This is going to be a long post, so to spare those who are not interested in reading about the life of General Yamashita do skip downwards and look for the first video that you can see, and enjoy that too.

*Note on Japanese names: family name appears first, followed by first name. Therefore in the case of General Yamashita, Yamashita is the family name, while Tomoyuki is his first name.

I would like to share a concise biography of the famous (or infamous) General Yamashita Tomoyuki – the ‘Tiger of Malaya’ – which I’ve compiled for military history class. This man had struck my impression when I read Akashi Yoji’s assessment of the man in the compilation Sixty Years On (see References for full citation) and realised: he is not commonplace amongst the brutal Japanese we have often read about in the history of the Second World War and the Japanese Occupation. So this piques my interest in Yamashita and I decide to read up more about him, especially when I decide to pick Akashi’s article as my choice for the critique assignment that I have to submit by the end of the term. And I’ve been fortunate to be assigned to the team role-playing Yamashita in our final project (as a class we’re supposed to stage a war crimes trial for Yamashita) for the same module, because this is a terrific justification to read up more about Yamashita (when there’s so much assignments and readings to do in the semester, sometimes you need to stop yourself to ask if reading a particular work is worth your time and effort… sadly this is the reality of education here and perhaps in many places of the world). The write-up that you will see below, which takes up the bulk of this post, is a presentation of the research that I have compiled for the team, written in prose form, which I would really like to share with everyone here who takes an interest in our subject matter.



A Concise Biography of General Yamashita



I. Birth

1. Born 18 November 1885 in the village of Osugi Mura (‘Great Cedar’), southwest Shikoku.

2. Youngest of two sons of the village’s doctor.


II. Education

1. As a boy, Yamashita was not particularly hardworking, and would frequently skip classes.

2. After his older brother left the household following a feud over career issues, greater attention was given to Yamashita’s upbringing and education. He was sent to Kainan Middle School, a boarding school that included military training, which instilled Yamashita’s ambition to become a professional soldier.

3. Thereafter, he enrolled in the Cadet School, Hiroshima, at the age of fifteen, where he achieved excellent grades.

4. His achievements enabled him to be short-listed for the Central Military Academy in Tokyo. This marked the beginnings of reverence for the Emperor, who was the patron of the Academy. The Emperor gave the cadets special attention that surpassed the importance he placed on politicians. For instance, when the opening of Parliament coincided with the graduation ceremony of the cadet school, he chose to postpone the parliamentary session instead.

5. Upon graduation, he was appointed a local regimental commander.

6. At the same time, he tried for a place in War College – Staff College, only succeeding after several sittings of the examination.


III. Personal Life and Family

He married at the age of 32 to the daughter of a General. He rejected all proposals of romance and marriage during his stint at the College, preferring to inject his focus into his military training and career.


IV. Military Career

1. After graduating from the Staff College, he became an assistant military attaché to the Japanese Embassy in Berne, Switzerland. Among his colleagues was Hideki Tojo, who would later become Japan’s War Minister and Prime Minister thereafter. He remained in Switzerland for three years until he was recalled back to Tokyo to serve in the Imperial Headquarters, while being promoted to the rank of Major.

2. Five years later, he was again posted to Europe, this time as a military attaché at the Japanese Embassy in Vienna.

3. In the 1930s, he returned to Tokyo. This was a time when the Army played an increasing role in the politics of the country. Yamashita was politically intelligent, but chose to shy away from involvement, preferring to focus on a purely-military career.

4. He became the Commander of the Third Regiment, an important unit in the Japanese Army, as this position was on the path to general-ship.

5. Thereafter he was promoted to the important position of Chief of Military Affairs in the Japanese Imperial Headquarters.

6. He was holding this appointment when he became involved in the Young Officers’ Revolt of 1936. Yamashita was sympathetic towards the officers, although he stopped short of assisting them financially.

Eventually he was called upon to play the role of mediator after the rebels had assassinated several politicians who were advisers to the Emperor. This enraged the Emperor very much. Senior commanders in the army, from the older generation, were also calling for tough action to be taken against the mutineers.

Yamashita’s solution – the most compromising it could be – was for the Emperor to order the officers to end their insurrection and return to their bases – he believed that no officer would dare to disobey the orders of the Son of Heaven.

As a result of this event, Yamashita was surrounded in controversy: he was viewed in negative light in the eyes of the young officers as well as the older commanders. He felt he ought to resign to avoid further embarrassment, but he stayed on, due to the interventions of General Count Hisaichi Terauchi as well as the Emperor, who felt that Yamashita was ‘too valuable an officer to lose’[1]. General Terauchi had Yamashita posted to Korea, to a post that did not experience much action.

7. Come 1940, Yamashita was chosen to lead a fact-finding mission to Germany and Italy (comprising of officers from the three services) to learn from the Europeans the ways of preparing for and fighting a war. Tojo, the Japanese War Minister of the time, had designs to take Japan to war, and had signed a Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. Yamashita was widely recommended by his colleagues in the armed forces for the job, but this only marked the beginnings of Tojo’s paranoia and hostility towards Yamashita whom he feared might eventually overshadow his political position.

The trip was an eye-opener for Yamashita as he had a realistic insight into German intentions, behaviour as well as their performance in the European war. On the way home, Yamashita and the Army and Air Force team personally witnessed Germany’s invasion of Russia, having broke the Nazi-Soviet Pact by launching Operation Barbarossa.

Yamashita reported that Japan was not yet ready for war, and recommended that the three services should sweep their differences aside and work together. The Navy and Army, in particular, were known to be feuding services. Tojo, however, ignored Yamashita’s recommendations, on the basis on personal jealousy.

8. Fear of Yamashita’s influence also led to his appointment to Manchuria ‘to set up a new headquarters there’.[2]

9. In November 1941, Yamashita was once again recalled to Tokyo, where he was instructed that he was to lead the 25th Army in the invasion of Malaya and Singapore. At this time, Yamashita had never seen a jungle before, nor entered one. He was to experience his first one in Saigon, where he went for conferences where the plan for the Malayan Campaign was formulated.


V. The Malayan and Singapore Campaigns

1. Yamashita was well known for his ruthlessness and daring in his offensives against the enemy. His method was to ‘chase [the defenders] as fast as he could, ignoring supplies and communications’.[3] At the same time, he was also compassionate, who genuinely cared about the welfare of his men as well as enemy personnel alike, unlike many of his contemporaries. He upheld a sense of righteousness that he constantly tried to extol to his subordinates during the course of the invasions, without avail.

2. Throughout the course of the campaigns, he experienced challenges to his command. First was the subordination and displays of temperaments by his subordinates. Even if he were the supreme commander of the 25th Army, not everybody agreed with his directions; neither did everyone heed his orders.

He could not prevent his troops from committing atrocities against POWs and civilians: the Imperial Guards’ slaying of surviving Allied troops after the Battle of Muar; the slaying of patients and staff at the Alexandra Hospital by members of the 18th Division in return for the difficult resistance put up against them at Kent Ridge.

Egotistical officers like Colonel Masanobu Tsuji (chief planning and operations officer of the 25th Army) and Lieutenant-General Nishimura Takuma (commander of the Imperial Guards Division attached to the 25th Army) threw tantrums when their aspirations and expectations could not be met. Tsuji, the Chief Planning Officer – demanded that his resignation be approved the moment he learnt, much unhappily, that Yamashita had not adhered to his battle plans.

Nishimura, commander of the Imperial Guards, wanted greater limelight for his troops in action. For the invasion of Singapore he wanted the Guards to fight their own battle, which threw Yamashita off his original battle plan and the latter had to make compromises. In any case the Guard’s crossing did not go very well – rumours of an oil spill engulfing soldiers from the Guards (which eventually did occur) caused tension between Yamashita and Nishimura. The Guards had placed the entire operation into jeopardy.

Yamashita also had to contend with the pressures of politics from those above him, and in-between services. Added to this was the pressure to succeed in the plan, because if he failed there were people in Imperial Japanese HQ who would be most delighted to watch him tumble.

3. Yamashita was very concerned for the welfare of the people in Singapore who were to be occupied by the Japanese forces. He prevented his troops from entering the city proper following the surrender of Allied forces because he knew that the ditz from victory would result in unruly behaviour in the men. He gave men and officers alike a dressing-down after he heard they had been looting the town. Yamashita was a proponent of the Geneva Convention and instructed that all POWs and internees were to be treated humanely. Unlike most other military men in the Japanese army, he did not think that people who surrendered were unworthy beings would did not deserve to live. (The contemporary and ‘perverted’ Bushido code – the way of the samurai – stated that death was preferred to surrender; the latter was an act of dishonour to oneself and one’s country). Unfortunately this plea frequently fell on deaf ears. Again Yamashita faced the problem of enforcement.

4. For his involvement in these campaigns, Yamashita has been accused of perpetuating the atrocities most severely meted out at Parit Sulong, Alexendra Hospital, as well as the isle of Singapore, in which the Japanese hauled up a large population of the Chinese for questioning in an attempt to weed out anti-Japanese elements in an elaborate genocide known as the ‘Sook Ching’.

The Parit Sulong massacre was committed by the troops of the Imperial Guards Division, who slain members of the Allied defence force who were left behind following the Battle of Muar in Malaya. The man responsible for issuing the killing order was Lieutenant-General Nishimura Takuma, commander of the Imperial Guards Division. Nishimura had travelled to see the prisoners, thereafter issued the order to have them all killed. This was revealed by Captain Nonaka Shoici, Nishimura’s assistant, at the trial of Nishimura on Manus Island, Australia.[4]

As for the massacre at Alexander Hospital, the orders had been issued by Tsuji Masanobu, who had done so ‘in retribution for the heavy casualties British artillery had inflicted on Japanese forces in the area. Tsuji accused the hospital of giving protection to British gunners’.[5] This claim was made by Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi (retired) who wrote a ‘lengthy written exposé of Tsuji’s wartime activities’ in 1959 that he distributed to parliamentarians as well as published in the press.[6] Tsuji had been ‘at the forward headquarters of the Japanese unit responsible fro the attack on the hospital, and just three hundred yards from the massacre scene, when the killing began.’

Yamashita was late in knowing that such horrendous deeds had taken place, committed by the troops under his command. He could prevent misbehaviour through constantly extolment of values to the troops, but he was in command of such a large army that it was impossible for him to follow about every troop movement. At best he could only rely on reports from the front. Even so, not all the reports made it to his desk. For instance he only found out about the massacre at Alexandra Hospital only in internment in the Philippines, and he had to be told by Colonel Cyril Wild.[7] Furthermore, there were officers within the 25th Army who harboured their own agendas (e.g. Tsuji and Nishimura); there were also secret alliances amongst personnel (e.g. Tsuji and his cronies while they executed the massacres against the Chinese population in Singapore), which Yamashita had little possibility of pursuing as a result of his weighty responsibilities as commander of a massive army, and which he could not pursue if information had not been passed to him.

Yamashita’s involvement with the Sook Ching bears a little more controversy because this was one incident whereby he was directly – or indirectly – involved. Yamashita was responsible for giving the order for a ‘mop-up’[8]: to round up suspected anti-Japanese elements to be rid of them. It was a justifiable move in occupation because the presence of such threats could jeopardise the conduct of operations. Yet it did not rank high up on Yamashita’s priorities: most urgently he had to prepare the 25th Army for re-deployment to the Netherlands East Indies. And then he had to settle occupational matters regarding the allocation of garrison forces in Malaya and Singapore.[9] According to Ian Ward, who has done by far a most detailed study into the conspiracy behind how the ‘mop-up’ operation became transformed into genocide, Tsuji Masanobu was responsible for the selection of personnel as well as the likely manoeuvring of instructions; Yamashita was clueless that the orders had been twisted around. The order that the garrison commander – Major-General Saburo Kawamura – received announced that Tsuji was the ‘officer-in-charge of the operation’, and noticeably did not contain Yamashita’s signature.[10]

5. Yamashita remained in Singapore for the next four months until he was posted to Manchuria, a move that was shrouded from publicity. He was not granted an audience with the Emperor following his successful achievements in the battles of Malaya and Singapore – in fact he was forbidden to land in Tokyo. This decision had been attributed to Tojo, who was intensely riled and possibly paranoid as a result of Yamashita’s successes.


VI. The Philippines, the end of the War and Death

1. The last posting that Yamashita received in 1944 saw him being sent to the Philippines to 14th Army in what would be the most impossible task: to defend the islands against the Americans who had been pushing the Japanese back northwards towards Japan since mid-1942. It was alleged that the person responsible for Yamashita’s posting was Marquis Koichi Kido, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, whose words carried much weight upon the Emperor’s ears. The Emperor thus agreed to have Yamashita sent to the Philippines.

Yamashita performed his best to hold the island, until Japan surrendered to the Allied soldiers following the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after which he surrendered to the American forces on the Philippines.

2. Yamashita has been accused of being responsible for the atrocities committed in Manila city. That was actually the doing of the Imperial Japanese Navy under Admiral Iwabuchi, who refused to allow his troops to retreat despite Yamashita’s orders to do so. As a result, the Navy was holed up inside Manila desperately defending the city against the invading American forces until the very last man. During the siege the Japanese troops took their frustrations upon the Filipinos who were trapped with them. By this time Yamashita was out of the city and in the mountains, and communications between the Army and Navy were technically poor. When Yamashita learnt of the Navy’s disobedience, he had to send a counterattacking force to distract the Americans in order to allow the Navy to retreat. But Iwabuchi stubbornly refused to move, and in time he and his men were decimated.

3. Nevertheless, the military tribunal in Manila, where Yamashita was charged, accused the general for war crimes and crimes against humanity. His defence lawyers who did not sense any intent of criminality in Yamashita fought extremely hard against the charges, even bringing the plea to the White House. But the majority of the legal system was unmoved, and eventually Yamashita was sentenced to hang. The conduct of the court had drawn contempt from members of the press of Allied countries as well as members of the American judiciary, who were disgusted at the discriminatory way that justice was meted out. Some charge that Yamashita had fallen victim: the scapegoat for victor’s justice, especially General Douglas McArthur’s (Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces) intention to pursue and successfully charge a high-ranking member of the Japanese military as a show of Allied victory.

Notes
[1] John Deane Potter, A Soldier Must Hang: The Biography of an Oriental General, Muller, 1963, p. 22.
[2] Ibid, p. 35.
[3] Ibid, p. 61.
[4] Gilbert Mant, Massacre at Parit Sulong (Kenthurst: Kangaroo Press, 1995), p. 111.
[5] Ian Ward, The Killer They Called a God (Singapore: Media Masters, 1992), p. 320.
[6] Ibid, p. 316.
[7] Robin Rowland, Sugamo and the River Kwai, http://robinrowland.com/sugamokwai.pdf.
[8] Ward, The Killer They Called a God, p. 46.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid, pp. 104-105.


References

Akashi, Yoji. ‘General Yamashita Tomoyuki: Commander of the Twenty-Fifth Army’. In Sixty Years On: The Fall of Singapore Revisited, pp. 185-207. Edited by Farrell, Brian P and Hunter, Sandy. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2002.

Mant, Gilbert. Massacre at Parit Sulong. Kenthurst: Kangaroo Press, 1995. Potter, John Deane. A Soldier Must Hang: The Biography of an Oriental General. London: Muller, 1963.

Rowland, Robin. ‘Sugamo and the River Kwai’. http://robinrowland.com/sugamokwai.pdf

Ward, Ian. The Killer They Called a God. Singapore: Media Masters, 1992.


In my opinion, Ian Ward’s The Killer They Called a God is particularly interesting to read as it uncovers the real conspirator behind the Sook Ching massacres. This man, then-Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, has been accused of manipulating General Yamashita’s instructions for the rounding up of subversive elements in Singapore and Malaya who might pose a threat to future army operations, transforming it into a mass killing system of Singapore Chinese instead. There has been much controversy over the issue whether Yamashita had known how his instructions had become twisted and if he should have done anything to stop it, although defenders argue that he had too much on his hands to worry about the conduct of the operations, which he regarded as a routine measure ordered by Imperial Headquarters from Tokyo and hence delegated it to a low priority.

Read more about Tsuji here: http://www.warbirdforum.com/tsuji.htm