During the trial, the general had tried to explain himself: “My command was as big as MacArthur’s or Lord Louis Mountbatten’s. How could I tell if some of my soldiers misbehaved themselves? It was impossible for any man in my position to control every action of his subordinate commanders, let alone the deeds of individual soldiers. The charges are completely new to me. If they had happened, and I had known about them, I would have punished the wrongdoers severely. But in war someone has to lose. What I am really being charged with is losing the war. It could have happened to General MacArthur, you know.”
But that was not how the war had turned out. Ultimately, Yamashita’s defense seemed to overlook the fact that a commander is ultimately responsible for the actions of his troops, even the lowliest private.
Swiftly, he was found guilty and sentenced to death for the war crimes committed by his troops.
Not being in a forgiving mood, President Harry Truman denied a request for a pardon.
And so Yamashita found himself climbing those steps, finally taking a drop into eternity. Justice had been done.
Thank you so much for reading and keeping some of our amazing American World War II history alive. I did want to clarify a few places and events in the story, because I have taken some artistic license here with the timeline that involved the 77th Infantry Division, the unit on which many of the adventures of Patrol Easy and Deacon Cole are based. Several of the events are inspired by the unit history
I’ve also used some of reporter Ernie Pyle’s words in Chapter 2, where he describes soldiers’ nostalgia for home. In Chapter 11, the article “On the Front Lines in the Pacific” is my attempt to write about Patrol Easy in Pyle’s voice to give a flavor for his reporting (although he did not actually write those words). Please consider it a small tribute to Pyle and his writing style from another old newspaper reporter. Pyle will appear in at least one more story in what I hope is a way to honor how he ultimately gave his life to bring the war home to so many. I often found myself dipping into the collection
In the first part of the story, the soldiers are involved in wiping out the last of the Japanese on the island of Leyte, where US forces initially landed. According to division records, the unit lost 543 killed and 1,469 wounded during their participation in the fight for Leyte between December 7, 1944, and February 5, 1945. Japanese losses were catastrophic, with an estimated 19,456 killed during actions with the 77th Infantry Division. (It’s worth noting that the overall population of Japan in 1941 was around 72 million, roughly half the population of the United States.)
Many of the defenders on Leyte were hidden inside deep bunkers like the one depicted or had taken refuge in the hills. (On a side note, the actual name for napalm was classified, although it made an appearance in the Pacific long before Vietnam.) It is notable that just 124 Japanese prisoners were taken — still enough to have kept Nisei interpreters like Yoshio busy. The Japanese mostly became prisoners only because they had been wounded or knocked senseless with bombs or rifle butts. There wasn’t a lot of surrendering going on.
From Leyte, the soldiers embarked for Ie Shima and Okinawa, preparing for the big invasion of what was considered one of the Japanese home islands. The division itself apparently was not involved in the fight for Luzon, having already left for Okinawa, but Patrol Easy has been assigned to Manila for the sake of the story. Their skills would have been welcome at what has been called the “Stalingrad of the Pacific” because of its similarity to the street fighting and sniper battles in that Soviet city.
The villains of this story, Major Tanigawa and Sergeant Inaba, are a composite of several Japanese officers who behaved with unusual cruelty that went far beyond any sort of military necessity. Some of these officers took their own lives in the last days of the battle, and others were tried and hanged after the war. As mentioned in the epilogue, the overall Japanese commanding general, Tomoyuki Yamashita, and his chief of staff, Akira Mutō, were executed for the crimes committed in Manila.
