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Snaring the other tiger
Shamed by the United States into abandoning her floundering war crimes trials and investigations, Australia decided to have one last attempt at snaring the other "tiger." The original "tiger of Malaya" was, of course, the victorious Lt. General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commander of Japan's 25th Army who was ultimately executed by the Americans. The "other tiger" was Lt. General Takuma Nishimura, commander of Japan's elite Konoye Imperial Guards Division, Emperor Hirohito's personal troops. The Australians decided his fate with a secret judicial lynching on Manus Island. Ian Ward's book is accompanied by two appendices of telling documents the military ordered withheld from public release.
347 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 1996
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November 14, 2025
Review Title: "FALLING INTO THE TIGER TRAP"
Ian Ward's "Snaring the Other Tiger" draws on extensive research in the National Archives of Australia. Therefore it should be a good, solid, work of history. However, from my own research into those same War Crimes files, I can say that Ward's main conclusions have been miscarried, due to his subjectivity...
Although this book contains some insightful eyewitness statements and enlightening photographs of General Nishimura, it has also been publicly criticised by author Lynette Silver ("The Bridge at Parit Sulong") for suppressing some key Archival evidence. While Silver's own book has many problems, and her criticism comes across as overly shrill, Ward does indeed appear to have disregarded some vital evidence held in the official files.
The reason for his behaviour was probably because Ward already possessed conflicting texts implying that the key investigator of Nishimura's case, Captain James Godwin, had been an embittered and biased person who had tampered with the official documents. Sadly though, Ian Ward has been seriously misled in this belief.
The damning "evidence" about Godwin's character was created by a forger named James MacKay in the mid-1990s. I am quite confident in stating this, as I am the co-author of an analysis of MacKay's historical forgeries, published in the "Journal of Military History" in 2007. (On Page 3 of Ward's book, there's even an effusive acknowledgement to James MacKay - which Ward probably now regrets!)
The following sections of "Snaring the Other Tiger" should NOT be accepted as accurate history:
Page 114-115.
Most of the text on these pages is derived from MacKay's "Betrayal in High Places" (hereafter: "BIHP") and is not historical. The half-page "Godwin diary" quote - which Ward uses to condemn Godwin's character - is copied from BIHP p101 and is completely fictitious.
However, one area where Ward did not accept MacKay's word is where Ward mentions Godwin's "smattering of Japanese". After interviewing Godwin's relatives, Ward must have developed doubts about MacKay's repeated assertion that Godwin had acquired a very high proficiency in spoken and written Japanese language during his time as a POW in Japan.
p129-131.
The purported Godwin diary entries, and the reports on Godwin's state of mind, are all fictitious and straight out of BIHP. Ward's extensive analysis is therefore baseless.
p132-133.
Ward's careful comparison of the differences between MacKay's fakes (originally BIHP p237-241) and the genuine Court documents should have convinced him that Mackay was a forger. Instead, amazingly, Ward assumes the opposite, that the Court documents had been manipulated by a vindictive Godwin! Ward even accepted purported copies of the "original" documents from MacKay without question, and published photographs of them on p330-333. The obvious discrepancies in format and typeface of the fakes, not to mention MacKay's purple prose, should have warned Ward that he was being conned.
p134-135:
The American "censure" of Godwin that Ward repeats is complete fiction, from BIHP p208 and p215, as are the "Godwin diary" entries that Ward discusses in these two pages.
p136-138,
The accusation by Ward that Godwin flouted the Official Secrets Act, by deciding to smuggle out documents, is again wholly founded on MacKay's fake storyline from BIHP p217, p219 and p221. (In fact, the small file of documents which Godwin did keep as a souvenir, after his Tokyo War Crimes office was closed down, merely contained Godwin's own - completely unclassified - carbon copies of his Weekly Reports. The file containing these papers was only a few centimetres thick in its entirety - certainly not a tea chest full, and Godwin never attempted to publish them - contrary to MacKay's story. The signed originals of all of these documents can be seen today, undisturbed, in the National Archives of Australia.)
p139.
Ward's discussion that Godwin had stolen a valuable document, "clearing Nishimura of the stigma of guilt over the Chinese Massacre," is probably the most risible conclusion in this book. (See the note about p334-339 below.)
p140-142.
Ward performs further extensive but doomed analysis of discrepancies between MacKay's fakes and Court documents, and repeats MacKay's assertions that Godwin made off with an enormous file of stolen papers, weighing "200 pounds". None of this has any basis in truth.
Page 246.
Ward's own doubts about Godwin are echoed here, but his evidence - about the American "complaints", Godwin's "clandestine cache" and the purported vindictive Godwin diary "quotes" - is entirely MacKay fiction.
p330-333.
Photographs of two obvious typewritten MacKay fakes.
p334-339.
Ward gets excited over another MacKay fake "confirming" the Colonel Tsuji cover-up. (Tsuji was the subject of Ward's own 1992 book, "The Killer They Called a God".) Ironically, MacKay probably used TKTCAG as his source in creating this faked report! (Originally p122-125 of BIHP.) It is a sobering illustration of the blindness of human nature that Ward could not even recognise his own work being fed back to him by the forger MacKay.
(And Ward was obviously keen to trumpet this "discovery", since this Appendix is entirely irrelevant to the subject matter of the rest of this book, namely General Nishimura and the massacre at Parit Sulong.)
Ian Ward's "Snaring the Other Tiger" draws on extensive research in the National Archives of Australia. Therefore it should be a good, solid, work of history. However, from my own research into those same War Crimes files, I can say that Ward's main conclusions have been miscarried, due to his subjectivity...
Although this book contains some insightful eyewitness statements and enlightening photographs of General Nishimura, it has also been publicly criticised by author Lynette Silver ("The Bridge at Parit Sulong") for suppressing some key Archival evidence. While Silver's own book has many problems, and her criticism comes across as overly shrill, Ward does indeed appear to have disregarded some vital evidence held in the official files.
The reason for his behaviour was probably because Ward already possessed conflicting texts implying that the key investigator of Nishimura's case, Captain James Godwin, had been an embittered and biased person who had tampered with the official documents. Sadly though, Ian Ward has been seriously misled in this belief.
The damning "evidence" about Godwin's character was created by a forger named James MacKay in the mid-1990s. I am quite confident in stating this, as I am the co-author of an analysis of MacKay's historical forgeries, published in the "Journal of Military History" in 2007. (On Page 3 of Ward's book, there's even an effusive acknowledgement to James MacKay - which Ward probably now regrets!)
The following sections of "Snaring the Other Tiger" should NOT be accepted as accurate history:
Page 114-115.
Most of the text on these pages is derived from MacKay's "Betrayal in High Places" (hereafter: "BIHP") and is not historical. The half-page "Godwin diary" quote - which Ward uses to condemn Godwin's character - is copied from BIHP p101 and is completely fictitious.
However, one area where Ward did not accept MacKay's word is where Ward mentions Godwin's "smattering of Japanese". After interviewing Godwin's relatives, Ward must have developed doubts about MacKay's repeated assertion that Godwin had acquired a very high proficiency in spoken and written Japanese language during his time as a POW in Japan.
p129-131.
The purported Godwin diary entries, and the reports on Godwin's state of mind, are all fictitious and straight out of BIHP. Ward's extensive analysis is therefore baseless.
p132-133.
Ward's careful comparison of the differences between MacKay's fakes (originally BIHP p237-241) and the genuine Court documents should have convinced him that Mackay was a forger. Instead, amazingly, Ward assumes the opposite, that the Court documents had been manipulated by a vindictive Godwin! Ward even accepted purported copies of the "original" documents from MacKay without question, and published photographs of them on p330-333. The obvious discrepancies in format and typeface of the fakes, not to mention MacKay's purple prose, should have warned Ward that he was being conned.
p134-135:
The American "censure" of Godwin that Ward repeats is complete fiction, from BIHP p208 and p215, as are the "Godwin diary" entries that Ward discusses in these two pages.
p136-138,
The accusation by Ward that Godwin flouted the Official Secrets Act, by deciding to smuggle out documents, is again wholly founded on MacKay's fake storyline from BIHP p217, p219 and p221. (In fact, the small file of documents which Godwin did keep as a souvenir, after his Tokyo War Crimes office was closed down, merely contained Godwin's own - completely unclassified - carbon copies of his Weekly Reports. The file containing these papers was only a few centimetres thick in its entirety - certainly not a tea chest full, and Godwin never attempted to publish them - contrary to MacKay's story. The signed originals of all of these documents can be seen today, undisturbed, in the National Archives of Australia.)
p139.
Ward's discussion that Godwin had stolen a valuable document, "clearing Nishimura of the stigma of guilt over the Chinese Massacre," is probably the most risible conclusion in this book. (See the note about p334-339 below.)
p140-142.
Ward performs further extensive but doomed analysis of discrepancies between MacKay's fakes and Court documents, and repeats MacKay's assertions that Godwin made off with an enormous file of stolen papers, weighing "200 pounds". None of this has any basis in truth.
Page 246.
Ward's own doubts about Godwin are echoed here, but his evidence - about the American "complaints", Godwin's "clandestine cache" and the purported vindictive Godwin diary "quotes" - is entirely MacKay fiction.
p330-333.
Photographs of two obvious typewritten MacKay fakes.
p334-339.
Ward gets excited over another MacKay fake "confirming" the Colonel Tsuji cover-up. (Tsuji was the subject of Ward's own 1992 book, "The Killer They Called a God".) Ironically, MacKay probably used TKTCAG as his source in creating this faked report! (Originally p122-125 of BIHP.) It is a sobering illustration of the blindness of human nature that Ward could not even recognise his own work being fed back to him by the forger MacKay.
(And Ward was obviously keen to trumpet this "discovery", since this Appendix is entirely irrelevant to the subject matter of the rest of this book, namely General Nishimura and the massacre at Parit Sulong.)
February 28, 2021
Aside from the numerous technical errors, referring to the Japanese Prime Minister from 1929 until his assassination in 1932, as Inukai Takeshi when his name was Inukai Tsuyoshi, and the Australian Prime Minister between July, 1945 and December, 1949 as Benjamin Chifley, when his name was Joseph Benedict (Ben) Chifley, and referring to Cardinal Norman Gilroy as Norman Cardinal Gilroy, and the fact that it drew inspiration from a book that contained invented documents with the aim of achieving compensation for former US POWs of the Japanese, it does raise some salient arguments.
One thing that it does not explain or take into account, is that James Gowing Godwin, who features prominently in the book, despite his appalling descriptions of the Japanese, on ABC Radio, in around 1950, worked in South-East Asia after the war and, in 1962, married a Chinese woman from Malaysia. I believe that a man who was as traumatised as suggested would have found it impossible to have lived and worked in South-East Asia and married an Asian woman, if that had been the case.
Needless to say, it does raise some plausible arguments suggesting that the one-day trial of Lt-General Nishimura Takuma was a travesty of justice and that his conviction was not sound. Even if one statement relied upon the written statement of the lone survivor of a war crime, the fact that that survivor was not subjected to cross-examination under oath and did not give oral evidence suggests this.
One thing that it does not explain or take into account, is that James Gowing Godwin, who features prominently in the book, despite his appalling descriptions of the Japanese, on ABC Radio, in around 1950, worked in South-East Asia after the war and, in 1962, married a Chinese woman from Malaysia. I believe that a man who was as traumatised as suggested would have found it impossible to have lived and worked in South-East Asia and married an Asian woman, if that had been the case.
Needless to say, it does raise some plausible arguments suggesting that the one-day trial of Lt-General Nishimura Takuma was a travesty of justice and that his conviction was not sound. Even if one statement relied upon the written statement of the lone survivor of a war crime, the fact that that survivor was not subjected to cross-examination under oath and did not give oral evidence suggests this.
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