On 7 July 1945, the Kalagon massacre was committed against inhabitants of

Kalagon Kalagon is a village in Mon State, Myanmar. The village was the site of a Kalagon massacre, massacre perpetrated by the Imperial Japanese Army on 7 July 1945 during World War II. The 3rd Battalion, 215th Regiment and the OC Mawlamyaing, Moulmein K ...

, Burma (present-day

Myanmar Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John C. Wells, Joh ...

), by members of the 3rd Battalion, 215th Regiment and the OC Moulmein Kempeitai of the Imperial Japanese Army. These units had been ordered by Major General Seiei Yamamoto, chief of staff of the 33rd Army, to sweep the area for guerrillas reportedly teamed with British

paratroops A paratrooper is a military parachutist—someone trained to parachute into a military operation, and usually functioning as part of an airborne force. Military parachutists (troops) and parachutes were first used on a large scale during World ...

. The Japanese occupied the village and rounded up all the inhabitants, some to the local mosque and others to different buildings, for questioning. Women and children were raped and beaten. After it was confirmed that they had aided British commandos, Major Ichikawa Seigi ordered the entire village to be massacred. The inhabitants were taken in groups of four to ten people to nearby wells, blindfolded, and bayoneted, and their bodies were dumped in the wells. The village was then burned to the ground. An estimated 600 to 1,000 villagers died in the massacre. The Japanese kidnapped 10 female survivors who agreed to act as "spies", albeit it is believed that they were instead used as

comfort women Comfort women or comfort girls were women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in occupied countries and territories before and during World War II. The term "comfort women" is a translation of the Japanese '' ia ...

. Two of them escaped, but the others disappeared.

Prosecutions

Because the Japanese had conducted the massacre rather hastily, multiple villagers survived the massacre. The survivors became witnesses in war crimes proceedings against some of the participants in the massacre. In 1946, a British military court tried Seigi and 13 other soldiers for participating in the massacre. Each of them were tried on two counts: # Participating in the massacre of the villagers # Participating in the beating, torture, wounding, and other maltreatment of the villagers Seigi also faced a third charge for kidnapping the women. Ten of them were found guilty. Seven of them were found guilty on both counts, and three others were only found guilty on the second count. Seigi was found guilty on all counts. Seigi and three officers who supervised the massacre were sentenced to death. The court said Seigi would be hanged, while the other three men would be shot by firing squads. As for the other three soldiers who were deemed complicit in the massacre. However, the court found that these men either had lesser roles, or that not enough evidence had been found that death sentences were warranted. Each of them were instead given 10-year sentences. The other soldiers were automatically ineligible for execution since they were only found guilty on the second count.

Individual defendants and sentences

Each of the sentences were confirmed upon review. Seigi and his three condemned codefendants were executed on 15 July 1946, using the methods prescribed by the court. The others were sent to the local jail in

Rangoon Yangon ( my, ရန်ကုန်; ; ), formerly spelled as Rangoon, is the capital of the Yangon Region and the largest city of Myanmar (also known as Burma). Yangon served as the capital of Myanmar until 2006, when the military government ...

to serve out their sentences. In mid-1951, those still in prison were transferred to

Sugamo Prison Sugamo Prison (''Sugamo Kōchi-sho'', Kyūjitai: , Shinjitai: ) was a prison in Tokyo, Japan. It was located in the district of Ikebukuro, which is now part of the Toshima ward of Tokyo, Japan. History Sugamo Prison was originally built in 1 ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

to serve out the rest of their time. General Heitarō Kimura, one of the defendants at the

International Military Tribunal for the Far East The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), also known as the Tokyo Trial or the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, was a military trial convened on April 29, 1946 to try leaders of the Empire of Japan for crimes against peace, conven ...

, was charged multiple counts, including his failure to prevent atrocities, including the Kalagon massacre. He was sentenced to death and executed in 1948.

References

Citations

Sources

* Raymond Lamont-Brown, 1998, ''Kempeitai: Japan's Dreaded Military Police'', Sutton Publishing, Phoenix Mill, England. . * Christine Sherman, 2001, ''War Crimes: Japan's World War II Atrocities'', Turner Publishing Company. .

External links