“General Douglas MacArthur later commuted all death sentences when he was military governor of Japan.”
Wait. So we spent the last seventy years hunting down Nazis but, the Japs were commuted?
Great...
When I read stories like this, and of the Bataan Death March, I think of the firebombing of Tokyo and the use of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and say: “Good.”
I think the commutation of sentences was one of those silent deals upon which much diplomacy is based. We agreed quietly under the table to allow the Emperor to keep the ceremonial throne and not aggressively pursue war crimes trials. In exchange, the Japanese “Unconditionally surrendered.”
MacArthur saw that the executions of many Japanese war criminals were expedited.
“Wait. So we spent the last seventy years hunting down Nazis but, the Japs were commuted?”
In the case of Shiro Ishii and a few of the other senior officers of Unit 731, they escaped punishment completely. The U.S. cut a deal to give them all immunity from prosecution, in exchange for turning over all their “research” on bioweapons and their use on living human beings to our side. The Soviets were furious, as they wanted to prosecute the Japanese officers for war crimes. Likely they also wanted to wring the secrets of the research out of Ishii and the others for themselves.
It’s not a particularly proud moment in WW2 history, to be sure. The depths of evil Unit 731 engaged in were near bottomless. I’ll never forget a story I read in Factories of Death (the book I mentioned in my previous post). Japanese authorities in Nanking, as a show of “kindness”, handed out chocolate candies to Chinese children.
The chocolate was laced with anthrax, and the entire exercise was a test to see if biological weapons could be disseminated through foodstuffs.