Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Adam Wakeling, Viking, $34.99.
Wakeling makes a renewed contribution to Australian history about a neglected chapter of our nation’s past. This is the forgotten story of Australia, Japan and the Pacific War Crimes Trials.
It’s filled with revelations about post-war order in the Asia-Pacific.
The Nuremberg trials at the end of the Second World War are infamous, as are the atrocities committed by Japan in that conflict, but few now remember the trials that prosecuted Japanese personnel for those crimes
Stern Justice recovers this forgotten story in an effectively written history of an event that grabs your attention. The event saw Australia emerge as a player on the stage of international law.
Much was written about Australia’s leading role in the Allied program of war crimes trials that followed the end of World War II in the Pacific. One journalist said: “For the first time Australia speaks, not for herself alone, but for the whole British Commonwealth”.
Australia conducted hundreds of other trials throughout the Asia-Pacific region and Australian judge, Sir William Webb, was president of the Tokyo Trial of Japan’s wartime political and military leaders. The most tenacious of the Allied prosecutors, Australia led the unsuccessful bid to prosecute Emperor Hirohito as a war criminal and was the last country to conduct war crimes trials against the Japanese, on Manus Island in 1951.
The trials were aimed to prevent a repetition of the horrors of the Pacific War when millions perished. Yet debate around the trials raged fiercely when legitimacy, among other factors, was questioned.
Seven decades later and there’s still a lot to be learnt from both the successes and failures of these trials. With international law more important today, Stern Justice makes an irrefutable case for not allowing them to stay forgotten.
