Not many people, perhaps, noticed a recent news item to the effect that the Japanese were planning to release a new movie based on the life of General Tomoyuki Yamashita. Yamashita (pronounced, Ya-MASH-ta), nicknamed in military circles the Tiger of Malaya because of his rapid-fire jungle campaign against Malaya and Singapore, holds the rather dubious distinction of having been the first major World War II criminal executed in either theater. He met his death, in disgrace, by hanging, pursuant to the verdict of a military tribunal appointed by General Douglas MacArthur. The tribunal had found Yamashita, as over-all Philippine commander, responsible for the orgy of atrocities committed in Manila in February, 1945.
The news item went on to say that the Japanese hoped to use Yamashita as part of a campaign to rebuild their national prestige. I suppose that means they will try to make a martyr out of him, and in the process also re-tell the story of the Pacific war in softer and more flattering tones—from their point of view.
If some such re-writing of history in the cause of national pride is indeed in the works, the Japanese have at least picked their most likely prospect. For in the months that elapsed between his capture and execution, Tomoyuki Yamashita, four-star general in the Emperor’s Army, made a real hit with those few American servicemen who came in contact with him.
I know because I was the first American to interview him at any length following the end of the war. That was in Manila in September, 1945. I was a naval language officer attached to MacArthur’s headquarters when Yamashita, bowing to his Emperor’s surrender edict, came down out of the Luzon hills and gave himself up.
Looking back on that event as I read the item about a Yamashita movie, I realized how closely my encounter with the old Tiger of Malaya in those early days had foreshadowed America’s relations with Japan as a nation in the post-war world, including the almost complete about-face we have since made towards the Japanese as a people.
For one thing Yamashita in the flesh never quite measured up to his advance “Tiger” billing. The name, of course, was well calculated to match the popular conception of the typical Japanese as reflected in the propaganda of the day—ferocious, wicked-eyed, buck-toothed, leering, and with a mouth dripping with blood. The few pictures of Yamashita that had become available after the fall of Singapore had shown a man, large for a Japanese, with sharp, piercing eyes, and a cruel mouth set off under a Hitler moustache.
Actually when I ran across him in Manila’s New Bilibid prison after the surrender ceremony, the General was far less impressive. He was still big for a Japanese especially in girth. His head was shaved completely bald, and the Hitler moustache was gone, revealing an upper lip that was much too long. Maybe the months of hiding out from MacArthur’s forces had taken the fire out of him. Or maybe the Japanese war photographers had just tried to make the old gentleman look tougher than he really was.
Judging from the story he told me about how he acquired the name of “Tiger,” I suspected ,it was more the latter than the former. That Tiger business, Yamashita had confided to me, grinning sheepishly, had all been the result of a misunderstanding. He explained by recounting for me the details of the Malayan campaign, a campaign that had struck the Allied world at the time as one of the strategic and tactical masterstrokes of an almost invincible Japanese war machine.
Ignoring the mighty British coastal defense guns guarding Singapore’s approaches southward from the sea, the wily Japanese had done the thing the British said was impossible. They had landed in the Malayan jungle to the north and then moved their full-scale ground attack down through supposedly impassable territory to the very rear of the great naval base. The British, of course, were flabbergasted. Unable to stop the Japanese forces under Yamashita, the defenders moved back towards the island of Singapore for a final stand. But once the enemy got his amphibious column across the last barrier of the Straits of Johore, the British gave up without a fight.
What seemed to the outsider almost a push-over, was, according to Yamashita, a risky military gamble that had nearly failed. For squeezed into Singapore to conduct its final defense were some six British and Australian divisions. Yamashita’s force consisted of only three. He was banking on the swiftness and shock of his attack to force the defenders into a quick surrender before they caught onto the disparity in numbers.
Apparently the deception was working as Yamashita moved across the final water obstacle under cover of darkness. By the time a bridgehead had been established, the British commander, General Perceval, had asked for a discussion of surrender terms. But Yamashita was still apprehensive. If the cease-fire continued too long, the defenders might yet find out his weakness and resume the fight. Hence it was essential that the surrender talks be gotten over quickly.
Unable to speak English, Yamashita was at the mercy of his interpreter, a young officer educated abroad. All he wanted, Yamashita told the interpreter beforehand, was Perceval’s surrender as quickly as possible. But the prolonged interchange of question and answer that was needed to get even this simple point across the language barrier seemed endless to Yamashita. Nervously remembering his inferiority in numbers, he finally exploded in his interpreter’s face: “End this discussion! All I want is ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Nothing else.”
Moved by this display of bluntness and impatience the British signed on the dotted line and then promptly dubbed their impressive conqueror “The Tiger of Malaya.” Funny, wasn’t it, Yamashita mused as he recounted the incident, that his own nervousness and weakness should have won him a reputation for fearless and decisive action! And I had to admit that as a prisoner of war he certainly didn’t look much like the kind of “tiger” I had imagined.
Some of Yamashita’s one-time ferocity may well have rubbed off, too, during his eight months of hiding from a closely pressing American army. Originally he had been in command of all Japanese forces in the Philippines when General MacArthur struck at Leyte in October, 1944. First Leyte had fallen to the Americans, and then in December the tiny island of Mindoro, just south of Luzon. Early in January, 1945, another great American task force hit Lingayen Gulf on Luzon, the same spot where the Japanese themselves had marched ashore three years before. Yamashita and his staff could do little but take to the hills. Here and there small Japanese garrisons were left along the highway from Lingayen Gulf to Manila to slow the Americans down as best they could; and in Manila were the remnants of a naval guard unit whose bloody and ignominious last-ditch stand left the onetime Pearl of the Orient a smoking hulk and ultimately led to Yamashita’s own execution. But the Japanese commander was in hiding. Now and then a Filipino civilian would come in with a report that a fat Japanese four-star general had been seen in this barrio or that up in the hill country. But not until the surrender order had been radioed down from Tokyo did the Tiger of Malaya finally give up the chase and trudge back down the mountain trails to Baguio to surrender.
Along with Yamashita came his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Akira Muto, a small, restrained man with glasses, a knowing, urbane air, and a razor-sharp mind, plus a handful of lesser general and flag officers. Muto had served a tour of duty with the Imperial General Staff in Tokyo before coming to work for Yamashita, and on the strength of that earlier assignment was later to be tried and convicted by the War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo for his part in planning Japan’s over-all war effort.
Yamashita’s surrender ceremony at Baguio was a smaller copy of the one held a day earlier on board the Missouri in Tokyo Bay. General Jonathan M. Wain- wright, who had originally surrendered the remnants of Bataan and Corregidor to the Japanese three years earlier, was back from his wartime captivity to taste the sweet fruits of retribution. With the surrender out of the way, Yamashita and his cohorts were whisked away to Manila’s New Bilibid prison to await the relentless military justice that was soon to overtake them.
That was where I came in. The fighting, of course, was over. The headlines had moved to Tokyo. The occupation of Japan, destined to become one of the strangest social and political undertakings in history, was under way. Almost overnight Manila shifted from one of the nerve centers of a great world war to just another backwash of post-war activity. But there were still jobs to be done, and one of them was the official history of the Philippine campaign, with all the endless battle reports to be filled out and filed. Now at least we could find out where the enemy had been at each stage and what he had been doing. Only in that way, of course, could we fully measure the accuracy of our own battlefield estimates. The task was not a priority one to be sure, but future training and planning might well hang some day on a careful review of just how well the American forces had done their job in the Philippines.
Obviously no one was better qualified to tell the Japanese side of the story than the top commander himself, now in jail. As a Japanese-speaking intelligence officer on MacArthur’s staff, I was given the assignment of digging out that story. Armed with a clipboard, some paper, a pencil, and a jeep, I set out alone for the thirty-mile ride to the prison.
New Bilibid was not exactly what you would call a plush penal institution. But it had been built only a decade or so before, and compared to the tents and barbed wire of the stockades that had housed Japanese prisoners of war through most of the Pacific fighting, it looked like the ultimate in luxury. I interviewed Yamashita and his staff around a long, bare table set up in the middle of a wide corridor that ran between their separate cell blocks.
The General himself was gracious and obliging. Sitting there at the head of the table, he was clearly in command, and, in spite of his prisoner status, dignified and good-humored.
General Muto, who sat at Yamashita’s left, was a more complex personality. Like the ideal chief of staff he deferred to his commander, but also managed to supply him with all the facts and figures he needed to refresh his memory of events. Muto, I decided, had been the brains of the outfit. But Yamashita had plainly made the decisions; there could be no mistake about that. From a professional point of view it was a perfect textbook combination.
Like a good chief of staff Muto was also solicitous of his commander’s prestige. This developed at the outset of our conversation when I began in my somewhat faltering Navy-acquired Japanese.
Japanese is a language that sometimes seems to have been invented especially to torment the would-be student. It is not enough, for example, to learn one set of words to express the ideas you happen to be interested in. Literally you have to learn three separate sets of words for the same idea. Which particular set you happen to use depends on just where you stand in the social scale. If you are talking to an inferior you need more than just a harsher tone. You actually have to employ an entirely different set of words from the ones you use in talking about the same idea with a social equal. When you talk to a superior still a third set is necessary. This means that to get along in normal, every-day relationships in Japan, where social distinctions are usually carried to an extreme, you need three separate vocabularies. And anyone with business in the Imperial Court needs still a fourth for use in connection with the Emperor!
Naturally within the rank-conscious Japanese armed forces these distinctions of vocabulary had to be strictly adhered to. A second lieutenant would use one set of words discussing affairs with a buck private, and an entirely different set in chatting with the wife of a four-star general. This was a subtlety which we language officers had been briefed on in our hurry-up course in Japanese back in the States, but had rarely had to worry about in practice because the vast majority of war prisoners were privates. Consequently the blunter vocabulary used by military superiors in addressing their subordinates had become second nature to us, while the fancier words reserved for addressing four-star generals rapidly slipped away into limbo.
For this reason the interrogation of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, Imperial Japanese Army, by Lieutenant Stratton, United States Naval Reserve, opened in an idiom more frequently reserved within the Imperial Army for dealing with obstreperous Privates Second Class Suzuki or Watanabe. General Muto listened incredulously for a sentence or two and then blurted out: “Lieutenant, you are speaking to a general officer. Surely you know better than to employ the language of the barracks and the drill field!”
Before I could reply Yamashita broke in on his chief of staff. “Come, come, Muto- san. The lieutenant makes himself understood. After all, we are prisoners, you know.” He grinned across at me benignly and motioned for me to resume. Muto subsided. For my part I put on my toughest look, and tried to act as though nothing out of the way had happened. As a matter of fact, as prisoners of war they rated this lower-case treatment. Still I resolved when I got back to my quarters to look up some of those fancier words I had learned in school. They might just come in handy in case I ever wanted to substitute molasses for vinegar.
Yamashita and I fought over again on the map the land campaign for the Philippines. On the whole there were few surprises. Our estimates of the enemy turned out to have been remarkably accurate. In fact, throughout most of the concluding battle for Luzon, American headquarters actually knew more about the whereabouts and composition of the Japanese defenders than did their own commander. This was true partly because of the excellence of our intelligence staff work, aided by Filipino guerrillas, and partly because the swiftness of MacArthur’s thrust from Lingayen Gulf to Manila had sent the Japanese reeling in every direction. By taking to the mountains Yamashita had avoided our motorized forward reconnaissance patrols, but only at the cost of close communication with and control over his own troops. As far as our forces were concerned, he didn’t even know as much as a regular reader of the American daily press. Units which had long been identified in stateside newspaper stories from the Philippines still were unknown to the cave-bound Japanese high command.
One thing that became especially clear as the interview went on was the almost hypnotic impression which General MacArthur’s colorful personality had made on the Japanese military. So steadily and relentlessly had the General pushed his leap-frog drive from the shores of Australia to the Philippines that the Japanese, so Yamashita confessed, had come to regard him as virtually unbeatable. With them it was no longer a question of whether MacArthur would hit, but only when. No longer did they hope to stop the colorful American, but only slow him down. Oddly enough nothing of this feeling extended towards Admiral Nimitz or the other heroes of the Navy’s Central Pacific drive, although they had certainly contributed every bit as much as General MacArthur to the desperate plight in which Japan’s newly-acquired Empire had found itself.
This defeatist psychology had completely permeated the Japanese Southeast Asia command by the time Yamashita was hastily recalled from the obscurity of his Manchurian training post in October, 1944, to take over full responsibility for halting General MacArthur’s anticipated return to Manila.
Following his brilliant capture of Singapore in 1942 and some subsequent duty on Bataan, the Tiger of Malaya had run afoul of Japanese service jealousies. Premier General Hideki Tojo, a one-time army colleague, was reportedly afraid that the Tiger’s popularity might jeopardize his own position. And so instead of sending the conqueror of Singapore on to even greater glories, he had assigned him to virtual exile in Manchuria. Only when the inner ring of Empire defenses began to crumble with the fall of New Guinea and Saipan was Yamashita brought back to make one last attempt to stem the rising tide of American military power.
The Tiger came to Manila only a brief two weeks before General MacArthur struck his opening blow. He figured, so he told me, that the Philippines were next on the agenda. In fact, Yamashita even claimed to have doped out the direction of the blow towards Leyte itself. This bit of prescience he attributed to his visits many years earlier to American military staff colleges. In those days, Yamashita recalled, young American officers were trained for command on problems that centered chiefly in the Philippines, and in those problems Leyte had always figured prominently.
Whether the story was true or not made little difference, because the situation Yamashita had inherited from his predecessor had kept him from doing much about his hunches anyway. He just didn’t have the stuff to build an iron-clad defense. The Japanese commander could only sit tight and wait, and in the meantime try again to coax more troops and supplies out of Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo.
Two weeks later when General MacArthur finally waded ashore at Leyte and proclaimed the Philippine Republic, Japan’s major counter-thrust came from the navy by way of San Bernardino and Surigao Straits. As far as Yamashita was concerned, the best he could do was resurrect a new version of the “Tokyo Express” and try to resupply the Leyte garrison from the west.
One important detail of the Leyte operation escaped the Japanese completely. They overestimated General MacArthur’s publicity machinery. To them it was unthinkable that a five-star general should really wade ashore with his troops on D-day, even several hours behind the assault wave. They had assumed, Yamashita said, that all the newspaper pictures showing General MacArthur decked out in sunglasses and corncob pipe doing precisely that had been carefully posed back in the safety of New Guinea.
“Oh, no,” I said, “General MacArthur was really there. In fact he set up his headquarters at Tacloban.”
“What?” Yamashita’s rough features showed flat disbelief. “You mean he wasn’t back in Australia or New Guinea all the time?”
“Not at all. In past landings MacArthur used to go ashore with the troops, and then when they were safely dug in would fly back to Australia or New Guinea. But with the Philippines it was different. At Leyte, you see, he had ‘returned,’ just as he said he would. And he meant to stick it out.”
I went on to describe how the high command had set up shop in a house in the tiny Philippine town of Tacloban near the airstrip that was one of our principal objectives, and how General MacArthur and his staff had spent many an unhappy moment those first few days under Japanese air attack. One enemy bomb had actually struck the house across the street where the correspondents attached to GHQ lived, killing two of them. But General MacArthur himself, unconcerned as usual for his own safety, had come through untouched. Once again the famous luck had held!
“Alas,” Yamashita sighed, “if only we had known. Why, we could have thrown everything into one suicide raid on MacArthur’s headquarters!” Thinking of what he had missed, he seemed disappointed, though more from a professional than a personal standpoint. “I was sure they were trying to fool us. I was sure MacArthur was in Brisbane!”
Several weeks later when I recounted this story to General MacArthur in Tokyo in making my personal report on the Yamashita interrogation, the Supreme Commander was hugely amused.
Once the Americans had taken Leyte, Yamashita knew the end was just a matter of time. He expected the subsequent attack at Lingayen, which materialized two months later, but there was little he could do to stop that one either. The Tiger of Malaya had tasted defeat. In retelling it he managed to salve his ego only by acknowledging that the man who beat him was a master.
No small share of the credit for this strange hypnotic power which General MacArthur exercised over the Japanese mind (as the occupation was later to demonstrate even more dramatically) was due to his aloof, almost imperial manner. The second day of our conversation I walked in on my distinguished prisoners reading some American magazines which the G.I. guards had obligingly loaned them. One was a copy of Life, opened to a full-page picture of General Eisenhower wearing his familiar grin.
“What do you think of him, General?” I asked Yamashita.
“You know,” he replied, “a general shouldn’t smile. I don’t quite understand this fellow Eisenhower. How can a man be a successful general who smiles all the time? Take MacArthur: there’s a man for you. Always stern and imposing. Why, now that Roosevelt is dead, he’ll undoubtedly be your next president, won’t he?”
By the end of three days we had covered the Philippine campaign pretty thoroughly, and in the process were becoming fast friends. Muto and the others had managed to keep their distance, but Yamashita proved to be a warm, ingratiating personality. Perhaps the deficiencies of my own Japanese had been partly responsible. Yamashita knew little English, but whenever we came to a particularly tough word or phrase he would try his best to meet my limited Japanese half way. The results weren’t invariably successful but somehow we got by.
Towards the end of our three-day session he finally dropped courtesy for candor. “You know, Stratton,” he spoke up suddenly, “with a little practice you might get to be fairly good in Japanese!”
Muto the perfectionist roared, and I had to admit that maybe the Tiger of Malaya had a point there.
When it came to the inevitable souvenirs Yamashita was especially cooperative. An Army colonel who came along with me one afternoon to watch our prize catch perform was delighted to see that the pencil Yamashita had been using to diagram his Philippine strategy had been made by a company from the colonel’s home town. With a flourish Yamashita presented the pencil to the visitor along with his compliments to the company.
After my first trip I found myself loaded down each morning with sheafs of Japanese “victory” currency from my friends for Yamashita to autograph. The old gentleman never complained. Rather he seemed to take pleasure in the notoriety these requests implied. Usually he went beyond the mere signature to add the date and some appropriate inscription. The library of the University of Rochester (Rochester, N. Y.), for instance, today boasts among its collection of wartime invasion currency a 100 peso Philippine “victory” note especially inscribed to the University from Tomoyuki Yamashita, signed, incidentally, in both Japanese characters and English script.
When my tactical interrogation—“debriefing” they would call it today—was over, the war-crimes boys moved in. General MacArthur in Tokyo was impatient. He wanted justice meted out swiftly. Manila had been ravaged, and the man in top command would have to stand trial.
I couldn’t help feeling just a bit sorry for Yamashita as I realized what was undoubtedly in store for him. In the few days of our association I had gotten to like the guy. Just what he had was hard to say—a certain quiet dignity, a sense of humor, an air of self-confidence without either the arrogance or obsequiousness that so often marked prisoners of war.
Perhaps the rumors of a split with Tojo had been true after all, though under the circumstances Yamashita had certainly served his country’s leaders well. But he had betrayed none of the fanaticism that cropped out later in the Tokyo trials as it did at Nuremberg. Yamashita was a professional military man, more so even than Muto. Fighting was his business. He had done it brilliantly in the case of Singapore, somewhat less brilliantly at Leyte and Luzon. Now the fighting was over. He had lost, and he knew it. And in defeat he asked no quarter of the victor.
We never talked about the matter of war crimes; that would come later. But Yamashita appeared totally unconcerned as to his ultimate fate. None of his answers on tactical questions, for instance, the defense of Manila, the extent of his command authority, and so on—answers which might be, and in fact were, used against him later on— were made with any hesitation or apparent wish to be cagey. In fact, his candid account of the Japanese command structure, pinning ultimate responsibility on himself, virtually sealed his own death warrant. But whatever fate had in store for him, the fat little Japanese was ready to meet it stoically. Muto was argumentative, if you gave him half a chance. Yamashita was simply resigned. War had to be played according to the rules. He had played and lost. That was all there was to it.
Once the General mentioned his wife, living then in Kamakura, an exclusive resort colony a few miles south of Tokyo. I volunteered casually to stop in and call on her if I ever got to Tokyo. Yamashita seemed pleased but did not pursue the point. Family relationships had long been a luxury that the Japanese fighting man—the samurai—had learned to get along without. I never did see the lady in fact, though I did get to Tokyo. But I remember reading that before her husband finally went to the gallows she sent a futile plea for clemency to General Mac- Arthur.
It was Yamashita’s dignity and humor that made an impression on other Americans, too, who later came in contact with him. His defense lawyers, for instance. Before the long trial was over these three officers had become so devoted to the old gentlemen that they tried every trick in the legal book to save him from death, including an appeal to the United States Supreme Court, and when that failed, to President Truman. Neither succeeded. But one member of that defense team, Army Captain A. Frank Reel, later wrote a book, The Case of General Yamashita, to document his contention that justice had miscarried.
It was a bit odd, when you stopped to think of it, that a man who is one day your mortal enemy, trying to kill you and, in fact, succeeding in killing many of your friends, should turn out when you meet him the next day to be a pretty nice guy after all. But I guess war was like that, because I had run across the phenomenon before. Stripped of his rifle, his fanatical devotion to the Emperor, and the tight disciplinary system that tied the two together, the average Japanese prisoner of war we had come to know bore little resemblance to the propaganda conception. Most of these captured Japanese had been just pathetic characters—sick, ignorant, dirty, and bewildered. Some of them were very likeable, cheerful once they knew they wouldn’t be tortured, and almost childishly anxious to oblige.
This, of course, was the same pattern that developed later on under the occupation. From our most hated enemy the Japanese turned almost overnight into one of the staunchest of allies. And today our whole defense structure in the Orient hinges on continued cordial relations with the people from the Land of the Rising Sun.
Once before in American history a bitter enemy became a fast ally—Great Britain. Would the pattern repeat itself now with Japan? I wondered. Anyway, seeing that piece about a Yamashita movie reminded me just how much my brief encounter with the Tiger of Malaya had contained the key to what had happened since. But would the movie stick to these straight facts, or would it try to overdo the story for propaganda effect? Only time would tell.
Just before our brief interview at New Bilibid prison came to a close I had ventured to ask the erstwhile Tiger one personal question. Whatever happened to his Hitler moustache?
“It began to grow out gray,” he answered, half embarrassed, “so I shaved it off.” Then after a moment’s hesitation he added: “Don’t you like it better this way?”
With a quick glance at his long upper lip I answered, “Frankly, General, I don’t. Why don’t you let it grow back in, gray or not?”
Months later when I was back in the States and Yamashita appeals to the Supreme Court and the White House had failed to upset the death sentence, I chanced on a newspaper picture of the former Japanese commander awaiting the inevitable end. I looked closely and saw that the Tiger of Malaya had indeed let his old moustache grow back in.
But this time it didn’t give him that ferocious look. Because, just as he had said, it was gray.