Leatherneck Magazine
October 2008
Talking with the Enemy: Major Harry Pratt and the Yamashita Trial
Story by: Dick Camp
Newsboys from the Manila Times rushed through the crowded streets, hawking the freshly printed special edition with "TIGER OF MALAYA TO STAND TRIAL FOR WAR CRIMES" splashed across its front page. Jubilant Filipinos eagerly grabbed the newsprint, thrusting "guerrilla pesos" (wartime currency) into the hands of the young entrepreneurs. Excited readers skimmed the newsprint; lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commander of the Imperial Japanese 14th Army, had been ordered by Emperor Hirohito to surrender-the fighting was over!
Yamashita was taken into custody near the mountain town of Baguio by American troops and quickly whisked off to New Bilibad prison, about 35 miles south of Manila. Military Police Major A. S. Kenworthy placed the general under arrest, charging him with "violation of laws of war, failing to control his troops and permitting them to commit atrocities."
Yamashita, one of Japan's most able commanders and the architect of the British defeat in Malaya, bragged prior to the American landings that "the only words I spoke to the British commander during negotiations for the surrender of Singapore were, 'All I want to hear from you is yes or no. I expect to put the same question to MacArthur.'"
Despite the bravado, Yamashita's forces were overwhelmed quickly and forced to fight a defensive battle in the interior of the country. As Yamashita pulled out of the capital, he left it under the command of Vice Admiral Densuchichi Okochi with instructions for him to destroy the port facilities, declare it an open city and join him at Baguio. However, the bridges were all destroyed by U.S. bombing, and there was no escape. Okochi's troops went on a murderous rampage, and in a monthlong battle, Manila, the "Pearl of the Orient," was destroyed. At least 50,000 Filipinos were killed in the fighting. Yamashita was blamed because "while commander of all the armed forces [he] failed to control the operations of the members of his command."
On 8 Oct. 1945, Yamashita was taken before a military commission and charged with violating the rules of war. One of the men standing alongside him at the arraignment was the chief interpreter for the trial, Marine Maj Harry D. Pratt, combat veteran of Guadalcanal and Tarawa.
Draft Incentive
Harry Pratt was a graduate student, majoring in French at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1941 when "the draft board began breathing down [his] neck." Most of bis fraternity brothers were Army ROTC, but he decided to "look elsewhere, and was accepted for the training course at Quantico, Virginia." Pratt successfully completed the demanding course. He was commissioned a second lieutenant and assigned to the second Marine Division in San Diego as a platoon leader for a .30-caliber heavy machine-gun platoon.
"I'd only fired it once," he said, tongue in cheek. On Sunday, 7 Dec., Pratt was on weekend leave in L. A. when he heard the radio broadcast about Pearl Harbor. "I raced back to San Diego to find I'd been reassigned as Platoon Leader, 81 mm Mortar Platoon. I'd never fired that one!"
Word swept through his regiment that it would sail to Wake to reinforce the embattled 1 st Defense Battalion. "By the time enough shipping was found," Pratt recalled, "Wake was gone, and we were ordered to American Samoa" to protect the supply lifeline to Australia and New Zealand from the Japanese advance. "We [Second Marine Brigade] were loaded on three Matson passenger liners unchanged from cruise service," Pratt gloated. "Imagine two second lieutenants assigned to a 'B' deck stateroom with lanai-great way to start a war!" The ships had not been stripped of their comforts. Cabins had beds, stewards waited on the Marines, and food was served civilian style, not chow-line specials.
Shortly after arriving in Samoa, the brigade started a Japanese language school in response to an urgent requirement for interrogators and translators. Pratt volunteered. "I became a full-time student of Japanese for the next six months. Major Ferdinand Bishop, a former graduate of the formal Tokyo Embassy language course, established the school in a tin-roofed shanty under the palms." The first class, three officers and 13 enlisted men, began an intense 576-hour curriculum.
"The students' waking hours were reserved for lectures, study and occasional mandatory guard duty" designed to produce graduates with a "sound basic familiarity with the language." In addition to language skills, they studied Japanese order of battle, military terms and customs, historical and military background of the Japanese, as well as interrogation techniques. Of the 16 who started the course, only Captain Harry Pratt and seven enlisted men (five of whom would later become officers) completed it.
Pratt rejoined the 8th Marines as the assistant intelligence officer in time for the regiment to reinforce the IstMarDiv on Guadalcanal. "It was 'an unopposed landing,' " Pratt recalled, "except for Japanese bombing attacks on our shipping. The regiment was assigned to the line on the Matanikau River where it was heavy jungle and we couldn't see the enemy, but there was plenty of incoming fire."
Because of his language skills, Pratt was assigned to Headquarters, 1 stMarDiv to assist in the handling and interrogation of the few Japanese prisoners of war. "Few of the enemy surrendered," Pratt said. "However, a number of downed avialors and survivors of naval actions had been picked up. Our main objective was to learn what routes and bases they were using to get reinforcements to Guadalcanal. By this time we had their ground units pretty well contained to the northern part of the island."
Pratt found that "getting information from the few POWs we had taken was not too difficult. We simply told them we were sending information about their capture to the International Red Cross, which would inform the Japanese government. Inevitably they would respond, 'Don't do that; we'll tell you what you want to know.' They knew that if information about their capture reached Japan, their families would be disgraced forever." The Japanese considered surrender disgraceful. It was better to die a noble death in combat.
In January 1942, the 8th Marines left the island for rest and recuperation in New Zealand. Pratt accompanied "about 30 POWs that were embarked aboard our ship. My group of six interpreters provided all the communications between the ship and the POWs. Upon arrival in Wellington, we accompanied them to a camp in the hills above the city and worked with the New Zealand staff until they felt comfortable handling the Japanese."
After months of refitting and training new replacements, the division boarded transports and sailed toward the tiny island of Betio, Tarawa atoll, in the central Pacific. At 0910 on 20 Nov. 1943, the first assault waves touched down on Red Beach 1. Pratt went ashore the next day after spending most of the night in a landing craft because there was no room for more troops on the beach.
"We were dropped off 500 yards from the beach because the tide was out," he recalled. "I had my carbine on my shoulder and a box of Japanese dictionaries balanced on my helmet. As we waded ashore, we came under fire. I caught a piece of shrapnel in my left leg, but I managed to make it to [the] beach."
Pratt expected to interrogate Japanese prisoners; however, "there were none, they all committed suicide. As a matter of fact, only Korean laborers surrendered to us." The Koreans were happy to be taken prisoner and they had only one request, 'Take us to America."
After the operation, Pratt was sent back to the Joint Intelligence Center Pacific Ocean Areas (JICPOA), Pearl Harbor and assigned to the Enemy Land Forces section to work on translating the documents taken on Tarawa. Within weeks, he received orders to the Navy School of Oriental Languages at Boulder, CoIo., a school unlike any other.
In one year he was required to master what a prewar student in Japan had taken three years to learn. Classes ran Monday through Friday, with a difficult exam on Saturday morning. The study groups were small and devoted to reading, translating and conversation. Students were expected to memorize hundreds of Kanji symbols.
Many students fell by the wayside, but Pratt's prior language training in Samoa and on-the-job training in Guadalcanal and Tarawa stood him in good stead. Upon graduation, he was ordered back to the Pacific and assigned to GEN Douglas MacArthur's command in Manila with the Allied Translators and Interpreters. "I expected to return to the second Marine Division," Pratt lamented, "but a friend in the G-I at FMFPAC, whom I will never forgive, gave me orders to MacArthur's G-2 staff."
Allied Translator and Interpreter section, or ATIS, was part of GEN MacArthur's G-2 section, which translated enemy documents and interrogated POWs. It consisted of Army and Navy Japanese language officers and enlisted men, hundreds of Army Nisei (Americans of Japanese descent) and about 40 Japanese-language officers, as well as some personnel from Allied countries.
Chief Interpreter
Shortly after the surrender, Pratt was transferred suddenly to ATIS headquarters in Tokyo to translate documents and prepare directives for MacArthur's headquarters. However, within a month "I was suddenly transferred back to Manila for duty as chief interpreter for the International War Crimes Commission. This commission was convened by MacArthur to conduct trials for war crimes committed in the Philippines."
Pratt thought his selection was more accident than intent because "I was the only regular U.S. field grade officer available with the combat experience and language training needed to deal with the trial of [Lieutenant] General Yamashita, a [three]-star general. My responsibilities included all interpretation for the accused and both defense and prosecution."
Before the trial began, Pratt interviewed LtGen Yamashita and his chief of staff, LtGen Nobuyoshi Muto at New Bilibad Prison. MPs escorted the two enemy officers from their cell block to a small conference room in the prison chapel.
They were dressed in gray-green Japanese summer field uniforms. The 5-foot-7-inch Yamashita was the more impressive of the twoshaved head, bull-necked and heavyset, although his uniform hung in folds because he had lost a great deal of weight during the campaign. Three gold stars of a general adorned the lapels of his turned-down collar. Four rows of service ribbons decorated the left side of his blouse. Highly polished boots with gold spurs completed his uniform.
Pratt was understandably ill at ease talking to the two senior enemy officers. "Like all of us who went through the Pacific operations against the Japanese, there was no 'love lost.' However, my experience at Boulder clearly showed the necessity of treating these officers with the respect their positions deserved, so I felt it necessary to address them as 'Kakka,' the Japanese term for 'your Excellency.' "
As it turned out, "they were both very open and talked freely. The 60-year-old Yamashita was rather relaxed, while Muto was more reserved and formal in the presence of his former commander." Pratt was somewhat surprised when LtGen Yamashita asked questions about his wartime experiences. "The general seemed to be impressed with the fighting qualities of Marines," he recalled.
The three talked about the fighting in Manila and Yamashita's possible indictment for war crimes. "Yamashita decided that the defense of Manila was impossible," Pratt said, "and took his forces north towards Baguio in northern Luzon, leaving the city under the control of the Navy, who committed terrible atrocities." Yamashita claimed he "knew nothing about this, and could have done very little had he known, because he had no contact with the city."
Command Responsibility
On 8 Oct., Yamashita was arraigned before a military commission of four nonlegal U.S. Army general officers and one Philippine general that had been convened by GEN Mac Arthur. He was charged with "unlawfully disregarding and failing to discharge his duty as commander to control the operations of the members of his command, permitting them to commit brutal atrocities and other high crimes."
Yamashita's defense, according to Pratt, was that "although he was nominally the senior commander in the Philippines, he had no way of making direct contact with whoever was still in command of Manila because radio communications were severely limited to his immediate tactical area. He had no direct control over the forces in the city."
Pratt agreed. "It appeared to me that, given the combat conditions on the ground at the time, it was inaccurate to find him personally responsible for the 'Rape of Manila.'"
The trial lasted for more than one month, during which time the prosecution presented more than 400 exhibits-photographs, motion-picture film and newspaper accounts of atrocities-and called 280 witnesses to testify. As chief interpreter, Pratt had to oversee the translation of this diverse testimony-"three dialects of Philipina, three of Chinese, plus Spanish."
Because of the heavy workload, Pratt "turned most of the Japanese defendants over to the Nisei staff and supervised enough to ensure that correct military terms and usage were used. In general, the Nisei were quite competent in Japanese, but some were limited in their knowledge of specific terminology and early combat operations."
Pratt listened to "weeks of testimony from hundreds of witnesses that confirmed the atrocities in Manila, leaving no doubt they actually occurred." MacArthur's headquarters constantly badgered the commission to quicken its pace by minimizing court procedures and allowing hearsay evidence.
On 7 Dec. 1945, Yamashita was taken into the packed courtroom for sentencing. U.S. Army motion-picture photographers focused on him as he stepped forward. Newsmen from all over the world stood poised to broadcast the finding. Pratt moved to Yamashita's side to translate the sentence.
"He never changed expression as I read the verdict in Japanese-'Death by Hanging.' Yamashita was very stoic throughout. I believe he knew all along what the sentence would be." It is interesting to note that an informal poll taken among the warhardened newsmen had Yamashita acquitted. They had not taken into consideration MacArtiiur's influence.
Yamashita's defense counsel appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was denied by a vote of 6 to 2. On 23 Feb. 1946, Yamashita, clad in U.S. Army fatigues (MacArthur ordered him stripped of his uniform and medals) was led to a crude wooden scaffold and hanged. Newspapers throughout the world trumpeted his death-"The Tiger Hangs" and "Yamashita Dies On Gallows."
The commission's verdict and subsequent Supreme Court decision established the so-called "Yamashita standard"-a person in higher authority is responsible for the malicious acts of subordinateswhich was quite controversial. "In general," Pratt recalled, "the legal profession questioned the validity of the commission, the qualifications of its members, the use of hearsay evidence and the principle of command responsibility." Independent legal observers felt that, in view of the structure of the court, the sole objective was to extract revenge for the many atrocities committed during the "sacking" of Manila.
After the trial, Pratt reflected: "It was a fascinating experience, but it was also one which I found, as a career officer, to be very worrisome. War-crimes trials are a function of the victors. I could then and still find, that this law of command responsibility might well be charged against our own commanders under circumstances beyond their control."
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