Michael Eastman Wins Major Award from the U.S. Navy

Center researcher and Stanford University  Libraries historian Michael Eastman is the winner of the 2025 Chief of Naval Operations History Award! Eastman, previously a South African human rights lawyer, wrote an essay on the United States Navy’s prosecutions of Imperial Japanese war criminals after World War II. Remarkably, the story of these courts is almost completely absent from the records of history – even those of the Navy. For many years, the Center has run the Virtual Tribunals initiative in conjunction with Stanford Libraries, seeking to discover, digitize, and display the records of international criminal justice. While working on the records of the U.S. Army’s prosecution of war criminals, Eastman discovered the long-forgotten Navy records, carefully stored on microfilm in the vaults of Stanford Library. Over the course of two years, and with assistance from his student research assistant, Lindsey McKhann, he slowly established the facts of the Navy prosecutions. 

Uniquely among post-war Allied war crimes prosecutions, the Navy gave Japanese defendants the same rights to which American sailors were entitled, actively seeking to avoid any hint of ‘victor’s justice.’ Serendipitously, the personal papers of the senior officers involved in the trials are held at the Hoover Archive, and these proved invaluable in explaining the underlying motivations for the trials. After their completion, the records of trials were classified for decades and, by the time they were declassified, their happening had practically passed out of all memory. Thanks to grants from Stanford Global Studies and Stanford Libraries, however, Virtual Tribunals was able to digitize the 25,000 pages of records. They are due for release this December, complemented by narrative and multimedia histories. 

In late April, Eastman learned from an active-duty naval officer that 2025 was the 250th anniversary of the United States Navy, and that special emphasis was being placed on the already-prestigious annual history essay competition organized by the Chief of Naval Operations. Luck was on Eastman’s side: he had a story of history to write and had just cleared his calendar for the impending birth of his son, Roland! Writing a 3,500-word essay canvassing the history and law of the Navy’s war crimes prosecution program, as well as its relevance for today’s Navy, he submitted the paper an hour before his wife, Anna, went into labor! Months later, the Navy wrote back. He had won first place. 

In September, Eastman travelled to the Naval Academy in Annapolis to meet with the Vice Chief of the Navy, Admiral Jim Kilby, and receive his award: an elaborate trophy made of copper sheathing from the USS Constitution, a $5,000 check, and membership in the United States Naval Institute. An edited copy of Eastman’s essay “The Legacy and Lessons of the U.S. Navy War Crimes Program, 1945-1949” will appear in the January 2026 edition of the journal Naval History and on the Virtual Tribunals website. 

As they say in the Navy: Bravo Zulu!