[Rarebooks] FS: WWII Troop Transport Shipboard Newspaper with News of War Crime Hanging

[Joslin Hall Rare Books, Ephemera & Photographs]

WWII Troop Transport Shipboard Newspaper with News of War Crime Hanging.

Two issues of the Victory ship ‘SS Waterbury Wanderer’ for February 23 
and 24, 1946, the last two days at sea of a voyage from Bremerhaven to 
New York, returning US soldiers home from Europe. The two issues include 
shipboard news, a ‘Chaplain’s Corner’, details of embarkation plans, 
comments about other transport ships vying to reach New York first, and 
a full-page map of the voyage so far.

The February 23 issue contains a front page story titled ‘Tiger of 
Malaya Hanged as Criminal’, with details about the hanging of Japanese 
general Tomoyuki Yamashita on that same day. Yamashita was charged with 
war crimes for atrocities carried out by his troops in the Philippines 
during the war of which it appears he had no knowledge, and for which he 
had in fact tried and executed several of his own officers and men. 
Prosecutors charged that as overall commander he still had 
responsibility and the courts, all the way to the United States Supreme 
Court, agreed, resulting in a precedent called “Command Responsibility” 
or the “Yamashita Standard”, “that a commander can be held accountable 
before the law for the crimes committed by his troops even if he did not 
order them, did not stand by to allow them, or possibly even know about 
them or have the means to stop them. This doctrine of command 
accountability has been added to the Geneva Conventions and was applied 
to dozens of trials in the International Criminal Tribunal for the 
former Yugoslavia. It has also been adopted by the International 
Criminal Court established in 2002 [Wikipedia]”. The ‘Wanderer’ article 
charges Yamashita with having overseen the Bataan Death March, confusing 
him with General Masaharu Homma, who had a similarly controversial 
trial, and was executed by firing squad on April 3, 1946.

The SS Waterbury Victory was a 10,800 ton transport, keel #842 in the 
Victory Ship program. She was laid down June 9, 1945, launched July 26, 
and delivered August 31. After spending several months transporting 
troops home, the ship was sold to a Dutch company in 1947. It was sunk 
off the coast of Taiwan in February 1973.

2 issues. 8.5”x11” mimeographed, stapled pages, 3 sheets each. Pages 
age-browned, some creases, light soil. [43430]  $45

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