The surrender of Yamashita

On 2 September 1945, the same day that Japan’s instrument of surrender was being signed aboard the Missouri in Tokyo Bay, General Tomoyuki Yamashita came down from the mountains of northern Luzon. In the small town of Kiangan in Ifugao province he and his staff gave themselves up to American and Filipino troops. The next day, 3 September, at Baguio, he signed the surrender of all Japanese forces in the Philippines. For the “Tiger of Malaya”, the conqueror of Singapore in 1942, it was the end of his military career and the start of a road that half a year later led him to the gallows.

Yamashita is sometimes described as the “commander of the Imperial Japanese Army”. This is a simplification: Yamashita never commanded the Japanese army as a whole. From the autumn of 1944 he commanded the 14th Area Army, that is, all the ground forces defending the Philippines, and in the last months of the war in practice only the Shobu Group in the mountains of Luzon. The date and place of the surrender given in war chronologies are, on the other hand, accurate: on 2 September Yamashita surrendered near Kiangan, and he signed the formal instrument of surrender a day later at Baguio.

The last months of the Shobu Group

When the Americans landed in Lingayen Gulf in January 1945, Yamashita decided not to defend the central Luzon plain and Manila, but to withdraw his main forces into the mountains and tie the enemy down there for as long as possible. The strongest of his three groupings, the Shobu Group, under his personal command, occupied the mountain triangle between Baguio, Balete Pass and the Cagayan Valley, where it fought the decisive engagements of the Battle of Luzon.

In the spring of 1945 the defence began to crumble. At the end of April the Americans took Baguio, where Yamashita had until then had his headquarters. Balete Pass fell on 13 May, and in June troops of the Sixth Army pushed through the Cagayan Valley all the way to the island’s northern coast. A huge part in this fighting was played by the Filipino guerrillas of Colonel Russell Volckmann’s USAFIP-NL (United States Army Forces in the Philippines – Northern Luzon), who seized most of the north-western coast and cut off the Japanese lines of retreat.

On 5 July General Douglas MacArthur announced the liberation of the Philippines, but in the mountains the fighting went on. The remnants of the Shobu Group shut themselves up in the inaccessible terrain of the Cordillera Central, in the Asin River valley and around Kiangan, where Yamashita set up his last command post. Cut off from supplies, the Japanese soldiers lived on roots and whatever they could take from the local population. Many died of starvation, malaria and dysentery. Against them operated the American 6th, 32nd and 37th Infantry Divisions and USAFIP-NL units. The Japanese were no longer capable of attacking, but they held out until the very end of the war.

Down from the mountains

News that Japan had accepted the surrender terms reached Yamashita’s headquarters by radio in mid-August. On 16 August Imperial General Headquarters issued the ceasefire order, but carrying it out among units scattered across the mountains took time. The Americans dropped leaflets over the Japanese positions calling on them to lay down their arms, and at the end of August, after an exchange of envoys and messages, it was agreed where and when the Japanese commander would come out of the mountains.

On the morning of 2 September Yamashita, accompanied by his chief of staff, General Akira Mutō, and several officers, walked into the American positions near Kiangan. According to most accounts, he surrendered to troops of General William Gill’s 32nd Infantry Division, which had been fighting the Shobu Group in the mountains since February; some sources also name General Robert Beightler of the 37th Division. Filipino tradition, commemorated by a plaque of the National Historical Commission, stresses that the general surrendered to “Filipino and American forces” – in the final weeks the Japanese had been surrounded largely by USAFIP-NL guerrillas. The surrender took place in the building of the local school. From Kiangan Yamashita was taken via Bagabag to Baguio.

After him, his units began to come down from the mountains. According to American figures, some 50,000 men of the Shobu Group were still alive, the great majority of them in the last defensive area in the Asin valley. This was far more than MacArthur’s intelligence had assumed; in the summer it had believed that only shattered remnants were left in the mountains. Across Luzon, several tens of thousands more soldiers and sailors laid down their arms after Japan’s surrender, and individual soldiers who did not believe in the surrender went on hiding on the islands of the archipelago for years.

The instrument of surrender at Baguio

On 3 September 1945, in the residence of the American High Commissioner at Camp John Hay in Baguio, the summer capital of the Philippines, the ceremony of surrender of the Japanese forces in the archipelago took place. The document was signed by Yamashita and by Vice Admiral Denhichi Ōkōchi, commander of the Japanese naval forces in the Philippines. The surrender was accepted on the American side by General Edmond Leavey of the headquarters of US Army Forces, Western Pacific. According to Filipino sources, the signatures were made a few minutes after noon.

Two guests gave the ceremony its significance. Behind the table stood Generals Jonathan Wainwright and Arthur Percival, who the day before had been present aboard the Missouri and – according to contemporary reports – had flown from there straight to Baguio. Both had surrendered to the Japanese in 1942: Wainwright on Corregidor to General Masaharu Homma, and Percival at Singapore – to Yamashita himself. They had spent more than three years in Japanese captivity. MacArthur wanted both of them now to witness the surrender of the “Tiger of Malaya”. After signing the instrument Yamashita did not return to his troops – from that moment he was a prisoner, and soon a defendant.

The trial in Manila

From the outset the Americans intended to bring Yamashita to trial for the crimes committed in the Philippines. The gravest of them was the Manila massacre of February and March 1945, when – according to the most frequently cited estimates – some 100,000 civilians died in the fighting for the city and in killings carried out by Japanese sailors and soldiers before the end of the Battle of Manila. The indictment also listed the summary execution of guerrillas and of those suspected of collaborating with them, the killing of the population of Batangas province, the crimes of the Kempeitai and the massacre of American prisoners of war on Palawan in December 1944.

The trial before an American military commission of five generals opened in Manila on 29 October 1945. Yamashita was charged not with ordering the crimes, but with having failed as a commander to prevent them and to punish the perpetrators, although – in the prosecution’s view – he had been obliged to do so. The defence, led by Colonel Harry Clarke, argued that in the chaos of the American offensive Yamashita had no communication with many units, and that responsibility for the slaughter in Manila lay with the sailors of Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, who had defended the city against his orders. The accused himself maintained that he had not known of the crimes and that, had he known, he would have punished the guilty severely. The prosecution presented testimony – partly hearsay – according to which Yamashita had condoned the summary execution of captured guerrillas.

On 7 December 1945, the fourth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the commission found him guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging. MacArthur confirmed the sentence. On 4 February 1946 the Supreme Court of the United States, by six votes to two, declined to overturn it. Two justices, Frank Murphy and Wiley Rutledge, called the trial hasty and unfair in their dissenting opinions. President Harry Truman did not exercise his power of clemency. On 23 February 1946 Yamashita was hanged at Los Baños, south of Manila.

Command responsibility

The Yamashita case became one of the most important precedents in the law of war. The principle that a commander bears criminal responsibility for the crimes of his subordinates if he knew or should have known of them and did nothing to prevent or punish them is sometimes called the “Yamashita standard”. In various, often narrower, forms it was later applied in the judgments of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, and it also found its way into Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1977 and into the statutes of later international tribunals.

Opinions of the trial itself remain divided to this day. Critics – beginning with one of the defence counsel, A. Frank Reel, author of a 1949 book on the case, and with Justices Murphy and Rutledge – argue that Yamashita was condemned simply for having lost the war and for having commanded an army that committed crimes, in a trial conducted in haste and in breach of the rules of evidence. Other historians point to the enormous scale of the crimes in the Philippines, to the fact that many of them were committed by army rather than navy units, and to evidence that Yamashita approved orders to deal with suspected guerrillas without trial. For the Filipinos, who lost – according to estimates – from around half a million to a million people during the war, the trial was above all a reckoning for the occupation.

Significance

Yamashita’s surrender ended the fighting in the Philippines, which had gone on, with interruptions, since December 1941. The Americans had retaken most of the archipelago, where they had suffered one of the greatest defeats in their history in 1942, well before that – on 5 July 1945 MacArthur announced that the Philippine campaign was virtually over – but in the mountains of northern Luzon Yamashita’s forces held out until the end of the war. Yamashita’s plan to tie the Americans down in the mountains for as long as possible largely succeeded, but the price was paid by the Japanese soldiers, who died in their thousands of hunger and disease, and by the civilian population of Luzon. On 4 July 1946 the Philippines gained independence, and the plaque at Kiangan still marks the place where the Second World War ended there.