I'm John Batchler. This is all tragedy now.

Tojo takes upon himself the explanation for the japanese empire he takes

it upon himself and he means to kill himself so that he has no more to say he's destroyed his notes

he's destroyed his letters they've all been burning documents for days it's amazing how much

material peter has access to given that what went up in smoke was all the rest of the story. However, we do know that Tojo was waiting to be arrested, and when the MPs came for him, he killed himself, except it didn't work. The Americans grabbed him, took him to a field hospital, put him back together.

I've got a photograph of the nurse that cared for him, the doctor that saved him.

And he's lying on a cot in the midst of a ward not moving.

He wants to die, but he doesn't.

And that means that he's going to be tried as a war criminal.

It takes some time to organize.

It's nowhere near as important or driven or now many decades later famous as Nuremberg trials.

But there is a war crimes trial and it happens in different places.

The major one is in Tokyo.

That's the one where Tojo is the centerpiece of the prosecution.

Peter, both you and I have read through some of the transcript, and I want to get right to it.

Tojo is the star, the villain, the one they want to denounce and deny, the one they want to say,

you did all of this. And Tojo has a defense that is quite worthwhile and worth listening to.

At the time, there was no interest in it. Everybody had convicted him, even he'd convicted

himself and knew that he was going to be

hanged. He understood that. At the same time, he did not give up details about the emperor's

involvement. And he did that without anybody asking him, that was his idea of what he could do

to serve his emperor. Have I said that correctly?

...