Book Review | When an Adored Villain Gets His Day in Court

• Published in: MomentMag.com
• Main Author: Siegel, Robert
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Washington Moment Magazine 01.01.2024
• Subjects: Bass, Gary Jonathan; Cities; Hirohito, Emperor of Japan (1901-1989); Indictments; Nonfiction; Political campaigns; Politics; Prime ministers; Trials; Truces & cease fires; World War I; World War II; Asia; China; Japan; France

Among those crimes were the abuse of POWs, the campaign of rape and murder in the Chinese city of Nanjing (then the capital, and then called Nanking) as well as abuses of civilians in other Chinese cities, and the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. (Resisters had fled to London or North Africa.) Promoted to the elite rank of maréchal in World War I, Pétain was loved by the French—especially by the kind of perennially reactionary French who were royalists during France’s revolutionary and republican eras, clerical when the government was secular, or anti-Dreyfusard when the Jewish Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus was cleared of phony espionage charges. The jury recommended leniency for the old war hero turned quisling, and de Gaulle, to no one’s surprise, reduced the sentence from death to life imprisonment (Pétain died of natural causes in 1951). [...]the main architect of France’s national policy of collaboration had been formally convicted and the French people had been spared the spectacle of his public degradation and demise, not to mention further discussion of their past enthusiasm for him. Mention of this was kept out of court, as U.S. intelligence, mindful of the Cold War that was getting underway, was too interested in the lab’s secret work.