Doctoral Thesis
Prosecuting command: Allied command responsibility trials of junior and Mid-Level Japanese officers after the Second World War
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Murdoch University
2022
Abstract
Between 1945 and 1951 the victorious Allies from the Second World War prosecuted suspected Japanese war criminals. While an international trial prosecuted military and political leaders in Tokyo from 1946 to 1948, the Allied militaries also separately prosecuted thousands of Japanese military personnel in tribunals across the Asia-Pacific region. These trials aimed to hold to account not just the enlisted men who had usually been the direct perpetrators of war crimes, but also officers, through the new doctrine of command responsibility. This doctrine holds commanders criminally liable for the crimes of their subordinates even if they did not order the crimes to occur, or when there was no evidence of an order. Previous literature has dealt with the doctrine in trials of senior officers, but this thesis, focussing on U.S., UK, Australian and Philippine proceedings, demonstrates that it was also widely used in prosecutions of low- and mid-level officers. Command responsibility was at the forefront of legal planning for the trials, and was used extensively at trials for execution, torture, massacre and mistreatment of prisoners and civilians. Although the doctrine seemed like a simple principle at the start, however, legal complexity, the vast scope of the trials, and an overwhelming desire amongst Allied personnel to secure convictions impeded its consistent application. Beyond these immediate difficulties lay the much greater problem created by the fact that the Allies never reached any agreed understanding of what behaviour could and should be expected of commanders. The result was a tangle of legal, moral and philosophical issues that were never solved. command responsibility failed to develop into a cohesive and authoritative doctrine, to the detriment of its usefulness in future proceedings.
Details
- Title
- Prosecuting command: Allied command responsibility trials of junior and Mid-Level Japanese officers after the Second World War
- Authors/Creators
- Paul D Taucher
- Contributors
- Sandra Wilson (Supervisor)Dean Aszkielowicz (Supervisor)
- Awarding Institution
- Murdoch University; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Identifiers
- 991005548669907891
- Murdoch Affiliation
- College of Arts, Business, Law and Social Sciences
- Resource Type
- Doctoral Thesis
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