The Life And Death Of A Japanese General

LEYTE…LUZON…MANILA...places where thousands of Americans died, bloody battles that finally turned the tide for America in World War II. Who was the man who led the Japanese to fight so tenaciously in the face of certain defeat, who cost the Americans such a hard-won victory?

While Manila was being razed and raped by Japanese troops, while his soldiers were dying of starvation in the hills, Tomoyuki Yamashita finally bowed to the orders of his Emperor and surrendered to American forces. Official historian Robert Ross says of the brilliant general, “No one can ever dispute the fact that Yamashita executed one of the most effective delaying actions in the whole history of warfare.”

Yamashita was the first Japanese to be tried as a war criminal; as general he was held responsible for the atrocities committed by the soldiers under his command. Was his conviction in accordance with the code of American justice? Or was he a scapegoat of war, was he sent to the scaffold in vengeful retaliation for overwhelming American losses?

Foreign correspondent and biographer John Deane Potter interviewed General Yamashita in the military prison near Manila and later spoke at length with the general’s widow, who gave him access to her husband’s papers, books, and photographs.