The Daily Telegraph (November 1, 1946)
Over 1,200 Japanese war crime suspects tried
981 guilty: 225 executed
FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
TOKYO, Thursday. More than 1,200 Class B Japanese suspected war criminals have been tried in various Pacific areas, according to the latest figures, up to Oct. 5.
This number is derived from war crimes statistics from Australia, the British South-East Asia Command and records of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. It does no include Dutch, Canadian or French Indo-China figures, which are not up-to-date.
Of those tried, 981 were found guilty and 242 not guilty. Death sentences were passed on 225. Most of these were hanged and the remainder shot. There were 16 suicides.
Class B war criminals are those accused of having violated the laws and customs of war. They include military officers and prison camp guards and such special cases as “Tokyo Rose,” the Japanese propaganda radio broadcaster who was released last weekend for lack of enough evidence to retain her in Sugamo prison.
While there are scores more Class B suspects being held and tried, all Class A or major suspects sit in the Tokyo dock daily. Their trials continue to drone on.
There are now 26 of these, including Tojo, the war-time Prime Minister. There were 28, but Osaka, who slapped Tojo’s head on the first day of the trial, is now confined to hospital insane. He is the alleged instigator of the “Mukden incident,” which preceded the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Matsuoka, former Foreign Minister, died in July and all charges against him were dismissed.
Officials say they can clear up the routine trials of Class B criminals by Jan. 1 if the United States Eighth Army H.Q. can give them more tribunals. There are now four operating daily.
In the first place it took the legal section of the Supreme Command, Allied Powers, several months to reach the point where it could start sending cases to the Eighth Army for trial. Now, after a year, the Eighth Army can be given all the cases it can handle.
More releases expected
It is also expected that more than 50 Class B Japanese will follow in the footsteps of “Tokyo Rose” and be released from Sugamo prison in the next few days. Not enough evidence has been submitted to indict them.
A high-placed person on the staff of the International Military Tribunal, which is trying the Class A prisoners, estimated that perhaps these trials can be terminated by March, 1948.
There are three who are most likely to be acquitted: Shigemitsu, former Foreign Minister, Kaya, former Finance Minister, and Hata, Supreme Commander in China.
It is unlikely, if it is decided to try the members of Zaibatsu, the Japanese industrial and financial combine, that these trials will come up before the end of the present Tojo hearings.
The Minneapolis Star (November 1, 1946)
Japs knew of F.R. bid to avert war, held note, prosecutor says
Tojo accused of deliberate stalling on vital message
TOKYO (INS) – The Japanese “Pearl Harbor” government today was charged with deliberately holding up for more than 10 hours President Roosevelt’s last-minute message attempting to avert the Pacific war.
The cable had been addressed to Emperor Hirohito and was to be delivered by Joseph Grew, then United States ambassador at Tokyo.
Carlisle W. Higgins, associate prosecutor who made the charges before the international war crimes tribunal, declared the vital message was delayed as the result of a “deliberate order” of the government, of Premier Hideki Tojo, chief of the 27 defendants.
Higgins asserted he will prove the contents of President Roosevelt’s telegram were “bring freely communicated” among Jap government departments and the government could have acted on it hours before the note finally went to Ambassador Grew for formal transfer to the emperor.
Higgins also charged that an imperial conference November 5, 1941, set the date for opening hostilities under top-secret operation order No. 1, which included the Pearl Harbor attack, known as the “Yamamoto plan.”
By the Associated Press
Other war crime prosecutions also held the news spotlight in Japan today.
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Maj. Tochitake Odamura, ex-commander of the Kempei Tai thought police, was ordered to face trial in Manila on charges of executing 10 American captives of the Netherlands East Indies campaign.
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At Yokohama, three Japanese were sentenced today to be hanged and four others were sentenced to from 15 years to life imprisonment at the conclusion of a 14-week war crimes trial.
Ordered hanged were Lts. Masao Nichizawa and Takeichi Chisuwa, successive commanders of Tokyo POW Camp No. 1, charged with atrocities ranging to responsibility for the deaths of numerous prisoners, and Pfc. Hiroshi Kawamura, beating and torturing prisoners.
The Pittsburgh Press (November 1, 1946)
Tokyo war trial moves to climax
TOKYO (UP) – The trial of 27 leading Japs accused of war crimes approached its climax today as the prosecution outlined the plan that touched off the Pacific war.
This phase of the trial marked the introduction of prosecution evidence designed to show that Jap militarists regarded diplomatic “conversations” as a smoke screen for a conquest they hoped would yield them a substantial part of the Far East.
It was expected that the prosecution would furnish its strongest evidence against Hideki Tojo, the militarist who became premier two months before Pearl Harbor and who was Japan’s wartime leader until the invasion of Saipan in July 1944.
Associate Prosecutor Carlisle W. Higgins of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, told the court of Japan’s diplomatic offensives and her secret military preparations.
The Evening Star (November 6, 1946)
Tojo’s jailers keep close watch on him; Goering remembered
TOKYO (AP) – With a glance over their shoulders at Nuernberg, U.S. military police keep a close and stern watch over the last of the world’s war criminal suspects – Hideki Tojo and company.
Col. Francis Crary of Washington passes off the question of whether security regulations have been tightened since Goering’s suicide, saying “it’s like that one about have you stopped beating your wife?”
Col. Crary’s men assert, however, that if constant vigilance can forestall a Goering episode “it won’t happen here.”
Here is a glimpse of the security routine as the 27 accused walk stolidly down the long, tunnel-like corridor to their cell black after their day in War Crimes Court.
Bus closely guarded
They have just come from the War Ministry Building, the trial scene, in a closely-guarded bus.
Over these little men loom husky American military police.
Tojo, who became the very symbol of the oriental end of the Axis, shifts his brief case from his right to his left hand, reaches inside his mustard-colored jacket, and scratches his ribs.
Military police swing back the steel door and count them into the cell block, nodding at Mamoru Shigemitsu, he of the wooden leg who was Tojo’s foreign minister at one time, limping along in the rear.
The cell block door clangs shut and the prisoners go down the block, falling out of line to enter their small, steel-doored rooms.
The doors close and through the peep holes in each door guards take up the watch.
The defendants are checked in and out. of their cells for baths, shaving, exercise and religious ceremonies.
Defendants well fed
They are fed well by the Japanese government, but before their generous meal of rice, fish and vegetables is handed in, it’s probed by guards looking for anything that might be smuggled in.
Unlike the other 800 prisoners in Sugamo, these 27 men are allowed to bathe and shave daily.
Guards bring them out in groups of 12, six of whom bathe while the others shave. A guard issues each prisoner a blade for a safety razor and the blades are collected before they leave the bathroom.
There are several hundred Japanese working in Sugamo, but none has contact with the prisoners.
The Japanese who approach the closest are the mess attendants, who ladle food from large aluminum kettles into the prisoners’ bowls. Guards watch this process carefully.
Within their cells, the defendants read, write and just sit. They can go to religious services if they wish. The prison has a Buddhist shrine and a Buddhist priest makes regular visits.
The prisoners are allowed one visitor monthly, but they must speak through a screen in a closely guarded visitor’s room.
The Evening Star (November 12, 1946)
Affidavit from Grew holds 3 Japs innocent of war crime charge
Ex-foreign ministers are declared to have opposed war movement
TOKYO (AP) – Sensational statements that Japan rehearsed its Pearl Harbor attack five months in advance and that former Ambassador Joseph C. Grew believes three of the 27 top Japanese defendants are innocent were made to the International War Crimes Court today.
An affidavit from Mr. Grew, who was interned at the start of the war, said the three “in my opinion were wholly opposed to war and exerted their efforts to avoid war.” It startled the courtroom, but Sir William Webb, tribunal president, ruled that it could not be introduced by the defense until it opens its case, probably in December.
Defense Attorney David F. Smith of New York told the court, “This seems to eliminate three defendants from this case.” They are Kiichiro Hiranuma, former prime minister, and Kohi Hirota and Mamoru Shigemitsu, former foreign ministers.
‘Yamamoto plan’ detailed
Meanwhile, the prosecution pressed its case with documents detailing to the court for the first time the so-called “Yamamoto plan” for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
The testimony, based on a resorted prison-cell interrogation of Adm. Osami Nagano, a defendant, last March 21, pictured Emperor Hirohito as figuratively chewing his finger nails in anguish over the prospects of waging a war which might be lost while militarists at the same time held rehearsals for the attack.
Nagano said the plan was rehearsal at Kagoshima Bay in July 1941 with torpedo and dive bombers using aerial torpedoes specially designed for the shallow Pearl Harbor waters. Excerpts introduced by the prosecution from the diary of Koichi Kido, Hirohito’s closest adviser, showed the emperor at first optimistic and then disturbed after Nagano told him it was “doubtful whether or not we should ever win” a war against America.
Opposed to war action
Mr. Grew’s statement, made October 30 in Washington, said the three he named “fundamentally were opposed to many of the policies and actions of other Japanese, especially the policies and actions of the military and naval extremists, which ultimately led to war with the United States and other members of the United Nations.
“It is, of course, to be understood that the evidence may indicate that any of these three persons may, from time to time, have taken steps which might seem to be at variance with the foregoing opinion of their innocence.
“If such evidence should emerge, it would be my judgment that such steps were taken by them under the necessity of conserving their respective positions and authorities in order to be better able to carry through the fundamentally peaceful policies which they supported.”
Mr. Smith said the defense affidavit was obtained at Mr. Grew’s Washington home by a defense attorney, Lt. Col. Franklin E. N. Warden of Tulsa and Tucumcari, New Mexico, who just returned from an evidence-gathering trip to the United States.
Henderson Daily Dispatch (November 13, 1946)
Full blame for all of his acts taken by Tojo
Admits ordering the execution of Doolittle fliers
Tokyo (AP) – Former Premier Hideko Tojo has accepted “full responsibility for all of his official acts, including the execution of the Doolittle fliers,” Associate Prosecutor John W. Finhelly said today during a recess of the international war crimes trial.
Finhelly said that in 51 separate interviews in January, February and March at Sugamo prison, Tojo always was genial, sometimes laughing, and quite willing to reply fully to any interrogation about his own acts. But he would not implicate any other defendant.
Of the execution of three U.S. Army fliers who bombed Tokyo in April 1942 with Gen. Doolittle, Fihelly said Tojo told him: “That raid, the first of the war on Tokyo, was terrible. We never had anything like that before.”
“Tojo told me,” the prosecutor related, “he felt something had to be done about the raid and admitted he had ordered past and ex-post facto laws under which eight captured fliers were tried and sentenced to death.”
The emperor later commuted the sentences of five fliers.
The Evening Star (November 14, 1946)
Prosecution summons Grew to testify in war trial at Tokyo
TOKYO (AP) – Defense questioning of former Ambassador Joseph C. Grew’s credibility today provoked the prosecution to call him to testify at the international war crimes trial if his health permits.
Mr. Grew, who was ambassador to Japan in the 10 years preceding Pearl Harbor and was interned at the start of the war, has given affidavits to both the prosecution and defense at his Washington home. The defense contends portions of the prosecution affidavit, made last May, contradict portions of the defense statement, made two weeks ago, and of Mr. Grew’s book “Ten Years in Japan.”
Climaxing afternoon-long heated arguments, the tribunal president, Sir William Webb, asked the defense if further interrogations could not be conducted at Mr. Grew’s home “unless his credibility is questioned.”
“I am sure his credibility will be questioned,” promptly responded Defense Attorney G. A. Furness.
Webb said he thought a majority of the 11-member tribunal “seemed to be against” bringing Mr. Grew here, but he would entertain a defense motion to bring him as a defense witness. The defense objected that Mr. Grew in such circumstances “would be a hostile witness” and said it preferred, to cross-examine him as a prosecution witness.
Believes health bars trip
American Prosecutor Joseph B. Keenan agreed to ask Mr. Grew to come to Tokyo, but said he still believed the former ambassador’s health would not permit him to make the trip.
Lt. Col. Franklin E. N. Warren, defense counsel, who obtained an affidavit from Mr. Grew October 30 stating three of the 37 defendants are “innocent” of provoking war, told the court, “I do not believe Ambassador Grew’s health is impaired in any manner except for his age.” Mr. Grew is 72.
Today’s arguments developed over the wording of Mr. Grew’s prosecution affidavit in which he recited his oft-told version of events immediately preceding and following Pearl Harbor.
Mr. Grew said at his home, 3840 Woodland Drive N.W., today that he preferred to make no comment at this time on whether he would testify at the war crimes trial. He also refused comment on contentions that portions of affidavits he gave prosecution and defense officials are contradictory.
The Nome Nugget (November 18, 1946)
Tojo admits guilt of starting war in Pacific
TOKYO (AP) – Hideki Tojo, Japan’s wartime premier, has acknowledged chief responsibility for launching the Pacific war, the prosecution told the Allied war crimes tribunal today.
It quoted Tojo as saying last spring during questioning in Sugamo prison that “I, as senior member (of the cabinet) am chiefly responsible” for the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Hongkong, Malaya and the Philippines.
Tojo heads the list of 27 alleged warmongers on trial.
Joseph W. Ballantine, special assistant to the U.S. Secretary of State, told the tribunal later in the day that the State Department had opposed a meeting of President Roosevelt with the then Japanese Premier Fumimaro Konoye in the autumn of 1941, as proposed by Konoye.
The department felt, Ballantine said, that if the talks failed, the Japanese leaders would then be “in a position to declare that the United States was responsible.”