Terese Svoboda: Rape, Murder, and Execution in Occupied Japan
“Why do you want the records of all these horrible criminals?” asks the clerk at the National Personnel Records Center. I don’t believe they’re criminals. These GIs were all around twenty years old, from the lowest ranks. For most it was their first offense and many have ribbons from the most terrible battles in the Pacific. [1] J. Robert Lily, Michael Thomson and Alice Kaplan describe the scant preparation for the hasty trials of black servicemen in particular, where the defendants were so cowed by the court-martial process they didn’t even speak up for themselves. They also tell of the lack of due process, and of missing witnesses. [2] The Senate’s 1946 Committee on Military Affairs Report notes further flaws in the trials: “the officer senior in rank often uses his weight and influence to dominate without even a pretense of impartiality; that even when votes are taken in inverse order of rank, the junior officers are perfectly well aware whether they are voting in accordance with his wishes; that the votes are taken orally; that no record of the proceedings is given the person most concerned.” [3] However, even my uncle said that the inmates he guarded, the ones I’m researching, were bad. He served as an MP in the Eighth Army stockade in Nakano the largest American military prison in Japan, from April to June 1946.
Convicted U.S. soldiers from all over the Pacific were gathered there at the end of the war awaiting transport home. “The tough amongst the tough,” my uncle called them on the audio cassettes he left me just before he committed suicide in the wake of Abu Ghraib’s revelations. Maybe they were. But bad enough to be hung? My uncle said that his commanding officer, Captain Millar, called a meeting of all the MPs and announced that the facility had become overcrowded and that they were going to have to start executing. The captain then had a gallows built and decorated it with black bunting. “He took care of the problem,” said my uncle, and his tapes end there.
By 1946 the Eighth Army in Japan reported that “racial agitation” between black and white troops was the primary cause of assault, the most frequent violent crime among the American troops stationed there. [4] Yet the official records indicate that no one on the stockade’s rolls was condemned to death. [5] Was my uncle’s suicide related to this discrepancy? I had to investigate.
Vincent M. is the best. “Your uncle’s name sounds familiar,” he says in a silky Sinatra voice, and it’s like a fairy tale to encounter someone who remembers so much. He’s practically the last MP on the morning report I order (along with the inmates) from the National Personnel Records Center who answers the phone number I find on Ancestry. com. My uncle’s unit reorganized and changed its name right after it was assigned to the stockade, and it held no reunions.
But Vincent remembers my uncle as “the guy who earned a black belt while he was there.” He also remembers two prisoners waiting for the gallows. He says one of those two “was a colored boy who was sleeping with a Japanese girl who decided to scream rape.” Then Leroy S. remembers that they did execute a prisoner and sent his body back to the States. Jack W. remembers too. And John J. says his bunk had a view of the gallows and that he could see when the rope went taut.
Holding my breath, I ask, “And did you ever see that rope go taut?” He says yes, just once. That colored boy. [6]
Only blacks were executed for rape in England during World War II, [7] and only blacks—six men—were hanged for rape by MacArthur in New Guinea at the end of the Pacific war. [8] “Nowhere in these postwar documents is there even the shadow of suspicion that segregation itself might have played a role in creating a racial disparity in sentencing,” writes Alice Kaplan in The Interpreter, a recent book about the difference in sentencing white and black soldiers accused of the same crime in the European theater. “No one, as yet, was willing to venture the obvious: it was patently absurd that 8.5 percent of the armed forces could be responsible for committing 79 percent of all capital crimes.” [9]...