Paper short abstract:

Can legal trials constitute war time violence? In June 1943, James Bradley escaped from the Thai Burma Railway construction site, only to be captured and stand trial for attempted escape. Following a year of brutal interrogations and incarcerations he was sentenced to 8 years of penal servitude.

Paper long abstract:

In 1943, Lieutenant James Bradley and four other men emerged from a thick jungle following a dangerous escape attempt from the Thai-Burma Railway construction site. They were captured by Burmese hunters and quickly found themselves in Kempeitai custody. Facing brutal interrogations and harsh detainment in Moulmein Jail and Outram Road Prison, they were in the end hospitalized. Before long, however, emaciated, the men were loaded onto trucks and brought to Raffles College in Singapore. There, in 1944, they stood trial at the court-martial of the 1602 Oka-Unit over their alleged crime of fleeing detainment, with the Indian civilian who accompanied them being charged with assisting escape. The men were sentenced to multiple years of penal servitude, but managed to survive the war.

Japanese attitudes towards attempted escape have been established as early as the First Sino-Japanese war during which provisions were laid out to severely punish escapees due to fears over counterintelligence. This attitude was later formally put into law when, in 1905, the Japanese government issued its Law Pertinent to the Punishment of POWs. Despite being a departure from the 1899 Hague convention, this law formed the basis for many trials against enemy soldiers during the Russo-Japanese and the First World War. Then, in 1943, prompted by a sudden influx of enemy combatants within their captivity and a desire to maintain POW camps with as little personnel as possible, the Japanese government revised the law to define new crimes, streamline language, and increase punishments. As a result, allied soldiers faced long prison sentences and even capital punishment for their attempted escapes.

This paper considers whether legal trials could constitute a form of wartime violence through the analysis of the case against James Bradley and three other men. In following the hardships of him and his fellow escapees, this paper aims to showcase the process that allied combatants underwent when facing Japanese military justice, the uncertainty and opacity that accompanied a linguistically and culturally inaccessible system, in addition to the discrepancy between the experience of defendants and the system itself.