http://www.anzacday.org.au/education/ac ... _force.pdf
As Peter Thompson relates in his Kill The Tiger the executions were carried out by NCO prison guards,using their sub-standard,faulty NCO swords.The executions were botched and inhumane.The official Japanese record claims that the captured Rimau
commandos were now treated well out of respect for their brave
resistance to capture. The authors of the most recent detailed study of
the situation claim that is a lie. The men, they say, were brutally
tortured—several had now died of untreated disease, bashing and
torture, and possibly as a result of medical experiments. The others
lived on in a situation in which jailers regularly beat them, where their
cells were crawling with vermin and contaminated with filth. Disease
was rampant, with cases of beriberi, scabies, malaria and dysentery.
Food consisted of a starvation diet of five hundred grams of rice per
day, less for prisoners on the sick list.
The prisoners’ best hope now became the state of the war—Japan
was clearly being defeated everywhere, and it was only time before
they would have to surrender or be defeated in the home islands of
Japan itself.
On 3 July 1945 the men were put on trial for ‘perfidy and espionage’
and found guilty.
On 7 July they were executed. The Japanese record stresses the
‘honour’ bestowed on the men by being beheaded—witnesses,
however, later gave evidence that the executions were brutal and
horribly mangled. It took guards more than half an hour to execute
the ten men, and one of the guards had required ‘two or three’ blows
each time to complete the beheading. The bodies were dumped in
three unmarked graves, with nothing left to identify the men. On 6
August the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and
on 9 August on Nagasaki, and on 15 August the Japanese
surrendered.
Australian officials did not prosecute the case as a war crime.A "spy" trial had been conducted by the Japanese but the Australians had no defence attorney and were convicted on the premise that as they did not wear rank badges on their uniforms(and some were in native dress) at the time of their capture,that they were spies.Thompson questions why the war crime charge was not followed up.It appears Australian policy was to conduct war crime trials only when "there was very strong prima facie evidence that they would be convicted on evidence which could be clearly seen to be irrefutable.."
But according to Thompson,page 281:
Ironically the heroes of Rimau were avenged,although none of the Japanese responsible for their execution was charged with that atrocity,justice caught up with most of them for other war crimes.Four of the main offenders went to the scaffold:General Itagaki,Commander-in-Chief of the Seventh Area Army who had insisted on the death penalty,Major-General Otsuka,who had been in charge of the Rimaus' prosecution:and the military and civilian commandants of Outram Road Jail,Major Kobayashi and Mikizawa..
Major Kamiya,the prosecutor who had manipulated the evidence to make a guilty verdict inevitable,was sentenced to life imprisonment.One of the executioners,Corporal Hirata,had comitted suicide..but his four comrades(Nibara,Tsukudu,Okamura,Shimoi) received from five to ten years imprisonments for other offences..