1885-1946
Japanese army leader
1. Introduction
Yamashita (Yah-MASH-tah) was a Japanese army general who occupied Malaya and captured Singapore in under 70 days during World War II, earning the nickname the ‘Tiger of Malaya’ and causing Churchill considerable distress. He was then sidelined to a training role in north-east China, perhaps on the direction of Prime Minister Tojo to prevent potential rivalry. On Tojo’s demise, Yamashita was assigned to defend the Philippines against US recapture but was obliged to give himself up after Japan’s surrender to the Allies. He was hanged in the Philippines for war crimes committed by his soldiers and his remains were later moved to Japan.
2. Stories
- Yamashita’s rise in the army and his military successes made him a rival to Hideki Tojo, who became prime minister.
- Churchill called the surrender of Singapore in 1942 ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’.
- The loss of Singapore was a huge blow to Churchill, militarily and psychologically.
- Yamashita’s role was reversed in 1945 when he surrendered in the Philippines.
- Arthur Percival and Jonathan Wainwright were invited by General MacArthur to participate in both the Tokyo and Philippines surrender ceremonies.
- Yamashita’s conviction for war crimes was a landmark application of the principle of ‘command responsibility’.
- ‘Yamashita’s gold’ or ‘Yamashita’s treasure’ is a legend about war loot hidden in the hills of the Philippines.
Yamashita’s rise in the army and his military successes made him a rival to General Tojo, who became prime minister.
Yamashita was born to a country doctor father and set his sights on an army career from a young age, attending military schools and army officer institutions. He began as a second lieutenant in 1906, rising to general during World War II. He first saw active service in China against Germany during World War I and was then an assistant military attaché in Austria and Germany. He returned to Austria as military attaché in the late 1920s.
Yamashita was part of the radical ‘Imperial Way’ faction of the army which attempted a coup in 1936 to bring about military rule, assassinating two former prime ministers and nearly killing the incumbent Prime Minister Okada. He was not directly involved in the coup but lost favour with Emperor Hirohito for advocating leniency for the captured leaders, resulting in his being sent to Korea in a relatively minor role. The ‘Control’ faction of the army, to which Hideki Tojo belonged, also had totalitarian beliefs but was much less radical. Tojo assisted a purge of coup sympathisers and became chief of staff of the large Kwangtung Army.
Both Yamashita and Tojo were supporters of the Tripartite Pact between Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. In 1940 Tojo, as minister of war, sent Yamashita on a six-month liaison mission to Germany where he met Hitler and Mussolini. Yamashita concluded that Japan needed to modernise and reorganise its forces and that it was underpowered to fight the USA and Britain in World War II, views not shared by Tojo.
Tojo became prime minister in October 1941. In late 1941 and early 1942, Yamashita invaded Malaya and captured Singapore, a huge victory over the British and the Allies. He was then posted to Manchuria in north-east China in a training function, perhaps at Tojo’s instigation to isolate an ascendant rival.
However, Tojo resigned in July 1944 after the loss of the Battle of Saipan. Three months later, Yamashita was recalled and appointed to the important but difficult role of defending the Japanese-occupied Philippines from US recapture. After Japanese surrender to the Allies in September 1945, Yamashita and Tojo were both executed for war crimes, Yamashita in the Philippines in February 1946 and Tojo in Tokyo in December 1948.
Churchill called the surrender of Singapore in 1942 ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’.1
Singapore was known as the ‘Gibraltar of the East’ and ‘Fortress Singapore’. It was a naval stronghold with a deepwater port on an island that had been a British territory since 1824, five years after Stamford Raffles established it as a trading post. The Sembawang naval base was constructed in the 1920s and 1930s (against Churchill’s objections while chancellor of the exchequer) and had the largest dry dock in the world. In 1942, Singapore had four RAF airfields, 54 fortress guns in six locations and 85,000 military personnel. Any invasion attempt was expected to come from the sea to the south, but it came from the land to the north.
On 8 December 1941, Yamashita landed troops in northeast Malaya and southeast Thailand, advancing to the southern tip of Malaya in seven weeks with the use of bicycles taken from the local population. The retreating Allies blew up the Malaya-Singapore causeway, but it was passable again within a week.
Meanwhile, Japanese torpedo bomber aircraft sank the Royal Navy battleship HMS Prince of Wales and battlecruiser HMS Repulse, Singapore’s two main vessels. Bombing raids were conducted on various other Singapore targets. Artillery was set up on the Malayan coast which could reach three out of four of the Singapore RAF airfields.
On 8 February 1942, Yamashita sent the first wave of troops across the narrow Johore Strait, followed by a second the next day. On 10 February, Churchill sent a message to General Archibald Wavell, saying that the Japanese were outnumbered. ‘There must at this stage be no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population’, he instructed. ‘The battle must be fought to the bitter end at all costs. […] The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake.’2
The Japanese advanced towards the capital in the south of the island. On 15 February General Arthur Percival met with his senior officers in a bunker at Fort Canning to decide between a counterattack or surrender. There was unanimity that a counterattack was not possible. Percival surrendered that afternoon at the temporary Japanese headquarters at the Ford Motor Works (now a museum), relinquishing Singapore to the occupiers for the next three and a half years.
The loss of Singapore was a huge blow to Churchill, militarily and psychologically.
Much has been made of tactical failures, including the lack of implementation of Operation Matador to defend Malaya from invasion; the reluctance to defend the northwest of Singapore island in addition to the northeast; the lack of repairs to the water supply (its imminent disruption was a key issue in the surrender); poor communications and rivalries between senior officers; and the lack of a counterattack which could have been far more effective than imagined. Yamashita said, ‘My attack on Singapore was a bluff, a bluff that worked […] I was very frightened that all the time the British would discover our numerical weakness and lack of supplies and force me into disastrous street fighting.’3
More important were the strategic issues, particularly severe under-resourcing and the lack of defences on the north of the island. Churchill was stunned to learn about the latter. ‘I ought to have known’, he said. ‘My advisers ought to have known and I ought to have been told, and I ought to have asked. […] The possibility of Singapore having no landward defences no more entered into my mind than that of a battleship being launched without a bottom.’4
He was less forthright about under-resourcing, resulting from pressures in the Atlantic. Air strength was critical in the defence of Britain but was lacking in Singapore. Insufficient and inappropriate aircraft and vessels resulted in early Japanese air and naval superiority. As a result, the ‘Singapore strategy’ of having a major base in south-east Asia to deter threats in the East was considerably compromised.
There is a myth that Singapore’s guns were facing the wrong way: south, towards the sea. Many could rotate north, including three out of five of the largest (15 inch, or 38 cm), which were indeed used during the invasion. However, most of the ammunition was armour-piercing for sinking vessels rather than high explosion for resisting a land-based attack.
Months after the defeat, Churchill was sitting in his bathroom while his doctor Lord Moran hovered in the background. He stopped drying himself with his towel and said morosely, ‘I don’t think I will ever recover from Singapore’.5
Yamashita’s role was reversed in 1945 when he surrendered in the Philippines.
The Spanish-American War (which Churchill observed and wrote about in Cuba) ended with Spain ceding the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico to the USA in 1898. The Philippines were transitioning towards independence when Japan invaded in December 1941. General Douglas MacArthur was evacuated to avoid being captured but returned in October 1944 to attempt to retake the country. While he was away, Lieutenant General Jonathan ‘Skinny’ Wainwright assumed the position of Allied commander. He came under heavy Japanese attack, surrendered and was taken prisoner.
Yamashita arrived 10 days before MacArthur’s return, as commander of the Japanese Fourteenth Area Army and military governor of the Philippines. As US forces advanced on Manila, he evacuated his army into the mountains to prepare for resistance and counterattacks. However, the Japanese navy, under Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, re-occupied the city against Yamashita’s orders, undermining his plans. US forces and Filipino guerrillas engaged with Iwabuchi in the brutal Battle of Manila in February 1945, ending in Japanese defeat and Iwabuchi’s suicide.
Manila was almost completely destroyed by US bombardment, Japanese demolition, and extensive fires due to many properties being made of timber. At least 100,000 Filipino civilians died, including some through Japanese army atrocities (numbers are contested).
Japan’s surrender declaration in Tokyo on 15 August 1945 was not immediately known to some groups of Japanese forces in isolated areas. Yamashita continued fighting in a region which MacArthur referred to as the ‘Yamashita Pocket’. Letters to Yamashita were dropped by air who responded by saying he had ordered cessation of hostilities but could do no more until receiving formal notice of the Tokyo surrender. Eventually he agreed to sign provisional surrender papers in Kiangan, Ifugao province, on 2 September 1945, the day of the formal Japanese surrender on USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Tokyo. They were ratified the next day at Camp John Hay, an American military base in Baguio, Luzon island.
In 2019 President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines announced that 3 September is an annual national ‘working holiday’, known as ‘Yamashita Surrender Day’. He also made 2 September a non-working holiday in Ifugao province.
Arthur Percival and Jonathan Wainwright were invited by General MacArthur to participate in both the Tokyo and Philippines surrender ceremonies.
After surrender in Singapore, Percival was held at Changi prison for six months. He was transferred with other senior officers to Japanese Taiwan, and then to Manchuria, China. There he found himself in the same camp as ‘Skinny’ Wainwright who had initially been held in the Philippines after his surrender there, then Japanese Taiwan. Already very slender, Wainwright became even thinner from malnutrition in captivity.
When Japan surrendered, the Allies feared a massacre of prisoners of war held by Japanese forces. Preventive action included Operation Cardinal, a mission by the Office of Strategic Services (a precursor to the CIA), which involved parachuting a team of six into Manchuria. They located Wainwright and Percival and arranged for their transport to Japan.
At the surrender ceremony on USS Missouri, MacArthur asked Wainwright and Percival to stand immediately behind him as he signed the official documents. After his first signature, he turned and gave the pen to Wainwright. After his second signature, he gave the pen to Percival. Even though he had misgivings about the two men because of their surrenders, he wanted to display the unity and resilience of the US and British military.
After the Tokyo Bay ceremony, Wainwright and Percival were flown to the Philippines, where they attended Yamashita’s surrender ceremony. When Yamashita saw Percival, he gave a brief indication of surprise and was then expressionless.
Percival returned to the UK to write a report on the fall of Singapore, then retired, publishing his memoir The War in Malaya in 1949. He held honorary military positions and died in 1966, aged 78.
Wainwright feared that he would be a national disgrace but was promoted to general and returned to the US as a hero. He was invited to the White House to meet President Truman, who surprised him by taking him outside into the Rose Garden to award him the Medal of Honor, in front of the assembled press, for his valiant resistance. After a stroke in 1953, aged 70, he was interred in Arlington National Cemetery, a military burial ground near Washington D.C.
Yamashita’s conviction for war crimes was a landmark application of the principle of ‘command responsibility’.
Yamashita underwent a five-week trial in Manila by an American military tribunal in late 1945. The charges related to atrocities committed on his watch in the Philippines but not those in Singapore. While he was in command in Singapore, the Sook Ching purge took place, killing many thousands of Chinese deemed to be anti-Japanese. Massacres also took place at the Alexandra barracks hospital and on Changi and Punggol beaches. During investigation in the Philippines, Yamashita blamed the Singapore killings on the military police, saying he was not informed about their activities.
Yamashita also denied culpability for crimes in the Philippines. He asked, ‘How could I tell if some of my soldiers misbehaved themselves? It was impossible for any man in my position to control every action of his subordinate commanders, let alone the deeds of individual soldiers. […] What I am really being charged with is losing the war.’6
He was convicted of ‘unlawfully disregarding and failing to discharge his duty as a commander to control the acts of members of his command by permitting them to commit war crimes’,7 regardless of whether he was unaware of them or could not have prevented them. A claim that some of the crimes were committed by Japanese forces not under his command was deemed inadmissible.
He was convicted and sentenced to death. Four appeals failed, to MacArthur, the Supreme Court of the Philippines, the Supreme Court of the United States and President Truman. He was hanged on 23 February 1946, aged 60.
The notion of ‘command responsibility’ dates back to the fifteenth century but Yamashita’s case gave it increased significance. It has subsequently been widely adopted as a principle of international and domestic law, sometimes being referred to as the ‘Yamashita standard’. It has been expanded from military to corporate and other contexts, resisted by those who view it as potentially unjust to condemn senior figures for all the actions of their juniors. As the law has evolved, key issues have been the amount of knowledge required to determine culpability (including ‘did know’, ‘had reason to know’ and ‘should have known’) and the level of response to such knowledge.
‘Yamashita’s gold’ or ‘Yamashita’s treasure’ is a legend about war loot hidden in the hills of the Philippines.
Japanese authorities allegedly amassed a large fortune of stolen valuables during World War II and concealed it in tunnels and caves in the Philippines while Yamashita was governor. Treasure hunters have been looking for it, to this day.
Rogelio Roxas, a Filipino locksmith, claimed to have found some of it in 1971. He discovered a network of tunnels from which he removed a one-tonne Buddha made of gold with diamonds inside, a box of 24 gold bars, and some artefacts. He said that the tunnels contained many more boxes. His new wealth was confiscated by Philippine government agents and shortly afterwards he was jailed for several years by order of President Ferdinand Marcos. After Marcos fled to Hawaii in 1986, Roxas brought a lawsuit against him but died in 1993, before the trial began. The cause of death was supposedly tuberculosis, but no autopsy was performed and there has been speculation about foul play.
A Hawaiian jury found in Roxas’s favour and awarded his estate and corporation US$22 billion plus interest, totalling US$40.5 billion (equivalent to US$67 billion today, or £47 billion) on the basis of the estimated value of the entire treasure find. This was overturned by the Hawaiian Supreme Court as there was no proof of its existence. Instead, Roxas’s estate and corporation were awarded US$19 million (US$32 million today, or £22 million) for human rights abuses and the value of the confiscated property, for which there was sufficient proof. Only around US$1.4 million has been paid so far.
Various theories have been proposed about Yamashita’s gold. One is that it was found and confiscated by Marcos and his wife Imelda. Another is that it was located by the Americans and used by the CIA for Cold War operations. Perhaps a more likely one is that it never existed.
Anthropologists familiar with the Philippines say that legends of hidden treasure go back to the fifteenth century and have various forms, this one being a recent version, although Roxas did indeed make a relatively minor discovery. The European equivalent of Yamashita’s gold is the ‘Nazi gold train’, a legend about stolen war treasures hidden in a tunnel network in southwest Poland.
3. Biographical summary
| Occupation | Army officer |
| Nationality | Japanese |
| Career | Lieutenant (1908). World War I service in Shandong, China. Captain (1916). Assistant military attaché, Switzerland and Germany (1919-22). Imperial Headquarters (1922-26). Major (1922). Military attaché, Vienna, Austria (1927-30). Colonel (1930). Commander, 3rd Imperial Infantry Regiment (1930). Major-general (1934). Brigade commander, Kwantung Army, Korea (1936). Lieutenant General (1937). Commander, Kwantung Defence Army, Manchuria (1938). Commander, 4th Infantry Division, northern China (1938-40). Commander, 25th Army (1941-42). Sidelined by Tojo to a training position, Manchuria (1942-44). General (1944). Commander, 14th Area Army, Luzon, Philippines (1944). Military Governor of Japan to the Philippines (1944-45). |
| Born | 1885 in village of Osugi, now part of town of Otoyo, Shikoku island, Kochi, Japan (11 years younger than Churchill) |
| Father | Sakichi Yamashita, doctor |
| Mother | Yuu, from a wealthy family |
| Siblings | Second son; two sisters. Elder brother was a doctor. |
| Education | Imperial Japanese Army Academy (1905). Army War College (1916). |
| Spouse | Hisako Nagayama, m. 1916 until Yamashita’s death in 1946; daughter of an army general |
| Relationships | |
| Children | – |
| Died | 1946 in Los Baños prison camp, Laguna, Commonwealth of the Philippines (19 years before Churchill), aged 60; hanged after conviction for war crimes |
| Buried | Tama Reien Cemetery, Fuchu, Tokyo, Japan |
| Nickname | Tiger of Malaya; Despoiler of Manila; Yamashita Hobun (pen name) |
| Height | 5’7” (1.70 m) |
| Time magazine | Front cover: 1942 |
4. See also
War trials
- Pétain, Philippe (Vichy France)
- Tojo, Hideki (Japan)
Churchill’s other military opponents
- Atatürk, Kemal (Turkey)
- Aung San (Burma)
- Bose, Subhas Chandra (Indian National Army)
- Trotsky, Leon (Russia)
Churchill controversies
- Singapore and Asia defeats
5. Further reading
Yamashita
- Kenworthy, Lt Col Aubrey Saint, The Tiger of Malaya: The Story of General Tomoyuki Yamashita and “Death March” General Masaharu Homma (Verdun Press, 2015)
- Potter, John Deane, The Life and Death of a Japanese General (Verdun Press, 2016)
The fall of Singapore
- Glueckstein, Fred, ‘Churchill and the Fall of Singapore’, International Churchill Society, 2015
- Leasor, James, Singapore: The Battle That Changed the World (House of Stratus, 2001)
- Smith, Colin, Singapore Burning: Heroism and Surrender in World War II (Penguin Books Limited, 2006)
- Thompson, Peter, The Battle for Singapore: The True Story of the Greatest Catastrophe of World War II (Little, Brown Book Group, 2010)
- Warren, Alan, Britain’s Greatest Defeat: Singapore 1942 (Hambledon Continuum, 2007)
Philippines
- Chun, Clayton K.S., Luzon 1945: The Final Liberation of the Philippines (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017)
- Scott, James M., Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila (W. W. Norton, 2018)
MacArthur and Percival
- Herman, Arthur, Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior (Random House Publishing Group, 2016)
- Kinvig, Clifford, Scapegoat: General Percival of Singapore (Brassey’s, 1996)
War loot
- Nicholas, Lynn H., The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009)
- Zweig, Ronald W., The Gold Train: The Destruction of the Jews and the Second World War’s Most Terrible Robbery (Penguin Books, 2003)
6. References
1. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume 4: The Hinge of Fate, The Second World War (Houghton Mifflin, 1948), p. 92.
2. Churchill, p. 100.
3. James Leasor, Singapore: The Battle That Changed the World (House of Stratus, 2001), p. 244.
4. Churchill, p. 49.
5. Charles M.W. Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940-1965 (Constable, 1966), p. 29.
6. Alan Warren, Britain’s Greatest Defeat: Singapore 1942 (Hambledon Continuum, 2007), p. 287.
7. Laurie Blank and Gregory P. Noone, International Law and Armed Conflict: Fundamental Principles and Contemporary Challenges in the Law of War (Wolters Kluwer, 2014), p. 656.