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The Trials in Singapore

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The Trials in Singapore chapter 17 The Trials in Singapore Georgina Fitzpatrick 1 Introduction Although the trials in Rabaul were still underway, Singapore was the setting for 23 Australian-run trials between 26 June 1946 and 29 April 1947. All but five of the cases concerned crimes committed along the route of the Burma- Thailand Railway,1 constructed by the Japanese using the forced labour of Al- lied prisoners of war and Asian labourers. The British also conducted trials in Singapore in 1946, including many to do with the Burma-Thailand Railway. To understand why the Australian authorities mounted a separate series of trials is one of the issues to be explored in this essay and stems to some extent from the enormous task facing the British when they returned to their former territories, Singapore and Malaya, after Japan’s capitulation. That Austral- ian investigators and legal personnel would be active in the area was never questioned, but the form this participation would take was a matter of much discussion. 2 Difffering Priorities At a ceremony on the steps of the Municipal Building in Singapore on 12 September 1945, Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander of South-East Asia Command (SEAC) accepted the surrender of Lieutenant Gen- eral Itagaki Seishirō. Itagaki, the Japanese Governor of Malaya and Singapore, was the delegate of Field Marshal Count Terauchi Hisaichi, the commander of the whole Southern Army of the Japanese forces, who was ill at the time of the ceremony. Mountbatten’s area of responsibility as Supreme Commander of SEAC covered not only the former British territories and Sumatra, but had Where files have been digitised by the National Archives of Australia, the author has provided the slide reference to assist readers to locate items within large files. 1 Although contemporary sources, such as the trial transcripts, refer to the Burma–Siam railway, it seemed preferable to use today’s nomenclature. Georgina Fitzpatrick, Tim McCormack, and Narrelle Morris, Australia’s War Crimes Trials 1945-51. © 2016 Koninklijke Brill nv. isbn 978-90-04-29204-8. pp. 568-605. The Trials in Singapore 569 been extended to the rest of the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) and the south- ern part of Indochina only a few weeks earlier.2 The sudden termination of the war meant that British and Australian troops were located only in areas where Japanese forces had been defeated in battle: Burma, parts of Borneo, some outlying small islands of the NEI and Western New Guinea. There were 600,000 Japanese troops occupying Ma- laya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies.3 Organising the disarmament and concentration of this large number of Japanese troops and ensuring the smooth transfer of power from the Japanese to the British were significant challenges; however, they were perhaps the least of Mountbatten’s problems. More pressing for Mountbatten were the dual needs of restoring British prestige in Malaya and Singapore after the rapid collapse of the supposedly invincible imperial power in 1942 while also responding to domestic Brit- ish demands for demobilisation. The forces at his disposal had already been stretched, even before Mountbatten was given the additional task of restoring law and order in French and Dutch territories in the face of nationalist move- ments in Indochina and the NEI, respectively. Given that there was national- ist unrest in India occurring at the same time, using Indian troops for this task posed an obvious risk. The difficult juggling of military and political pri- orities that faced Mountbatten lies outside the scope of this essay,4 but these problems created the context in which Australian military officials investi- gated and prosecuted war crimes in Singapore. For the first time, the Austral- ians established tribunals in an area that was not under their direct military control. They had to operate within boundaries established by SEAC: in ef- fect, they were guests. Furthermore, the relationship was not always smooth because the 1st Australian War Crimes Section (1AWCS) and Mountbatten did not always share the same priorities. For the Australian Government, the main task of the Australian-run tri- als in Singapore was to satisfy the expectations of the Australian public that those responsible for atrocities committed along the route of the Burma-Thai- land Railway would be punished. Although the Government had been very guarded while the war continued about releasing any specific information about the conditions of Australian prisoners of war, reports of which were reaching them from various sources, once the war was over there was no long- 2 Peter Dennis, Troubled Days of Peace: Mountbatten and South-East Asia Command, 1945–46 (Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 1 and 5. The extension of his respon- sibility had come into effect on 15 August 1945. 3 Ibid, pp. 4–5. 4 This is the subject matter of Dennis, Troubled Days of Peace..
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