Category: Militaria

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 566

Several years ago I purchased part of an archive of David Katcher*, who was the founding editor of the journal Physics Today. Before that, several years before that, in 1945, David Katcher was Lt. Katcher, serving as a correspondent/writer in the public relations office of the U.S. Army Headquarters of the Western Pacific (GHQ USAFPAC). There’s a 6-inch stack of paper here with what seems to be his (and associated) mimeographed offprints of the daily grind of running the PR department of the Army in the Philippines, which, taken as a whole, is pretty interesting, showing the concerns and trials of the Army in reestablishing the government and infrastructure of the country.  Some of the individual reports/publications are stand-alone, straight-up fabulously interesting things, and so far as I can determine, have not been published anywhere else.  These two examples are both related to the subduing of the last remnants of the Japanese Army still fighting in the dense nether lands of northern Luzon, the Philippines, fighting after the surrender had been made (14 August 1945) and  signed (formally, on the USS Missouri, 2 September) , fighting after the war had ended. 

There’s much more than can be written about fighting after  peace treaties ending wars–I know that the Germans were running around in Africa following WWI–but that’s a very big story, and not for here.

 

DOCUMENT 1      (Issued 28 September 1945)

The first document relates the extraordinary story of Col. Russell W. Volckmann who from 1942 led a force of thousands of guerrillas against the Japanese and who, by September 1945, led a force of 20,000 in routing the last elements of the Japanese army.    (The entire text of his memoir written in 1954 as We Remained Behind: Three Years Behind the Enemy Lines in the Philippines  can be found here.)                                                                                                 

(see Continued Reading section, below, for the rest of this document)

DOCUMENT 2  (Issued 25 September 1945)

This short document relates the story of the capture of the last of the Japanese forces in Luzon, including the capture of some 40,000 troops, including General Yamashita (“The Tiger of Malaya”) and soon-to-be-executed war criminal and beast of Manila.

I’ll let the documents speak for themselves.

(Read more, below)

*from the Washington Post, 2 June 2002, the following obituary of David Katcher:

“David Katcher, 87, who retired in 1979 as special assistant in science and technology to the undersecretary of state for security assistance, science and technology, died of cancer May 31 at his Chevy Chase home.

Mr. Katcher was also senior policy analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology policy during the Carter administration. He was the 1947 founding editor of Physics Today monthly magazine, published by the American Physics Association, and he edited the journal for four years.

He had been an editor at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory before World War II and later executive secretary of a theoretical physics division of the Institute for Defense Analysis.”

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 455

This is a rare offset printing of the statement of charges
and “outline of particulars” against the Japanese Imperial Army General Tomoyuki
Yamashita (1885-1946), a man accused of war crimes against humanity.  After he was captured 2 September 1945,
General Yamashita was arraigned principally for failing to control his troops,
segments of which had acted brutally in their treatment of residents of
captured Singapore and
against British Empire soldiers. He was
charged with “unlawfully disregarding and failing to discharge his duty as a
commander to control the acts of members of his command by permitting them to
commit war crimes.”  This was in
direct violation the doctrine of “command responsibility” which was established
by the Hague Conventions IV (1907) and X
(1907), and—after in re
Yamashita—would also become known as the “Yamashita standard”, in which courts
clearly accepted that “a commander’s actual knowledge of unlawful actions is
sufficient to impose individual criminal responsibility”. Yamashita would be
found guilty by the U.S. Military Tribunal and was sentenced to death, for “vengeful
actions are widespread offences and there is no effective attempt by a
commander to discover and control the criminal acts, such a commander may be
held responsible, even criminally liable.” 
It was a death sentence for a crime of omission. (As early as the 6^thcentury BCE, Sun Tzu,
in his Art of War, stipulated that it was a commander’s duty to ensure that his
subordinates conducted themselves in a civilized manner during an armed
conflict.)

Getting back to the war: 
after Yamashita captured Singapore in February 1942, accepting the
surrender of General Arthur Percival and 100,000+ British Army soldiers, a
steel wind policy was instituted, with thousands of people—soldiers and
civilians—finding their end at the point of Japanese soldiers’ bayonets. 

Chief among the atrocities was the Sook Ching movement, a
concerted, pervasive and prolonged ethnic cleansing of Singapore of
anti-Japanese “undesirable” elements. 
Among these groups were included (and this list is taken from a rather
good contribution to the dubious Wikipedia):

• Persons who had been active
  in the China Relief Fund.
• Rich men who had given most
  generously to the Relief Fund.
• Adherents of Tan Kah
  Kee, leader of the Nanyang
  National Salvation Movement.
• Hainanese,
  who were believed to be communists.
• China-born Chinese who came
  to Malaya after the 1937 Sino-Japanese
  War.
• Men with tattoo
  marks, who were believed to be members of secret
  societies, specifically Triads.
• Persons who fought for the
  British as volunteers against the Japanese.
• Government servants and men
  who were likely to have pro-British sympathies, such as Justices of the Peace, and members of
  the Legislative Council.
• Persons who possessed arms
  and tried to disturb public safety.

In short, it didn’t take all that much to be considered for
elimination, and a long and frozen fear and ruthless hearts-and-minds- campaign
was instituted which lasted until the Philippines were finally liberated.  And it was for the Japanese actions in the Philippines, and then principally in Manila, that General Yamashita was tried, despite the effects
of his long and terrible reach across South East Asia

Most
of the British and Australian prisoners incarcerated in Singapore’s Changi Prison would never
make it out.  Other segments of the POWs
would be transported on hell ships for forced slave labor throughout the
Japanese Empire.  The Siam-Burma death
railroad (surfaced in the Pierre Boullee novel The Bridge on the River Kwai) received other portions of these
POWs; on that 258-mile railroad upwards of 180,000 Asian slave laborers and
60,000 Allied POWs were put to work in horrific and desperate conditions—90,000
of the Asian and 16,000 of the Allied would be killed during the construction
(though many estimates are markedly higher than this).  The Sandakan
airstrip in North Borneo was another death receptacle
of these POWs:  3,600 Indonesian slave
laborers and 2,300 Allied POWs were set to work here—only 6 Allied POWs
(Australian escapees) survived. 

In re Yamashita focused
on the Philippines and the battleground that it was turned into by Yamashita, costing the civilian
population more than 100,000 lives. Tomoyuki Yamashita was hanged on 23
February 1946 at Los Banos Prison Camp, 30 miles south of the city in which he
caused so much misery.