Australia's War Crimes and the Unmaking of Ben Roberts-Smith

One of the more ridiculous chestnuts from the Asia-Pacific War is that Japanese war criminals avoided prosecution. There are certainly individuals who were protected for political reasons, most prominently Ishii Shiro, the head of the Unit 731 human experimentation lab in Manchuria. In return for the experimental data, he avoided prosecution while spending the years of the Tokyo Trial as a guest lecturer at Fort Detrick in Maryland.

However, the list of convicted Japanese war criminals is extensive. Around 6,000 were tried, 4,500 convicted, and 1,000 sentenced to death.

By contrast, there were no postwar trials held for Allied soldiers, despite it being largely accepted that war crimes were routinely committed. The nature of those war crimes is often stated as a point of difference, especially regarding the large number of Allied POWs who failed to survive the war.

But the most compelling reason for the disparity is that the Japanese lost, whereas the Allies won. This could not have been more clearly expressed than by US Air Force General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the terror bombing campaign of Japanese citizenry, who conceded that if the US had lost the war, he and his subordinates would "all have been prosecuted as war criminals."

Business as Usual in the Postwar Years

In the post-WW2 years, little has changed. The West has gone on to engage in innumerable aggressive wars and, while suffering strategic defeats, has rarely been militarily defeated. Its soldiers and leaders have never been subjected to the type of wide-ranging war crimes trials that the West imposed upon Japan.

Additionally, the nations of the West have been reluctant to prosecute their own, or when they have, the sentences have been minimal or only partially served.

This unwillingness even extended to US Lieutenant William Calley, the officer deemed primarily responsible for the notorious Mai Lai massacre in which hundreds of Vietnamese civilians were murdered in 1968. While sentenced to life imprisonment, his conviction met with huge public opposition. President Nixon intervened, and Calley ultimately served a mere handful of years under house arrest.

Australia Meets its Moment

Australia is presently being forced to confront this issue in a very public form. On April 7, 2026, a highly decorated Australian soldier named Ben Roberts-Smith was arrested and charged with war crimes, allegedly committed in Afghanistan.

Roberts-Smith is no ordinary soldier. Standing 202 centimeters tall and weighing around 105 kilograms, he is a bull of a man. In January 2011, he was awarded the Victoria Cross, Australia's highest award for military bravery.

Later that year, he met with Queen Elizabeth II, and his exploits were extolled by the then Prince of Wales, the present-day King Charles III. Ben Roberts-Smith was a national hero, a poster boy for the Australian military and Australian manhood.

Roberts-Smith's fall from grace began when whispers were first heard of unlawful killings that included "bloodings," in which junior soldiers were allegedly encouraged to kill prisoners to achieve their first combat kill. A pair of investigative journalists took up the case. Their articles first appeared in 2018. In directly contradicting the public image of a national war hero, they generated a firestorm.

*Ben Roberts-Smith (center). (Office of Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia)*

A System Questioned

Roberts-Smith maintained strong public support, which continues to this day. His supporters advance various forms of the "fog of war" defense, while contending that armchair generals are in no position to judge.

His advocates have also suggested that responsibility for a prevalent "warrior code" that underpinned the alleged war crimes lies further up the chain of command. They referenced the Yamashita standard, named after Japanese general Yamashita Tomoyuki, who was convicted and executed for war crimes that he did not order, but were carried out by those under his broad command.

Roberts-Smith might have simply dismissed the allegations made within the articles, while continuing to bask in the adulation that a significant portion of the Australian population was committed to unconditionally awarding him. Instead, backed by the resources of a prominent billionaire, he went on the attack. He sued the media outlets for defamation, thereby bringing the matter to court.

The rumors of misdeed, however, ultimately evolved into sworn testimony from twenty-one of his subordinates. In 2023, the presiding judge found, on the balance of probabilities (the standard of proof required in a civil law case), that there was no defamation and that the allegations against Roberts-Smith were substantially true. An appeal was dismissed by the Federal Court in 2024, paving the way for his recent arrest and impending criminal trial.

The US Is Stuck in the Past

It is hard to accept that the US has made progress in its attitude toward its own indiscretions since the trial of William Calley.

Coincidentally, and revealingly, the April 7 date of Roberts-Smith's arrest was also the date upon which US President Donald Trump threatened to exterminate the entire Iranian nation and its 5,000-year-old culture.

Several weeks prior, US Secretary of War Peter Hegseth celebrated the torpedoing of an unarmed Iranian warship that had participated in maneuvers at the invitation of India. He has also extolled US troops to give no quarter during ground operations in Iran.

America, however, is something of an outlier in the present day. Its regressive attitude towards the crimes of war may even induce others to draw distinctions by committing to a more moral stance. The trial of Ben Roberts-Smith, therefore, is somewhat well-timed. It will not be a pleasant experience for Australia or the West, but it may be a positive one.

Generational Pain

In 1946, an Australian Japanese interpreter, Allan Clifton, participated in the occupation of Japan. He wrote Time of the Fallen Blossoms, an explosive book detailing rape and war crimes by the Australian component of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force.

He delayed publication until 1951, being hesitant "about expressing opinions that ran counter to the popular mood." His five-year cooling-off period, however, was nowhere near long enough. Clifton was subjected to backlash. His credibility was attacked, and he found himself professionally marginalized. He spent much of the remainder of his career as an expat.

Clifton paid a steep price for writing his book, but he was clear about why he did so. "All the libraries of hate books, all the ostracism and unforgiving exclusionism, will not bring back one dead soldier or salve the wounds of the maimed," he cautioned in the forward of the book, but "it could dig the graves of their children."

Perhaps the sympathies that many feel for Ben Roberts-Smith should be expressed in that light–that Roberts-Smith should be seen as the child of Western nations that are finally learning lessons that they should have learned generations ago. Those lessons begin with a recognition that victory and defeat were the ultimate arbiters regarding who received a war crimes charge at the conclusion of the Asia-Pacific War. Moreover, since its formulation, the Yamashita standard has only ever been applied to Yamashita and his Japanese contemporaries.

Author: Paul de Vries