Manus Island is the largest of the Admiralty Islands, which lie about 300 kilometres north of Papua New Guinea and about two degrees south of the equator. Manus is of volcanic origin, mostly covered in tropical rainforest, and has a range of low mountains running along its spine. Its principal settlement is Lorengau in the far east of the island, from where a causeway runs to nearby Los Negros Island. Between Manus and Los Negros is Seeadler Harbour, one of the finest anchorages in the region – in the Second World War the US Navy was able to securely anchor a thousand ships there.

The Admiralty Islands were part of German New Guinea when they were captured by the Australians in 1914. They were then captured by the Japanese in April 1942, and recaptured by the Americans in February 1944. The Americans left in 1948 and the islands came back under Australian control.

The Chifley government decided to rebuild the Australian Navy’s base at Seeadler Harbor using Japanese war criminals serving prison terms as labour. Starting in February 1948, the government began transferring prisoners from Rabaul to a new compound at Manus near Lombrum, a process completed by early 1950.1 In the federal election of 10 December 1949 the Chifley Labor government was defeated and Robert Menzies led the Liberal–Country Party coalition into office. At its first cabinet meeting, the new government dealt with a long message from MacArthur demanding the Australian trials be completed by 31 December 1949. At the time, 191 suspects were still being held on Australia’s behalf.2

The Menzies government was suspicious of Japan, but not to the extent the previous government had been. A rebuilt Japan was a potential threat, but also a potential trading partner and ally against communism. And Menzies and his ministers were fiercely critical of holding men without trial. ‘The previous Prime Minister very properly said that it is inexcusable to hold men year after year without bringing them to trial,’ Country Party MP Larry Anthony told the House of Representatives in March 1950. ‘Whether they be Japanese or German, they are entitled to a fair and speedy trial in accordance with the tenets of British justice.’3

MacArthur had granted the new government a short extension to decide what to do, and on 11 January 1950 it announced that trials would commence on Manus Island with all possible speed.4

On 23 February 1950 Menzies made a statement to the House of Representatives explaining his government’s policy towards the remaining suspects in Australian detention. ‘As the war was a crucial struggle against aggression and injustice,’ he told the House, ‘so our conduct in victory should be marked by an adherence to those great principles of clear allegation, prompt trial, and unswerving execution of judgment which have characterized the whole development of what we call, in simple but proud terms, British justice.’5

He announced that the government would bring to trial those cases ‘involving charges of murder or other revolting crimes or charges in relation to which, on conviction of the accused persons involved, the sentence of death might be appropriate’. Menzies justified the decision to hold the trials on Manus Island on the odd basis that it was the closest Australian territory to Japan. The government was unwilling to hold more trials in Australia itself after the adverse publicity of the Darwin trials. The authorities in Hong Kong would not allow any further Australian trials to be held there, and nor would MacArthur allow them in Japan, as they were not, in his view, directly connected with the occupation. It’s likely that Manus was selected because the convicted war criminals already in prison were being assembled there to work on an Australian naval base and it was distant enough from Australia to prevent the trials becoming a media show.

Menzies further announced that those defendants accused of lesser crimes, and those who were unlikely to be convicted due to insufficient evidence, would be released.

This last point did not sit well with some MPs. Eddie Ward, Labor MP for East Sydney, rhetorically asked the House, ‘I am wondering whether this is an act of appeasement towards the Japanese nation. There appear to be elements in the world who are now endeavouring to strengthen Japan because they consider that it could be a possible buffer against the Soviet [Union] in the event of any future hostilities with that nation. No doubt this is another act of appeasement of enemy countries on the part of the Government.’6

A heated exchange between Ward and new Minister for External Affairs Percy Spender followed, with Ward repeatedly asking Spender how many suspects had been released, and Spender reluctant to give a straight answer. Finally, he gave the number of seventy-one.

Liberal MP Bill Graham supported Menzies but also called for reconciliation with Japan, saying: ‘If we, as British people, are to maintain our standards of justice, we are forced to mete out to the Japanese, Germans and Italians – our three foes in the last war – the same measure of justice. Germany again trades with Australia, and an Italian grand opera company visited this country last year, yet we are still looking at the Japanese with suspicion. I admit that there are many people who will always have feelings of rancour and hatred for the Japanese, but, from a national viewpoint, if we are to maintain our standards for posterity, we must put aside those feelings.’7

And so the Manus Island trials came under criticism before they began.

The Japanese were accommodated in five huts made of galvanised iron with cement bases, and there was also a mess hut, a recreation hut and a hospital hut. At night the men were locked in the dormitories, which were lined with neat plank bunks. The Australian Navy took command of the facility in March 1950, and it became formally known as RAN War Criminal Compound Manus Island. On 16 January 1951 the government released the War Crimes (Imprisonment) Regulations, setting out various matters for the prisoners – a work schedule (nine hours per day, six days a week), discipline, medical care, the right to send one letter home every six weeks (censored for political matters), and the right to make a complaint. A schedule to the regulations laid out the daily food ration, including (with unusual exactness) two-sevenths of an ounce of tea, 7 ounces of biscuits or 8 ounces of bread, half an ounce of flour, 10 and two-sevenths ounces of rice, 8 ounces of potatoes, 2 ounces of onions, 6 ounces of tinned vegetables, 3 and three-sevenths ounces of herrings or pilchards, 3 and three-sevenths ounces of tinned meat and vegetables, and various other items, down to soap and tooth powder. The prisoners were then put to work rebuilding the naval base.

The Australian government also built a facility to hold the trials at Nutt Point on Los Negros, 3 miles (4.8 kilometres) from the compound: the trials are still referred to as the Manus Island trials even though they were held on Los Negros. A series of quonset huts – prefabricated corrugated iron structures with a semi-circular cross-section – were laid out: a large one for the trials themselves, open on either side to allow sea breezes through and with a room for the judges to retire in at the back, and a series of smaller ones for living quarters. The huts accommodating the prisoners were surrounded with barbed wire.

Finding people to run the trials was harder, as enough time had elapsed since the end of the war for prosecuting Japanese war criminals to have lost much of its urgency and the Menzies government, sensitive to criticism of the trials, wanted only the best lawyers and interpreters. It made a sound choice to head the court with Justice Kenneth Townley of the Queensland Supreme Court, brigadier in the army and former judge advocate at Morotai. Gerard Brenann, future chief justice of the High Court of Australia, was his associate, and his speeches, interviews and writings are a fruitful source on the trials.8 Lieutenant Colonel Norman Quinton, section commander at Manus, also sat on the court, and had responsibility for the executions.

Unlike in the other trials, there was no geographical connection between the crimes and Manus Island. The events prosecuted had happened across the Pacific theatre, from Burma to Bougainville, but the cases had not been ready for trial at Morotai, Labuan, Rabaul or Singapore. The Australian war crimes investigations units, 1AWCS in Hong Kong and 2AWCS in Tokyo, had been busily gathering evidence over 1948 and 1949, although they were hampered by lack of resourcing. Investigation had also been held up by the civil war in the Netherlands East Indies. Some of the defendants were in custody at Sugamo or the Australian compound, with some already serving sentences, but some were living freely in Japan and needed to be arrested by occupying authorities.

In all cases but two, the trials were for the murder of Australian prisoners of war, and there was some criticism of this Australian focus. The exceptions were the killing of seventeen Javanese civilians by injecting them with an experimental anti-tetanus vaccine (LN25) and mutilating a dead Australian prisoner (LN22). One member of 2AWCS in Tokyo was so enraged that the suspect in a case he was investigating had walked free – a Japanese soldier wanted for the brutal rape of an eleven-year-old Papua New Guinean girl – that he refused to join the prosecution at Manus.9

The chief prosecutor was Charles Rooney, whom Brennan described as ‘a colourful Irish expatriate, who wore a monocle which would drop from his eye as he affected surprise at any answer which did not appeal to him’.10 He had to be evacuated in September 1950 after a bad asthmatic reaction to the tropical climate, leaving the prosecution to his three AALC juniors. The defence consisted of Japanese lawyers led by Nakayama Chōji, an elderly member of the Tokyo bar who had been in the defence team at Hong Kong. He was familiar with Australia, having lived in Sydney before the war, and even placed a bet on the November 1950 Melbourne Cup. As the Japanese lawyers were often not familiar with Anglo-Australian law, Major George Dickinson, a Sydney barrister, was engaged to help the defence.

All up, 113 defendants were indicted to stand in nineteen separate trials, which ran from 5 June 1950 to 9 April 1951. The prisoners were guarded by native ‘boys’ who got bored, fell asleep and dropped their rifles to the floor with a clatter. Service personnel and civilians came to watch the trials at first, but the crowd of spectators diminished over time. Most of the evidence was documentary, and there were few witnesses. The most noteworthy was General Imamura Hitoshi, former commander of the Eighth Area Army, who was serving a ten-year sentence following his conviction at Rabaul. He appeared for the defence in full uniform, complete with four rows of medal ribbons, including a British Military Cross awarded during the First World War.11 When asked by a defence counsel if a Japanese soldier had a right to disobey an order that was contrary to the principles of humanity, he said that ‘an order given by a superior officer could not be a violation of humanity and would have to be obeyed’.12

In the isolated location Brennan struggled with the lack of legal resources. Others struggled in different ways. Major Clarke, a Japanese linguist, had to be medically evacuated after suffering hallucinations that may have been connected with his partiality to the ‘Singapore Cocktail’, a drink of his own invention consisting of a mixture of liqueurs topped with a dash of ginger ale and a slice of lemon. The facilities were likewise limited, and the judges, prosecution and Dickinson all shared the same mess. Brennan thought this irregular, particularly as the Japanese defence lawyers were excluded.13

I will now look at two of the trials in detail – those of Lieutenant General Nishimura Takuma in June 1950 and Navy Lieutenant Tsuaki Takahiko in March 1951.14

Nishimura was then sixty-two years old and was already serving a life sentence in Hong Kong for other crimes. He had entered the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1903 and been commissioned as an officer in 1910. During the rapid Japanese advance through Malaya from December 1941 to February 1942 he was the commander of the Konoe Division, serving under General Yamashita. Nishimura and his aide, Nonaka Shoichi, were indicted for the massacre of around a hundred Australian and forty Indian POWs at Parit Sulong in Malaya on 22 January 1942.15

There was one survivor of the massacre, Lieutenant B.C. Hackney of the 2/29th Battalion, who gave evidence through a written statement. Wounded by shrapnel, he and the other prisoners, many also wounded, were held by the Japanese in a wooden building. According to Hackney, Nishimura arrived at the site by car, inspected the prisoners, gave some orders to his subordinates, and left. That evening, the prisoners had their hands tied behind their backs, and they were led (or dragged) from the building, driven with kicks, rifle butts and bayonets to a clearing in the forest. There they were killed en masse with rifles and machine guns in a ‘most violent and wicked’ massacre.16 Hackney was pulled down when the men around him fell and was overlooked by the Japanese in the dusk. The bodies of the other men were dragged into the centre of the clearing, piled up, doused with petrol and set alight. Many were still alive, and Hackney reported them ‘screaming and yelling terribly’ as they burned.17

The prosecution tendered statements by three Japanese witnesses claiming Nishimura, upon inspecting the prisoners, gave the order to a subordinate to ‘instruct the officer in charge of the prisoners of war to execute all the prisoners of war by firing squad and then cremate all their dead bodies’.18

In his defence, Nishimura acknowledged he had visited the place where the prisoners were held but he claimed his orders were to deal with (or dispose of) the prisoners by taking them to the rear. He said he knew nothing of the massacre until he was charged with it.

The case came down to one question: whether Nishimura had used the word shobun (dispose of or deal with) or shokei (execute) in his orders. Nishimura claimed he had said shobun, but the witnesses and Nishimura’s co-defendant Nonaka insisted on shokei. Based on the evidence of the witnesses, the court convicted both Nishimura and Nonaka. On 22 June 1950, Nishimura was sentenced to death and Nonaka to imprisonment for six months. Nishimura was the first defendant to be given a death sentence at Manus.

Both men petitioned. Nishimura insisted he had never given an order to kill the prisoners, and furthermore, no divisional commander would ever give such a detailed order as ‘execute the prisoners by firing squad’.19 Nonaka said he was merely ‘like a speaking tube’ and should not be held responsible for the order he relayed.20 Nakamura, the defence counsel, further argued that Nishimura posed no further danger in a demilitarised Japan, public opinion in Australia was turning against executions of war criminals, and hanging Nishimura could damage the global anti-communist cause by creating resentment between Australia and Japan.21 Nonetheless, the conviction and sentences were both upheld by the commander on Manus Island on 7 July 1950 and by Judge Advocate General Simpson on 7 August 1950.

Following this, however, a new controversy arose. The three Japanese witnesses had used almost identical wording when quoting Nishimura’s order. Given they were recalling a conversation that happened eight years previously, this was unusual; it suggested that the person who took the statements, Captain James G. Godwin of 2AWCS in Tokyo, may have put the words into the witnesses’ mouths. Georgina Fitzpatrick and her co-authors concluded that this would have been difficult, as Godwin could speak only rudimentary Japanese and depended on an interpreter and stenographer, and that it is difficult to see how he could have had the opportunity to coerce the witnesses.22 But this still showed a fundamental flaw in the trial process in not having the witnesses made available for cross-examination.

While there is no guarantee that Nishimura ordered the prisoners killed, he certainly had a case to answer. If he did order his subordinates to ‘deal with’ the prisoners and then left and gave them no further attention, he must at least bear some responsibility for the massacre. He himself obliquely acknowledged this from the dock. ‘I am deeply sorry that, due to my carelessness, such an incident happened,’ he said upon hearing his death sentence. ‘I wish to give prayers with sorrow to those who were killed.’23 Whether the death penalty was appropriate in his case, however, remains controversial to this day.

Tsuaki Takahiko probably thought he had left the war well and truly behind him when he was arrested by the occupation authorities on 20 February 1950 in his village of Tonomi, Yamaguchi prefecture, in the far west of Honshu. He was then in his mid-thirties. He had been drafted into the navy for six months in 1937, had left and worked as a merchant seaman and for a railway company, and gotten married in 1939. He was redrafted in 1941 and commissioned as a second lieutenant.

Returning to Tonomi after the war, Tsuaki found his previously comfortable situation turned upside down. His family once owned 12 and a half acres (5 hectares), but 12 and a quarter of them had been taken by the government in the land reforms. He and his wife persevered, farming the remaining quarter-acre as best as they could and winning the respect of the community. When Tonomi decided to introduce democracy at the local level in 1947 in line with the national reforms, Tsuaki was elected village headman. He worked hard, his constituents approved of his efforts, and he concentrated on farming, the affairs of the village, and raising his young son. Then he was arrested in connection with the Laha Massacres at Ambon.

Ambon is a small island in the centre of the archipelago formerly known as the Moluccas, now the Maluku Islands. The city also called Ambon was the capital of the Dutch Moluccas and the site of a large military base, including an important airfield at Laha. Shortly after the Japanese offensive began in early December 1941, the Australian government decided to reinforce the Dutch and Dutch colonial troops stationed there with the 2/22nd Battalion and supporting arms. The combined Dutch–Australian force still proved inadequate to hold Ambon, and the Japanese swiftly conquered it between 30 January and 3 February 1942. Following the Allied surrender, over 300 Dutch and Australian troops were summarily executed by the Japanese Army and Navy in four separate incidents known as the Laha Massacres. The survivors were either sent to a prison camp at Hainan in Indochina or left on Ambon, which quickly became one of the worst Japanese prisons under the sadistic commander Ikeuchi Masakiyo. Of the 528 men of the 2/22nd Battalion left on Ambon, only 119 survived captivity. The massacres and the appalling prison conditions on the island were the subject of the Australian war crimes trials held at Ambon.

Tsuaki was charged with murder along with two others, Warrant Officer Kanamoto Keigo and Seaman First Class Nakamura Shikao, and their trial began at Los Negros on 9 March 1951.24 All pleaded not guilty.

Tsuaki had been serving on a minesweeper as part of the Ambon invasion force. On 2 February 1942, it struck a mine and sank; twenty were killed and seven injured. The remaining men, between seventy and eighty, were organised into a naval platoon on Ambon under Tsuaki’s command. They were not issued with rifles or ammunition, but were instead put to work inspecting billets. A day or two later Tsuaki was told by the special duty lieutenant that he was to proceed to Laha to take part in the execution of prisoners of war.

Tsuaki and the special duty lieutenant do not seem to have got along particularly well. Several times in his evidence, Tsuaki said he felt he was being belittled for being only a reserve officer. He said he was ‘embarrassed and upset’ by the order to take part in an execution, and his unease may have showed.25 He did not get more information from the special duty lieutenant except the fact that the executions would not be by shooting because of the noise. Returning to his men, he found they now had rifles, bayonets and ammunition.

At 1 pm, Tsuaki and thirty of his men were taken in a launch from their quarters to Laha airfield. The men knew nothing of the mission. At the airfield, the special duty lieutenant briefed them and put them to work digging graves. When these were finished, he told Tsuaki (according to Tsuaki’s testimony): ‘You, a commanding officer, must take the initiative in this execution. The first prisoners of war will now be sent to the execution place, so make the necessary preparations.’26 Tsuaki had lost his own sword in the sinking of the minesweeper but he had been lent a new one. He felt he was being pressed into joining the execution because of his earlier reservations.

When Tsuaki returned to the gravesites, only six or seven of his men were there. At 5 pm the first two prisoners were brought over – their hands were bound but they were not blindfolded. Tsuaki beckoned the first one forward and asked him his name and age in English. At his trial he could not remember the prisoner’s name, but recalled his age being somewhere between nineteen and twenty-one. Tsuaki was surprised, thinking he looked much older. Tsuaki did not know his nationality, but as he answered in English he was probably Australian rather than Dutch. ‘I could not help but admire his bravery,’27 Tsuaki recalled, saying that the prisoner had stepped forward confidently even though his fate was obvious. Tsuaki described what happened next: ‘I desired to set a good example to others who were present, including my subordinates, but I had not had previous experience [executing prisoners] and therefore did not feel very confident. Observing all the rules of Japanese swordsmanship, I beheaded the prisoner with one stroke . . . [B]ecause of my success in decapitating the prisoner I felt I had fulfilled my duty and moved away from the grave.’28

Tsuaki said he left soon afterwards and did not see the rest of the executions.

Warrant Officer Kanamoto’s evidence painted a bleak picture of what happened next. An officer told the men that ‘anyone who wants to can have a go’, inviting them to come forward and behead or bayonet the prisoners. As they killed the prisoners, each Japanese sailor shouted, ‘This is in revenge for ~,’ naming a comrade who had been killed when the minesweeper sank. As in many other cases, it seems that the Japanese made no effort to check if the prisoners were actually dead before burying them, and Kanamoto spoke of the wounded moaning in the pits as they were buried alive. He denied killing anyone himself but admitted he lent his sword to another sailor. To his annoyance, it came back notched and dented – clearly the mass-produced swords issued to junior officers were not designed to cut through bone. These lurid reports were naturally picked up by the Australia media. For example, an article in the Courier-Mail was entitled ‘Frenzy of Revenge at Ambon – Crazed Japs Butchered 200 Diggers’.29

In Tsuaki’s defence, Nakayama argued both military necessity and command responsibility. He admitted that large numbers of prisoners were executed in violation of international law, but claimed they had been unruly and threatening to revolt. The execution could therefore be seen as ‘a means of self-defence and [an] emergency measure’,30 and as there was no legal officer at Laha, the defendants had no means of knowing the order was unlawful. Nakayama further argued that the defendants had played only a minor part, and consideration should be given to the fact that Tsuaki did not kill the man out of revenge. Instead, he was setting an example for his subordinates of the most humane way to kill with a sword in accordance with the warrior code of bushidō.31 Nakayama’s examination of Tsuaki included the following exchange:

Q: Did you think that the commanding officer’s order was a legal one?

A: I had no doubt about the commanding officer’s order at all. I thought it would be just for us to follow the commanding officer’s order.

Q: How did you feel when you cut the victim?

A: I thought I had to have courtesy to the victim and had to cut him well. I thought cutting him well would not cause him much pain.32

In response to a question from the prosecution, Tsuaki said he had no idea how prisoners of war were to be treated. Asked if he knew of the humane treatment of Russian prisoners in the Russo-Japanese War, he said he had ‘heard such a story’ but did not recall it at the time.33

The court was not entirely convinced by Nakayama, and convicted Tsuaki and Kanamoto but acquitted Nakamura. On 19 March 1950, Tsuaki was sentenced to death and Kanamoto to life imprisonment.34

In a petition against the verdict and sentence, Tsuaki pointed out that he had no knowledge of military law and no experience of commanding men on land, he was scolded when he showed hesitation regarding the executions, and he felt his sentence was harsh compared with others convicted for the Laha Massacres at different tribunals.35 Tsuaki seems to have been a popular and well-respected man, and the Australian government received dozens of pages of petitions from his wife, his classmates, and residents of his village, all attesting to his good character. Tsuaki’s wife wrote of their three-year-old son constantly asking when his father would come home so they could go fishing together.36 The Tonomi villagers described Tsuaki as a ‘democratic and self-sacrificing man’ and ‘a man of high character who is thought to have had a strong animosity against the inhuman acts taken place during the War’.37 They praised his work in dismantling feudalism in the village, improving infrastructure and education, coaching the Tonomi Middle School baseball team, and taking the lead in educating young people on the ways of a new and peaceful Japan.

It was all to no avail. Tsuaki’s sentence was confirmed by the commanding officer at Manus on 17 April 1951 and upheld by Judge Advocate General Simpson on 27 April 1951. Finding that the sentence was legal, Simpson did not look at the character references.

The Manus Island trials, and the Australian class-B and -C trials generally, ended on 9 April 1951 with the acquittal of Seaman First Class Miyazaki Jyosuke on a charge of murdering an Australian prisoner of war at Koepang in 1942. Defence counsel Nakayama pronounced himself satisfied with the ‘extremely fair’ process: ‘Even accused war criminals told me they had been struck by the fairness of their trials. At the beginning of the trials we Japanese lawyers were handicapped because of our ignorance of British law – in Japan the law is modelled on the German system – however, the court was patient and gave us every possible assistance. Every help was given us to allow the other side of the picture to be presented.’38

The barrister George Dickinson was less satisfied, being fiercely critical of the War Crimes Act, the inability of the defendants to object to either the jurisdiction of the court or the admission of evidence, and the reliance on documentary evidence. However, he did approve of the way in which Townley handled the trials.39

At the time the trials ended, no executions had yet been carried out, even though Nishimura had been sentenced to death ten months previously. The Australian Army had not carried out an execution since October 1947 at Rabaul, as all men condemned by Australian courts at Singapore and Hong Kong were hanged by the British authorities there. The government, searching for a hangman before the trials started, approached Major Thomas Upson, who had supervised the executions at Rabaul. He was on Manus, having been commander of the compound there, and even though he had been discharged from the army following a serious car crash on 14 February 1950 he was still willing to give his expertise. He promised to donate the £30 fee for each execution to a fund for the education of children whose fathers had died in Japanese captivity.

This proposal was inexplicably announced to the press and then slammed by the opposition in parliament as an act of prejudgement. Kim Beazley Sr pointed out that Upson’s promise to donate the fee to charity would provide an incentive to sentence more men to death.40

The government, hypersensitive as ever to criticism of the trials, cancelled Upson’s appointment and began to look elsewhere. There were many volunteers. Lieutenant Colonel Quinton interviewed eight men from the Department of Works and Housing (DWH) who were then based at Manus to assess their motives for volunteering. The results were not satisfactory. According to the DWH official present at the interviews, ‘it was patently obvious that seven of them just wanted to kill someone’.41 The eighth, a veteran of the 7th Division, said he wanted to do his duty as a good Australian. He was selected and proved diligent, attending practice sessions in his own time. The 1946 instructions on hanging were updated and sent to him at Manus.

The government wanted the gallows prepared in secret to avoid further accusations of prejudgement, but this was difficult as parts had to be sent from Australia. In the end, an official flew from Sydney to Manus Island with 20 pounds of excess luggage. Construction began in the forest near the compound once the first death sentence was pronounced. Twenty condemned cells were also built.

Unlike its predecessor, the Menzies government involved itself actively in the trials and considered each death sentence at cabinet level. It sought advice broadly, particularly given the controversy over Nishimura, finally making its decision on 25 May 1951. On the counsel of Judge Advocate General W.B. Simpson, it commuted eight sentences but upheld five, including Nishamura’s and Tsuaki’s. Nishimura had been held in solitary confinement for nearly a year by this point, attracting more controversy.

The defendants in the Manus trials had a lot of time to reflect on their wartime experiences, and Japan had been rebuilt and democratised in the meantime. Their final writings on the trials therefore tended to be longer, more complex and less critical than those who were sentenced in 1945 and 1946. A Kempeitai lieutenant, for example, wrote of the value of ‘the exposure of the so-called discipline, command, esprit de corps, and above all human character of the senior officers of Japan’s former military units’.42 Tsuaki, in his reflection, was critical of the Japanese military rather than the trials process:

It was pointed out that we committed acts in violation of international treaties during war. But most people would be unaware that these acts are violations. Even if they were aware they were violations, they could not have objected because that was not permitted in relation to military orders at the time. In short, I believe this came about because of the irresponsible arrogance, the disregard for human rights and laws, and the fanatical ideas of those who were responsible for issuing orders . . . Even if the trials were not undertaken with a sense of retaliation, the different way of thinking between Japanese and Westerners, and the difference in culture and the military command system at the time, etc, surely led to our disadvantage.43

At 6 pm on 10 June 1951, Quinton informed the prisoners that they would be hanged early the following morning. They were given a meal of ‘fine Japanese food’ and left with a Buddhist priest overnight.44 Tsuaki waved the priest away and slept soundly.

In the morning the men were hooded, taken from their cells and driven in a black van to the gallows. The other war criminals in the compound were left in their huts and not sent to work, for fear they would revolt or otherwise try to stop the executions.

A group of journalists clustered uncomfortably around the railing in the confined shed as each man was led in. Tsuaki was hanged first, at 5 am. The Queensland Times journalist noted that he was apparently unconcerned.45 The other four followed at thirty-minute intervals, as a heavy rainstorm passed over the island. Warrant officer Ipachi Miyamoto told the assembled journalists, ‘I hope Japan and Australia can become friends and remain friends.’ Nishimura was hanged at 6 am, giving three shouts of Banzai! before the trapdoor was sprung. The last to the gallows was Navy Lieutenant Suzuki Yutaka, hanged at 7 am for the murder of a member of the RAAF at Kokas, New Guinea, in or about December 1944. His was the last execution of a war criminal by the Australian government, and the last ever execution carried out by the Australian federal government. It was also the last carried out anywhere as part of the class-B and -C war crimes trials in the Pacific. After it was over, the executioner went to the mess boasting he’d ‘just killed five Japs’.46 Major Upson would have been a much better and more discreet choice.

Like the army at Rabaul, the navy on Manus Island maintained the prisoners were ‘not entitled to the privileges afforded to prisoners of war’ and their treatment must be ‘humane but not lenient’.47 They were put to work building the naval base, working in the sawmill, and growing vegetables. The isolation had the advantage of security. No Japanese war criminals were known to escape from Australian custody at either Rabaul or Manus, although one did escape from a Tokyo hospital after he was returned to Japan for medical treatment.48

Still, life in the Manus Island compound was not excessively austere.49 There was a recreation hut with a library, playing cards, board games and musical instruments, and also facilities for football, tennis and table tennis. This last seems to have been the most popular; from August to December 1951 alone, 252 table tennis balls were ordered. A monthly movie night was initiated in 1950, but the hundred or so films on the island were all prewar, and with constant use in the hot and humid climate they wore out. The war criminals had more luck with fishing trips, which were both popular and useful for bringing variety to the food supply, and parties of the prisoners went fishing at various beaches and bridges every Sunday.

In spite of the no-gifts policy, the International Red Cross was permitted to supply clothing, books, musical instruments and beer. Other organisations also sent packages, for example, the Japanese YMCA sent Christmas hampers in 1951 containing Japanese tea and other goods. Even the Australian Red Cross supplied items at times. While the prisoners continued to write letters of complaint, these seemed to focus more on isolation and boredom than actual mistreatment. On 18 July 1950, General Imamura Hitoshi wrote to the International Red Cross Society of his ‘monotonous life’ on the ‘isolated island’.50

As at Rabaul, some in the Australian press complained that the war criminals at Manus had it too good. Journalist and RAAF veteran Alan Underwood visited the island in November and wrote a series of articles published around Australia under headlines like ‘Less Work, More Luxury for Jap War Criminals’ (the Sydney Morning Herald), ‘War Criminals Get the “Soft” Treatment’ (the Courier-Mail), and ‘Japanese War Criminals “Taking It Easy”’ (The Advertiser).51 According to Underwood, the prisoners at Manus had originally been ‘servile and industrious’ but since the 1951 Peace Treaty had become ‘arrogant and lazy’. He found their hours of work had shortened – they began work at 8.15, took fifteen minutes off for morning and afternoon tea, and an hour and a half for lunch, and finished at 4.15. They were fed special Oriental dishes, read whatever books they wanted to regardless of censorship, had their own equipment for playing baseball and volleyball, and got taken fishing every Sunday. ‘Riding in an official’s car at Los Negros last week, I noticed a Jap criminal leaning against a shed,’ he wrote. ‘Immediately he saw our car he seized a pick and held it above his head. When the car had passed, he threw the pick down again.’

Underwood concluded that the prisoners were suffering only from ‘tropical boredom’ and separation from their families, and wondered if the authorities were taking it easy on them to discourage them from rebelling or trying to escape. But it was ‘softer treatment than Australian ex-servicemen would like to see dealt out to them’. Nonetheless, Underwood was impressed by General Imamura. Describing him as the ‘Best Jap’ at Los Negros, he praised him for helping with the smooth administration of the compound and for his success in horticulture: ‘To raise a garden in the sterile coral and clay of Manus and Los Negros is an achievement. General Imamura’s little patch is an oasis of tomatoes, eggplant, and beans. I watched this wrinkled, slightly-built soldier staking up his tomatoes. He ignored my interest. In his ginger pink prison uniform and raghat, he seemed like any retired Australian – wearing his oldest clothes for pottering about the garden.’52

In July 1953, the compound was closed and the remaining war criminals were returned to Japan on the merchant ship Hakuryu Maru; 147 were to serve out the remainder of their sentences in Sugamo Prison, while eighteen had finished their sentences and were now free. As they were leaving, a special correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald interviewed them.53 According to him, two facts stood out – all were unrepentantly denying responsibility for war crimes, but ‘strangely willing and diligent, [they] had almost an essential role in Australia’s slow, difficult rebuilding of the Manus base as a naval and air outpost’.

‘The war criminals were among the most useful members of the Manus Island community, and the perplexing problem up there now is how they are going to be replaced as a skilled work force,’ he wrote. But he was unsure if the trials and sentences had the desired effect. ‘I could not find one who showed any repentance,’ he observed. ‘Without exception, those I spoke to declared that they had been unjustly convicted and that anything they had done was in obedience to orders of their superiors.’

Some of the prisoners he interviewed raised the atomic bombs, the defence of following orders, the responsibility of the entire Japanese nation, or specific criticisms of the Japanese government. Lieutenant Colonel Kiyoshi Miyakawa, sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Australian and other Allied prisoners of war at Bougainville in 1943, said: ‘The trials were neither legitimate nor consistent. I will not cease to challenge them. Some I know to be guilty have been found not guilty, and some I know to be guiltless have been found guilty, even executed. The fact that some Allied countries are releasing war criminals from serving the balance of their sentences is a further inconsistency which is unfair to us.’

Navy Lieutenant Nara Yoshio, sentenced to twenty years for taking part in the murder of the Ocean Islanders, maintained he had merely handed the natives over to an execution party on his superior’s orders. ‘The whole Japanese nation should accept the responsibility,’ he said. ‘We should not be the scapegoats.’ Surgeon-Captain Nakamura Hirosuto, convicted of carrying out fatal medical experiments on Javanese civilians, said he did not think people from a temperate climate should have been kept working for so long in the tropics, but he nonetheless admitted that the Australian Navy’s treatment of the prisoners had been good. And last of all, there was General Imamura. Then sixty-seven, he said working in his garden had kept him fit and he had no critical comment to make. ‘As I am one of those who must accept responsibility for Japan’s defeat, I will go into retirement when I am released,’ he said. True to his word, he lived in quiet retirement after his release from Sugamo in 1954 until his death in 1968.

Once they were in Sugamo, the prisoners would not enjoy freedom of movement, and there would be no more fishing and swimming on tropical beaches. But they would be near their families again. As the Hakuryu Maru pulled away from Manus Island, the Australian government’s responsibility for keeping war criminals ended. But it retained the right to determine whether they were paroled or released early, and at the time, it was not inclined to allow them to walk free before their sentences ended.