Michel Paradis
Trying the Japanese as War Criminals in WWII
Many students of WWII know the Doolittle Raid of 1942 — the first American strike on Tokyo after Pearl Harbor, in which sixteen American bombers secretly bombed Tokyo. This provoked the Japanese Empire into making a series of catastrophic strategic blunders, including the Battle of Midway. Few know, however, about the fate of the two lost crews and how Japan’s torture, trial, and execution of the Doolittle Raiders in the summer of 1942 set in motion the modern era of prosecutions for war crimes. Based on Paradis’ critically acclaimed Last Mission to Tokyo, this presentation will reveal the dramatic aftermath of the famous Doolittle Raid, which involved two lost crews captured, tried, and tortured at the hands of the Japanese, a dramatic rescue of the survivors in the last weeks of World War II, and an international manhunt and trial led by two dynamic and opposing young lawyers (in which both the United States and Japan accused the other of war crimes) that would change the face of our legal and military history.
Michel Paradis, PhD, JD, is a leading human rights lawyer, historian, and national security law scholar and most recently the author of the critically acclaimed Last Mission to Tokyo. He is also a partner at the international law firm Curtis Mallet-Prevost and a Lecturer at Columbia Law School. He has appeared on or written for the PBS NewsHour, CBS, MSNBC, CNBC, C-SPAN, Netflix, NPR, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Lawfare, Just Security, and Articles of War, among other publications. He is a fellow at the Center on National Security and the National Institute for Military Justice. He was awarded his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Campion Scholar, and received his law degree from Fordham Law School in New York.
