his subordinates to brutalize Americans and Filipinos while Homma publicly pronounced that POWs would be treated kindly and fairly. Perhaps he was negligent of duty.

At the end of the war, war crimes trials were convened in Manila. Homma was tried for crimes including abuses of POWs in the Philippines, atrocities related to the death march and the bombing of Manila after it was declared an open city. Homma accepted moral responsibility as commander - but maintained that he had no knowledge of atrocities until after they had occurred. According to historian Philip Piccigallo, Homma was convicted for the actions of his troops rather than for directly ordering atrocities.

On April 3, 1946, Lt. General Masaharu Homma was executed. His wife appealed to American General Douglas MacArthur to spare his life; her pleas were denied.

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General Tomoyuki Yamashita




























General Tomoyuki Yamashita began his military career in 1916, after graduating with honors from the Japanese War College. During the interwar years he served in many influential posts in the army, including staff, command and attaché duties in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. In 1937 he was posted to Korea, where he commanded an infantry brigade.

By 1941, General Yamashita was the commanding general of the Twenty-Fifth Army. His plans for taking Singapore were already underway. On December 8, 1941, he struck, marching his troops for nine weeks through supposedly impenetrable jungle to pounce on Great Britain's 'Gibraltar of the East.' On February 15, 1942, Yamashita prevailed, when British Lt. General  Sir Arthur Percival and 130,000 Empire troops surrendered. It was the largest surrender in British history.

Five months later, General Tomoyuki Yamashita was transferred to the backwaters of Manchuria, the victim of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo's jealousy and Yamashita's often-voiced dislike of the warlord's policies. For the next two years that is where Yamashita stayed, watching his command dwindle away as his soldiers were called to fight in more active theaters. Then, in the fall of 1944, when the Pacific War had reached its zenith, General Yamashita received orders to command the defense of the Philippines. It would be his final call to destiny.

By then the Allies had swept the emperor's soldiers away from most of their fanatically defended island bastions. General Yamashita already knew that the Philippines were next on the Allied list for liberation. He also knew that the Philippines were an absolutely vital link in the shrinking supply lines of Japan's crumbling empire. General Yamashita had no illusions about his chances for success. At best he hoped to deprive the Allies of the Philippines as a forward operating area for as long as possible. He reached Manila on October 5, 1944, two weeks before his last battle would begin.

Meanwhile, General MacArthur's Southwest Pacific area forces were on board hundreds of troopships bound for the Philippines. On October 20, Lt. General  Walter Krueger's Sixth Army stormed ashore almost unopposed on the east coast of Leyte. As soon as General Yamashita learned of the invasion, he reluctantly ordered troops stationed on Luzon to reinforce Leyte's outnumbered garrison. More troops were brought in from Korea and Manchuria. By November, the Japanese had 45,000 soldiers facing General MacArthur and more were on the way. Eventually, 75,000 Japanese soldiers would be thrown into the fight on Leyte.

The battle raged for more than two months. Before it concluded in late December, General Yamashita had lost 60,000 soldiers killed. U.S. Army casualties were 3,500 killed and 12,000 wounded. MacArthur called the battle for Leyte 'perhaps the greatest defeat in the annals of the Japanese army.' Still ahead, however, were the grim battles for Luzon and the Philippine capital, Manila, the prewar 'Pearl of the Orient' and MacArthur's adopted home.

The opening gambit of the battle for Luzon started on December 15, 1944, when MacArthur ordered troops ashore on the nearby island of Mindoro. MacArthur knew that if he attacked Luzon without overwhelming superiority the invasion would be a bloodier repeat of the 1942 Japanese conquest. To that end he needed airfields to gain air superiority and protected supply routes that avoided Luzon's still dangerous air force.

Young Japanese kamikaze pilots already were crashing their planes onto the decks of Allied ships. The first American ship lost to the suicide planes had gone to the bottom on October 25, when planes from the hastily formed kamikaze squadron of Vice Admiral Takijito Onishi's First Air Fleet sank the escort carrier St. Lô. In all, 16 ships would be sunk off the Philippines and another 80 damaged before the Americans gained total control of the air.

The invasion of Mindoro surprised General Yamashita. He had anticipated that General MacArthur would develop airfields farther south, thinking that it would take too long to build runways on the marshy ground of Mindoro. Within eight days of landing, however, American and Australian engineers had two fighter strips in operation. A week later they added a bomber base for Fifth Air Force medium bombers.

Within three weeks of landing on Mindoro, Allied aircraft were striking hard at Luzon. More than half the ships carrying supplies to General Yamashita were sunk. Thousands of fresh troops drowned, and those that managed to get ashore had nothing to eat.






































General Yamashita was left with few options. The only offensive weapons he still possessed were the young pilots who were willing to fly one-way suicide strikes at General MacArthur's support ships, and their numbers were dwindling. The situation on the ground was even worse. On paper, Yamashita had 275,000 troops, but those numbers were deceptive. Many of his soldiers were survivors of other battles thrown together in ad hoc outfits of dubious value. Many more were service troops and second-rate line units.

Another 16,000 sailors and special landing-force troops of the 31st Naval Base Force were stationed around Manila under the command of Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi. Although Sanji Iwabuchi was nominally under General Yamashita's command, in practice the fiery Bushido warrior chose to ignore orders from General Yamashita that he did not like.


Iwabuchi Sanji



























The plan General Yamashita finally adopted for defending Luzon was simple. He would abandon Manila and its environs and head for the hills. Already resigned to losing eventually, Yamashita simply hoped to occupy as much of the island as possible to deny its use to General MacArthur. He later claimed that he was already prepared to cede Manila to General MacArthur when the Sixth Army struck. Meanwhile, Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi put his own simple plan into effect. Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi planned to defend Manila to the death.

On January 9, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur finally mounted his invasion of Luzon. At two points on Lingayen Gulf, 110 miles north of Manila, 68,000 men from Krueger's Sixth Army waded ashore. Two days later, Krueger established a secure beachhead and began forging inland. With I Corps on the left flank and XIV Corps in the van, Krueger headed for Manila.

For the rest of the month he piled on new divisions, until almost the entire Sixth Army was ashore. Throughout January, Krueger's troops fought a series of tough actions that slowed their assault on Manila to a crawl. Some of the pressure on the Sixth Army's front was relieved on January 31, when the 11th Airborne Division came ashore by boat at Nasugbu Bay, 55 miles southwest of Manila. But it was not until February 3, when the newly arrived 1st Cavalry Division drove 70 miles through thinly held Japanese lines to reach the eastern approaches to Manila, that the Sixth Army's goal was in sight. The following day the 11th Airborne Division entered the city from the south to catch Rear Admiral Iwabuchi Sanji's sailors in a giant vise.

Remarkably, General MacArthur was still hopeful that Manila could be taken without a serious fight. To that end he ordered his soldiers and airmen to use restraint when taking the city. General MacArthur completely forbade the use of tactical airstrikes in the city, and he told his gunners to shoot sparingly. There were both philosophical and practical reasons for doing so, Douglas MacArthur told his generals.

First and most important, Douglas MacArthur said, General Yamashita could not feed Manila's 700,000 civilians. Second, if General Yamashita allowed his army to be bottled up in Manila, he could not defend the rest of the island. Finally, General MacArthur, for whatever reason, did not believe that General Yamashita would order the city's destruction.

Perhaps General MacArthur believed that the dire warnings he had been broadcasting to General Yamashita after landing at Leyte would give the Japanese general pause. In a broadcast initially read on October 4, 1944, and repeated many times during the ensuing campaign, General MacArthur warned General Yamashita that he would 'hold the Japanese military authorities in the Philippines immediately liable for any harm' to POWs, civilians and internees trapped in the Philippines.

By February 6, facing mounting casualties, General MacArthur purged himself of his grand delusion and ordered his soldiers to use their artillery. He still forbade tactical bombing. Once the earlier prohibitions against using heavy artillery on important buildings was rescinded, the Sixth Army began applying its full might against the Japanese. As fighting raged from building to building and strongpoint to strongpoint, the battle slowly consumed the city.

Later, General Yamashita protested that the naval troops and service units still in Manila were not supposed to be there. During his court-martial, Yamashita testified that even before General MacArthur had invested Manila he had given orders for his troops to pull back into the mountains to the north and east. The bulk of the Japanese forces complied, he said, though some army service troops and almost the entire contingent of Iwabuchi's naval force stayed behind.

The U.S. Army's own reconstruction of the battle several years later somewhat supported General Tomoyuki Yamashita's view. In fact many of the service troops in Manila were simply trapped there by General MacArthur's relentless attacks. But others, particularly Iwabuchi's naval troops, had refused to leave. It was those die-hards who faced Krueger's troops.

By February 23, the Sixth Army had forced most of Manila's defenders into the Intramuros, the 150-acre 'walled city,' a three-square-mile area near Manila Bay, where many government buildings stood. The retreating Japanese left thousands of murdered and mutilated Filipino civilians in their wake. Holed up with them were 4,000 more civilians who could not escape.

When the Americans began the task of reducing Iwabuchi's final stronghold, the slaughter was terrific. Still denied air power by General MacArthur, the soldiers resorted to massive doses of artillery to give them the edge. Inside the walls of the old Spanish city, Japanese soldiers and sailors went on a vindictive rampage, burning and looting indiscriminately. When the last shot had been fired, Intramuros was razed to the ground, as were the stout government buildings where the Japanese had sought final refuge. Included in the destruction was General MacArthur's six-room penthouse above the Manila Hotel.

The carnage General MacArthur witnessed was incredible. Almost all of Iwabuchi's 16,000 troops, including their commander, were dead. More than 1,000 American soldiers were also killed, and another 5,500 were wounded. But the greatest toll was taken on Manila's defenseless population. More than 100,000 souls, including most of those trapped in Intramuros, had been wiped out. Thousands more were wounded or missing.

The fall of Manila did not end the Philippine campaign. General Tomoyuki Yamashita was still to the north of Manila with the bulk of his remaining army, and there were many bitter campaigns ahead. For the remainder of the war, General Yamashita's soldiers fought a series of fierce delaying actions along Luzon's Cordillera Mountains. It was not until the last day of the war that General Yamashita stopped fighting. And then, on September 2, with nowhere else to go, Yamashita surrendered. 'If I kill myself,' the general explained,'someone else will have to take the blame.' The blame was not long in coming. On October 8, 1945, five weeks after Japan unconditionally surrendered, Yamashita was arraigned before a military commission in Manila and charged with war crimes.General  MacArthur had drawn up the charges, appointed the military commission, and set the rules for the trial.

General Tomoyuki Yamashita was charged with failing to 'discharge his duty as commander to control the operations of the members of his command' between October 2, 1944, and September 2, 1945. In the same specification Yamashita was accused of 'permitting them to commit brutal atrocities and other high crimes against the people of the United States and its allies and dependencies.' The prescribed punishment was death. Yamashita's defense was simple. He claimed he was not there. During his trial at the high commissioner's residence in Manila, Yamashita testified that he had ordered his troops to leave Manila to the Allies. But because of the stranglehold MacArthur had placed around his garrisons in Manila, he was unable to make sure the orders were carried out.

General Tomoyuki Yamashita denied any involvement in the atrocities that took place in Manila. 'I positively and categorically reaffirm that they were against my wishes and in direct contradiction to all my expressed orders,' he told the court-martial panel. 'They occurred at a time and place of which I had no knowledge whatsoever.'

It was to no avail. General MacArthur had already made up his mind. General Tomoyuki Yamashita was defended by a battery of competent trial attorneys. His case was even appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. During the first week of January 1946, the high court listened to arguments from both sides. The defense claimed that Yamashita could not have received a fair trial under the mandates dictated by MacArthur. The prosecution argued that the destruction of Manila by Japanese troops under Yamashita's command was all the evidence needed to convict him. In a 7­2 decision, the high court ruled General Yamashita's conviction and death sentence were just and fitting. The two dissenting justices called it 'a legalized lynching.'

General MacArthur would hear none of it. On February 11, 1946, he wrote: 'This officer, of proven field merit, entrusted with high command involving authority adequate to responsibility, has failed this irrevocable standard; has failed his duty to his troops, to his country, to his enemy, to mankind; has failed utterly his soldier faith. The results are beyond challenge.'

On February 21, 1946, Lt. General W.D. Styer, commander of the Western Pacific forces, ordered Colonel John H. Fonvielle, commanding officer of the Philippine Detention and Rehabilitation Center near Manila, to carry out General MacArthur's order. Two days later, General Yamashita dropped through the gallows floor, unrepentant to the end. 'Before my God I have told the truth,' he announced through an interpreter when the sentence of execution was read. 'I do not believe that I have sinned. I think that I – my soul – will live forever.'

General Tomoyuki Yamashita swung below the gallows for 25 minutes, swaying to and fro in the early morning breeze. Raroad, the executioner, remembered how the lights suddenly went out–because someone had thrown a circuit breaker–and how the taut rope stood out 'evilly, connecting the crossbeam and the platform. 'Yamashita, general in the Imperial Japanese Army and its commander of the Philippine Islands, had been hanged by the neck until dead.'

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Names of War Criminals Enshrined 
At The Yasukuni Shrine In Japan

Hideki Tojo
Heitaro Kimura
Seishiro Itagaki
Kenji Doihara
Iwane Matsui
Akira Mutou
Koki Hirota
(These Seven Sentenced to Death)

Yoshijiro Umezu
Kunaiki Koiso
Kiichiro Hiranuma
Toshio Shiratori
(These four were sentenced to life in prison)


Shigenori Tougo
was sentenced to twenty years in prison

Osami Nagano
Yosuke Matsuoka
(died of natural causes before trial)