Hidden Atrocities by Jeanne Guillemin

Author:Jeanne Guillemin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Sutton Assists at IPS

Committed to the IPS, Sutton took on a new assignment, to assist Prosecutor Pedro “Pete” Lopez of the Philippines, a former resistance fighter and, in 1945, the leader of his country’s delegation to the United Nations. The Philippines was a favored country at SCAP. When it became an independent nation on July 4, General MacArthur returned to Manila for the celebration, and he chose Filipino guards for his office at Dai-Ichi. At the IPS, the Philippines was respected but a junior player.

Sutton’s assignment was to help Lopez formulate his country’s Class C war crimes charges against Japan. The atrocities in the Philippines had been as grotesque as those in China—the fanatic soldiers with bayonets, swords, and machine guns seemed part of the same Japanese pattern of warfare, which Lopez had seen firsthand. The evidence included documentation of individual murders—of a blind woman stripped naked and hung, of a woman raped and stabbed to death—and of mass killings: 800 defenseless men, women, and children machine-gunned at St. Paul’s College in Manila, another 2,500 shot or bayoneted at Calambra, 100 people in a church in Ponson killed in the same way, another 169 villagers slaughtered in Matina Pang. In his presentation, Lopez planned to cover the Bataan Death March, even though several American attorneys already expected to present it for the US case. He had the advantage of fourteen thousand pages of documents from the earlier trials of Generals Yamashita and Homma.46 The Philippine justice Delfin Jaranilla, a Bataan survivor, had agreed to absent himself from the court during this phase of the trial.

After Lopez, Alan Mansfield, the prosecutor for Australia, would follow with more Japanese government documents showing that individual defendants in the dock—Tojo, Kimura, Muto, Sato, Togo, and Shigemitsu—were responsible for these and other atrocities in the Pacific.

As an IPS expert on Class C war crimes, Sutton helped Lopez calculate the civilian death statistics. By official count, the total came to 130,000, likely an underestimate given the lack of records in rural areas and the chaos during the 1945 “Rape of Manila.”

Meanwhile, the Chinese were moving forward with their own trial for the Nanjing Massacre.47 The precepts of the London Charter that defined the crimes of aggressive war, of violations of customary rules of war, and those against humanity had become Chinese law. Since General Matsui had already been indicted for war crimes at the IMTFE, the Chinese settled for Lieutenant General Tani Hisao, former commander of the Japanese Sixth Division, which had entered Nanjing with Matsui’s troops. After a long delay, Legal Section helped arrange for him and twelve other Japanese suspects to be transported to Shanghai. On September 9, 1946, Tani was arrested there, and within weeks he was indicted in Nanjing. The Chinese government used the prospect of the tribunal not only to show, like other victors, that it represented justice and social order but also for communitarian ends, to encourage ordinary citizens to speak up about what they had suffered at the hands of the Japanese military.

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