Insufficient Evidence

After the excitement of a stretch in the Gordon Highlanders during World War I, life in Scotland's coastal town of Perth seemed a dull prospect to young Bill Hutton. Instead of going home at war's end, he signed up with the Shanghai police. From time to time in the next 20 years, he would turn up on brief leave and let the Perth neighbors goggle at his strapping, soldierly bearing and his fierce military mustache. His father, old Bill Hutton, a railroad worker, seldom failed to point out the framed certificate on the wall awarding young Bill the Distinguished Service Medal for the capture of "armed bandits."

Natural Causes. Then came another war. When the Japs took Shanghai, young Bill was captured, and in 1943 sent to the Bridge House Prison Camp. A year later his father received word from the War Office that young Bill had died of "natural causes" in the prison.

From his son's fellow prisoners old Bill learned part of the real story.

Young Hutton had annoyed the prison's commander, General Eiichi Kino-shita, by refusing to sign a statement that he had been humanely treated. The general turned him over to one Sergeant Bunzo Yoshida. Sometimes Yoshida's lessons would be taught with water, sometimes with electric shock, sometimes with just the butt of a rifle or the heel of a boot. Then one day Yoshida trussed his naked prisoner up with his head between his legs and his arms strapped behind him, and left him alone. Five days later his fellow prisoners found Hutton stark crazy. Next day he died.

The Impossible. Old Bill discovered that the British government had known this all along but was not intending to try his son's murderers. Using his life savings and the railroad pass he held as a retired railroad employee, he traveled all over Britain interviewing everyone he could find who had known his son. He wrote letters to China and the U.S., and even took a trip to Wisconsin to find Bridge House veterans. He besieged his local M.P. with evidence and demands that the government act. "It had proved impossible," War Secretary Shinwell told the House of Commons last June, "to obtain evidence ... to bring these Japanese to trial."

Old Bill went right on collecting more & more letters and affidavits. One day last summer he took the train to London and charged straight into Britain's Judge Advocate General's office. "I had no appointment," he recalls, "but they let me in. They were very nice to me, and they listened." Slowly and ponderously the machinery of justice began to roll, and last fortnight Torturers Kinoshita and Yoshida heard their sentences before a British court: life imprisonment for the former, twelve years for the latter.

In his lonesome flat on Perth's gloomy Abbott Street last week, Bill Hutton said of the sentence: "It's an outrage. These men should be properly punished."

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