John “Skip” Bailey

16.0
War Crimes Investigations after the War

At the end of the war the Allied forces had already compiled documents from eyewitness accounts and intelligence reports of the many atrocities committed by the Japanese throughout Asia and the Pacific region.

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), also known as the Tokyo Trial and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, was a military trial convened on 29th April 1946 to try leaders of the Empire of Japan for their crimes against peace, conventional war crimes, and crimes against humanity, leading up to and during the Second World War. [56]

The judges, prosecutors and staff were from eleven countries began with Japanese crimes committed from the invasion of Manchuria since 1931 to the end of the war. Thousands of other "lesser" war criminals were tried by domestic tribunals convened across Asia and the Pacific by Allied nations, with most concluding by 1949. Due to U.S. government intervention, the trials failed to bring to justice many war criminals.

The murderers of the crew of A9-244 were never brought to justice. However, a list of Japanese Navy personnel in Rabaul at the time of the murders was compiled for the War Crimes Trial conducted in Rabaul. Those Japanese who were present at executions in November 1943, the month in which Skip was executed, have been highlighted in red.

A letter written by Mr. M. C. Langslow (Secretary, Department of Air) to F/Lieut Geoffrey Hubert Vincent’s father did mention that the Japanese who witnessed his son’s beheading “expressed their admiration of the fearless manner in which all met their death”. Was this made up by Langslow or did the RAAF know the identities of the murderers and did not follow up with their prosecution?

Twenty two thousand Australian servicemen were captured and were POWs of the Japanese, 1049 from New Britain. They were shipped to as far away as Manchuria and Japan and throughout Asia. At the end of the war only 13,872 prisoners in total were recovered. Compared to this, Axis forces in Europe and the Middle East captured 8000 Australians and only 265 died in captivity. [57]

In the early 1950s, the U.S. Government convinced the Australian Government to cease charging Japanese, or those working for the Japanese, with war crimes. General Douglas McArthur issued a directive on 7th March 1950, reducing sentences imposed on war criminals by a third and authorized the parole of those who had received life sentences after fifteen years. By the end of 1958, all Japanese war criminals were released from prison and politically rehabilitated.

Unfortunately, some of the worst Japanese crimes against humanity were deliberately omitted from human rights tribunals including the chemical and biological experimentation on Chinese and Allied POWs by Imperial Army Unit 731. Although responsible for some of the most grotesque atrocities committed in either theatre of the Second World War, much of Unit 731 was granted immunity from war crimes prosecution by the United States government.

In 1945, the United States’ explicit strategic reason to pardon members of Unit 731 was the threat posed by the USSR. Unit 731’s experiments, horrific as they were, provided enormous amounts of useful medical knowledge and data to the United States Army regarding biological and chemical warfare. After gathering the Unit’s data, General Douglas MacArthur decided that the information learned by members of Unit 731 had the potential to be of major strategic importance in a future war against the Soviet Union. [58]

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[56] Wikipedia
[57] Dept. of Veteran Affairs – Anzac Portal
[58] Pardoning Devils: The American Cover Up of Imperial Japanese Unit 731