[December 7th
marks National
Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ll remember and AmericanStudy
some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to a special post on how
we remember such infamous days.]
On the complex
question of whether a military attack is also a war crime.
Although they
are not as well-known as the concurrent Nuremberg
Trials (perhaps because there wasn’t an excellent dramatic film
made about them), the Tokyo War
Crimes Trials comprised one of the most significant aftermaths of and
responses to World War II in their own right. Convened in Tokyo by the International Military Tribunal for the
Far East (IMTFE), an organization established by General Douglas MacArthur
in a January
1946 proclamation, the trials took place in the city between May 1946 and
November 1948. Per MacArthur’s charter the IMTFE was tasked with bringing to
trial Japanese officials and officers charged with war crimes and other “offenses
which include crimes against peace”; under that aegis nine senior political
leaders and eighteen military leaders were prosecuted, and all of them (other
than two who passed away from natural causes during the course of the trials)
were found guilty and sentenced to death or imprisonment.
Many of the Tokyo
trials’ focal war crimes fit that broad category straightforwardly enough: the rape of Nanking
and similar mass atrocities; the beheading
of prisoners of war and similar violations of international law; and so on.
But a number of the accused were also charged with Class
A war crimes (the category that focuses on “crimes against peace”) stemming
from the Pearl Harbor attack: this group included Shigetaro Shimada,
the Minister of the Navy who authorized the attack (and was convicted of a
Class A war crime for it); and the attack’s mastermind, Chief of Naval General
Staff Osarni Nagano
(who died in prison during the trial). This paper
by University of Virginia law student Jeffrey D. Fox makes the case for why the
Pearl Harbor attack should indeed have been defined as a war crime by the IMTFE,
and it’s a compelling case, starting with the lack of a war declaration or a self-defense
justification for the attack, and including broader legal ideas in the era related
to “waging aggressive war.” I’m no expert in wartime or international law, and
so I’m willing to accept such arguments and this legal definition of Pearl
Harbor as a Class A war crime.
And yet (a
favorite third-paragraph opener of mine, as longtime readers know well). I know
that the August 9, 1945 U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki took place in the midst
of a declared war, but in every other way (as I wrote in this 2015
piece for Talking Points Memo) that bombing seems to me more criminal than
the Pearl Harbor attack. It targeted almost exclusively civilians, for one
thing (soldiers comprised an estimated 3% of the city’s 1945 population). And
it was extremely aggressive and likely unnecessary, for another thing (the
Truman administration gave Japan only two days after the August 6th Hiroshima
bombing to figure out what had happened and surrender, and the U.S. military
was already rehearsing the Nagasaki bombing on the second day, meaning that
there really was no time for Japan to take action before this second bombing).
I’m not suggesting that Nagasaki fits the legal definition of a war crime,
necessarily; just that such categories and their applications, as is always and
inevitably the case with any law, are influenced in no small part by who is
framing them and in what contexts. I’m also not excusing Pearl Harbor in any
way—simply noting that the contrast between it and Nagasaki is not as clear-cut
as the Tokyo trials would suggest.
Last history
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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