Choosing War (Fredrik Logevall)

In this book, Prof. Logevall argued that the US's involvement in Vietnam was not inevitable, there were opportunities where the US could have left Vietnam, none better than the months immediately after Lyndon Johnson was elected as President. Unfortunately he was not of the temperament to read the signals coming from his own electorate or the international community. In the end, he would have to bear a big part of the responsibility for bringing the US into war.

Whether one agrees with the thesis, this is an excellent book. Extensively researched, logically argued, and fluidly written, the book takes the reader through an exploration of the circumstances surrounding Vietnam after the French left. It takes a broad frame of reference, tackling the issues including presidential leadership, their advisers, the attitude of the electorate and the international political climate. He examined the options available at each point between 1964 and 1965 and whether a different decision could have been made. 'Yes', he argued, and in hindsight might not have been difficult, but no, these roads were not taken.

The different questions he explored include: Would JFK keep the US out of the war had he lived as some came to argue (e.g. McNamara in his book In Retrospect)? Were the attitudes of the elites at that time as they said they were after the war (eg. George Bell)? Did the 'Domino Theory' really hold? To the first of these questions, the author examined JFK’s fundamental doubts about the US’s agency in dealing with the political issue in Vietnam (pg. 37) and compared it against his actual actions. In that section the author started one of the paragraphs with these two words: And yet. That’s the author's lament. JFK, despite his doubts, first adopted a wait-and-see attitude, but would later boxed himself in with his rhetoric. The author systematically dismantled the enduring myth that JFK would have kept the US out of the war if only he had lived.

Of more interest is why LBJ, despite having won a large mandate from an electorate that expected him to keep the US out of the war, continued to stay the course and in fact progressively up the stakes, eventually Americanising the war. This the author explored in detail, taking care to explain that it was not because he felt that LBJ had managed the situation worse than JFK would have, but because he had a much longer time in the game and so was able to make many more decisions. I shall not spoil the plot by leaking his conclusions here, enough for me to say that the argument was convincing.

The final chapter of the book is a summary of the arguments but the author also expanded it to consider a few counterfactual scenarios. The fact that Prof. Logevall revisited questions he asked earlier and gave them a somewhat different treatment shows the nuance he employed in investigating this important issue of why the US ended up caught in Vietnam. The Vietnam War receive a lot of attention by historians, journalists and people who fought and suffered in the war. In all cases the motivation is to understand why and how it happened and hopefully we are able to avoid getting in such a situation in future. How much we have succeeded we still do not know, but if this book has gotten it right then we are looking at a complex mix of flawed logic, personality, arrogance and career management. Any one of which can lead any nation down this unfortunate road.

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Yamashita's Ghost (Allan A. Ryan)

This book is about the trial of General Tomoyuki Yamashita in the Philippines at the end of the Second World War. It is not a simple narrative of the events that took place during the trial. The author argued that the trial was a show done to satisfy the vanity of General Douglas MacArthur. As a result, the first trial of its kind, saddled with the destiny to set a precedence, was relegated into a theatre that contravenes all manner of good legal process (pg. 88).

The book started with the concept of a military tribunal, stressing that it is a challenging one. While it is grounded in legal practice, the process is often carried out by people not trained in the legal profession. More importantly, the idea of laws governing behaviours in wars is a tenuous one. Therefore it is easy for a tribunal to end up miscarrying the justice it is supposed to uphold. This appears to be the case with the tribunal trying Yamashita.

Yamashita was charged with failing in his duty as commander of Japanese forces in the Philippines to prevent them from committing atrocities in the dying days of the war leading to what is called the Rape of Manila. The author raised two questions to this charge: the first is whether Yamashita indeed knew about what was going on, and if he did, whether he could do anything about it. The answers to both questions appear to be a resounding ‘no’. Yamashita did not know about the rampage of that was going on in Manila because he had ordered all troops to vacate the city and was not informed of any atrocities that took place later. Secondly, even if he had known, by then the American forces had so effectively cut off his communication lines that there was no way he could stop the troops even if he had wanted to.

In the end Yamashita was found guilty and sentenced to death, a verdict the author felt was unjust, conceived through a ‘legal’ process flawed in so many ways. Most of his dissatisfaction however, is directed at the presiding judge, Maj. Gen. R. B. Reynolds. To him, General Reynolds was unfit to preside over the tribunal and was portrayed as incompetent (pg. 121, 161, 244) and unfair. On numerous occasions, he allowed the prosecution the latitude that would not have been in a proper trial. He admitted ‘hearsay’ and even double or triple hearsay to be admitted as evidence and when asked to make a judgement on the legality of the prosecution’s methods, could only say “sustained”. Yet, this might not have been the case had it not been for General MacArthur’s haste in wanting the tribunal to conclude quickly, therefore the sub-title “MacArthur's Justice”.

This is a book that requires careful reading and reflection; the author can easily be accused of being a revisionist arguing that a high-ranking Japanese officer was not responsible for the suffering of prisoners-of-war and civilians. To the author, war crimes tribunals is a self-contradictory concept. Wars are started for different reasons but killing of soldiers and civilians are implicit, to put it within the framework of law is oxymoronic. However, we intuitively think that people who perpetuate atrocities must be brought to justice, the question is whether it can be done properly. Despite the difficulties there is value to a war crimes tribunal (which the author argued in the last chapter of the book) and when it is convened, it has to be done properly, and given the self-contradictory nature, carefully. This was obviously not the case in the Yamashita tribunal. I do not think that the author is sympathetic to the Japanese, but he recognised that a tribunal that is not carried out properly would allow those sympathetic to the defendants to claim that it was “victors’ justice” (as argued by Maurice Bardèche in his book, Nuremberg or the Promised Land).

At the end of the book, I asked myself what would have been the right thing to do. While I agree with the author’s argument, I found it impossible to imagine that Yamashita would be acquitted in that climate where everyone who suffered under the Japanese occupation wanted to see something done to members of the Japanese military. The author did not deny the Rape of Manila, he in fact showed data and described the atrocities without any attempt at whitewashing. To him the one that was responsible was Iwabuchi who openly ignored Yamashita’s order to vacate Manila. But Iwabuchi was killed in Manila with almost all his troops. As such, there should not be a tribunal. Yet I cannot imagine this whole issue to不了了之 (a Chinese phrase to describe a situation where something is left unclosed and eventually forgotten). I can, being born a generation later, buy into the author’s argument, but I cannot imagine my grandparents or even parents accepting it. In the immediate aftermath of the war, it was politically untenable. Yamashita would have to be executed, even if purely out of vindication, whatever the consequences. This was acted out in the Chinese movie The Tokyo Tribunal where China’s representative on the prosecution, Mei Ju-ao, wondered to himself at the end of the movie – “I cannot imagine what would happen had we not gathered enough votes to put the accused to death.” This scene is probably made-up, but it reflected the sentiments at the time. The judges could judge according to the logic and spirit of the law, the people wanted their own form of justice.

I came across a book on the Tokyo Military Tribunal – Beyond Victor’s Justice where in the foreword, Sir Gerard Brennan who was involved in the trial of General Nishimura in Australia claimed that it was the first time he came across the passing of the death sentence and it was appalling to him. This was despite Nishimura being quite clearly implicated in the massacre of wounded Australia troops left behind in Parit Sulong, Malaya. This is a contrast to the emotions that civilians who suffered under the Japanese experienced then. We see therefore on one side, a defence that would not convict an accused over slightest doubt in the interpretation of an order but on the other, the people who had suffered untold atrocities who would not care who had to pay for it.

This is a very thought-provoking book. The last few chapters of the book are short and are not on Yamashita’s trial. They are there to show the legacy of that trial and the impact it would have right up to modern times. The last chapter is where the author shared his thoughts on the concept of war crimes. If the rest of the book are well-worth reading, this last chapter is invaluable. Readers like me who are not familiar with this tribunal or the concept of war crimes will find this a very good introduction and will be richly rewarded for reading it.


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