An Indonesian man who worked with my grandfather for nearly 50 years was missing his fingertips. He had two knuckles, not three, on every finger on his hand.
As a child, I would ask him about his hand, and he always told a different story. As an adult, I learned the truth: In World War II, he endured Japanese torture, escaped from their prison camp, and survived alone in the jungle for three years until the war ended.
He protected a small child from that horrible truth by making up stories about accidents with doors, lawn mowers, refrigerators. He attended my grandfather’s funeral, where a grandson of slaves who grew up a sharecropper offered a most intelligent, graceful, and concise eulogy: “He was not a large man. But he was a giant.”
Both men were hired by my grandfather right after the war, and stayed with him until he died. Those three men of three different races and backgrounds all knew right and wrong, and they all helped form my character.
My grandfather, William West Grant Jr., was born in Estes Park in 1910. The story goes that at the age of 8, he rode a horse unsupervised from Colorado Springs to Denver to attend school. He went to Dartmouth at 16, was the youngest person to hold a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and witnessed the crash of 1929. He still offered to pay for Harvard Law School in cash.
Later, he served under Admiral Chester Nimitz in Pacific Intelligence. He was on the deck of the USS Missouri as Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu signed their unconditional defeat.
Back in Denver, he became a successful lawyer and political consultant, working with Mayor Quigg Newton. On a number of occasions, I’d ask him about the war, but he was always reluctant, only occasionally telling me hints of what happened or showing the trace of scars on his arms. He was a paragon of Colorado’s rugged independence and intelligence, known for his strength, wit and athleticism.
He had photos of himself with Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and with Bobby Kennedy. He once said, “If you must, go to war. But try to find a way to serve your country other than the business of killing people.” Our nation would do well to heed that advice.
I took it. My college thesis was on the U.S. occupation of Germany, the Nuremburg Trials, and the International Tribunal system set up to “de-Nazify” Germany.
Later, I studied the International Military Tribunal for the Pacific Theater, which adjudicated national crimes that had gone on far longer than in Germany and were just as brutal.
Tomoyuki Yamashita conquered Malaya in 1941 and Indonesia and Singapore by 1942, and captured over 130,000 Allied troops. He referred to locals as “citizens” and was demoted to POW camps in Manchuria and later defended the Philippines, even after the surrender. He finally surrendered to British Generals Jonathan Wainwright and Arthur Percival, both of whom had been POWs under Yamashita in Manchuria.
Yamashita reportedly wept upon recognizing his dishonor when they refused to shake his hand for his treatment of POWs and non-citizens. He was accused of atrocities committed by his troops against the population during his “defense” of Manila in an American Military Tribunal.
His assigned lawyer, U.S. Col. Harry E. Clark, argued that the chain of command was lost, and the brutality inflicted on the population by his forces was not ordered: “One man is not held to answer for the crime of another.” Nonetheless, Yamashita was found criminally liable for failure to stop crimes that he “knew or should have known” would happen at the hand of his soldiers, and was convicted to death. Yamashita thanked his defense lawyers, and included this in his execution statement: “I know that all your American and American military affairs always has tolerant and rightful judgment.” He was then hanged.
Think of this in light of the current “torture debate” and its currency: torture memos, photos of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Lynndie England, the “Black Sites” in the former Soviet Union and Thailand, and “extraordinary rendition” of people to known torturers in Syria and elsewhere. Think of how the pressure on my grandfather to deliver actionable intelligence on Japanese military to Nimitz must have been enormous, yet for them, compassion and civility were the screws on the thumbs that got good intelligence.
Today, we are debating whether waterboarding — an activity for which we have sentenced Japanese interrogators to life imprisonment — is a crime if we do it. We are arguing whether the explicit authorization of “enhanced interrogation” techniques by White House lawyers and others responsible for the chain of command is illegal.
There are law professors who say that U.S. law and treaties signed by President Ronald Reagan and ratified by the Senate don’t apply, pundits who say that “some things should remain mysterious,” and talking heads who declare that we should only prosecute “the few bad apples” who are mostly low-level. Some people say these techniques are necessary to protect ourselves from Islamic terrorists. And yet, our government did not need “enhanced interrogation” to defeat the Nazis, the Japanese, the Soviet Union.
Lately, I’ve missed the guidance of my grandfather, his Indonesian employee and that sharecropper’s son, three great men who taught me about principles. I think they would realize the obvious: In the name of “tolerant and rightful judgment,” we should prosecute people who torture, people who authorize it, and people who fail to stop it in their chain of command. Torture is immoral and against the law.
Peter H. Smith Jr. is an attorney in Denver and a seventh-generation Coloradan.
