JAPS ON TRIAL

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 148, 20 December 1945, Page 7

JAPS ON TRIAL

THE FIRST BATCH

MEMBER OF COMMISSION REMOVED

(By Telograph—Press Association—Copyright.)

TOKIO, December 19

Colonel Joseph Hall, who was captured in the Philippines and spent three years as a prisoner of the Japanese after participating in the Bataan death march, has been relieved of his duties as a member of the Military Commission which is trying the first batch of Japanese suspected war criminals. This followed a claim by counsel for the defence that he was not fit to judge impartially.

Asked if he was ever beaten up, Colonel Hall replied, "Often." Asked if he had ever received kind treatment, he replied, "Never," but he claimed that he was unprejudiced except regarding incidents in which he himself participated. High lights of the first session of the trial were a plea of pot guilty by Tatsuo Tsuchiya, a prison guard accused of beating prisoners to death with knotted ropes and torturing others, and a prosecution announcement that the death penalty would be demanded because of the seriousness of the crimes.

The prosecution introduced copies of letters between the former American Secretary of State, Mr. Cordell Hull, and the Japanese Government agreeing that the United States and Japan would abide by the 1929 Geneva Convention in the handling of prisoners of war.

Tsuchiya sat impassively as interpreters related how he and other guards tortured prisoners, stole food from others, and also compelled British and Americans to line up and slap each other's faces while they looked on laughingly. Laying a pattern for the trials of 400 others similarly charged, the bulk of the evidence will comprise statements made by prisoners. Almost the only spoken testimony will be, • iven by doctors who later examined the men, CHARGES AGAINST HOMMA. Lieut.-General Masaharu Homma, conqueror of the Philippines, will be charged, first, that between December 8, 1941, and August 15, 1942. when a lieutenant-general in the Japanese army and commander-in-chief in the Philippines, he failed to control his troops, permitting them to .commit atrocities; and, secondly, that on May 6, 1942, he refused to grant quarter to American and Allied forces in Manila Bay after the white flag had been raised.

The charges are backed by 43 specifications in which Homma is charged with responsibility for the 80,735 slayings and torturings listed, plus many others. There are more than 20,000 more crimes listed against Homma than against General Yamashita. The first specification accused Homma of wantonly bombing Manila after it had been declared an open city, Homma will be tried under a directive of General Mac Arthur as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. Yamashita was tried under a directive by General Mac Arthur as Commander of the United States Army Forces in the Pacific, which enabled him to appeal to the United States Supreme Court. Homma's trial is thus ostensibly a United Nations affair and outside the jurisdiction of any domestic civil court. The military commission trying Homma has been appointed, like the Yamashita Court, by Lieuten-ant-General Styer, Commander of the Army Forces in the Western Pacific.