Last Mission to Tokyo?is the story of the 1946 war crimes trial of four Japanese men for the torture and death of three American airmen who bombed Japan in the famous and daring Doolittle Raid four months after Pearl Harbor. It is told from the perspective of a US Department of Defense criminal defense lawyer who has defended accused terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and who has been publicly critical of the work of US Military Commissions in the so-called “War on Terror”.

On 18 April 1942, a squadron of modified B-25 bombers led by then Colonel James Doolittle took off from the?USS Hornet?about 700 nautical miles from Japan. Their mission was to bomb military/industrial targets in Tokyo, to symbolically avenge Pearl Harbor, and to raise the morale of the American public after the loss of the Philippines and a string of Japanese victories in the Pacific and East Asia. The pilots and crew only had enough fuel to land in China after completing the mission. Eight of the airmen were captured by Japanese army units and taken prisoner. The raid resulted in minimal damage to Japanese factories and killed about 50 people, including civilians. The captured Americans were tried as war criminals by a Japanese military court. Three of them—Dean Hallmark, William Farrow, and Harold Spatz—were executed. After the war, four Japanese soldiers involved in the trial and execution of the American flyers—Shigeru Sawada, Sotojiro Tatsuta, Yusei Wako, and Ryuhei Okada—were tried for war crimes by an American military commission.

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?Last Mission to Tokyo: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice, Michel Paradis (Simon & Schuster, July 2020)

Michel Paradis’s narrative of the story, including the personal stories of the lawyers involved in the war crimes trial on both sides, is fast-paced and interesting, but is marred by his obvious admiration and sympathy for the defenders of the accused Japanese defendants and, more important, his apparent lack of awareness of the brutal nature of Japan’s political regime and military forces both before and during the Second World War.

To fully appreciate Paradis’s perspective, a reader of this book should listen to a?Lawfare?podcast interview of the author on 3 August 2020. There, Paradis calls the Japan of the 1930s and early 1940s a “well-meaning country”, that “didn’t set out to do horrible things.” Unlike in Nazi Germany, he said, Japan’s atrocities were not “systematic”, but resulted from a lack of discipline, bureaucratic inertia, and “turning a blind eye” to bad things. He even downplayed the evil of the Bataan Death March.

What is missing from the story Paradis tells in this book is a recognition of the historical context of these events, especially the nature of the militaristic, imperial totalitarian regime that ruled Japan—infused with what British historian Paul Johnson called the “metaphysic of militarism and violence.” Japan in the 1930s and 1940s was every bit as evil an empire as Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

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The 1942 “trial” (it lasted an hour) and murders of the captured Doolittle Raiders and the subsequent war crimes trial in 1946 of the Japanese soldiers should be viewed in that context, but the author does not do so, at least not in this book. To be sure, Paradis describes the mistreatment and torture of the captured Doolittle Raiders, and the sham trial, coerced confessions, and their subsequent executions. But he suggests that the American airmen may in fact have been guilty of war crimes by deliberately bombing civilians. And he comes precariously close to exonerating the Japanese defendants who oversaw the sham trial and imposed the death sentences on the American flyers, and who were also in the chain of command that ordered and carried out the executions.

Achieving justice for conduct during wartime can be complex and difficult, and it is always the victors who mete out justice after the war. Paradis correctly notes that more culpable Japanese soldiers and leaders were not always prosecuted—sometimes for political reasons. But that fact does not exonerate the four defendants who, like their Nazi counterparts, claimed they were just following orders or just applying their country’s laws.

Paradis commends the prosecutors in the case, Robert Dwyer and John Hendren, for working to close legal loopholes that had previously shielded those who mistreated prisoners of war. Their work, he writes, informed the 1949 Geneva Conventions that forbid torture, restrict solitary confinement, guarantee the right to counsel, and provide other procedural safeguards.

Unsurprisingly, the heroes of the book are the legal team, Edmund Bodine and Charles Fellows, that defended the accused—Paradis goes so far as to compare their work to John Adams’s defense of British soldiers in the Boston Massacre—and the military judge, Col Edwin McReynolds, who found the defendants guilty but imposed sentences ranging from five-to-nine years at hard labor, sparing the defendants the death penalty that the prosecutors sought. Interestingly, one of the Japanese defendants, Yusei Wako, was later sentenced to death for his involvement in the execution of other American POWs.

The surviving Doolittle Raiders, especially Chase Nielsen, who was tortured and mistreated by his captors and testified at the war crimes trial, did not believe that justice was done. Neither did the families of the dead Americans. A review of the case concluded that the sentences were “extremely lenient” and resulted from a “serious error of judgment”, but concluded that a retrial would violate double jeopardy. The War Department agreed.


《最后的東京任務(wù)》講述的是1946年對四名日本人的戰(zhàn)爭罪行審判，他們因三名美國飛行員在珍珠港事件四個月后實施了著名而大膽的杜立德突襲(Doolittle突襲)，對日本進行了酷刑和死亡。本書講述了一位美國國防部刑事辯護律師的觀點，這位律師曾為古巴關(guān)塔那摩灣被指控的恐怖分子囚犯辯護，并公開批評美國軍事委員會在所謂的“反恐戰(zhàn)爭”中的工作。

1942年4月18日，由當時的詹姆斯·杜利特爾上校率領(lǐng)的改裝B-25轟炸機中隊從距離日本約700海里的大黃蜂號航空母艦上起飛。他們的任務(wù)是轟炸東京的軍事/工業(yè)目標，象征性地為珍珠港復(fù)仇，并在失去菲律賓和日本在太平洋和東亞的一系列勝利后提升美國公眾的士氣。飛行員和機組人員在完成任務(wù)后只有足夠的燃料降落在中國。其中8名飛行員被日軍俘虜。這次襲擊對日本工廠造成了最小的破壞，并造成包括平民在內(nèi)的約50人死亡。被俘的美國人被日本軍事法庭作為戰(zhàn)犯審判。其中三人——迪恩·賀曼、威廉·法羅和哈羅德·斯帕茲——被處決。戰(zhàn)后，四名參與審判和處決美國飛行員的日本士兵——澤田茂、達田聰次郎、和子友成和岡田龍平——被美國軍事委員會以戰(zhàn)爭罪審判。

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《最后的東京任務(wù):Doolittle Raiders的非凡故事和他們?yōu)檎x而戰(zhàn)》，米歇爾·帕拉迪斯(西蒙與舒斯特出版社，2020年7月)
米歇爾·帕拉迪斯對這個故事的敘述，包括戰(zhàn)爭罪審判中雙方律師的個人故事，節(jié)奏快且有趣，但他明顯的欽佩和同情被指控的日本被告的辯護人，更重要的是，他明顯缺乏對二戰(zhàn)前和二戰(zhàn)期間日本政治體制和軍事力量的殘酷本質(zhì)的認識。

為了充分理解帕拉迪絲的觀點，本書的讀者應(yīng)該在2020年8月3日收聽Lawfare播客對作者的采訪。在那里，帕拉迪斯稱20世紀30年代和40年代初的日本是一個“善意的國家”，“沒有打算做可怕的事情”。他說，與納粹德國不同，日本的暴行不是“系統(tǒng)的”，而是由于缺乏紀律、官僚惰性和對壞事“視而不見”。他甚至淡化了巴丹死亡行軍的邪惡。

在這本書中，帕拉迪斯講述的故事缺少的是對這些事件的歷史背景的認識，特別是對統(tǒng)治日本的軍國主義、帝國極權(quán)主義政權(quán)的本質(zhì)的認識——英國歷史學(xué)家保羅·約翰遜(Paul Johnson)稱之為“軍國主義和暴力的形而上學(xué)”。上世紀三四十年代的日本與納粹德國和斯大林時期的蘇聯(lián)一樣邪惡。

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1942年的“審判”(持續(xù)了一個小時)、對被俘杜立德襲擊者的謀殺，以及隨后在1946年對日本士兵的戰(zhàn)爭罪審判，都應(yīng)該在這個背景下看待，但作者沒有這樣做，至少在這本書中沒有?？梢钥隙ǖ氖?，《帕拉迪斯》描述了對被俘的杜利特爾突襲者的虐待和折磨，以及虛假審判、逼供和隨后的處決。但他認為，美國空軍實際上可能因故意轟炸平民而犯下了戰(zhàn)爭罪。他差一點就要為日本被告開脫，這些被告監(jiān)督了假審判，對美國飛行員判處了死刑，他們也在命令和執(zhí)行處決的指揮鏈中。

在戰(zhàn)時實現(xiàn)行為正義是復(fù)雜和困難的，而且總是勝利者在戰(zhàn)后伸張正義。帕拉迪絲正確地指出，罪責更重的日本士兵和領(lǐng)導(dǎo)人并不總是被起訴——有時是出于政治原因。但這一事實并不能免除這四名被告的責任，他們和他們的納粹同伙一樣，聲稱他們只是在執(zhí)行命令或只是在執(zhí)行他們國家的法律。

帕拉迪絲贊揚了此案的檢察官羅伯特·德懷爾和約翰·亨德倫，因為他們努力填補了法律漏洞，這些漏洞曾保護過那些虐待戰(zhàn)俘的人。他寫道，他們的工作為1949年的日內(nèi)瓦公約(Geneva Conventions)提供了依據(jù)，這些公約禁止酷刑、限制單獨監(jiān)禁、保障律師的權(quán)利，并提供了其他程序保障。

不出所料，書中的主角是為被告辯護的法律團隊埃德蒙·博丹和查爾斯·費羅斯——帕拉迪斯甚至將他們的工作與約翰·亞當斯在波士頓大屠殺中為英國士兵辯護的工作相提并論——以及為被告辯護的軍事法官埃德溫·麥克雷諾茲上校