Tears in the Darkness (62 page)

In his closing argument for the prosecution, Meek reviewed the list of atrocities—the bombing of Manila, rapes and murders of civilians, the conditions at O'Donnell and Cabanatuan, finally the death march.

Never will there be a blot in human history to compare in my estimation with the Death March. Someone is to blame for these marches, and that someone is the accused . . . What do we have? We have the testimony here of the dead and the dying. We have heard testimony that they didn't have food. We [heard] that they did not have water . . . These things, gentlemen of the commission, cannot be denied. They cannot be overlooked. Someone had to be responsible. That someone is this accused . . . He is not the fine humanitarian soul [the defense] would have you believe . . . General Homma, as he has said, is morally responsible. I submit he is responsible in every sense of the word . . . Hard as it is for anyone to pass judgment on his fellow man, there is but one plain, clear duty for the members of this commission, and that is to find this accused guilty as charged, and in doing that the prosecution in this case expects and requests the death penalty.
⁵²

General Donovan adjourned the session and announced that the commission would reconvene in two days, February 11, “at which time the finding of this case will be announced.” That night, Bob Pelz went to see his client.

“I paid what must be my last visit to the General,” he wrote afterward. “It touched me deeply and when I told him that it has meant much to me to have known him, he bowed his head and said, ‘I am honored that you should say so.' Then I bid him au revoir although we both knew, in our hearts, that it was not au revoir . . . I shall never forget the General. I believe he is a good man who was placed by fate in an impossible situation. Truly he will die for the sins of others.”

Sometime before 1:00 a.m. Sunday, Bob Pelz and Fujiko boarded a four-engine C-54 Skymaster at Clark Field for the long flight north to Tokyo. “Mrs. Homma cried a little as she saw the lights of Manila fade,” Pelz noted in his diary.

The next afternoon in Manila, General Donovan called the commission into session and read the charges against the accused. Then he told the defendant, dressed in a white linen suit and dark tie, to rise, come forward, and stand before the bar with his lead attorney, Major Skeen.

 

Donovan:Â	Upon secret written ballot, two-thirds or more of the members concurring, the commission finds you, of the charge, guilty . . . Has the accused or his counsel anything further to offer before sentence is announced? Do you wish to make a statement?
Homma:Â	I wish to thank the gentlemen on the commission for the courteous ways which I have been treated all through and during my trial. I thank you very much.
Donovan:Â	Sentence. Upon secret written ballot, two-thirds or more of the members concurring, the commission sentences you to be shot to death with musketry. The accused will be escorted from the courtroom. 53

 

The same day, in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Supreme Court officially refused to hear Homma's writ of habeas corpus. Justices Rutledge and Murphy again dissented. The trials, Murphy suggested, had been nothing more than “pretense,” no better than “blood purges.”
⁵⁴

In the weeks that followed, the Homma verdict worked its way up the chain of command, reviewed and certified at each step, until it reached the desk of the final authority in the case, Douglas MacArthur.

On Monday, March 11, the supreme commander announced that he was beginning a “conclusive” review of the case, a review that began with a visit from the condemned man's wife, Fujiko. Accompanied by George Furness, who was handling all the posttrial legal matters, Fujiko met with MacArthur for some forty minutes. She stressed that she had not come to beg for mercy; “My husband would be very angry with me if I did,” she told reporters. Rather she asked the supreme commander to take special care reviewing the facts in the case, in effect a plea for clemency. Furness said MacArthur “understood and sympathized” with the aggrieved woman's request.
⁵⁵

Nine days later, none of that empathy was apparent. Declaring, “If this defendant does not deserve his judicial fate, none in jurisdictional history ever did,” MacArthur ordered his surrogates in the Philippines to carry out the death sentence. He also decided to use the occasion to respond to Rutledge and Murphy.

“No trial could have been fairer than this one,” he insisted. “The trial was conducted in the unshaded light of truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
⁵⁶

________

 

HOMMA WAITED
in a prisoner of war camp near Los Baños for the army to set the date of his execution. He spent the hours, days, weeks praying, reading, and writing.

He wrote a last letter to his mother, Machi-san.

Dear Mother
,

I don't know how to express to you the depth of my gratitude for raising and caring for me all these years. Since I left for the academy to become an army officer at 18, I haven't lived with you and have not returned your kindness. I went my own way, and made you worry constantly. Now, at the end, instead of taking care of you, I will die before you do. What an impiety for a son. No matter how much I apologize, it will never be enough . . . Please forgive me
.
⁵⁷

 

And a last letter to his children.

 

Dear Masahiko, Hisako, Seisako,

It is the greatest of sorrows to die without seeing you, however this is my destiny and nothing can be done . . . No matter how much I write, I still miss you . . . Please take good care of your mother. She will be the greatest legacy I leave to you, and you will be the greatest asset I can leave to her
.
⁵⁸

Not knowing the date he was to die, he wrote several “final” letters to Fujiko.

[
March 10, 1946, letter from the “condemned cell”
] I always write my letter thinking this would be the last one for me to write . . . Prison life makes me like a living corpse . . . It is unbearable to wait for the day of my execution wondering if a call for me may come today or tonight.

Now [that] I've been reduced to being a carp on the chopping board, there's nothing that can be done . . . I will resign myself to my fate and stand before the muzzles of the American soldiers' rifles . . .

At last, goodbye.
⁵⁹

 

Another week passed with no word.

“Everyday I picture you, mother, Hisako and Seisaku in my mind's
eye,” he wrote on March 19. “I always think to myself, ‘Today might be the last day.' ”

He wanted to prepare himself for his final moments and decide what he might say. Perhaps recite something from the sutras? Offer his family a final good-bye?

“I will die,” he finally resolved, “giving cheers [banzais] to the Emperor.”
⁶⁰

He passed those last days reading books and Buddhist scriptures. He was still hoping for enlightenment, some spiritual release. At the end of every day, however, he found himself earthbound, still behind bars, waiting.

“My nerves,” he wrote Fujiko, “have become as sharp and thin as a needle . . . I often have dreams of the family . . . My agony is great.”
⁶¹

At last he was handed notice of his execution, the sentence to be carried out April 3. He sat down and scribbled his “very last letter,” assuring his family that “it will be better to be shot to death” like a soldier on the battlefield than spend the rest of his life “in such a cage.” Then, following Buddhist tradition, he wrote his death poem, his last attempt to find a moment of peace in the life he was about to leave.

. . . With a smile I'll give the life I offered long ago, as I have now found a place to die.

 

It will be good to become the earth of Manila, looking at the mountains of Bataan, where my comrades sleep.
⁶²

IN THE LATE WINTER
of 1946, when Captain Ivan J. Birrer of Kansas arrived at the Philippine Detention and Rehabilitation Center, an army jail near Los Baños that doubled as the place of execution for condemned war criminals, the officer in charge, an aging colonel named John Fonvielle, took one look at the young officer's sterling record—psychology major in college, certificate from the Army's Command and Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas—and made him his adjutant. It became Birrer's job to relay instructions and assignments to the center's staff, and in late March, when orders arrived to prepare for the execution of Masaharu Homma, Fonvielle called Birrer into his office.

“Okay,” the colonel said, “you're the adjutant, you take care of whatever has to be done.”
⁶³

The center had two execution sites. One was a wooden scaffold with tin skirting that stood in the shade of a mango tree, thirteen steps leading up to a platform with a trapdoor. Nearby on a patch of bare ground flanked by woods was a tall, thick wooden plank planted in the ground as a backstop for a firing squad.
⁶⁴

At roughly 1:00 a.m. on Wednesday, April 3, 1946, Masaharu Homma arrived at the execution center from the nearby prisoner of war camp and was put inside a small concrete blockhouse that sat in the middle of the compound and was surrounded by barbed wire. A lieutenant colonel who had escorted the condemned man from Los Baños sought out the center's young adjutant.

“Here,” the colonel said, handing Ivan Birrer a two-page single-spaced legal document. “You will read this to the general.”

Birrer made his way across the compound, two brawny military police sergeants with flashlights leading the way to the blockhouse where the condemned man was waiting. The room was bare except for a cot on which Homma sat.

Ivan Birrer started to read. He had recited death warrants to other prisoners, but never one this long, this detailed. It began with an outline of the charges, then came a list of the specifications followed by the findings of the court. Birrer tried to read slowly, carefully. Since there had been no time to look it over, he didn't want to make a mistake, louse up the drill. From time to time, he tried to catch a glimpse of the general out of the corner of his eye to see if he was listening.

Homma sat in silence, looking at no one or nothing in particular. After he had finished the first page, Birrer flipped to the second and kept reading. Then, all at once, he became aware of what he was reading.

The warrant included a summary of Homma's military career, a paragraph, in Birrer's opinion, of “blistering” insult, the kind of thing MacArthur had included in his final review of the verdict: “The proceedings show the defendant lacked the basic firmness of character and moral fortitude essential to officers charged with the high command of military forces in the field.”
⁶⁵

Homma was standing now, angry and staring at the young American officer. His execution had nothing to do with character or morality. “I'm being shot tonight because we lost the war,” he told Birrer dryly. Then he sat down again.

Birrer, stunned, stopped for a moment, then, not knowing what to say, picked up where he'd left off.

“General it is my duty to tell you that the sentence will be carried out at zero-two-hundred today,” some thirty to forty minutes hence. And with that, Birrer left the condemned man in the company of the burly sergeants, crossed the yard again, and stopped near the mango tree to wait.

The execution site was lit with floodlights, but the aging generator that drove them was cranky, and the yellow lights would dim, go bright again, then dim once more. Beyond the circle of pulsing lights, the compound sat in the pale silver of a full moon, a place of silhouettes and shadows and warm night breezes.

Shortly before 2:00 a.m., the condemned man came out of the blockhouse, flanked by the two guards. He walked slowly, deliberately across the yard to the spot where the wooden plank had been set in the ground.

A doctor had pinned a six-inch square of white cloth on the general's shirt over his heart. The executioner, Lieutenant Charles R. Rexroad, had set his six riflemen in a line twenty-five yards away. Now he moved the condemned man into position in front of the plank.

“General,” Rexroad asked him, “do you have any last words?”

Masaharu Homma seemed to lean forward, then turn, Birrer guessed, in the direction of Tokyo, home of the Imperial Palace.

“Banzai!” Homma yelled. “Banzai! Banzai!”

Rexroad took his position.

Ready, he said, aim, fire!

 

 

 

 

 

H
E SPOTTED HER
right away. Beautiful smile, gorgeous hair. And the way she moved, out there on the dance floor, every guy in Elmo Club watching her.
¹

She was sitting with her girlfriend now at a nearby table. That's Bobbie Mellis, Ben Steele told Porky Dillon. All grown up from the girl he once knew. Must be eighteen, nineteen, “kind of a knockout.” They should go over, he said, introduce themselves, buy the girls a drink.

She remembered him from before the war, working with her father out at the Clark ranch. So Bud Steele was back. No worse for the wear, apparently. He still had that shock of dark hair, those deep brown eyes.

The four of them ordered steaks and rounds of whiskey and beer. They talked, they danced. When the Elmo closed at 4:00 a.m., they drove down from the heights to a diner on Montana Avenue for breakfast.

 

BEN STEELE
was twenty-eight, Roberta Mellis twenty, a bookkeeper at the Billings Gas Company. They dated almost every night for two weeks. At the end of his leave, sitting in the Elmo Club again, he said he had a question. He took a pencil out of his pocket and wrote something on a cocktail napkin.