Homma on Hiroshima: War Crimes and Politics

“I am being executed for the Bataan incident. What I want to know is: Who is responsible for the burning of 150,000 innocent civilians at Hiroshima—MacArthur or Truman?” – Gen. Masaharu Homma (Crowe 2004:191)

Gen. Masaharu Homma’s statement the day before he was executed on 03 April 1946 in Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines implicates at least two key issues about war crimes: semantics (meanings of terms), and justice (determination of guilt and the administration of punishment corresponding to the crime).

Double Standards

At first glance, Homma’s use of the term “Bataan incident” seems like a dismissive reference or an attempt to downplay the horrors wrought by his army for which he earned the moniker, “The Beast of Bataan”: the three-month battle of Corregidor Island where at least 1500 Filipino, American and Japanese soldiers died and about 2000 combatants wounded, and the subsequent “Bataan Death March” in which around 10,000 American and 66,000 Filipino POWs were forced to walk over 100 kilometers for two weeks amidst torture, heat and starvation.

Homma was, however, a true officer and a gentleman even by the West’s standards and also fluent in English so it is to me doubtful that he would be flippant and careless with his choice of words. The context within which he used the phrase seems to indicate that he was actually comparing the magnitude of death and devastation unleashed by the United States’ nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with that of the Battle of Corregidor and the Bataan Death March.

In doing so, he meant not to justify the atrocities committed by his men, but to point out the double standards by which his triers under the baton of Gen. Douglas MacArthur judged war criminals.

Estimates placed civilian deaths from between 100,000 – 200,000 in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with at least 600,000 scarred for life due to radiation exposure. To put the blasts into today’s perspective, the Beirut explosion of 04 August 2020 that killed over a hundred people and rendered 300,000 people homeless had just 10% of the intensity of the nuclear detonation over Hiroshima on 06 August 1945.

But of course, since the Japanese were the enemy at the time, America’s instant slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people was never seen as a war crime or an act of terror — just as the unjust war it later waged against Vietnam which killed 2,000,000 civilians in that country was never acknowledged as genocide. So Truman and and Johnson were hailed as champions of democracy and peace, not harbingers of death and terror.

Doublespeak

Whether that was Homma’s intent or not, his semantic choice reminds us of various terms used in modern warfare which are meant to condition our perception, challenge our understanding, or influence our judgment of or on historical events. Consider these two examples:

• The Americans referred to the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902 as the “Philippine Insurrection” to give the impression that they had legitimate authority over the archipelago, thus downplaying the fact that they were an invading, occupying force.

• The Allies viewed the German blietzkriegs and the Japanese kamikaze bombings as acts of terror, but didn’t call the firebombing of Berlin (by the Brits) or Tokyo (by the Americans) as such. They also agreed with FDR when he said that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was the US’ “Day of Infamy” but denied that wiping out 200,000 Japanese with nuclear bombs was a crime against humanity.

In the past few decades, we have seen the use of euphemisms used by state forces and non-state actors to legitimize an otherwise unlawful or reprehensible behavior or operation. Just take a look at how intelligence agencies and military operators use terms like “collateral damage,” “signature strike,” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” to hide the gruesome truth that they killed innocent civilians, executed drone attacks on their targets based on perception (i.e., terrorist-like behavior) and not on actual identification, and tortured their prisoners.

Double Tap

The assignment of responsibility is the critical test of the argument for justice. (Walzer [1977] 2006: 287)

The administration of justice for war crimes is predicated upon the accurate determination of perpetrators and the nature of the guilty party’s involvement in the heinous act. In the case of Homma, he clearly had command responsibility over the Japanese 14th Army. It is debatable though whether he should be judged guilty for his troops’ crimes despite his explicit order for them to act humanely towards their enemies. But his trial in Manila was a sham, as noted even by some American jurists — perhaps driven more by MacArthur’s ego rather than Lady Justice’s passion. For after all, the Japanese officer humiliated him by defeating him in Bataan.

So by setting all the terms and conditions of Homma’s trial and capitalizing on his charisma, MacArthur made sure he had his enemy at close range for a double tap headshot.

And so, as one writer had put it,

…Homma proved a thoroughly unsatisfactory villain. Here was a figure out of Shakespearean tragedy, an aesthete fighting a war he did not believe in, for a totalitarian regime he detested, and yet, in the end, having to answer with his life for that regime’s savagery. (Hampton Sides 2007)

Unsatisfactory villain or not, Homma was placed on the same judicial stage where Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita was. Being the twin faces of Japanese imperialism at the time, their heads had to roll.

Doublethink

The case of Homma is another reminder of the fact that political indoctrination then, as it is today, conditions our sense of right and wrong.

It explains why we could spin truths out of the web of lies crafted by our political leaders, why we approve of spreading democracy through acts of terror and by supporting or setting up dictators, why we extol mass murderers and warmongers as heroes and champions of peace, or why we can justify removing Lady Justice’s blindfold when it does not serve our purpose and put it back when it does.

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Suggested Readings:

Crowe, David M. 2014. War Crimes, Genocide and Justice: A Global History. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Parsons, Graham & Mark A. Wilson. Walzer and War: Reading Just and Unjust Wars Today. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave McMillan.

Sides, Hampton. 2007. “The Trial of General Homma.” American Heritage. Vol. 58 (1): ___. Available, https://www.americanheritage.com/trial-general-homma.

Walzer, Michael P. (1977) 2015. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. 5th ed. Basic Books: New York

LT. GEN. MASAHARU HOMMA (27 Nov 1887-03 Apr 1946)