As the sun rose swiftly over the tropical island of Morotai on the morning of 6 March 1946, Okada Tomiyoshi was counting down the final minutes of his life. Six weeks previously he had been convicted of the murder of two captured Australian airmen in the final days of the Second World War and sentenced to death.1 His avenues for appeal exhausted, he and three other convicted war criminals were to face an Australian Army firing squad at 7.30 am, with nine others to follow later that morning.

In the crowded huts of the war criminals’ compound – the cage, as it was sometimes called – it was still dark. Some of the prisoners had complained that the lack of light made it difficult to read and write the documents they needed to prepare their defence. It was also hot and humid, even by tropical standards; Morotai is only two degrees north of the equator. Most of the island was jungle and the Australians had occupied only a peninsula on the south-west. Even with the ocean on three sides, the Australian officers working in the court still went through two uniforms a day to keep presentable.

In the war criminals’ compound, behind gates guarded by two Australian military police armed with Owen guns, the heat never really dissipated. The sea breezes could work their way through the coconut palms and the wire fence, but the huts had not been built with ventilation in mind. Or for permanence; the time was fast approaching when the Australians would leave and return the island to the Dutch. Whether the Dutch would be able to retain control was another matter. Already, large areas of their former colony in the East Indies were under the control of Indonesian independence fighters. In January 1946, shortly before Okada’s trial began, guerrilla fighters loyal to Indonesian independence leader Sukarno had attacked Dutch forces in nearby Makassar, killing one officer and capturing two. The short-lived Australian military court at Ambon, 400 miles (643 kilometres) to the south, had already been abandoned in the face of mounting civil unrest.

Okada and his three fellow convicts were the first people to be executed by the Australian Army. Despite this dubious honour, not much is known about him. At the time of his conviction he was twenty-eight and unmarried. He had completed high school and then worked as a clerk in a drapery store before joining the Imperial Japanese Army in 1939. He served in the brutal and seemingly endless war in China and was awarded the China Service Medal. At some point he joined the Kempeitai, Japan’s feared army special police. Recognisable by their white armbands bearing the kanji characters for ‘law’ and ‘soldier’ in red ink, they were symbols of terror to ordinary Japanese, civilians in Japanese-occupied territories and Allied prisoners of war alike. Okada’s performance of his duties was clearly satisfactory to his superiors. At the time of his crime he was a corporal; soon after he was promoted to sergeant.

The journalist for the Adelaide Advertiser described his offence as ‘one of the most horrible crimes in the Pacific’.2 This probably overstated its magnitude, but it was undeniably a chilling one. On 27 July 1945, less than a month before the end of the war, an RAAF bomber crashed near Tomohon in Japanese-occupied North Sulawesi. The day before, the Allies had issued the Potsdam Declaration, promising Japan ‘prompt and utter destruction’ if it did not surrender. Three crew members survived the crash, and were captured and imprisoned at the Kempeitai headquarters at Kaaten. At some point one was either killed or escaped – none of the Japanese at Kaaten knew what became of him.

The two men responsible for the Kempeitai detachment at Kaaten, Captain Saito and Sergeant Major Morimoto, had been discussing what was to be done with the prisoners. Finally, one evening in early August, Morimoto woke the men of the detachment at midnight and told them the prisoners were to be executed. Sentries were posted on the roads around the HQ to make sure no local Indonesians stumbled onto the scene, and two graves were dug under the garage. Morimoto ordered the first prisoner to be bound and carried from his cell. He was chloroformed and, when he stopped struggling, buried alive. The second was also chloroformed, but when this failed to completely subdue him he was strangled with a rope. The Kempeitai then went into their mess, ate a meal of fish and wine, and returned to their quarters. According to the survivors of the detachment, they never spoke of the incident among themselves.

Why did Morimoto choose such a brutal method of execution over shooting the prisoners or bayoneting them? Preserving ammunition was always a consideration in the thrifty Japanese Army, particularly operating on islands cut off from supplies. But two bullets would have hardly mattered, and even if they could not be spared, the Kempeitai still had their bayonets. Morimoto’s preparations suggest that he wanted the men to be killed silently, with no trace left of their deaths. But as Morimoto himself was dead by the time of the trial – how and when was not mentioned in the proceedings – his reasoning remains unknown. Therefore it was Okada and the sergeant, Hondo Kazuma, who were placed on trial for the murders.

The story of the executions may have first come from a Japanese Army deserter who was being held prisoner in the cells near the two airmen, but several privates in the Kempeitai detachment were also willing to give evidence for the prosecution. Why they chose to turn against their sergeants was speculated on but never revealed.

The trial began on 21 January 1946 in a hut built by Japanese prisoners, not far from the beach and surrounded by coconut trees. It was a strangely informal setting for men to be tried for their lives, even with the two Australian flags and the picture of King George VI displayed behind the bench to give it a more official air. The prosecution and defence both agreed that Morimoto was chiefly responsible for the two deaths. Witnesses testified that he was a hard man and a disciplinarian, and some admitted to being frightened of him, although he does not appear to have been particularly brutal by Japanese Army standards.

All of the former Kempeitai who testified, witnesses and defendants alike, claimed they had acted only as sentries or gravediggers. None admitted to actually taking part in holding the men down or chloroforming them. They also claimed that it was too dark to clearly distinguish one man from another. Nonetheless, all the prosecution witnesses agreed that it was Okada who took the chloroform-soaked cloth from Morimoto and held it over both prisoners’ faces. Several also told the court that it was Okada who strangled the second prisoner. The evidence against Hondo was less compelling – two of the privates testified he was one of the men who held the prisoners down.

In his own testimony, Okada maintained that he was only a sentry and was not involved in the execution, and the witnesses for the prosecution were mistaken. Asked why they all gave the same evidence, he suggested that someone had accused him, after which the prosecution put the question ‘Was it Okada?’ to all of them, in turn, often enough to persuade them he was guilty. A few times the prosecutor’s questions were more general, and some of Okada’s answers are particularly interesting:

Q: It’s a very dreadful thing to say that a man has strangled a man with a piece of rope, isn’t it?

A: As it was during the war, I don’t think a soldier would consider it a very bad thing, to say that about. It’s right in law for an enemy airman if he bombs non-military installations or local civilians’ homes to be executed.

Q: And do you know that these airmen had done that?

A: They did.

Q: Do you think it was quite a proper thing to kill them?

A: Without orders from above I can’t judge whether it was right or not, but as it is an order from above, I think it’s natural.3

Nor did Okada seem to have much faith in the judicial process to which he was being subjected:

Q: They are very dreadful things these men have said about you don’t you think?

A: Whatever people say about it, the fact is that Japan has lost the war and you people can do as you like and call me guilty or innocent.4

In those few lines, Okada went through many of the objections raised by Japanese defendants in war crimes trials, from the Tokyo Tribunal down. First, he claimed that executing the airmen was lawful as they had committed war crimes of their own. The Allied bombing of Japanese cities, which killed between 300,000 and 500,000 civilians and left millions homeless, was raised by both defendants and opponents of the war crimes trials process as an example of an Allied war crime that had gone unpunished. Given where the RAAF bomber had crashed, it would have been striking military targets in the East Indies rather than civilian targets in Japan, but the objection was a common one. Second, Okada maintained that as a soldier it was for him to follow orders, and for his superiors to determine their legality or illegality. Or, to go even further, their morality or immorality. Third, he implied the whole process was a sham and the court would come to whatever decision it wanted, regardless of the evidence.

In response to this last comment, the prosecution put it to him that the damning evidence came from his own countrymen, but Okada insisted the evidence was conflicting. In his testimony, Okada comes across as cold and inflexible, qualities that perhaps explain both his rise in the Kempeitai and the willingness of his subordinates to turn on him.

Hondo, Okada’s co-accused, made a better impression on the court.5 For a start, the evidence against him was weaker. And while we only have his word to go on, it seems he gave more thought to the lawfulness and morality of killing the two airmen. He testified that he had asked Morimoto why the prisoners were to be killed without first being tried by a court martial, because to do so, he thought, was improper.

Morimoto responded, ‘I’ve got my orders from above and I don’t know the details either.’

Hondo said he felt sorry for the prisoners and didn’t want to see them killed, but he was afraid of Morimoto and raised no further objections. Whereas Okada claimed the witnesses who accused him were mistaken, Hondo directly accused them of lying out of fear. An ordinary Japanese private, he said, faced by a court of Allied officers, would say whatever he thought his captors would want to hear. Given the brutal discipline of the Imperial Japanese Army, Hondo’s argument is believable.

The court convicted Okada and acquitted Hondo. It accepted that one of the murdered men was Flight Sergeant A.A. Lockyer, based on a captured Japanese document that referred to one of the prisoners as ‘Rockyard’. Okada was therefore convicted of the murders of Lockyer and an unidentified member of the RAAF, and on 23 January he was sentenced to death by shooting.

Courts martial are not required to give reasons for their verdicts and sentences, so we do not know why the three Australian officers making up the court found Hondo more persuasive than Okada, or why they decided that Okada warranted the supreme penalty and not a prison sentence. We also don’t know why they opted for death by shooting rather than hanging, either penalty being permitted by the War Crimes Act – it may have simply been because there were no gallows at Morotai and any man sentenced to hang would need to be sent to Rabaul in New Britain.

Okada, through his defence counsel, appealed both his conviction and his sentence. In a two-page document dated 27 January 1945, he argued that his conviction was unsound because the witnesses had acknowledged it was too dark to clearly see who was present and what they were doing. He further argued that, while he denied having anything to do with the death of the airmen, his sentence was excessive, given that ‘nothing was done by the free will of the persons concerned, but was done in accordance with that unquestioning obedience to the command of a superior officer which is inculcated into every Japanese soldier from the day he enters the Army’.6

Under the War Crimes Act 1945, all sentences of death had to be confirmed by the commander-in-chief of the Australian Army. This requirement was the product of an unusual political compromise. Originally, all sentences of death handed down by Australian military courts needed to be confirmed by the federal cabinet. The War Crimes Act had been passed by the Chifley Labor government, and the Australian Labor Party was at that time moving against the death penalty. However, community pressure to execute war criminals was overwhelming, including among Labor Party members. To Australians, the Japanese war crimes were personal – 8,031 of 22,376 Australian servicemen and servicewomen captured by the Japanese had died in captivity, representing a staggering 46 per cent of all Australian deaths in the Pacific War.7 With the horrors of the Burma Railway and the Bangka Island massacre of twenty-two Australian nurses fresh in the public mind, there was little tolerance for leniency. So the government passed an Act allowing courts martial to impose the death penalty on Japanese war criminals, and then gave the responsibility of either confirming or commuting them to the commander-in-chief of the army, then Lieutenant General Vernon Sturdee. That way it could satisfy community demands without putting blood on its own hands.

The transcripts of Okada’s trial and his appeal were sent to Sturdee’s office in Melbourne. Sturdee, a veteran of Gallipoli and the Western Front, was a quiet and conscientious man who took his responsibilities seriously. He was not a lawyer, but was advised by the Judge Advocate General, John Bowie Wilson. While the trials had begun on Morotai on 29 November 1945 and the first death sentence was handed down a few days later, as of March 1946 there had been no executions. Between November and January, Sturdee had commuted the death sentences of twenty-eight Japanese war criminals to life imprisonment, based on concerns about the soundness of the conviction or the severity of the sentence.

The commuting of the death sentences of Japanese war criminals was not well received in the Australian community, particularly among those who had lost loved ones or friends in Japanese prison camps. Some people felt that the Chifley government was putting pressure on Sturdee to commute sentences. Captain Athol Moffit, a prosecutor at the war crimes trials at Labuan, wrote in his diary on 1 February 1946 of his frustration: ‘The court on the spot thought death was fitting and somebody in Melbourne sitting at a polished desk says otherwise . . . [T]he Government is still too burdened with its no capital punishment and is too weak-kneed to come out into the open.’8

In an article entitled ‘Soldiers Want Guilty Japs to Die’ in the Daily Telegraph on 22 February 1946, the president of the New South Wales RSL was reported as saying:

If the Japanese had been found guilty shortly after the war finished they would most likely have been shot, but now it’s the old story of letting bygones be bygones. Our own boys suffered at the hands of these jungle apes, yet our own military leader is exercising the power to reprieve them. There should only be one sentence for them – death. Then this would be too swift for them. There is no shortage of executioners, if that is what is holding the Government or the Army up. I know of plenty of ex-prisoners of war who would willingly do the job free.9

The Labor rank-and-file were also not pleased. On 12 March the Paddington branch of the party passed a resolution protesting the commuting of sentences and sent it to Eddie Ward, Labor Member for East Sydney and Minister for External Territories. Ward, who went on to become one of the strongest voices in the parliament on taking a tough line on Japanese war criminals, sent the petition to the Department of the Army with his endorsement.

Wilson reviewed Okada’s appeal on 18 February, writing to Sturdee that, in his view, the court had acted properly. Sturdee accepted Wilson’s advice, and wrote the word ‘dismissed’ across the second page of Okada’s letter, followed by the date and his signature. On 26 February, Sturdee confirmed Okada’s sentence. Shortly afterwards, the death warrants of Okada and another twelve Japanese war criminals convicted at various trials were on their way to Morotai.

The Australian Army had never carried out an execution before. Australian soldiers were subject to the death penalty for mutiny and desertion, but every death sentence handed down by Australian courts martial in both world wars had been commuted to a term of imprisonment. Special instructions for the execution of Japanese war criminals were therefore issued on 25 February 1946, with execution by firing squad to follow the British Army procedure.10 This was the procedure used for the execution of 306 British Empire soldiers in the First World War for crimes such as desertion and cowardice, the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, and the German spies executed at the Tower of London during both world wars. And, ironically, it was the same procedure used for the execution of Australian Lieutenants Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant and Peter Handcock for war crimes during the Boer War in 1902, an event perhaps contributing to the Australian Army’s unease with the death penalty.

The British Army procedure was designed for a fast, private and humane execution. Some of its requirements seem almost quaint – the place of execution was to be as near as possible to the prisoner’s place of confinement, so he would not face a long walk to his death; the commands were to be given in a low voice or using hand signals so as to not panic him; and the stretcher for carrying the body away was to be kept out of sight until the execution was complete. Executions by firing squad were to be held shortly after sunrise – hence the term ‘shot at dawn’.

A secluded place among the coconut palms was selected on Morotai. Men with combat experience were preferred for the firing squad, and each was given the choice to opt out for conscientious reasons. It’s not known how many of the men first tapped on the shoulder for the job did so. The procedure called for ten per condemned prisoner, but there were only enough for five – twenty men for four prisoners. Aside from the firing squad, a medical officer was needed to certify death and a provost marshal to manage the execution.

The provost marshal was Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Courtney, who had been a policeman in civilian life. He had also been responsible for bringing the prisoners in and out during the trial, so he could act as the official witness confirming their identities. In the event of the fusillade failing to kill one of the men, Courtney would have to shoot him in the head at point-blank range with his pistol.

In the meantime, Okada and the others were left to count the days in the compound. Was he mistreated by his captors? It seems there was some violence against suspected war criminals at Morotai in the early days, while former Australian prisoners of war were recovering in the hospital there, but discipline was restored fairly quickly. The Japanese themselves left mixed accounts. Army Lieutenant Yamamoto Shōichi, who was sentenced to die for his involvement in the death march of several hundred prisoners of war from Sandakan to Ranau, wrote that he was ‘subject to all manner of persecutions’ in Australian custody at both Labuan and Morotai, and that he ‘continued to endure all manner of punishments from the Australian soldiers and wished every day for them to quickly carry out my execution’.11 In contrast, Army Captain Yabe Tokuhiro, who faced the firing squad on Morotai fifty minutes after Okada, wrote that the Australians ‘treated us like gentlemen, the guards were especially cordial and spoke to us with kindness, to which we were deeply moved’.12 Perhaps the guards simply found some of their prisoners more likeable than others.

On the night before their execution, the condemned men wrote letters, played music, and sang songs. Those with a classical inclination wrote waka poems in the style of a samurai death poem, reflecting on the shortness of life. They often drew on Zen Buddhist teachings that the material world was transient and impermanent, symbolised by the decay of the cherry blossom. Some wrote thank-you letters to the Australian Army officers who defended them in court. They also wrote to their families, bidding them goodbye, making requests for the care of their children, and expressing regret they could not return home to play a part in rebuilding their war-ravaged country. Yabe, who described his captors as gentlemen, wrote to his uncle, asking him to look after two men who had lost their families.13

Unusually for the occasion, there was an air of merriment. Captain Iwasa Tokio played a lively tune on his shakuhachi, a bamboo flute, and several women from the Australian Women’s Army Service got up and danced the jitterbug. Some of the war criminals drew a cartoon showing Iwasa playing for a firing squad made up of AWAS women armed with Owen guns. ‘Don’t forget the shooting!’ he calls out in English. Okada, for his part, wrote a letter to his parents: ‘I hope you will certainly pardon me as my life is extinguished just as a drop of dew vanishes on the execution place. However, I believe our faith will continue forever and our country will be built again. I am worrying that when you receive this letter, you may lose your health. If it should happen thus, I should consider myself a bad son, my fears are only in this.’14

The next morning, while Okada waited in his hut, Courtney assembled the firing squad. There were also journalists present – the government had wavered on whether to permit them to watch, but allowed them on the condition that they did not report gory details to the public.

The squad loaded their rifles, rested them against a rack, and were then called away by a non-commissioned officer. He told them that the best thing they could do for the prisoners was to shoot straight and kill them quickly. In the meantime, Courtney had the task of unloading two of the rifles and reloading them with blank rounds, the idea being that no member of the firing squad could then know if he had killed a man. This had worked in the days of the musket; however, a skilled marksman firing a modern rifle would probably be able to feel the difference in recoil between a blank and a live round. But it gave them plausible deniability.

Shortly before 7.30, Okada and the other three men in the first batch were taken from their huts by military police for the short walk through the coconut trees to the execution ground. The medical officer, Captain Noel Fowler, commented on the condemned men’s ‘most extraordinary dignity, composure and fortitude, which commanded nothing but respect from those of us who were present’.15 The procedure allowed for the prisoners to either be strapped to a post or tied in a chair, and four chairs had been prepared. The journalists were lined up along the side. According to them, the Japanese were relaxed, talking and singing. As they were led to the chairs, each condemned man saluted, said goodbye, and thanked the Australian officers. ‘I wish to convey friendly relations between Australia and Japan,’ said one of the men, Lieutenant Tanaka. ‘We are ready to die. For your kindness we thank you very much.’16

The Japanese were tied into the chairs so tightly they wouldn’t be able to overturn them. None of them struggled. Courtney brought out four black hoods. The Japanese protested at this, but Courtney explained that the hoods would ease the consciences of the men who had to shoot them. At this they relented. The men of the firing squad took up their rifles and lined up between 10 to 12 yards (9–11 metres) from the prisoners. Fowler attached a white disc over each man’s heart as a target.

When Fowler walked away from the last prisoner Courtney signalled for the men to ready their rifles. One of the Japanese yelled, ‘Tennō Heika!’ to which they all responded with three cries of ‘Banzai!’: ‘Long live the Emperor!’, the Japanese battle cry. It was a hollow gesture and they would have known it. In Tokyo, Emperor Hirohito was openly co-operating with the Americans, and they were returning the favour by not prosecuting him as a war criminal. But the prisoners had been trained to call on the Emperor at the moment of death, and their training held to the end.

In a quiet, firm voice, Courtney gave the order to fire. According to the Sydney Morning Herald journalist, the prisoners ‘chatted, laughed, and sang until the bullets silenced them’.17

Fowler held his stethoscope to the chest of each prisoner. One was still alive, but only just – Fowler told Courtney he would be dead in thirty seconds. Nonetheless, Courtney did not want the man to suffer, however briefly, and he levelled his pistol at the man’s temple and fired. Even as a soldier, it is unlikely he had ever been called upon to shoot a wounded man at point-blank range in cold blood before. The bodies were handed over to a Japanese burial party, the members of which bowed reverently to each corpse before removing it from the chair.

Fowler later wrote to David Sissons, a 21-year-old Australian who had acted as a translator at the trial: ‘It was a proceeding which was carried out with dignity and was controlled by a man who was compassionate and who found the whole thing a distasteful necessity.’18 Sissons kept the letter and many others, and spent the rest of his life collecting research on the trials. ‘Japs Pay Penalty’ ran a headline on the front page of Brisbane’s Courier-Mail on 8 March.19 The death warrant was returned to Australia bearing Courtney and Fowler’s signatures, confirming Okada Tomiyoshi had been duly executed.