This is John Bachelor.

Conversation with Professor Gary Bass, his new book, Judgment at Tokyo.

Here the professor identifies how it is that we came to a tribunal for war crimes in Japan long after the Nuremberg trial.

It's MacArthur.

MacArthur drives the whole project thinking it'll be quick.

The professor explains. Much more of this later. Thank you.

Thinking about his own troops at Baton. And after the war, when Manila is devastated, that it's sort of devastation on the level of what happened to Warsaw, that MacArthur, you know, so the, you know, weeks after the surrender on the Missouri, it's on September

24th, MacArthur issues orders to create military, U.S. military commissions. It's not even a standard U.S.

military court like you get for a court marshal. You have special rules of

criminal procedure which are just seven pages long.

We have 30 seconds.

Go ahead, Professor.

30 seconds.

And these two generals are swiftly,

the trial takes a couple of weeks are condemned and hanged.

That's MacArthur's way of doing it.

And when he's thinking about punishing the rest of the war criminals,

he thinks, let's have a quick, maybe sixmonth trial that's just about aggression at Pearl Harbor,

aggression against the United States.