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Betrayal in High Places, a book written in 1996 by the late James MacKay, has created debate among World War II historians and former prisoners of war (POWs) because it claims to reveal suppressed Allied reports of Japanese war atrocities, such as the massacre of 387 American, Australian, British, and Dutch POWs in a gold mine at Aikawa on Sado Island, Japan, in 1945. Our investigation finds that the Sado Island massacre report is an intentional forgery, and that MacKay's book is a spurious historical source. We explain why he sought to deceive the public and contrast his fiction with the historical truth about Sado Island.
IN his book Betrayal in High Places, published in 1996, New Zealand author James MacKay claimed to have discovered a cache of secret military reports on atrocities committed against Allied prisoners of war (POWs) by the Japanese during the Second World War. MacKay asserted that these files had been preserved by the late Captain James Gowing Godwin, a New Zealander and former POW who had been attached to the second Australian War Crimes section (2AWGS) in Tokyo from 1947 to 1950. MacKay said that Godwin had been compiling a book based upon these reports when his health began to deteriorate, and that MacKay had taken over this task just before Godwin's death in 1995.1
The most sensational of the reports in Betrayal in High Places, "File 125M," provides startling detail of an alleged postwar Japanese and American conspiracy to cover up the massacre of 387 American, Australian, British, and Dutch POWs in the mines of Aikawa on Sado Island, Japan, on 2 August 1945.2 It supposedly records the interrogation, by Godwin in 1949, of a former officer of the Imperial Japanese Army, lieutenant Yoshiro Tsuda, second-in-command of the POW camp at that time.3
Reproduced opposite is Tsuda's alleged testimony, as published by MacKay in a book-review pamphlet in 1998.4 MacKay claimed that these photostats showed the "original" File 125M; this version is slightly longer than the 125M transcript in Betrayal in High Places.
In the eleven years since MacKay first published it, File 125M has received ongoing international exposure. Although Betrayal in High Places had only limited print runs in Australia and the United Kingdom, it was...