The second round of trials, from 1946 to 1948, dealt with far fewer defendants than the first, but some of those defendants were much more important. The most significant of these were the command responsibility trials of senior officers at Rabaul (R172–R188) from 3 April to 6 August 1947. They were not accused of directly ordering or participating in war crimes, but rather of failing to prevent them. Their trials were the Australian equivalents of those conducted against Generals Yamashita and Homma by the US Army in the Philippines, and the Australian courts frequently referred to those cases. The command responsibility trials were larger and much more complex than the early trials, but drew heavily on the evidence and verdicts from them.

As the Second Australian Imperial Force was demobilised over late 1945 and early 1946 and the remaining Japanese personnel throughout the East Indies and South Pacific were repatriated, the various Australian courts closed. And in the long run, all the locations used for the first round of trials except Rabaul proved inadequate for various reasons. Ambon and Morotai were in the Netherlands East Indies and needed to be handed back to the Dutch. Labuan needed to be returned to the British, and the Australian Army had no desire to keep personnel at Wewak on a long-term basis – it was simply where the 6th Division had been when the Japanese surrendered. The trials at Darwin attracted a great deal of negative publicity, and the government decided not to hold any further trials in Australia afterwards.

By April 1946, only the court at Rabaul was still operating and the first round of trials there ended in July, even though there were still suspects in custody. Another small round was held from 7 December 1946 to 23 January 1947 (R168–R170), but in March 1947, the last Japanese at Rabaul, not being needed as suspects or witnesses, were repatriated.1 In the meantime, other Australian courts were opened at more permanent premises in Singapore and Hong Kong. Along with the command responsibility trials these make up the second round of Australian trials.

In Singapore, the twenty-three trials of sixty-two defendants were held from 26 June 1946 to 11 June 1947. The Australian trials in Singapore were the result of political and budgetary considerations. Australian public opinion demanded those Japanese responsible for atrocities on the Burma Railway face justice. But Lord Louis Mountbatten, British commander in South-East Asia, had to balance these demands with the cases involving Asian civilians in Malaya and Singapore. The British Empire’s prestige in Asia had taken a huge hit with the Fall of Singapore, and such trials could help restore its position. In December 1945, the Australian government therefore agreed to set up and fund a war crimes investigation unit in Singapore, called 1AWCS (First Australian War Crimes Section). Australia would conduct some of the trials involving the Burma Railway and crimes against both British and Australian POWs, freeing British resources for the trials involving crimes against civilians.

Of the twenty-three Australian trials at Singapore, eighteen concerned the Burma Railway, and a significant number involved Korean guards, who were in the same position as the Formosans in Borneo. The remaining cases concerned the execution of downed airmen, and the mistreatment of prisoners of war in the Netherlands East Indies and French Indochina. All death sentences were carried out by the British authorities, by hanging at Changi Prison. In total, 130 Japanese war criminals were hanged there, of whom eighteen had been convicted in Australian courts.

The trials were not quite finished when 1AWCS lost its accommodation in Singapore and was compelled to move to Hong Kong in November 1947. There, thirteen trials of forty-two defendants were held by the Australian authorities between 24 November 1947 and 25 November 1948. Originally there had been only one case scheduled for trial, involving the mistreatment of Australian POWs on Hainan Island. The other cases were added subsequently, covering a wide geographical area and a wide range of victims.

Of the thirteen trials, eight concerned prisoners of war and five concerned civilians. Ten defendants were sentenced to death but only five were actually executed. As at Singapore, the British authorities carried out all executions, by hanging at Stanley Prison. By 1948, both the British and Australian governments were uneasy about continuing to execute Japanese war criminals so long after the end of the war, hence the high rate of commutation. The trials at Hong Kong were also troubled by a lack of resources from both governments, and by pressure from MacArthur to conclude them. In November 1948, 1AWCS lost its premises in Hong Kong and the Australian trials there ended; 2AWCS, which had been raised in Tokyo in March 1946, continued the investigations. Originally created to work with SCAP for the American class-B and -C trials at Yokohama, 2AWCS now, on a limited budget, carried on in the hope that more trials would be held at some point.

At Rabaul, the command responsibility trials began in April 1947. The need to wait for the earlier trials to be resolved and the scaling back of the Australian Army’s presence in New Britain caused the delay. Lieutenant Colonel Crofton Stephens, Chief Legal Officer from 1946 onwards, felt that the huts used in the earlier trials at Rabaul were not suitable for the trials of senior officers. They were also starting to deteriorate, but there was no money to rebuild them, and the court had to be stopped at those times when the rain on the tin roof made it impossible to hear what was going on.2

There were more people on the bench at the command responsibility trials and of a higher rank, reflecting their greater importance. There were seven officers, led by Major General John S. Whitelaw as president, as well as Judge Advocate Lieutenant Colonel John T. Brock. The prosecution was led not by an AALC officer, but a civilian barrister, Lennard C. Badham KC from the New South Wales bar. The Japanese government sent a defence team of fifteen lawyers and translators, led by senior legal officer Major General Yajima Masanori.

As a result, the legal submissions at the command responsibility trials were much longer than earlier ones, and the quality of the translation is far superior. The trials themselves also went for much longer, often a week or ten days, which could be an ordeal in the tropical heat. The court sat from 9.30 am to 12.30 pm, then from 2.30 to 4.30 pm, an onerous schedule for translators and stenographers. At one point, journalists reported the prosecutors playing noughts and crosses while submissions were being translated, while the president amused himself playing with a baby mouse. ‘Unhappily the mouse died’.3

As an example of the command responsibility trials, I will look at that of Eighth Area Army general Imamura Hitoshi, overall leader of all Japanese forces in Rabaul and the surrounding area.

At the start of 1946, Imamura was living with thirty-seven other high-ranking Japanese Army and Navy officers at Talili Bay, about 12 miles (19 kilometres) from Rabaul. Living conditions there were not bad. In fact, they appeared to be exceptionally good: self-contained cottages with electricity and indoor plumbing, surrounded by lush gardens. An Australian journalist visited the compound in March and wrote a furious article, published in various newspapers around Australia as ‘Japanese Officers Live High at Rabaul’ (The Age), ‘Jap Officers in Luxury, Australians Rough It’ (The Sun), ‘No Action Indicated on Japs’ Luxurious Housing’ (The Telegraph) and ‘“Prison Paradise” For Japanese Officers’ (the Sydney Morning Herald).4 According to the journalist, Australians in Rabaul were ‘disgusted beyond expression’ that senior Japanese officers were living in comfort while Australian prisoners of war recovering in hospital had no eggs or fresh vegetables. ‘This state of affairs demands a public inquiry,’ he wrote, singling out Imamura in particular:

General Hitoshi Imamura, who commanded the Eighth Army Group in the Java and Rabaul area, and who, I am informed, is wanted in Batavia for responsibility for the murder of about 500 natives in Java, is No. 1 man of the camp. Like all the other 37 senior officers, he lives in solitary splendour in a small house, extravagantly furnished, and elaborately equipped with new furniture. He has a separate bedroom, protected completely by flywire, and spotlessly clean sheets and hand-woven rugs so as not to soil his honourable feet. Imamura has an office of his own and several batmen. Bookshelves line the walls, and there are hand-painted vases containing small red flowers. I took all this in and wondered why he should want to return to Japan, when, in his own words, ‘I never imagined I should be treated so well.’

In response, the Australian Army testily pointed out that the Japanese compound at Talili was entirely self-supporting, but it nonetheless took away the poultry and goats.5

Imamura’s good fortune did not last. In May, he and the other accused senior officers were moved to the war criminals compound. ‘He has been deprived of the comfort of his well-appointed cottage, his sake, his whisky, his poultry, and his eggs,’ wrote journalist Max Coleman. ‘Now he has to rub shoulders with the lowliest Jap private.’6 Coleman did acknowledge that Imamura bore the indignity of being searched by a native police ‘boy’ much better than another of the generals did (as it turned out, Imamura was able to smuggle a bottle of poison into the compound, so it’s questionable how thorough the search was). He would now need to take orders from native guards, attend two parades daily, and answer ‘yes, sir’ when the Australian corporal called the roll.

Imamura was hoping he would be put on trial quickly, to allow him to defend both himself and his subordinates. But the authorities in Rabaul pushed through the trials of the lower-ranking officers first, and so Imamura needed to endure the frustration of seeing his subordinates convicted and, in some cases, executed, while he was powerless to help them.

After a couple of months in the compound, he tried to kill himself. He bit on the small phial of poison he’d carried with him throughout the war (and smuggled into the compound) and then slashed at his throat with a razor blade. But the poison had lost its potency over the years and only made him sick, and the cut wasn’t deep enough to kill him. He was found by a guard within a few minutes and rushed to hospital. Imamura recovered, telling his captors he’d tried to kill himself because he felt partly responsible for Japan’s defeat. The guards kept a close eye on him from then on, although he promised not to attempt suicide again. The event was hushed up at the time but became public shortly before his trial.7

A significant number of charges against the officers in Imamura’s command related to the mistreatment of Chinese, Indian and Indonesian POWs (the Indonesians served in the armed forces of the Dutch East Indies). Imamura’s position, and that of the Japanese Army, was that these men were not legally prisoners of war.

Officially, Japanese policy distinguished between European prisoners, who were regarded as prisoners of war and put to work where their labour would be of use to the empire, and Asian prisoners, who were to be given the opportunity to join the Japanese in the creation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Imamura maintained that all the Indians, Chinese and Indonesians under his command at the end of the war had been set free after capture and then volunteered to join the Japanese. The Indians, he argued, were heiho, or foreign servicemen in the Japanese Army or Navy. The Chinese and Indonesians were either heiho or had been willingly employed as labourers.

This interpretation was strenuously challenged by many of the Indians, Chinese and Indonesians themselves. When the Australian Army reoccupied Rabaul at the end of the war, they found a large number of these so-called volunteers, almost all in very poor shape. About 6,000 Indians were recovered in the South Pacific – they had been captured by the Japanese in Malaya or Singapore and sent to New Britain and the surrounding islands to work as labourers when they refused to join the pro-Japanese Indian National Army.

The British had learned from long and difficult experience that understanding religious difference was essential in governing India. The Japanese, though, tried to force the Hindus they captured to eat beef, the Sikhs to shave their beards and stop wearing turbans, and the Muslims to eat pork and pray towards the Imperial Palace in Tokyo rather than towards Mecca. When they refused they were beaten. They were forced to work seven days a week through the daylight hours, and were underfed and denied medical attention. One of the Indians found at Rabaul was the sole survivor of a labour company that had had 176 men when it was formed in February 1943.8

Ninety-nine of the earlier trials at Rabaul had dealt with the mistreatment of Indian prisoners of war, with Subedar Chint Singh serving as a witness in many of them. A Hindu soldier from the 2/12 Frontier Force Regiment captured in the Fall of Singapore, he was one of the forced labourers in New Britain.

There was also a sizeable number of Chinese in Japanese captivity in New Britain, either soldiers captured in China, civilians sent to Rabaul as labourers, or civilians living in the area before the war who were interned. All had suffered high death rates. Of the 1,500 soldiers sent to New Britain, 758 were alive at the end of the war; of 2,000 civilian labourers, 831 were alive; and of the 2,000 or so other civilians, 10 per cent had perished.9 Forty-four of the Australian cases at Rabaul dealt with Chinese soldiers or civilians. While the Indians were British subjects and therefore more familiar with the common law and Australian Army practices, there was something of a cultural divide with the Chinese. For example, some did not understand why the Japanese accused of war crimes were not executed on the spot.10 The slow repatriation of the Chinese to China also caused unrest, and at one point led to a small riot.

The final four cases at Rabaul dealt with Indonesians.

At first glance, the question of whether the Chinese, Indians and Indonesians volunteered or were coerced might seem irrelevant. However, the War Crimes Act only gave the Australian courts the power to try ‘violations of the laws and usages of war or war crimes against any person who was at any time resident in Australia, or against any British subject or citizen of an Allied Power’. It gave no authority to try offences committed by the Japanese against members of their own armed forces, and the internal discipline of the Japanese Army and Navy was therefore outside the jurisdiction of the courts. If the Japanese Army flogged or shot its own workers as punishment for offences under Japanese military law, there was no war crime.

Imamura stuck to this line in a letter to Douglas MacArthur and the Australian government in April, in which he (unsuccessfully) sought a reprieve for some of his officers sentenced to death for shooting Indian labourers caught escaping.11 Imamura, and the officers, claimed the Indians were being executed for desertion in accordance with Japanese military law. He had made the same argument when he appeared as a witness in the trial of Major General Hirota Akira, responsible for supply within his command. Hirota had been charged with the mistreatment and killing of Chinese prisoners of war and Papua New Guinea natives. Imamura claimed that the Chinese were volunteers recruited by the collaborationist government of Wang Jingwei. When asked in cross-examination why Chinese officers would consent to being sent as manual labourers to Rabaul, he said they had done so to escape starvation in China.12

In what a Daily Advertiser journalist described as a ‘sensation’ and a ‘dramatic development’, Imamura took responsibility for the offences Hirota had been charged with. ‘I, not General Hirota, should be held responsible for these incidents if they occurred,’ he informed the ‘hushed courtroom’. ‘I, as G.O.C. of the Eighth Army Group, assume responsibility for the military discipline affecting the 26th Supply Depot. Hirota’s responsibility was supply only.’13

He was to get his opportunity, with his own trial (R175) beginning on 19 March. Imamura was charged with a violation of the laws and usages of war, in that he ‘unlawfully disregarded and failed to discharge his duty’ to prevent his subordinates committing brutal atrocities against the people of Australia and its allies.14 The prosecution presented dozens of instances of the mistreatment or killing of Indian POWs, Chinese civilians and POWs, Indonesian civilians, Dutch civilians, and British POWs throughout Imamura’s command, some of which had seen his subordinates convicted at earlier trials. He pleaded not guilty.

In his opening address, prosecutor Lennard Badham KC explained the concept of command responsibility: ‘there is no allegation here that the Accused himself committed any of the things in respect of which complaint is made, but that he either expressly authorised them, or connived at them, or was so criminally negligent in respect of the duties devolving on him as commander, that he ought to have known of them, or did know of them and took no steps to prevent them or to see that they were not perpetrated.’15

The evidence against Imamura was mostly documentary, consisting of affidavits, extracts from the Third Webb Report, and material from earlier trials. As time passed, it became more common to have witnesses provide statements, rather than use the army’s stretched resources to fly them to Rabaul. However, Indian soldier Chint Singh returned to testify in person.

Singh reported that after he was captured, he and his fellow Indians were pressured to join the Indian National Army, the military force of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Provisional Government of Free India. According to Singh, about 20,000 joined it in September 1942 ‘after many tortures and punishments’.16 Those who held out were beaten, called traitors to the cause of Asia and India, and told they would be sent to the Solomon Islands, then under heavy American air attack. Singh and the men of his unit were sent from Singapore to Wewak in Papua New Guinea in May 1943. Contrary to Imamura’s claim, he insisted ‘there was none among us who ever joined or intended to join an organisation of the Japanese’.17

The prosecution also presented affidavits by a number of Chinese officers telling a similar story. In conclusion, Badham argued, the Indians and Chinese were prisoners of war and therefore entitled to the protection of the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907 and the 1929 Geneva Convention. (The citing of specific treaties, and articles of those treaties, was a sign of the greater sophistication of the command responsibility trials.) The prosecution then went through all the individual instances of torture and murder, showing that these conventions had not been adhered to.

In his defence, Imamura stubbornly maintained that the Indians, Chinese and Indonesians were not prisoners of war. He called seven witnesses to his defence, but all were Japanese – clearly, the defence was not able to find an Indian, Indonesian or Chinese witness who would back up their claims. Under skilful cross-examination from Badham, Imamura found himself tied in knots trying to explain the status of the Indians.18 If they were not prisoners of war, Badham asked, had they been released? Yes, Imamura replied. So they had the opportunity to leave and not serve the Japanese? Yes. Did any take it? Imamura was not aware; he denied there had been any coercion at Rabaul, but admitted he did not know what happened at Singapore. In the end, he could not explain how any of the Indians could have chosen anything other than service with the Japanese Army, making their volunteering look very much like a Hobson’s choice.

In his closing address in Imamura’s defence, Yajima held the same line. The ranks of the Indian National Army could not have been filled by force, he said, as such an army would be useless in battle. Indians were labourers in the Japanese Army, and it was ‘natural’ they would be executed if they tried to desert.19 The treatment of the Indian prisoners of war was, therefore, outside the jurisdiction of the War Crimes Act.

Regarding the actual atrocities, Imamura maintained he knew nothing about them, and any officers who had tortured or executed civilians or prisoners had done so contrary to his orders. Cross-examined by Badham, though, he again found himself in difficulties. One exchange concerned the conviction and death sentence for Captain Ikeba Toma, who’d had a number of Indians shot for trying to escape in Bougainville.20

Q: First of all, did you issue, or were you concerned in issuing, an order that Indians who attempted to escape should be shot?

A: No.

Q: Did you issue an order that Indians who attempted to escape should be treated as enemies?

A: Yes, that is stated in the instruction which I referred to before.

Q: And do you know that Captain Ikeba interpreted it as meaning he could shoot the Indians without trial?

A: That is a mistake.

Q: What is a mistake?

A: When in the act of escaping they can be shot, but once caught they must be tried.

Q: Do you know that he said this in the course of his statement: ‘I concluded that, acting on my own authority, I order to prevent any unexpected damage, such Indians should be shot.’ Do you see that?

A: Yes.

Q: Was that a misinterpretation of your instructions?

A: Yes, it was a misinterpretation. Once they caught them they had to try them.21

In Imamura’s defence, Yajima submitted that the international law relating to command responsibility was vague and unclear.22 None of the previous cases established a definite rule for holding a commander responsible for the actions of his men, particularly when they were outside his direct supervision. Many of the individual atrocities had taken place away from Rabaul, in Papua New Guinea or the East Indies. Yajima argued that to hold Imamura responsible for them was to form a connection that was simply too tenuous. In his lengthy concluding address, Yajima said it was not enough to prove that Imamura had been the commander at Rabaul, and that his subordinates committed atrocities; the prosecution had to point to some unlawful act or omission on Imamura’s behalf. In Yajima’s view, the prosecution had not been able to do this.23

Badham, for his part, accused Imamura of ‘seeking refuge in ignorance’.24 It was ‘preposterous’ to argue that Imamura had not paid attention to atrocities committed in his command. People had been killed, Badham said, often brutally, and the dead called for justice.

After a lengthy concluding address by the judge advocate, the court retired to consider its verdict. When they returned, Imamura was convicted. Neither party made any submission on sentence. The court adjourned for two minutes and then sentenced him to ten years’ imprisonment. A petition against his conviction and sentence was dismissed.

The sentences handed down at the command responsibility trials were relatively lighter than those at earlier trials. Part of this may have been a cooling of the anti-Japanese feeling that had accompanied the earlier trials; part of it may have been discomfort with the idea of holding senior officers culpable for everything done under their command. Especially when the men of the court that sentenced Imamura were senior officers themselves, commanders of battalions, brigades or, in the case of the major general, divisions. And while the men under Imamura’s command certainly committed heinous crimes, he was not in overall command of an atrocity on the scale of the Rape of Manila or the Bataan Death March. That probably counted in his favour.

So Imamura found himself returned to the war criminals compound. Still, his situation was not too bad. As the senior Japanese officer there, he was useful to the Australian authorities, and helped with the management of the other prisoners. When two men were caught stealing food, an Australian officer suggested they be sentenced to a week’s hard labour. Imamura found the punishment too lenient, and they were given two.25 Living in the ‘General’s Village’ within the compound, Imamura had a great deal of freedom of movement, and was frequently seen out and about with Lieutenant Katayama Hideo.

Katayama was one of the most interesting characters at Rabaul. A devout Christian who spoke fluent English, he had been sentenced to death by shooting at Morotai in February 1946 (M43) for taking part in the execution of a downed Australian airman. His sentence was deferred, however, as he was needed at Rabaul as a witness in another trial. He arrived in May 1946 but it took a year for the trial to take place, so in the meantime he made himself useful around the compound as a translator. In his spare time he led church services and ministered the gospel to Australians and Japanese alike.

Katayama seems to have been an exceptionally personable man, and over time he became one of the most popular residents of the Rabaul compound. The Australian interpreters gave him tea, cigarettes and magazines, and even took him on a tour of Rabaul’s Chinatown – a remarkable relaxation of security for a man on death row. He was touched that they began calling him ‘Mr Katayama’ – no Australians had ever so addressed him before.26

Not everyone liked him, though. One Australian officer, Lieutenant H.E. Smith, seems to have been his particular nemesis. One night a group of prisoners broke out of their cells to visit a man who was to be shot the next morning and keep him company. In fact, his sentence had been commuted, but one of the Australian officers had decided to let him spend the night thinking it was his last. Katayama let the escapees through his cell, and then tried to cover for them. The next day, Smith gathered a party of natives and beat him up. Imamura saw this and complained to Major Upson, the commander of the compound.27

The Japanese at Rabaul all seem to have had a high opinion of Upson. Imamura found him ‘proper and fair’28 while Katayama spoke of him as an ‘Australian of high character who is respected by all the Japanese’. He ‘instituted stern discipline’, but ‘possesses in his heart always a feeling of warm brotherly love’.29 A number of prisoners wrote thankyou letters to Upson before their release, execution or suicide.

However, Katayama also recorded cases where guards, in defiance of Upson’s orders, mistreated prisoners. His own beating at the hands of Smith and his posse was certainly one. Such incidents were more common in the early days, when there were a number of high-profile war criminals on death row, like Hoshijima and Takakuwa. Ikeuchi Masakiyo, the reviled commandant of the unusually lethal POW camp on Ambon, claimed in a letter smuggled out of the compound before his execution that he was repeatedly assaulted by the guards.

Allegations of assaults on prisoners continued into 1946 and 1947. Katayama wrote of the case of Corporal Mayama Kihachi, sentenced to six months for mistreatment of an Indian prisoner of war. Mayama was employed in the laundry and was caught peeking at the wife of an Australian NCO in the shower. He was confined to a cell, where it appears he was beaten up, and the next morning was found to have strangled himself. According to Katayama, all the Japanese questioned knew what had happened but stayed silent when questioned as they did not want Upson to lose face.30

Complaints about mistreatment at Rabaul did not go further than the compound, as letters were censored. Afterwards, a few were made public. Some repatriated war criminals claimed before a Japanese House of Representatives Committee in 1953 that their treatment in Rabaul had been ‘cruelty itself’, a claim the Australian government vehemently denied.31 In late 1947 Katayama provided his list of incidents to Brigadier Edward Neylan, the new commander at Rabaul, but acknowledged that things had improved significantly since some of the problematic guards had left, and the compound was now a ‘model prison’.32

Outside of these incidents, the prisoners at Rabaul do not seem to have been particularly ill-treated. They were put to work in the sawmill, cutting wood for rebuilding the town, in road-building parties outside the compound, or growing vegetables and doing other tasks necessary to keep the compound running. Work hours were from 6.45 am to midday and from 1 pm to 4.30, six days per week. The men were relatively free within the compound, to the point where Chint Singh wanted a pistol to defend himself when he came to testify.33

Where possible, the previous professions of the war criminals were made use of. The most common was farm labourer – an interesting insight into the social background of the men who ended up convicted of war crimes. There were sixty other professions, including farmer, blacksmith, electrician, carpenter, mechanic, doctor and pharmacist. There was also a fountain pen dealer, who probably did not have the chance to use his professional skills while imprisoned. Some prisoners were also lent out under guard to civilian authorities, to work on the roads and the aerodrome, or, more alarmingly, bomb and mine disposals. Five were killed in industrial accidents on Rabaul, leading to petitions being signed by the others for dangerous work to be abolished and for the families of war criminals killed on the job to be compensated. These were not accepted.

When they weren’t working, the prisoners were engaged in educational or religious activities, sport and recreation. They had access to a gramophone, a table tennis set and magazines, and a Buddhist and Christian priest held a service every Sunday.34 But they could not receive luxuries from home. In early 1948 the Japanese government asked permission to ship some comfort items, including food, to the Japanese prisoners of war at Rabaul. The Department of the Army responded that there were no prisoners of war at Rabaul, only convicted war criminals who were not entitled to be issued with special comforts.35

But even with this policy, there were complaints in the Australian press that the war criminals were being treated too softly. On 19 December 1945 one press correspondent, on seeing the prisoners at Rabaul smoking Australian Army cigarettes, wrote: ‘We do not want to “beat them up”, because that would be sinking to their standards . . . But what I saw makes me feel that we have gone too far the other way.’36 Another journalist who visited the compound in May 1948 reported ‘fat and well fed’ war criminals who ‘never seem short of cigarettes’ doing only ‘light menial’ tasks like digging the occasional drain in pumice-stone soil. In his impression, they were living a ‘life of comparative comfort and ease’ and were better off than many of the island’s European residents. ‘Returned servicemen and other people at Rabaul are disgusted with the lenient way in which the criminals are being treated,’ he concluded.37

When the command responsibility trials at Rabaul ended in August 1947, operations there began to wind down. The final executions, both hangings and shootings, were held in October. The last firing squad was formed on 23 October for the executions of Lieutenants Takahashi and Katayama.

A lot of people had gone to a great deal of effort to save Katayama. Neylan had delayed his execution for as long as possible and asked the government to commute his sentence, and everyone in the compound had signed a petition in his favour. However, without any direction from Melbourne or Canberra to the contrary, Neylan was reluctantly forced to order the execution to go ahead. Facing the firing squad, Katayama sang a hymn, said the Lord’s Prayer, and then prayed in English for good relations between Australia and Japan and for the health and happiness of everyone in the compound. ‘It was an excruciating duty to shoot him,’ wrote Georgina Fitzpatrick, not least because the firing squad was drawn from men in the compound who had lived with Katayama for nearly eighteen months.38

Takahashi and Katayama were the last people executed by firing squad under Australian law. The Rabaul court was closed in December 1947. The compound continued to operate as a prison, and the Australian government remained satisfied with it. Cyril Chambers, the acting Minister for External Territories, visited in January 1949 and found ‘the grounds were in excellent condition, gardens and lawns having been laid out and all buildings inspected were spotlessly clean and tidy’.39

But once the town of Rabaul had been rebuilt and returned to the civilian authorities, there was less work for the war criminals to do and less political desire to keep them in New Britain. Over 1949 and 1950 they were transferred to Manus Island to work on rebuilding the Australian Navy base there, and the Rabaul compound was closed down. Rabaul’s part in the trial and imprisonment of war criminals had come to an end.