Tomoyuki Yamashita

General Tomoyuki Yamashita took Malaya and Singapore in seventy days and was hanged for what other men did in the Philippines. He was an officer of the Imperial Way faction who had spent time as an attaché in Germany and Switzerland, and his relations with Tojo were poor throughout. In December 1941 he landed in northern Malaya and drove eight hundred kilometres down the peninsula, using bicycles for mobility and outflanking prepared positions through jungle the defenders had thought impassable. At Singapore in February 1942 he bluffed a surrender out of Arthur Percival with a force smaller than the one facing him and nearly out of ammunition, demanding to know whether the answer was yes or no. It earned him the name Tiger of Malaya and, from Tojo, immediate posting to Manchuria, where he sat out most of the war. He was recalled in 1944 to defend the Philippines, withdrew into the mountains of Luzon and held out until after the surrender. His troops had committed the Manila massacre, in which around a hundred thousand civilians died, but the unit responsible was a naval force outside his command and he had ordered the city evacuated. He was convicted anyway on the principle that a commander is responsible for his troops' conduct, which entered law as the Yamashita standard, and hanged in February 1946. The Yamashita standard has since been cited at Nuremberg, in the trials arising from Vietnam, and before the International Criminal Court. Douglas MacArthur convened the commission and confirmed the sentence, and the United States Supreme Court declined to intervene over two dissents. Justice Frank Murphy wrote that the proceedings had permitted a victor to try a vanquished commander for the crime of losing.

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