David Sissons, translator at Morotai, devoted much of his life to researching the Australian war crimes trials. In 1985 he wrote an article published in the Sydney Morning Herald recounting a story involving a visiting Japanese author. The author had showed him a picture of a monument built on Mount Sagane to commemorate the Japanese men sentenced to death in the Australian war crimes trials. It bore the inscription: ‘These trials were nothing more than vengeance, the proud victors exercising arbitrary judgment over the vanquished.’ The author asked Sissons if he agreed with the inscription. ‘The question called for a “yes” or “no” answer. I’m afraid my reply must be more complex,’ was Sissons’ response.1

There are many such questions about the trials, and even seventy years later, not all can be answered. Not least, the question of whether they should have been held at all. George Kennan, Director of Policy Planning at the US State Department, accepted the moral right of the Allies to punish Japan’s leaders but said the punishment should not be ‘surrounded with the hocus-pocus of a judicial procedure which belies its real nature’.2 Others were even more blunt. Bert Röling, the Dutch judge at the IMTFE, used to play tennis with MacArthur’s Chief of Intelligence, General Charles Willoughby. Willoughby was an unlikely friend for the liberal Dutch academic, being an ultra-conservative career soldier with limited faith in Japanese democracy, but they got along well. MacArthur called him ‘my pet fascist’ in reference to his right-wing political views and sycophantic attitude. Shortly after the Tokyo Trial concluded, Willoughby remarked to Röling that it ‘was the worst hypocrisy in recorded history’.3

Ultimately, though, it’s hard to see if any of the alternatives would have been any better. At the end of the Second World War the Allies had three options: release the Axis leaders; summarily execute or otherwise punish them, along with others responsible for atrocities; or put them on trial. It is unlikely the first two would have set a better precedent than the third, or painted the Allies in a better light. Nor do the war crimes committed by the Allies change this argument. What the Allies can be criticised for is not referring the major trials to an entirely neutral court, or for failing to prosecute war criminals of their own, but these failures hardly mean the Axis war criminals were treated unfairly, or that summarily executing or releasing them would have been a better option.

Having decided to hold war crimes trials, the Allies then had to grapple with the problem of deciding who to prosecute and how to prosecute them. The question of who to prosecute was problematic in Germany as well as in Japan, but particularly so in the latter. At one end of the scale, the Emperor was shielded; at the other, junior officers and men found themselves on trial for their lives for following the orders of their superiors. Today, the ‘Nuremberg defence’ (‘I was only following orders’) is viewed with contempt, and pleading it is seen as a sign of cowardice and moral weakness. But the Japanese in the 1940s had a very different view of obedience, and this culture clash is readily apparent in the Australian class-B and -C trials.

Japan had adopted a German-style legal system as part of its modernisation. But it was built on centuries of Confucianism, a philosophy that prizes social harmony, and lays out a means of achieving it through mutual obligations.4 Leaders and those in positions of power and authority are responsible for making morally correct decisions, and their subordinates are responsible for obeying them. Obedience is a virtue in and of itself. Superiors, in turn, are responsible for their subordinates’ actions. See, for example, the punishment of officers in the Japanese Army and Navy for the misdeeds of their men, a form of collective punishment hardly compatible with Western ideas of justice.

Even today, legacies of this system can be seen in Japan, where solving problems through litigation is regarded as contrary to social harmony and therefore discouraged. As a result, Japan has far fewer lawyers per person than do English-speaking countries, and it is still not uncommon for Japanese parents to issue public apologies when their children are convicted of crimes, or even accused of crimes.5 To the Japanese soldiers raised in such a society, being tried in a court of law for following the orders of their lawful superiors was inherently contradictory – the criminal justice system exists to punish those who threaten the social order, not those who uphold it.

Of course, the natural destination of this train of thought is the prosecution of the Emperor, the man ultimately responsible for the morality of society as a whole. And some Japanese people certainly were shocked at Hirohito’s failure to take responsibility for the crimes of his subordinates, as a leader was expected to. One such man was Watanabe Kiyoshi, who reflected on his changing relationship with the Emperor in his 1983 memoir Kudakareta Kami (Shattered God).6

Watanabe joined the navy as a fifteen-year-old, a devoted Emperor-worshipper who accepted the propaganda of the militarists without question. When his battleship, the Musashi, was sunk at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, he watched an officer jump into the sea holding a heavy, gilt-framed portrait of the Emperor as a weight to drown himself. Returning to Japan after the war, Watanabe assumed the Emperor would abdicate or commit suicide, or at the very least, make a sign of contrition. But Hirohito’s behaviour shocked him. When the Emperor met a veteran on one of his tours, the Emperor exhorted the veteran to work as hard for peace as he had for war. Could not the Emperor make an apology? Watanabe fantasised about taking him to the bottom of the sea to show him the skeletons of those who died shouting his name, or tying him up by the feet and beating him with a stick to knock some sense of shame into him (this was a punishment in the Japanese Navy).

The photo of MacArthur and the Emperor also shocked Watanabe, as did the Emperor’s calm co-operation with SCAP. When Watanabe saw an American GI walking down the street arm in arm with a Japanese woman, he got into a fight with the GI and was arrested. The police then lectured him for causing trouble. In April 1946, learning that anyone could now write to the Emperor, he sat down and composed a letter. He said he wished to end their relationship and enclosed a cheque for 4,282 yen – everything he was paid when he was in the navy. ‘Now I owe you nothing,’ he said, addressing the sovereign with the informal word for ‘you’ (anata) normally used only when addressing social equals or inferiors.

Should the Emperor have been prosecuted? For more than four decades after the Second World War, Hirohito was the leader of a peaceful, democratic Japan. He pursued his interest in marine biology and published a number of scientific papers. In all that time, he stayed true to the Tokyo Trial version of events, where he was cast as the helpless victim of the militarists. He never admitted any personal responsibility for the millions of deaths in a war fought in his name, or for the atrocities carried out by the armies who fought it. He was, according to biographer Herbert Bix, ‘the prime symbol of his people’s repression of their wartime past’.7

Over time, his international reputation was rehabilitated. In 1975 he made his first and only visit to the United States, patting a koala at San Diego Zoo and visiting Disneyland. On his return, a Japanese journalist asked him, ‘Your Majesty, at your White House banquet you said “I deeply deplore the unfortunate war”. Does Your Majesty feel any responsibility for the war itself, including the opening of hostilities? Also, what does Your Majesty think of so-called war responsibility?’8

It was not a question the Emperor particularly wanted to answer, as his body language and demeanour showed. ‘I can’t answer that kind of question because I haven’t thoroughly studied the literature in this field, and so don’t really appreciate the nuances of your words,’ he responded stiffly. It was a strange response from someone who had been at the centre of the events he was talking about.

Asked about the dropping of the atomic bombs, he responded with: ‘It’s very regrettable that nuclear bombs were dropped, and I feel sorry for the citizens of Hiroshima. But it couldn’t be helped because it happened in wartime.’ It was not a popular remark.

The Shōwa Era finally came to an end on 7 January 1989. At 7.55 am Grand Steward Fujimori Shōichi emerged from the inner recesses of Fukiage Palace and announced the Emperor’s death to Japan and the world. World leaders were invited to the funeral; reactions were mixed.9 US President George H.W. Bush, a veteran of the US Navy in the Pacific War, committed to attending, saying, ‘I feel you look ahead, don’t always look back.’ The governments of Japan’s other former enemies, including Australia, also took Bush’s position. But not everyone was willing to overlook Hirohito’s central role in the war. In South Korea, newspapers demanded an apology from the Japanese government as a precondition to representatives attending the funeral, and student protestors threw fire bombs at the Japanese cultural centre in Seoul. In the UK, Harold Payne, president of the Federation of Far Eastern Prisoners of War Association, criticised the decision by the Thatcher government to send Prince Philip and Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe. ‘With all these high dignitaries going, the Japanese will assume they are being exonerated for all the dreadful things they did in the war,’ he said.

Bob Tizard, New Zealand’s Defence Minister, who had served in the RNZAF during the war, said Hirohito should have been hanged or shot as a war criminal. He was echoing the view taken by many in Wellington in 1945, but in 1989 the government was quick to confirm that Tizard was speaking only on his own behalf. In Australia, Bruce Ruxton, Victorian RSL president, said that attending the funeral would be an ‘obscene act’: ‘Hirohito was the biggest war criminal on Earth, he would have made Adolf Hitler look like a Sunday school teacher. He condoned the slaughter of as many as 40 million Chinese in the years leading up to World War II. Going to Hirohito’s funeral would be like going to the funeral of the devil. If our trade dollar demands that we send representatives then it is a sad state of affairs for this country.’ His view was rejected by other RSL leaders, including Queensland RSL president Sir Albert Abbott.

But Victorian trade union leader John Halfpenny agreed with him: ‘The emperor’s death should be noted as the passing of a notorious but unrepentant war criminal.’ He said it would be inappropriate for the federal government to pay tribute to ‘a person who bore a substantial amount of the responsibility for the atrocities carried out by Japanese military forces against Australians and Pacific Islanders during World War II’.

In defending his decision to send Governor-General Bill Hayden and Trade Minister Michael Duffy, Prime Minister Bob Hawke said ‘the level of representation at the funeral reflects the importance which the government attaches to Australia’s relationship with Japan . . . While it is appropriate to remember times of war, it is more appropriate to realize Japan is our major trading partner.’ Nonetheless, Hawke did not go himself.

At the funeral, Japanese Prime Minister Takeshita Noboru delivered a short eulogy, describing the late Emperor as a pacifist and a constitutional monarch who prayed throughout his reign for world peace. ‘Regarding the great war, which had broken out contrary to his wishes, when he could no longer bear to watch the nation suffering its evils, he made the heroic decision and, disregarding his own welfare, ended it.’10 So the Japanese government maintained its position.

Not everyone in Japan took the same line. In December 1988, as the Emperor lay dying and crowds held vigils outside the palace, a member of the Communist Party asked Liberal Democratic Party Mayor of Nagasaki, Motoshima Hitoshi, what he thought about Hirohito’s responsibility for the war. Motoshima, who had been drafted into the Imperial Army, said, ‘If I look at the descriptions in Japanese and foreign histories, and reflect on my experiences in the military in the education training of soldiers, in that regard I think the Emperor has war responsibility. But based on the will of a majority of Japanese and Allied countries, the Emperor escaped and became a symbol in the new Constitution, and we have to act under that understanding.’11

It was an extremely mild comment, but enough to cause a furious political debate, both within the LDP, which took a traditionally conservative position on the monarchy, and outside it. And the controversy went beyond debate. On 18 January 1990, eleven days after the end of the official mourning period following the Emperor’s death, Motoshima was shot in the chest outside the Nagasaki city hall. He survived, and the police arrested the would-be assassin, forty-year-old Tajiri Kazumi. It emerged that he was a member of an extreme right-wing group called the Spiritual Justice School.

When Hirohito’s son, Akihito, was enthroned, he took the name Heisei (‘achieved peace’). Certainly, Japan had achieved peace. While it is easy to find things to criticise about MacArthur, his occupation of Japan was ultimately a success. In light of later attempts to reform societies through military occupation, it was a remarkable achievement and vindicates the decisions he made. Japan has now been a peaceful democracy for seventy years, and while there were many reasons why militarism in Japan was extinguished, the co-operation of the Emperor was almost certainly one. Not prosecuting Hirohito may have been a legal travesty but a practical necessity.

There were many others, though, who escaped prosecution on less-defensible grounds. Ishii Shirō, the leader of the chemical and biological warfare centre Unit 731, was given immunity from prosecution by SCAP in exchange for his research, which had been carried out on Chinese prisoners of war and civilians. Another who went unprosecuted was Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, a Tōseiha fanatic who hated the West and had pushed hard for war. As a senior officer in Malaya, the Philippines and New Guinea, he left a trail of atrocities in his wake. He was, perhaps, the individual most responsible for the brutality of the Bataan Death March, and may have ordered and committed the crimes for which his commander, Lieutenant General Homma, was shot. He was long pursued after the war by British authorities who intended to bring him to trial for the summary execution of Chinese Singaporeans suspected of being pro-British, but he evaded capture. Returning to Japan, he made the successful transition to a pro-Western, anti-communist politician under General Willoughby’s protection.12 In 1952, he was elected to the Diet.

Perhaps the most extreme example of a likely war criminal who went free is Kishi Nobusuke. An ardent nationalist and militarist, Kishi was effectively in charge of the economic development (or exploitation) of the puppet state of Manchukuo from 1936 to 1939. While there, he imposed a command economy on the province, made free use of forced labour, and was implicated in conscripting Chinese and Manchurians as comfort women for the Imperial Army. He then moved into national politics, serving as Tōjō’s Minister for Commerce and Industry in the cabinet that approved the attack on Pearl Harbor. Arrested as a class-A war crimes suspect, he was locked up in Sugamo. Fortunately for him, a small but influential group of Americans identified him as a possible future leader of Japan, and he was eventually released without being charged in 1948.

From there, his career recovered rapidly, aided by American money. He was elected to the Diet as a Liberal in 1953, and following the merger of the Liberal and Democratic Parties into the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), became Prime Minister in 1957. He was feted as a Cold War ally on visits to the Australia and the United States – in the latter he addressed both houses of Congress, threw the first pitch at a New York Yankees baseball game, and played golf with President Eisenhower in a racially segregated country club that made a special dispensation to admit him. Yet he remained, to the end, unrepentant in his nationalist views, pushing for the release of convicted war criminals, the rolling back of constitutional restrictions on the Emperor’s involvement in politics, and Japanese rearmament. While it is not reasonable to expect the Allies to have prosecuted every war criminal, there were clearly political considerations as well as legal ones in the choices.

Even some of the convicted class-A war criminals returned to public life. Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru, sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment, was elected to the Diet in 1952 and became deputy prime minister. There had been significant doubt over whether he should have been prosecuted or convicted in the first place, but his example probably emboldened others more culpable than he. Kaya Okinori, Tōjō’s Finance Minister, who was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, was also elected to the Diet and became Minister for Justice. Hoshino Naoki, sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes in Manchukuo, was released and became a senior corporate executive.

But not everyone fared so well. The class-B and -C war criminals often faced stigma in society and difficulty finding jobs. Attempts by supporters to rehabilitate them were not entirely successful. One former soldier wrote: ‘I was redrafted, but as a result I became a war criminal. Subsequently, I wanted to receive compensation from the government even though it was good I received the minimum term of imprisonment. We became war criminals and spent ten gruelling years overseas. How does the Japanese government deal with that? We are ignored, as an annual stipend of 10,000 yen could not guarantee even subsistence after we returned to Japan. If they have money for corruption, then the government must pay us, who are struggling to survive, some compensation for our time in prison as war criminals.’13

In other words, those who had loyally followed orders were entitled to be compensated by the government for the consequences of following those orders. It was a common view.

As for the question of how to prosecute the suspects, having a neutral power conduct the trials would certainly have removed all suggestions of victors’ justice. At the end of the First World War, the German government proposed a compromise with the Allies whereby those of its officers suspected of war crimes would be tried by a court of neutral powers. This suggestion was made again at the end of the Second World War for all levels of trials. A senior petty officer with the Japanese Navy who was tried at Rabaul for the Ocean Island massacre wrote: ‘I am not opposed to war crimes trials per se. But I object strongly to the so-called retaliatory trials of the victor over the vanquished. If they were impartial trials moderated by the conditions of a neutral third country (meaning having the same command relations as those in Japan), then it is possible to think that even war crimes trials could prevent future troubles.’14

This would have probably been harder to achieve in practice than principle, as one or more neutral powers would have needed to have been found willing to commit to the laborious and resource-intensive process. And by the end of the Second World War, with most of the world having joined the Allies in some way or another, the burden would have fallen on a handful of countries like Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland. This would have made the trials scattered through the Pacific particularly impractical. Waiting, for example, for a Swiss court to be established at Labuan in Borneo would have taken years. An Australian military court using troops already there, even if less impartial, was much faster. It is probably a fair criticism to make of the Allies, though, that they did not consider this idea in depth, particularly for the class-A trials.

But they should certainly be given credit for the expansive bench at the Tokyo Trial, which included judges from Asia, and for the openness of the proceedings, although they can fairly be criticised for giving the defence too little time to prepare. MacArthur’s choice of Webb for president was, in retrospect, not the best, but it’s difficult to see how he could have foreseen that. The real problems with Tokyo lie in the specific charges and the findings of guilt against individual defendants, and these can be traced back to problems with the prosecution.

Firstly, the IMTFE did produce a well-researched and complete record of Japan’s plunge into the abyss. Many thousands of pages have been written on the rise of Nazism in Germany and the demise of the Weimar Republic, but the rise of militarism in Japan and the demise of the Taishō Democracy has attracted less attention. The IMTFE transcript represents a good starting point for researchers to draw on. However, attempting to use this narrative to tie the defendants together in a conspiracy was overreach. The prosecution argued for a conspiracy for its own convenience, and the court should have not accepted their argument.

On the charge of crimes against peace, Tokyo was always going to follow Nuremberg. From a legal perspective, Nuremberg was the only precedent. And from a political perspective, for Tokyo to find that Nuremberg was wrong would have retrospectively vindicated not only Japan’s wartime leaders, but Germany’s as well.

But the charges remained controversial. George Finch, in a review of a 1947 book about Nuremberg, claimed the charge of crimes against peace was based on ‘treaties which are refuted by the acts of the signatories in practice . . . unratified protocols or public and private resolutions of no legal effect’.15 Others, including Justice Pal, made the same claim. While Nuremberg and Tokyo were the high-water mark of the idea of crimes against peace, the precedent they set ultimately had more moral than legal force. The United Nations was not able to agree on a definition of aggression in international law until Resolution 3314 of 1974, and while this definition was carried over into the Charter of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998, it does not yet have jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for these crimes. The obvious paradox is that states do not generally initiate force without real prospect of success, but that initiation of force can only be put to trial if its perpetrators are defeated.

Finally, there were the charges of conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity, at both Tokyo and the class-B and -C trials. Establishing that the Holocaust was a crime was the great innovation at Nuremberg, but the trials in the Pacific closely followed existing law. All of the crimes against civilians and prisoners took place in countries Japan had conquered, and so could all be considered conventional war crimes under existing international law. This put the Allies on firm legal ground in all their courts in the Pacific.

From Tokyo, we can move to the Australian trials – were they fair? Narrelle Morris and Tim McCormack identified the following factors as demonstrating fairness in the Australian trials: the application of established legal principles, the consistency of procedure, the dedication of the officers involved, and the high number of acquittals and successful petitions.16 I agree with this list, and I would also add the willingness of the Australian courts to prosecute crimes against non-Australian victims, which showed a desire to enforce international law consistently and not simply take revenge on those responsible for atrocities against Australians.

On the flipside, Morris and McCormack identified the following consistent problems with the trials: trials of many defendants (most famously M41, with ninety-one accused), conflict of interest among the court members (as at R55, where Chinese officers who had been prisoners of the Japanese sat on an Australian court trying Japanese and Formosan guards for murdering Chinese POWs in the same camp), difficulties in translation, and inconsistencies in sentencing.17 To this list I would add the time taken to prosecute the defendants in the later trials, the length of time some defendants were held without trial, and, in some cases, an over-reliance on documentary evidence. Morris and McCormack felt, however, that these problems tended to be confined to specific trials, and there were no systemic abuses throughout them. I share this conclusion.

Once the trials finished, neither the prosecutors nor the prosecuted had much interest in talking about them. In an August 1955 Japanese poll, 66 per cent of respondents accepted the prosecution and punishment of wartime leaders by the victors as ‘inevitable’, but 63 per cent also said that the victors’ war trials went too far. Overall, the attitude was still apathy and passive acceptance.18 The Japanese viewed the Tokyo Trial almost as a force of nature, like the earthquakes that periodically trouble their islands. It made little appearance in public discourse over the next few decades, with only sixteen articles referring to the Tokyo Trial appearing in the Asahi Shimbun in 1960s and only sixteen in the 1970s.19 Discussion was kept alive in a small group of critics, initially started by some of the defence lawyers and then including nationalist historians. The class-B and -C trials were largely ignored. And once Japan was rebuilt and presenting its new face to the world, there was little reason to dwell on shameful memories.

The Allies, too, did not like to draw attention to the Tokyo Trial. The proceedings of the Nuremberg Trials were proudly published in both English and French, but it was many years before the proceedings at Tokyo were published in full in English and Japanese. When the Japanese government approached the Australian government throughout the 1950s and 1960s for copies of the records of class-B and -C trials, Australia repeatedly refused until assured they were for historical research only. The quiet release of the war criminals was met with little interest, and the court records were only made available to the Australian public via the National Archives in 1975.

What debate there was during this time on the Allied program of trials in the Pacific was dominated by their critics. The most influential of these in the English-speaking world was probably American writer Richard Minear, with his 1971 Victor’s Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial. Minear admitted that his book was overtly political, something obvious from the dedication on the first page: ‘Dedicated to the many Americans whose opposition to the war in Indochina has made them exiles, criminals or aliens in their own land.’20 Minear set out to demolish the credibility of the Tokyo Trial and its verdict and to demonstrate Tōjō’s innocence, even though he acknowledged Japanese war crimes are ‘as repugnant to me as current American acts in Indochina’.21 Minear went through the problems with the trial, from its legal basis to its procedure, and concluded those problems rendered it invalid. His book was significant in establishing the IMTFE’s negative reputation. While Nuremberg is now seen as a triumph in spite of its issues, Tokyo has not been favoured by history’s verdict.22

Over the 1980s and 1990s, the trial returned to public attention in Japan. First there was a TV documentary in 1983, then the debate over war responsibility following Hirohito’s death in 1989. In the Murayama Statement of 1995, the Japanese government formally took responsibility for waging a war of aggression in Asia and committing war crimes, essentially vindicating the IMTFE’s findings without necessarily endorsing all of them. Opinion polls at the time showed that the majority of Japanese agreed with this view. But nationalists have continued to criticise the ‘masochistic view of history’ or the ‘Tokyo view of history’, and the debate in the country remains heated even today. For example, the Yūshūkan museum, attached to the Yasukuni Shrine, presents a view of the Pacific War essentially identical to the one Tōjō presented to the IMTFE. According to its displays, the Kwantung Army was compelled to use force against China due to ‘anti-Japanese harassment and terrorism’, and the Second Sino-Japanese War spread beyond the Marco Polo Bridge Incident due to ‘the prevailing anti-Japanese atmosphere in China’.23 The evidence unearthed by the Allied war crimes trials, particularly the statements by men and women who actually witnessed the crimes, are perhaps the best resource available to those both within and outside Japan who would challenge this narrative.

Ultimately, the war crimes trials following the Second World War are known for the notoriety of the defendants and the scale of their crimes. This makes Nuremberg far more famous than Tokyo, and leaves the class-B and -C trials in the Pacific less famous still. Language barriers, the unavailability of records is one reason, and a lack of interest by popular historians or writers of fiction is another.

‘Posterity cannot condemn us if we deal with our enemies in the strictly legal way recognised by International Law, to which, after all, our enemies should have professed their adherence,’ Webb wrote in June 1945.24 Can posterity condemn the Australian trials? They would certainly be judged deficient by the standards of a modern war crimes court. However, as international law scholar William Schabas described it, criticising them on these grounds is like ‘modern-day architects criticizing the Parthenon because it doesn’t have ramps for the disabled and proper emergency exits’.25 The few modern scholars who have looked at the Australian trials in depth have acknowledged their problems but generally approved of them as an effort to enforce international law. As Emmi Okada wrote of them, ‘in many respects [they] fell short of the international law standards of justice that we have evolved today. Yet, at least in a great majority of cases, there was nevertheless a notable exercise of legalistic restraint and an effort to achieve procedural integrity (despite the shortcomings of the [War Crimes Act]), which belies a simplistic view that the Australian trials were nothing more than vengeance disguised as law.’26

In 1945, giving in to anti-Japanese hysteria and taking revenge would have been easy. It is to the great credit of the AALC officers, civilian lawyers, and other Australian military personnel and civilians involved in the trials that this, in most cases, did not happen. It is perhaps fitting to give the last words to the Japanese defence team on Morotai, the men responsible for defending Okada Tomiyoshi, whose trial I described in the prologue. In a letter to prosecuting officer Captain John Myles Williams, written shortly before they left the island in March 1946, they wrote: ‘We have sent letters of thanks to a few Australian officers, mostly legal officers who have done greatly for the benefit of the Japanese accused, but of course it was you who introduced us to all these excellent defending officers. You, therefore, favoured us not only with direct kindness but with a great deal of indirect kindness. When we reconsider the things by changing mutual positions, we are not quite certain whether we could favour the defeated with such kindness.’27

In doing what they could to ensure the accused Japanese a fair trial, the men behind the Australian war crimes trials gave moral vindication to the sacrifices made by their comrades to defeat them.