A. Frank Reel; Defended Japanese WWII General

A. Frank Reel, 92, attorney named to defend Japanese general in war crimes trial. A former labor lawyer in Boston, Reel was assigned after World War II to defend Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, who led the Japanese in conquering Malaya and the Philippines and served as wartime commander in Manila. Yamashita, who surrendered in September 1945 to Gen. Douglas MacArthur, was tried in Manila a month later by a military commission of five generals untrained in the law. Accused of failing to prevent atrocities by his troops, he was found guilty in December and hanged the following February. Reel, then a captain in the Army’s Claims Division in the Pacific, wrote a book printed in 1949 and reprinted in 1971 titled “The Case of General Yamashita.” Reel asserted that Yamashita had no connection to the atrocities and that the sham trial, including the verdict, had been scripted by MacArthur. Reel, a native of Milwaukee, earned undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard and was a partner in the Boston law firm Roewer & Reel when he enlisted in the Army during World War II. Among his clients were the Massachusetts State Federation of Labor and the New England section of the American Federation of Radio Artists, which became his employer from 1947 to 1954. Later he was an executive at Ziv Television programs and Metromedia Producers before resuming his law practice in the late 1970s. He wrote a second book in 1979 about network programming, “The Networks: How They Stole the Show.” On April 3 in Norfolk, Va.