Dear Dona

Page 14

The Last Battle

By Michael Shannon

“The God of Death has come.” Shouted by a Japanese Imperial Naval Marine* upon seeing Marines landings on Betio, forever enshrined in the notes taken in interviews by MIS translators during the battle for Tarawa.

The filth, the crawling over sharp coral, running crouched, hunched over with every muscle in the body nearly rigid with fear, the noise which never stopped, artillery, flamethrowers, grenades and the constant pop of gunfire. Battleship shells weighing a ton, Destroyers nearly run up on the beach duking it out with gun emplacements at point blank range. A miss is a miss but the M-1 round still can kill at 6,500 yards, over 3.5 miles. The Japanese Arisaka type 99 rifle could kill at 3,700 hundred yards. No place on the island could be safe for the soldier. The air is full of them. There was no place safe. No one could think or conceive of any other universe. The Battle of Okinawa (Operation Iceberg) was the final major land battle of World War II, lasting 82 days from April 1 to June 22, 1945. It was a brutal, large-scale engagement where U.S. and Allied forces fought Japanese troops on the island of Okinawa, the last step before a potential invasion of Japan. The battle was exceptionally bloody, resulting in massive casualties for both sides, including a significant loss of civilian life among the Okinawan people, and heavily influenced the U.S. decision to use atomic weapons on Japan.

Soldiers are so young. Is it impossible that they should be able to process the situation they are in? When they awaken at the bottom of their waterlogged foxholes after dreams of home they understood there was no escape.

Witness this Marine Ambulance driver’s letter home written about half way through the invasion. He would celebrate his 19th birthday on Okinawa.

Dear Folks. I know you have been worried about me but as you see I’m still very much O K. I’ve had a few close calls but that can be expected on this Rock. They say in the stateside news that this island is secure but, but they still have eight more miles to go so you can figure that out. We are three miles back from the front licking our wounds now and waiting for I don’t know what. Maybe we go back and maybe we don’t. I guess I’ve seen most of this island so far—enough anyway.

Private John Brewster Loomis USMC, Headquarters company, 1st Battalion, 1st Regiment, 1st Marine Division. MOS 245, Truck Operator. Just before shipping out to the Pacific, 1944.

Shuri Castle was a rich joint and Naha used to be quite a town. I am sitting in Jap truck now that we picked up in our travels. It is something like a ton and a half and something like a Chevrolet but right hand drive. I’m a little thinner but feel alright. (He entered the Marines at 5′ 11″ and 160 lbs.) Instead of “Golden Gate in ’48, it’s from Hell to Heaven in ’47. Old Snowball, a friend, is still alright as far as I know. We sure took a beating but took our objective.

Dad I’m sorry I couldn’t write on your birthday but Happy Fathers day and Fourth of July.

The weather is better now, cold at night. Last night was the first time I got to take off my shoes when I hit the sack. They brought us a little better chow for a while. Boy! Am I tired of C-Rations. My old ambulance is still running but it doesn’t look the same-no windshield. bumpers, paint, top or sides-just one seat and the stretcher racks.

I had my picture taken the other day by Division. I don’t know if it will get in the papers or not. I sure didn’t look like much that day.

Well, folks, I’ll write when I can and I hope from now on that will be very often. Much Love John.**

Modified by Holden an Australian body building company, this is the Jeep type ambulance John Loomis drove on Okinawa. The Marine Corps used this much more, go anywhere ambulance instead of the big GM trucks used in Europe. The rugged terrain and mud sloppy roads couldn’t be navigated by trucks and Sherman Tanks were sometimes used as tow trucks if they didn’t sink in the mud holes themselves. Almost everything was hand carried by exhausted Marines themselves.

As the battle for Okinawa came to a close, many of the Nisei translators were ordered off the island. The almost complete annihilation of the defenders meant there was little to do. In preparation for the invasion of Japan there was a mountain of captured documents to be gone through and they were needed back at headquarters.

The Lieutenant gathered the Nisei translators in a shell hole covered with a tent fly then read the names of those who would take one of the LCIs out to the attack transport (APA-139, the USS Broadwater) for transport back to Manila for further orders. Hilo and his team were leaving the island.

MacArthurs headquarters were now in the ruins of Manila. After unloading at Cavite Naval base in Manila bay, the MIS boys were trucked to the city and reported for duty.

Hilo and his team were issued new orders and upon pulling them open with a mixture of excitement and dread inherent in the action were delighted and almost giddy with the news that they were to report to Subic Bay for immediate transport to Naval base Long Beach, California to begin a 30 day leave. They were being sent home to rest before the invasion of Japan.

USS Broadwater APA-139 and USS Bellepheron ARL-31, a landing craft repair ship at anchor, San Francisco 1944

They were going to be transported by one on the Navy’s APAs or Attack Transports such as the USS Broadwater APA-139. The APAs*** were the real workhorses of the Navy. They were designed and built on Liberty and Victory ship hulls for the purpose of transporting men and supplies. With their boats they were able to house, feed and land an entire marine battalion of fifteen hundred men. Anchored just offshore, in harms way, they would swing out the landing craft, load the Marines and their equipment and then the Cox’ns would drive them into the landing beaches. When they had unloaded they would wait to receive the wounded and other men pulled off the line and return them to base. Equipped as emergency hospital ships they would offload casualties to the larger dedicated hospital ships waiting outside the arc of Japanese artillery fire and Kamikaze air strikes.

An Aircraft carriers hanger deck loaded with casualties from Okinawa, April 1945. War Department Photo.

The Navy operated over three hundred of these ship along with freighters of the Liberty and Victory types, over fifty oilers, and a myriad of specialty support ships. This allowed the Navy, Marines, and the US Army to operate efficiently more than 7,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean where there was little infrastructure to support operations. The logistics of the operations are literally mind boggling.

The APA’s were to serve a special purpose beginning in the waning weeks of July and August 1945. In the service any action needs have a name to identify it. Most, such as Okinawa which was dubbed “Iceberg” and the invasion of Guadalcanal “Operation Watchtower” general have no meaning other than to confuse the enemy but the name for the last major movement of men was oddly prescient. Operation “Magic Carpet” would return veterans of the Pacific home. By August the allies had just over 23 million troops and support service men in the western Pacific. The Aussies, New Zealanders, British, French, Dutch and the Mexican Air Force were all going home. Magic Carpet would be the largest mass transport of men and women ever attempted. Every ship type was going to be utilized for transport.

On July 25th Hilo Fuchiwaki and his team boarded an APA in Subic bay. The boys must have leaned over the ships rail and watched the sailors on the dock cast of their lines and felt the ship begin to vibrate as she backed into the stream and headed for home.

Dear Dona Page 15 is next.

Cover Photo: Holden Jeep ambulance. Missing one fender, other one dented. Shrapnel hole in hood, broken windshield. The exhaust pipe is extended to get it out of the mud. No paint and tow strap wrapped around the bumper. Hard used.

*Rikusentai, Imperial Japanese Naval Marine Infantry.

**The letter must have been written after the the capture of the Katchin peninsula by the 1st Marines. The battle for the island still had about ten weeks of combat left. He was, after a short rest to participate in some of the most brutal fighting ever seen in WWII. Private Loomis earned the Bronze Star for his actions on Okinawa.

***The book “Away All Boats” which was made into a movie of the same name based on the 1953 novel by Kenneth M. Dodson (1907–1999), who served on the USS Pierce (APA-50) in World War II and used his experiences there as a guide for his novel. It is considered a classic in naval literature.

Michael Shannon is a writer and lives in Arroyo Grande, California.

Dear Dona

Chapter 13

The End And A New Beginning.

By Michael Shannon

Easter Sunday, April 1st, 1945, and where were you? I was resting in my mother’s arms in Sisters Hospital Santa Maria California. Staffed with sisters from the Poor Clares, a Irish enclosed order of the Holy Roman Catholic church. The sisters carried me to my mother from the nursery wrapped in a blue blanket and a small green ribbon tied in a bow in my sprig of blond hair, the only child born on that day. It’s been my luck.

Half a world away on the same date the tenth United States army made up of three Marine divisions and four army divisions started going ashore on the Japanese island of Okinawa. Supported by the Navy’s Fifth fleet made up of three separate task force units and the British, Australian Royal Canadians and New Zealanders. The combined forces numbered nearly 541,000 troops, 184,000 thousand of them combat infantry. The invasion was supported by a fleet consisting of 18 battleships, 27 cruisers, 177 destroyers/destroyer escorts, 39 aircraft carriers (11 fleet carriers, 6 light carriers and 22 escort carriers) and various support and troop transport ships.

One of the great euphonius names of WWII commanded at Okinawa. Lt. General Simon Boliver Buckner jr. Named for his father he commanded the entire 10th Army. A graduate of Virginia Military Institute and the US Military Academy at West Point he had served in WWI and The Philippine Insurrection which I’m sure the Filipinos considered a war. His father Buckner sr. served in the Mexican war, the Civil war, was a Confederate General and Governor of Kentucky. General Buckner had iron clad credentials. Considered a soldiers General he was on the front lines with the 2nd Marine Division when he was warned by marines to remove his helmet with it’s three gold stars because they could see them a half mile away. He did. Moments later a small artillery shell hit near him and he was wounded by coral shards and died less than an hour later while being operated on in an aid station located in a shell hole.. He was one of four US Generals killed in WWII.

General Buckner was just one of the 200,000 deaths, including both military personnel and civilians. It was an orgy of killing and the newspapers back home listed casualties of such high numbers that the public which had become inured to the death toll was shocked into a stunned numbness. Marine casualties exceeded the total number of a single fully manned division. It was as if one of the three Marine divisions, the 1st, 2nd and 6th has been completely wiped off the face of the earth. The army suffered equally with over 19,000 dead and wounded. The Navy lost thirteen destroyers sunk by Kamikazes. Nearly sunk, the Essex class carrier USS Franklin, CV-13, the “Big Ben” lost 1,294 with 807 killed in the greatest single ships loss since the USS Arizona. Lest any one should think that support personnel were relatively safe 35,000 cooks, seabees, truck drivers, labor detachments, hospital corpsman and doctors were killed and wounded. The dead included two war correspondents.*

When the “Butchers Bill” was presented to the population of the United States and its government they were aghast. What was it going to cost to invade the Japanese homeland? You could scarcely drive down a street in the countries small towns without seeing small banners with gold and blue stars hanging in windows.

The Battle of Okinawa was a victory for the US but resulted in massive casualties on both sides. Japanese forces fought with the same fanaticism the Americans had witnessed in battles such as Iwo Jima and Peleliu. Rather than be taken prisoner, defenders often chose suicide. Okinawa was so close to home, most Japanese soldiers refused to surrender and fought to the death. Their fanaticism contributed to a dreadful toll. Some 110,000 Japanese and conscripted Okinawan defenders were killed in action. The battle created a humanitarian disaster for civilians as well. It is believed that the number of civilians casualties was greater than all battle casualties combined. Combatants on both sides, after three years of war were completely numb, bereft of any kind of humanity. Robert Leckie and Eugene Sledge both wrote books about their experiences and told the same story. Marines and soldiers automatically shot Imperial Japanese soldiers who were wounded, they also shot the dead to be sure they stayed that way. They told of the absolute necessity in a cold, pragmatic way, emotionless. No combat rifleman wanted an enemy soldier playing dead to suddenly come back to life and jump into their foxhole at night.

Later in Vietnam, a marine sergeant told Lieutenant Phillip Caputo. “Sir, before you leave here you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy. Phillip Caputo was Marine officer who served as a platoon leader in Vietnam. He was right. It is a quote that describes soldiers as far back in antiquity as you choose to go. It could have been said by a Hoplite in Alexander the Greats Macedonian/Greek army two and a half thousand years ago.

For the last time the Nisei boys boarded assault ships and sailed for the islands of the Ryukyu Group of which Okinawa was the largest island, 66 miles long and seven miles wide on average it was to be the last major battle of the Pacific war though no one knew it yet. It was also going to be the deadliest.

MIS camp, Okinawa, 1945. Signal Corps photo

The Japanese Imperial Army wasn’t nearly on it’s last legs. The Military leaders in Tokyo had determined that they would not engage in offensive battle but rather set up defense in depth and attempt to bleed the Americans dry. They well knew that after three years of increasingly brutal fighting the American public was losing heart. Printed in the nations newspapers casualty lists were enormous. Though newsmen tried to put a positive spin on war news, the Battle of the Bulge had just ended and cost the American army 81,000 casualties. People were war weary. We were running out of children to sacrifice. The High School class of 1944 was just finishing training and was headed for the front.

Mom’s cousin Don Polhemus, lost on the USS Spence during typhoon Cobra, her brother headed for the western Pacific on a destroyer. My dad’s best friend Sgt. Harry Chapek, killed in France, and his cousin Bill Marriott had just left New Guinea and was headed for Okinawa . Jim Moore, son of the judge and my grandparent’s closest friends LST was bombed in the Pacific.The war was everywhere in our little county. There were military posts in literally every town and all along the coast. People don’t think about it much anymore but there were P-38’s at Santa Maria, flying cadets at Hancock field, Coast artillery units above Pismo Beach, a Rec. Center in Grover City where my mother volunteered. There was a Coast Guard bases in Morro Bay and Avila beach. Amphibious landing were practiced along the Atascadero Beach. Camp San Luis Obispo was the largest infantry training base in the country turning out ten thousand soldiers with every cycle. Camp Roberts in north county on the Hearst ranch and just to the south Camp Cooke where Patton’s tank Divisions had trained on the dunes above Lompoc before North Africa.. Mom said military convoys clogged the old highway and would go through Arroyo Grande, rumbling people awake at all hours. The list carried in the old Arroyo Grande Herald Recorder titled “Our Boys in the Service” was filled with nearly four hundred names in August of 1943. They were the last names of kids I would go to school with. The bus drivers, librarians and teachers in our schools, the postman, truck drivers, housewives, doctors and pharmacists, all listed. Those that would never come home marked with a small black star. There were more than a few. All from a town with a population of less than five thousand people.

The troops were weary too. The American leadership put no real censorship on the news and the people at home and their families wrote of neighbor boys who were dead, wounded and captured. Every day, every thought grounded in the agony of a war that seemed to have no end.

Hilo and his team must have worked frantically to translate all the information coming in from the Army and Marines. The temptation is to think that all this emphasis on information was at this point useless. We al know the end of the story. Thats the problem with history. Though we can study events for their meaning there is one thing we cannot do and that is see the future. Hilo and his team hadn’t the least inkling of where it would end. The man at the center of the hurricane has no idea where the way out is. Even the big brass in the Phillipines, Pearl Harbor and Washington DC had no crystal ball. The only thing they could do was to press ahead.

Planning for the invasion of the Japanese islands was well under way. The war in Europe would soon be over, there was no doubt of that. Germany was finished. The only question was how much longer would the insane self destruction continue. Even the Dogface trudging along German roads, still dying daily knew it was over. They all wanted to live, Japan was waiting. They knew that is was different fighting the Japanese than the Germans. No one wanted to go. But they did. The first Army Air Corps units had already arrived from England. The Generals had no doubt that when the time came they would go. Bill Matousek, some day to be my family doctor, as a fresh replacement tank driver who arrived on the line just days before the battle of the Bulge knew it. My sister in laws father had fought all the way from Sicily to Anzio to southern France, he knew it too. Del Holloway, Orville Shultz, John Loomis*** Arch and Leo Harloe, your father too, they all knew what the next step was going to be. It’s all they talked about. It seemed to them that it would last for years. “Golden Gate in ’48” they said.

They knew nothing of the Manhattan Project and the bomb. During the fight for Okinawa, FDR died .On April 12th the day of his death the first order of business for the new President, Harry Truman was to be told about the bomb. It would be up to him to decide.

Ernest “Ernie” Pyle, the soldiers friend killed on Okinawa April 18, 1945 RIP National Cemetery of he Pacific, “Punchbowl” 2177 Puowaina Dr. Honolulu, Oahu, Hawai’i

They lie supine in their regimented rows where once they stood. They are the waste. The war dead. Those who know nothing pass them by on the road. Only as long as the markers, the holy grail of the left living, be visited by those who remember will they signify the personal cost. On memorial days and anniversaries families may gather at the stones to remember their children who all too often were in their teens or early twenties when they died. But during the rest of the year they are noticed only by the caretakers who mow between the stones.

The consequences, the blind, the amputees, the depressed, the suicidal, these insane, these jobless, these homeless, the side effects and delayed effects whose very existence keeps memories of the war alive when most citizens can’t wait to forget, or, remember in a circumscribed vision for the burial of the dead is a burial of memory. The National Cemeteries fulfill a desire to set it all aside. No one can say that they are not moving places but the arranged beauty does not evoke any memory of terrible battles.

Perfectly aligned marble does not resemble the memory of the men who lived them, but rather masks the heaps of the dead and wounded, They lay in piles, in fragments, limbs broken and contorted, Burned, muddy clothes shredded or ripped from bodies by the sheer velocity of the man made forces that took their lives. This, the veteran of combat knows and of which he will not speak. The impossible knowledge cannot be conveyed to the living, the wives and children and grandchildren. Thats the secret, the wilderness of slaughter and death, put away as if in a box to be gradually forgotten. It speaks to the resiliency of memory, the ability by some to bury the scars so deep they can never be found.**

Punchbowl

Next, Chapter 14. Home, it’s all changed.

*During the Battle of Okinawa in World War II, Ernie Pyle, a renowned American war correspondent, was killed by enemy fire. He was covering the battle for American newspapers and was known for his deeply humanizing accounts of soldiers’ experiences. Pyle won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his newspaper accounts of the “dogface” infantry soldiers from a first-person perspective. He was killed by enemy fire on Ie jima (then known as Ie Shima) during the Battle of Okinawa. Another journalist, John Cashman, was killed in an aircraft crash on Okinawa on July 31, 1945,

**As far as I know I am the only living member of my family who recalls Corporal Edgar Green of the 2nd Australian Infantry whose grave is in the Baghdad North Gate military cemetery in Iraq. When I am gone so is Edgar, his incredible and brutal goes story with me. Markers are not for the dead but for the living.

***https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-arroyo-grande-valley-herald-recorder/179529347/ Follow this link to a letter home from a local Marine on Okinawa.

Cover Photo: Private Bob Hoichi Kubo United States Army MIS

Below is the link to “letters to Dona” page one.

https://wordpress.com/post/atthetable2015.com/1226

Michael Shannon writes so his children will know where they come from. He lives in Arroyo Grande California

Dear Dona 12

Page 12

Closing the Ring

Landing Ship Tank was the official designation for the ship your dad traveled on to Luzon. The Navy thought that the name was adequate, they didn’t believe they deserved an official name such as those given to “Real” fighting ships. Sailors of course, being very young and with a patented sense of irreverence simply called them Large Slow Targets. Nearly forty were lost during the war so the swabs were right on the mark.

Disembarking from a large slow target, Lingayen Gulf Phillipines. US Navy Photo.

MacArthurs army charged down highway 55 towards the City of Manila. General Sasaki had chosen to leave only a few units along the 224 miles of the fertile Cagayan valley that runs down the center of Luzon. They convoys of American troops sped past Tarlac City, Angeles, San Fernando to Valenzuela on the outskirts of Manila proper. Though the allies had declared Manila an open city and had planned to bypass it. The Japanese were determined to defend it.

In the run down the valley, Some of the major guerrilla groups materialized out of the Corderillas and joined the regular tropps of the Eleventh and sixth corps. Groups led by Ramon Mafsaysay, future president of the Phillipine Republic, Russell Volckmann who was a West Point Graduate and had escaped into the mountains in December 1941 and led a guerrilla force of over 22,000 men*. Robert Lapham was a reserve Lieutenant in the 45th Regiment, Philippine Scouts and escaped into the jungle just before the fall of Bataan in 1942. Considered the most disciplined and successful of the guerrilla groups he moved into the Zimbales mountains where his 13,000 fighters fought with General Walter Kruegers sixth army.**

MacArthur ordered your dad’s team to Zimbales province where they were to be stationed in Olongapo City on Subic Bay. Subic was to be one of the prime the anchorages for the Navy as the Allies prepared for the invasion of Japan. By early 1945 the Navy operated over 6.700 ships of all types and Harbors like Subic and Manila Bay were essential to provisioning and maintenance.

Arriving at a large permanent base the team would have had the opportunity for the first time since landing on Luzon to strip off their filthy uniforms, shave and be relatively safe. For the first time in a long while the chances of being killed or wounded by artillery, Japanese bombers or snipers was behind them. For perhaps the first time your dad could stand up straight without fear of being killed. One MIS soldier said that when he moved into the Quonset hut he was to live in he was reminded that the slamming of the screen doors caused him to stand there and repeatedly open and close it because it reminded him of home so. He said it made him literally weak in the knees.

Hilo must have looked out at the country they were traveling and been reminded of his home in California. The land was gentle and planted in crops tended by families who lived on it. The feral and disturbingly inhospitable jungle, the Green Hell he and his friends had lived in for two years was replaced by a land more familiar to the farm boy from Arroyo Grande.

The island was such that a war of maneuver, where overwhelming numbers of troops and war machinery such as tanks an aircraft gave the allies a great advantage. American industry helped to turn the tide. I read of a German soldier captured in France asking his captors. “Where are your horses?” The Germans moved by horse drawn vehicles and had never dreamed of the American ability to produce. The Japanese Imperial army was equally amazed.

Highway South to Manila. War Department 1945.

The job of the MIS was to put together as much information as they could for the planners of the coming invasion of Japan proper. Captured documents, radio intercepts, military orders, maps and personal letters were to be collated in order to locate as precisely as possible every installation, road, railroad, landing strip In the islands. They even knew the home addresses of individual officers and enlisted men. It was a monumental task.

No longer suspect, Military Intelligence had long proved its worth. The battle of Midway, Guadalcanal, the island hoping campaign, MacArthurs drive up the southwest Pacific, The ambush of Admiral Yamamoto, Merrills Marauders, The mission in China supporting the armies of American General Stillwell and Chiang Kai-Chek, The battleship encounter in the Surigao Straits of the Phillipines along with the organization of the vast amounts of information obtained through all sources gave the allies an impressive view of the Japanes forces everywhere.

Housed in Quonset huts, hundreds of MIS translators worked around the clock preparing the information that would be need for what was planned as the largest invasion in history. The planning assumed multiple invasion beaches scattered around the Japanese homeland. In the coming invasion of Japan, the US navy planners favored the blockade and bombardment of Japan to instigate its collapse. General Douglas MacArthur and the army urged an early assault on Kyushu followed by an invasion of the main island of Honshu. Admiral Chester Nimitz agreed with MacArthur. The ensuing Operation Downfall envisaged two main assaults – Operation Olympic on Kyushu, planned for early November 1945 and Operation Coronet, the invasion of Honshu in March 1946. The casualty rate on Okinawa was to be 35% of all troops and with 767,000 men scheduled to participate in taking Kyushu, it was estimated that there would be 268,000 casualties. The Japanese High Command instigated a massive defensive plan, Ketsu Go (Operation Decisive) beginning with Kyushu that would eventually amount to almost 3 million men with the aim of breaking American morale with ferocious resistance. All men of any age, women and children were to be drilled for the effort. Thousands were issued sharpened stakes for use. The plan was for a resistance that would cause the ultimate collapse of the empire and the end of the Japanese nation. Resistance would be suicidal. Some estimates of American casualties ran as high as a million killed and wounded.

It’s impossible today to imagine what the military leaders and planners struggled with. Ordinary soldiers who were involved in the planning must have simply been sick at the thought. No one knew about the bomb. He wasn’t told about it until after President Roosevelt died on April 12th, 1945. From President Truman on down the inevitability of the holocaust in Japan for all countries must have been horrific. America was already exhausted. Too many dead boys to bear. Casualties in other allied countries were much higher than ours. In Great Britian there were literally nl boys left. Generals waited impatiently for 17 and 18 year old boys to graduate and be eligible for conscription. As in WWI these children were referred to as “The class of 1917” or “The class of 1944.” Back home in Arroyo Grande, class of 44′ boys included Gordon Bennett, John Loomis, Tommy Baxter and Don Gullickson who would all be in the Pacific by wars end. It must have seemed a universe of war with no ending. Most soldiers and sailors never made it home for a visit. From 1941 you father had spent over fourteen hundred days without seeing his family. There must have many nights lying on his cot in the steaming tropics unable to sleep thinking about his family, not knowing precisely where they were, how they were being treated; would he ever see them again. There was no answer to be had.

Exhaustion would have been written on the face of your father by the beginning of 1945. He had been overseas for over three long years. He hadn’t seen his family, surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers with machine guns pointed inward for going on five years. Corralled in the Southwest Arizona desert, winter and summer it must have been agony for Hirokini and Ito. Until 1943 theirs could not visit them. The fact that the boys had volunteered to serve the only country they knew meant little to military administrators.

The agony of mothers is compounded by the fact that though grandparents knew he was somewhere in the Pacific they never knew exactly where or what he was doing. Headlines in the Newspaper blared massive headlines praising the military for the carnage they caused and were exposed to. Casualty figures, though not typically released to the press didn’t stop the reporters on the wartime beat from happily publishing the butchers bill.

There is a scene in Saving Private Ryan where, in the distance a small farmhouse and barn somewhere in the wheat-fields of mid-America you see an automobile being driven along a dirt road. It’s a drab green color with a white star on its door. It’s rolling through a cloud of dust of its own making. A middle aged woman in the kitchen goes about her business, rinsing the lunch dishes, her hair styled in the rolls worn by mothers and grandmothers of the time. As she moves about dressed in a red print housedress and an apron exactly like your grandmother wore, she begins rinsing the dishes in the sink. A little movement in the distance catches her eye and she looks up to see the car as it turns up the road to the house. The woman, who you know immediately is the mother of the four Ryan boys because there is a small banner hung, almost without notice by the camera, on the kitchen wall. Framed in red with four blue stars on a white background indicating four children, boys, just boys in the service. Mrs Ryan looks up, sees the car, goes back to the dishes, with her head still down it registers. Why the car is here. She looks up again and grows absolutely still, She knows. The heart goes still, scarcely breathing, she sleepwalks to the screen door and stands, her slippered feet spread, very still as the car pulls up. She does not move. Everything in the scene is in suspended animation and when the doors open, first an officer in uniform from the front then her pastor from the back door, she loses control of her legs, staggers and then slowly, agonizingly collapses on the floor boards. It goes to the heart of every mother who sent a son off to war. It’s the finest scene Spielberg has ever made.

Mrs Margaret Ryan at the window, sees the car, in that instant she knows. Note the white picket fence reflected on the glass in a way that suggests white crosses. Superb imagery. Spielberg is a master artist. Screen capture. Amblin Entertainment, Mutual Film Company. 1998

The battle for Manila was to be the most destructive operation in the war outside of Stalingrad and the final apocalypse of Berlin. In the movie, “The Pianist”* the final scene is Adrian Brodie standing in the ruins of Warsaw, Poland. Though it’s a movie set, the scale of destruction is enormous, it borders on insanity, hopelessness and utter destruction. Such was Manila.

Your father had a ringside seat working at Subic Bay. MacArthur himself had a personal attachment to the city, he had lived there for many years. His son had been born in a Manila hospital and when he was serving in the Filipino Constabulary he was often quoted that it was his favorite city. An ancient city with wide avenues and scores of beautiful old buildings shaded by tens of thousands of trees, the dignified Narra with its gorgeous yellow flowers underlayed by the fallen blossoms carpeting the walks below, the unfurling Dapdap known as the Coral Tree with it’s diamond shaped, fiery red blossom, and the huge and ominous Balete, trees renowned for their expansive, sprawling roots and branches which are said to be home for sorcerers.

Gracing the ancient streets deep in the city, “Old Manila” refers to the historic walled city of Intramuros. Manila was known for its Spanish colonial architecture and historical landmarks like Fort Santiago and the San Agustin Church. Fort Santiago (Saint James, the patron Saint of Spain) was built between 1590 and 1593 by the first governor of the Spanish Phillipines and anchored the city center.

Your dad never saw it. By the time he left the Phillipines it was a graveyard of buildings, people and culture.

When the Japanese attacked the islands in 1941 MacArthur declared Manila an open city and withdrew his troops to save it from destruction. This was not to be the case in 1945 when your father was there. General Tomoyuki Yamashita, he commander of the army withdrew his forces from the city into the mountains of the northeast portion of the island leaving Yamashita decided not to declare Manila an open city as MacArthur had done but that Gen. Shizuo Yokoyama, destroy all bridges and other vital installations in the area and then evacuate his men from the city as soon as American troops arrived in force.

In spite of these orders, Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s 31st Naval Special Base Force, was determined to fight a last-ditch battle in Manila. Iwabuchi repeatedly ignored orders to withdraw from the city. From the beginning of February 1945 until march, some of the most vicious street fighting of the war took place. Artillery and air strikes reduced the beautiful old city to a vast landscape of roofless shells. The Japanese forces resorted to a suicidal defense, refusing to surrender and murdering tens of thousands of Filipinos, men, women and children. Accounts from US soldiers tell of rape and systematic execution of the civilian populace. For the remainder of March 1945, American forces and Filipino guerrillas mopped up Japanese resistance throughout the city. With Intramuros secured on 4 March, Manila was officially liberated, although the city was almost completely destroyed and large areas had been demolished by American artillery fire. American forces suffered 1,010 dead and 5,565 wounded during the battle. At least 100,000 Filipino civilians had been killed, both deliberately by the Japanese in the various massacres, and from artillery and aerial bombardment by U.S. and Japanese forces. 16,665 Japanese military dead were counted within the Intramuros alone.

Afterwards, City of Manila, April 1945. War Department photo.

From Subic Bay where your father was, the sound of fighting would have heard. Flashes on the horizon coming from fires and exploding bombs would have illuminated the night sky. He heard the rolling thunder of the defenders being crushed. No one really knows the number of Japanese troops and civilian Filipinos died there. At the end the Imperial Army simply executed any Filipino they could find. They burned them with flame throwers, lined them up against walls and move them down like wheat stalks, they locked them in churches and burned them alive. Women were brutally raped and then shot. It was Hell on earth. It simply cannot be imagined except by those who lived through it and those, especially the soldiers, sailors and nurses to save their sanity simply locked it away. PTSD as it is known today is not a recent phenomenon but has been known by all veterans since Thermopylae and the Phalanx’s of Alexander and the Emperor Xerxes.

Dear Dona

Chapter 13

Coming Next

The Final Blow.

Cover Photo: The Fort Santiago Gate after the battle for Manila. War Dept. Photo.

*Brigadier Russell W. Volckmann was one of the founders of the Army’s Special Forces units after the war. His experience as a partisan commander was highly valuable in the formation of that elite force

**In 1947, Lapham returned to the Philippines for five months as a consultant to the U.S. on the subject of compensation to Filipinos who had served as guerrillas during the war. He recognized 79 squadrons of guerrillas under his command with a total of 809 officers and 13,382 men. His command suffered 813 recognized casualties. However, sorting out the deserving from the fraudulent was difficult. Of more than a million claims for compensation in all the Philippines, only 260,000 were approved. Lapham believed that most of his men were treated fairly, but was critical of U.S. policy toward the Philippines after the war. “If ever there was an ally of American whom we ought to have treated with generosity after the war, it was the Philippines.” He said the U.S. Congress was “niggardly” with the Philippines, providing less money for rebuilding than that spent in many other countries, putting conditions on Philippine independence that favored U.S. business and military interests, and backing corrupt Filipino politicians who protected American, rather than Filipino, interests.

***The nurse, LT. Sandy Davys from the film “They Were Expendable” by John Ford surrendered with the other 86 nurses on Bataan and spent the war years in the Los Banos and Santo Tomas internment camp in Manila. They all survived.

“The Angels of Bataan” War Department Photo. 1945

****”The Pianist,” the Oscar-winning film, is based on the real-life story of Władysław Szpilman, a Polish Jewish pianist who survived the Holocaust. Szpilman’s memoir, also titled “The Pianist,” details his extraordinary survival in Warsaw during World WarII.

Dear Dona 11

Moving Up

Michael Shannon

Your fathers original group of four hundred translators that worked in Brisbane in 1943 had been broken up into small units and was now spread all over the Southwest Pacific. Many of them now shared the privations and dangers of combat and had taken to carrying rifles. They operated just behind and into the lines and were subject to enemy gunfire, artillery and bombs. War zones are dangerous places and even those that see no actual combat are subject to the whims of the monster.

After Morotai headquarters moved up to the island of Leyte and promptly discovered something entirely new. The translators as with all staff, headquarters and support troops rarely knew what was going on in the wider war. As they advanced in the Phillipines the war began to widen out. The days of jungle fighting were nearly over. Leyte with a population of just 900,00 most supporters of the Americans was divided by a mountain range with the southern portion of the island very lightly populated The flanking coastal plains allowed the use of tanks and other mobile units for the first time. Fighting was heavy but the Japanese were pushed up the island in a series of very sharp battles. The campaigns success allowed the planning for the invasion of the main island of Luzon to go forward in a hurry.

Since MacArthur had been ordered out, Corregidor had been surrendered, the Bataan death march had taken place and most combatant Americans had been locked up in concentration camps. MacArthurs Filipino Scouts had also surrendered but not all. Army Navy personnel and the Filipinos had disappeared into the hills of the Phillipines and for three years had been roving the country formed into Guerrilla groups. (1) Filipino ex-soldiers, American service members, Naval officers and Australian and Dutch soldiers had formed lethal bands of Guerrillas who preyed on Japanese troop movements and supply convoys. The Dutch and Australian stole or cobbled together radio sets with which they sent messages to Army headquarters in Australia. They reported on Japanese ship movements and disposition of army units.

MacArthurs command arranged to deliver better radios, generators to provide electricity to the Coast Watchers were constantly on the move. A message sent in the clear or in code could be tracked by Japanese rangefinders so they picked up and got out of Dodge immediately after sending. It was highly dangerous work but invaluable to the allies. Radio message were synced with MIS translations and throughout the three years before the return the command had a clear picture of almost everything the Japanese were up to.

The base radio station dugout of the Coastwatchers Ken network in the Solomon Islands. Photo: Australian War Memorial.

During August and September 1942, 17 military coast watchers (Seven Post and Telegraph Department radio operators and 10 soldiers) and five civilians were captured as Japanese forces overran the Gilbert Islands. Imprisoned on Tarawa atoll, they were all beheaded following an American air raid on that island. The coast watchers and their teams, mainly native islanders were constantly on the move. They faced starvation, boredom and feared for their lives but none attempted to escape. Though mostly resident civilians who had worked for the rubber plantations and the petroleum companies they received nothing for their work. It wasn’t until late 1944 that that the Anzacs bestowed military officer rank on them so if killed their families would receive a pension.

Coastwatchers were also involved in organizing supplies for the Guerrilla bands. They received supplies and arms from American subs, Dumbos (2) and the famous Black Cat Catalina flying boats. They also rescued downed flyers and other military personnel who were downed or sunk along the island chains. These included the future US President, US Navy Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, whose PT 109 Patrol Torpedo boat was carved in two and destroyed by a Japanese warship in the Solomon Islands. After the sinking, Kennedy and his crew reached Kolombangara Island where they were found by Coastwatcher Sub-Lieutenant Reg Evans who organized their rescue.

In the Philippines they were to witness the roots of the local Resistance which represented the cultural and socio-economic diversity of the Philippine Islands. From socialist peasant farmers the Huks, middle school teachers, ROTC youths, to Moro (Philippine Muslim), the range of the men and women who participated in the struggle against the Japanese Imperial Army was seemingly inexhaustible.

Officers at headquarter were initially astounded when groups began showing up. slipping out of the jungles like wraiths, armed and dangerous.

At least 260,000 strong, the guerrilla forces were ill-equipped and poorly armed. They depended on local civilians for food, shelter, and intelligence. Several units recruited women guerrillas. Some took up arms and served side by side with men, including journalist Yay Panlilio and Huk commander Remedios Gomez-Paraiso also know as “Kumander Liwayway.”

Remedios Gomez-Paraiso, Kumander Liwayway. Photographer unknown. 1945

Remedios Gomez-Paraiso was an officer in the Hukbalahap, a communist guerrilla army known for their daring attacks on Japanese forces. Born in Pampanga, Gomez-Paraiso joined the guerrillas after her father was killed by Japanese forces. Known for going into battle wearing her signature red lipstick, Gomez-Paraiso quickly rose in the ranks to become a commander of a squadron. At one point, she had two hundred men under her command. Perhaps best known for the “Battle of Kamansi” in which, despite being outnumbered, Gomez-Paraiso’s squadron forced Japanese forces to retreat. After the war, her Hukbalahap Guerrillas continued their revolution against the democratic Philippine government until 1948, when her husband was killed, and she was captured. She was released and went on to become a vocal advocate for the recognition of Filipina Guerrillas.

In a marriage of convenience the guerrillas, some who had been fighting the Americans invaders since 1898 when President McKinley annexed the islands against their wishes. In the southern Phillipines, the Muslin Moro had resisted the Spanish conquest since the since the end of the 15th century. This religious war only ended with the annexation by the US in 1898. The Muslim Moros then fought the United States and finally the Japanese. Resistance was baked into their DNA. Because they hated the Japanese more they saw the alliance as temporary but expedient. Filipino Guerrilla groups fought right up until the end of the war. (3)

A guerrila group on Leyte, Phillipines, 1944. National Archives photo.

On January 25th 1945 your dad and his MIS team walked aboard LST 922. They were bound from Leyte to the island of Luzon. Just nine days before 175,00 American troops supported by over 800 ships had gone ashore at Lingayen Gulf, ironically the same beaches employed by General Homma’s Japanese forces in December, 1941.

General MacArthur himself went ashore on S-Day. There were no histrionics this time. Luzon which he had abandoned in 1941 was not only his personal goal, but erasing the embarrassment which was compounded by secretly fleeing during the Phillipines during the dark of the night in a little PT boat, PT-32 commanded by LTJG John Bulkeley (4)

LST 922 at Morotai Island, Dutch East Indies, December 1944. USN Photo

Your dad’s MIS team hefted their barracks bags and walked up the ramp for yet another trip by an LST. Commanded by Lieutenant, Junior Grade Ronnie A Stallings who was a regular Navy officer. A special but not uncommon type in the WWII Navy, he was a Mustang. Mustangs as opposed the thoroughbred Naval Academy officers were generally outstanding enlisted men promoted up from the ranks. Born in Brooklyn New York in 1924, Stallings enlisted in April 1941 and went to sea as a 17 year old later that year. He was an ordinary seaman. Assigned to a Landing Craft Infantry 487 or LCI. LCI 487 was typical of this type of LCI. It was newly built and the crew was young and inexperienced. The skipper, Lt. Stewart F. Lovell was the “Old Man” on board. Born in Manchester, N. H. on May 26, 1907, he was 36 years old when he set sail on the 487. However, most of his crew was seventeen, eighteen and nineteen year olds. His young crew gave their Skipper the nick name “Baggy Pants” because he did not acquire a proper fitting uniform after losing a lot of weight while onboard. LCI’S were 158 feet long, just over half a football field and only 23 feet in the beam. With the bridge being high and the hold being empty she rolled like a “Drunken Sailor” to use a Navy term. There are other terms for unseaworthy ships but most are unprintable. A very strong stomach would be required and perhaps the skipper didn’t have one. The Executive Officer – Ensign James T. Clinton was nicknamed “Boy Scout” because he was pale, clean cut and did not drink or smoke. Ronnie Stallings was present during the landing in North Africa in 1942 and at D-Day, June 1944 where his little ship, derisively known as “Waterbugs” by disdainful Admirals disgorged over two hundred GI’s of K Company, 18th Regimental Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Divion onto Utah Beach. Unable to back off the beach, 487 was pounded by German artillery and temporarily abandoned. Stallings was taken back to a survivors camp in England located at Greenway House the estate of Agatha Christie. With only the clothes on his back he was given an overcoat and a bag with a broken tooth brush and a razor with no blades.

His next ship was the fleet oiler USS Salomonie. He caught up with her in Panama in July as she passed through the canal on the way to Milne Bay, New Guinea. By this time a Quartermaster or QM, he would stand watch as assistant to officers of the deck and the navigator; serve as helmsman and perform ship control, navigation and bridge watch duties. QMs procure, correct, use and stow navigational and oceanographic publications and oceanographic charts. Thats the official description. Navy slang is “Wheels” because the begin by steering ships which is no mean feat. (5)

USS Salamonie Ao 26 and an LCI unloading at Utah red Beach Normandy, France June 5th, 1944.

Salamonie sailed for the Pacific Ocean via the Panama Canal on 8 July 1944 and reported for duty to Commander Service Force, US 7th Fleet, at Milne Bay, New Guinea, on 23 August. Salamonie joined the Leyte invasion force in Hollandia on 8 October 1944 and later supported both the Morotai and Mindoro strike forces. She spent the final months of the war supporting Allied operations in the Philippines after Ronnie Stallings transfer to the LST.

By the time Stallings arrived at Milne Bay he was a Chief, a rank achieved in just three years, a feat that could only be achieved in wartime. In peacetime it could take 20 years of duty, and he was just 22 years old. A 22 year old former enlisted swab made it to Chief Quartermaster. At Milne Bay he received a commission as a Lieutenant Junior Grade, and his own ship. No stateside classes, no practice, only his three years at sea as his training ground. As a newly commissioned officer he walked up the gangplank as the senior officer and Captain of his own ship Landing Ship Tank-922. He could never have imagined as a seventeen enlisted recruit that he would end up here.

Trailing their gear the team came aboard 922. Led by your father, the leader with the rank of TEC 4. Trudging into the ship were his crew, Jim Tanaka, Michael Miyatake, Henry Morisako, and Tabshi Uchigaki. Masai Uyeda, and Tsukasa Uyeda followed. Seven men, all headed for Eleventh Corps headquarters at Lingayen. General Eichelberger commanding. By this time they undoubtedly knew that the end was coming for the empire of Japan.

Eleventh Corps Badge, WWII

Dear Dona,

12th page next week Feb. 15th.

Closing the Ring*

1) Guerrilla from the Spanish Guerra. Guerrilla literally translates to “little war”. It’s a diminutive of the Spanish word guerra, which means “war”

(2) Dumbo refers to large aircraft such as the B-17 or B-24 heavy bombers which were modified to carry a large lifeboat that could be dropped to survivors at sea. They were largely replaced by the more versatile PBY Catalina which had a longer range and could land on water. The Catalina has been Largely ignored by most historians but was a major factor in air-sea rescue, insertion and extraction of personnel from Japanese held islands. The Catalinas also delivered supplies to Coastwatchers and guerrilla groups. The term Black Cats or Nightmare is the name given to the Naval and Army squadrons who flew these missions by night.

(3) The Moro people in the southern Phillipines have fought invaders from the fifteen hundreds right up to the present conflict with independent Philippine government. Nearly five hundred years of almost constant conflict has made them a formidable force.

(4) LTJG John Bulkeley is portrayed by Robert Montgomery in the 1945 film “They Were Expendable.” Directed by John Ford and co-starring John Wayne and the inestimable Donna Reed. In my opinion one of Ford’s best films. It impresses with its portrayal of the utter hopelessness of those last days before the surrender of the Phillipines to the Japanese. The dinner scene with the officers and the nurse, Donna Reed is utterly in tune with the times. By todays standards it is mawkish but it wasn’t made for now but during the war when people felt differently than they do today.

(5) The author served in the Merchant Marine. Steering a ship as long as two football fields and weighing nearly 30,000 tons is not for the faint of heart.

(6) Technician fourth grade (abbreviated T/4 or Tec 4) was a rank of the United States Army from 1942 to 1948. The rank was created to recognize enlisted soldiers with special technical skills, but who were not trained as combat leaders. Technician fourth grade. The T/4 insignia of a letter “T” below three chevrons.

*Apologies to Sir Winston Churchill.

Michael Shannon is a writer from California. He knew Mister Fuchiwaki personally.

Dear Dona 10

The End of a Hard Row.

By Michael Shannon

A hard row, something a farmer knows all too well.

As early as 1943, morale amongst the Japanese soldiers was very poor. The information compiled by the MIS translators wasn’t just about the killing of Admiral Yamamoto or Plan Z or the other logistical and strategic finds. US Army G-2 intelligence reported on the mindset of the ordinary Japanese soldier as seen through his own eyes in captured letters and journals.

One that can be easily manipulated politically. The difference for those being on the ground dealing with face to face combat or interrogation when captured left little to interpretation.

Many in the US believed the Japanese soldier was a fanatic, freely willing to give his life for the Emperor. The banzai charges. The kamikaze attacks. Individual soldiers throwing themselves under tanks with an explosive charge strapped onto their backs in a suicide attacks was the image the wartime press pushed. The truth of the matter is Japanese soldiers were farm boys, city boys, Just like our boys, they were drafted. Instead of dying in “banzai attacks”, these “fanatical” Japanese soldiers wanted to go home just like ours did. They couldn’t for fear of reprisal against their families by their own government. It must have been ironic to read of that treatment by the Nisei whose own families were behind barbed wire in concentration camps.

Neither side was immune from publishing the most scurrilous propaganda.

Being a buck private in the Japanese army made you a fanatic. In the American army you got the Congressional Medal of Honor. To a soldier of any army the end was the same. Media makes it seem that heroism is a choice but that is rarely so. Desperation or fatalism is much more likely.

General MacArthur told General Eichelberger, his chief of staff after the initial disastrous American showing by the 32nd division Buna-Gona, New Guinea, “I’m putting you in command at Buna. Relieve Harding. I am sending you in and I want you to remove any officer who won’t fight. Relieve regimental and battalion commanders; if necessary, put sergeants in charge of battalions and corporals in charge of companies, anyone who will fight, put ’em in.

MacArthur then strode down the breezy veranda again and turned back to Eichelberger . He said he had reports that American soldiers were throwing away their weapons and running from the enemy. Then he stopped short and spoke again, with emphasis. He wanted no misunderstandings about the assignment.

“Bob,” he said, “I want you to take Buna, or not come back alive.” Bob Eichelberger put on his three stars and walked into the front lines where the Japanese snipers could see him. Warned that he might be killed, he said, “I want my men to see a general in the line not in the rear. The word spread quickly through the Red Arrows troops and they turned the tide of the battle. That’s courage and the boys he commanded knew it when they saw it.

Eichelberger was recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor, MacArthur disapproved it and awarded the Distinguished Service Cross to his staff officers at headquarters who saw no service. That was MacArthur at his political and selfish best. Eichelberger said nothing.

Major General Bob Eichlberger in New Guinea, 1943. US Photo

The MIS Nisei, as early as 1943 published a report detailing moral problems within the Imperial army. Culled from captured material, the official document spelled out problems within the Japanese officer corps. There were incidents of desertion, dereliction of duty, black market racketeering and hoarding rations for their own us. Enlisted men were homesick and felt helpless in the face of the war. Poorly led and often wasted in senseless attacks they were certainly as brave as American boys and throughout the Pacific campaign most American soldiers came to recognized this. Those Nisei who worked as cave flushers realized that the sense of hopelessness of soldiers hiding in caves during furious and savage battles were not always willing to die for the Emperor or their officers but could be talked into surrender by calm and kind words in their own language spoken by someone who knew their culture and in many cases who had been educated in their home prefecture.

Abandoned cave. USMC photo

Many of the MIS boys were descendants of families who emigrated from the southwest portions of Japan which were primarily rural. They came as contract laborers to work in the pineapple and cane fields of Hawaii and the fishing and agricultural areas of California. Hiroshima, Kumamoto, Okayama and Yamaguchi was where the majority of emigrants came from. By coincidence many of the Japanese troops in the southwest Pacific came from the same areas. The Kibei, American citizens who had been educated in Japan might, by a good chance be familiar with the home areas of the captured. The offer of a cigarette and comforting words from someone who not only spoke your language but in your own dialect quickly overcame any reluctance to speak. In many documented case the MIS translators personally knew schools, relatives, teachers, family members and in more than one case interrogated brothers, cousins and uncles. There is an instance where a cave flusher on Okinawa encountered his older brother inside.

The interlocking cave defense pioneered on Peleliu which brutalized the Army and Marines was quickly adopted by other Japanese units and even though you might not expect to see it used on the large islands in the Phillipines, it was. Your dad was still on staff with the Eleventh Army on October 20th, 1944 when the Philippine island of Leyte was invaded, the first step in the conquest of the Philippines by American, Australian, Mexican* and Filipino guerrilla forces under the command of MacArthur. The U.S. fought Japanese Army forces led by General Tomoyuki Yamashita. The battle took place from 20 October to 31 December 1944 and launched the Philippines campaign of 1944–45, the goal of which was to recapture and liberate the entire Philippine Archipelago and to end almost three years of Japanese occupation.

The invasion was a surprise because the Japanese assumed the Americans would invade Luzon first so many troops had been withdrawn from Leyte and those left had been pulled back from the prepared beach defenses. Fortunately for our troops, the Japanese General had withdrawn his troops from shoreline defensive posts. Even though there had been up to four hours of bombardment by the USN of the shore defenses, many fortifications – including pillboxes – were untouched. General Kenney concluded there would have been a blood bath similar to Tarawa if the Japanese hadn’t withdrawn.

The advance was so rapid that that MacArthur made his walk onto the Leyte beach a “Hollywood-esque” event on the first day. He actually had several takes done of wading ashore being the media seeker he was but. Being on MacArthurs personal MIS staff, you father may have been there though I could find no evidence of that. Soldiers in the know laughed at MacArthurs self promotion remembering him as “Dugout Doug” from Bataan and Corregidor in 1942. A foot soldier has a quite different view of rear echelon soldiers no matter how important he thinks he is. Patton’s well known nickname “Old Blood and Guts,” was easily changed to. “Yeah, his guts, our blood” by the infantry soldiers of his third army in Europe. Like a politician, which he was, the entire landing was a production. He had Manuel Quezon, the president of the Phillipines, several Philippine Scouts of the Filipino army, his staff officers each in his crushed hat echoing their bosses famous hat with the tarnished “Scrambled Eggs” and all wet to the knees. No one though to wear combat boots though and their dress brown shoes indicates they didn’t expect to even get wet. MacArthur was furious at the cox’n of the Higgins boat he landed from and wanted him punished until he saw the photos and decided he looked sufficiently heroic. The Cox’n was spared.

“I Have Returned.” Carefully posed and including representatives of the Filipino Army, the Army Air Corps and various staff officers MacArthur wades in for the third take. Check out the bemused expression on the face of the soldier just to MacArthurs right, above the little Filipino Major.*

“People of the Philippines: I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil—soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples. We have come dedicated and committed to the task of destroying every vestige of enemy control over your daily lives, and of restoring upon a foundation of indestructible strength, the liberties of your people.” MacArthur.

The landing on Leyte looked good on newsreel, there were even a few gunshots in the distance but the landing was safe enough for the men from the rear. Distant gunshots were exhilarating and added a little flavor to the event. The rest of the entire Philippine campaign would be bitter, savage and cost the United States military dearly. The Phillipines were not secured until the end of the war in August 1945. The Allies totaled up 220,000+ wounded and dead before it was over. The Japanese Imperial Army lost over 430,000.

Luzon was mostly jungle fighting but Leyte with the nations capital city of Manila turned out to be some of the worst urban warfare of the entire war. The Japanese were in desperate straits. The army and air force could not be reliably reinforced because the surface navy now controlled the air and US submarines controlled the inland sea and had devastated the Japanese surface fleet, particularly supply ships that soldiers on the islands were nearly cut-off from Japan.

Because of the MIS translators the Americans brass knew this. They knew where the ammunition dumps were, food supplies, location of all Japanese headquarters and many troop movements. At sea, the Navy was informed of Japanese Naval plans and was able to prepare for what became “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot” when Naval aviators decimated the air fleets of the Japanese Navy and Army in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, downing 65 planes and sinking one of Japan’s last carriers. Fighting on the defensive with no air support the isolated Japanese troops on the islands became more desperate and fatalistic.

No one knew of course but the war had less than a year to go but the nature of war in the Pacific saw the fighting get more and more desperate and dangerous. There was literally no hope for the Japanese and they knew it.

Lance Corporal Kiyoshi Koto was starving and wounded, but it is unlikely that he was troubled by his hunger or his pain as he reached the front on the day he had written his letter. Koto was killed in action about midnight on the same day, and his letter was never delivered. Instead, an American soldier pulled the letter from Koto’s uniform pocket and took it to his Nisei MIS intelligence section. The letter was translated into English while a few of Koto’s captured countrymen dug a grave for him somewhere on the site of the battle. The short paragraphs that Koto had hoped would give his family a sense of closure instead became a source of information and a curiosity for his American enemy.

Every Japanese sailor and soldier was familiar with the Song of the Warrior, an ancient ballad that captured the centuries of fighting culture that made surrender unthinkable for Kiyoshi Koto and his comrades.

If I go to sea, I shall return a corpse awash;

If duty calls me to the mountain, a verdant sword will be my pall;

Thus for the sake of the Emperor, I shall not die peacefully at home.

By December Lance Corporal Kiyoshi Koto wrote his last letter home. By that time, his unit’s command structure was decimated and the battle strength of his army and its supporting navy was nearly destroyed. As he wrote, the characters on the page of the letter, they were written with shaking hand because Kiyoshi had been wounded in the right arm by a shell during an attack five days earlier. He struggled to carry his rifle because of his injury, and he had not eaten because critical supplies had not reached the beach, let alone the front. Koto understood very well that he was a dead man.

Koto wrote, “Every day there is bombing by enemy airplanes, naval gunfire and artillery fire. No sign of friendly planes or of our navy appears. The transports haven’t come yet either. I have not eaten properly since the 24th of November; many days I have had nothing to eat at all. From tonight on indefinitely, again without expecting to return alive, I am going out resolutely to the front line. Even though I am holding my rifle with a right arm that doesn’t move easily, now is the time for me to dominate a military contest. I must serve as long as I can move at all.

“The Regimental Commander, Colonel Hiroyasu, 16th Infantry, died in battle. The battalion commanders are all either wounded or dead. My own company commander is dead. Two of the platoon commanders have been wounded; one of them entered the hospital for medical treatment and was with me there. In our company NCOs are acting as platoon commanders and privates as squad leaders. At present my company has come down to a total of only 30 men. Of the soldiers in my squad three were killed, four wounded, and at present four in good health are doing hard fighting. As I too am soon to leave for the front lines I should like to see their cheerful faces. The platoon leader, convalescing and almost up, says ‘Go to it Kiyoshi!’”

Koto includes greetings to members of his family and closes, “I am writing this as a farewell letter.”

Saipan 1944. National WWII Museum. Gift of Akita Nakamura.

The answer, as the balance of the war proved prophetically true, was combat with no quarter. And the actions of soldiers letters offer a glimpse into the mind of Lance Corporal Kiyoshi Koto, who also refused to surrender when he found himself in a losing battle. He wrote his farewell letter home, and on the last day went forward to fight and die. He had no illusions about his future. Instead, his thoughts were with home and with his brothers in arms along with a final hope that he could save his family the pain of not knowing what had happened to him.

Dear Dona Page 11

Your fathers original group of four hundred translators that worked in Brisbane in 1943 had been broken up into smaller units and was now spread all over the Southwest Pacific. Many of them now shared the privations and dangers of combat and had taken to carrying rifles and wearing helmets. They operated just behind the lines and were subject to enemy gunfire, artillery and bombs.

Dear Dona 11 coming on February 1st.

* Mexico’s Escuadrón 201, The Aztec Eagles, equipped with Republic P-47D Thunderbolt fighter aircraft distinguished themselves in providing close air support to American ground units as well as long-range bombing strikes deep into Japanese held territory.

Cover Photo: Captured Japanese soldiers on Okinawa.

Michael Shannon is a writer from California and personally knew the protagonist in this story.

Dear Dona

Page 9

There is no toilet paper.

Michael Shannon

From the MIS Nisei: “They described how they were searching a Japanese soldier that had surrendered in the jungle of Moroti. They came across one of the American propaganda leaflets promising safe passage for those Japanese soldiers that surrendered. It was neatly folded in the soldier’s pocket.
Akune asked the Japanese soldier if he believed what the leaflet promised since the MIS Nisei wrote it. The Japanese soldier said no but that it made for good toilet paper. “There was no toilet paper in the jungle of Burma,” said the prisoner.” Americans laughed. They were issued 25 sheets a day, maybe, not often or never.

The leaflet written by MIS Nisei translators and air dropped over Japanese posissions, 1944

The army and the Marines continued to slowly work themselves toward the northern end of Papua New Guinea. After more than two years the organized large battles were over but the island was still overrun with small units of Japanese. There was more and more jungle fighting where small units of American and Australian troops constantly patrolled the dense jungles looking for stragglers and shattered elements of the Japanese. Sharp and very nasty fire fights occurred often.

Australian Infantry of the 21st regiment, Papua New Guinea. Australia War Museum, 1943

The jungle itself was the enemy. It was as evil as any human enemy. It was dark and secretly evil, an enemy of all mankind. Its drenching, chilling, mud sucking presence came at the soldier with cold roiling mists, green mold and nearly ceaseless downpour. Tangled roots and vines tripped him, it poisoned a man with nasty stinging biting insects and malodorous bugs who flew and flitted about or dropped from dripping trees. The sop of mud into which his boots stepped and were sucked at by the jungle itself. It was a living breathing thing. You could awaken to find a dreaded Bushmaster Pit Viper coiled under your cot. Growing up to 10 feet long, a strike was almost certain to bring death. The Arizona national guard 158th regimental combat team which was requested by MacArthur because they were jungle trained adopted the snake as part of their regimental patch,

158th RCT Arizona National Guard “Bushmasters” on patrol, New Guinea. US Army photo. 1944

Nothing could stand against it. Letters were sodden and unreadable in a few days, Socks disintegrated in just a days, Cigarettes were sodden as soon as the cellophane was removed, your pocketknife blade rusted solid an your watch recorded it’s own death.

Food was garbage, made paste by the moisture which was everywhere in under canvas. A pencil swelled and burst, unable to write on sodden paper. Rifle barrels turned red from rust and had to be carried muzzle down to keep out the rain, a cellophane wrapper from a pack of cigarettes, parts of the waxed carton from K ration boxes or condom wrapped around the muzzle to little avail. Machine gun rounds stuck in their canvas belts. The jungle was an enemy so foul, stinking of mud and decay that the war was nearly forgotten in the search for a dry pair of trousers, socks or the prize wished for the most: a hot cup of coffee.

Brewing up a cup of Joe, Wewak, New Guinea, 1944.

Small units of translators were being sent into the field to do the interrogations of prisoners on the spot instead of relying on just the captured documents. They hoped to retrieve intelligence in real time. MacArthur was in the planning stages for the beginning of the move up the chains of islands between New Guinea and Japan itself.

Generals are as politically motivated as any politician,

they have to fight their way up the ranks and as the number of officers decreas, Major to Colonel, the pressure increase. There were three main components involving the Pacific theater. At the very top of that pyramid, General George Marshall the Army Chief of Staff and Admiral Ernest King of the navy were in a political fight for the means to prosecute a war on two fronts, the Pacific and the European theaters. The President, Churchill and Stalin had agreed that Europe would be the main focus of their efforts and the Japanese war would take a back seat. Admiral King, of course was not happy, as that meant the navy would receive fewer resources than the army whose main focus would be in Africa, the Mediterranean and western Europe. Initially this meant that the Navy and Marines would mount a holding action in the Pacific with the goal to halt Japanese expansion as the primary objective. This proved to be easier said than done.

The battles of the Coral Sea in May and Midway in June of 1942 showed that perhaps there was an opportunity to do more. The Japanese invasion of Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea was stopped. Admiral King began to press for more of everything to be sent west so the Navy and Marines could began the island hopping campaign which they are so famous for.

Politics immediately interfered. General MacArthur’s hasty retreat from the Phillipines left him with no army to command and no money to pay for it if he had one. The Joint Chiefs, FDR and his political advisors had to find something for America’s most famous and experienced military man to do. He wasn’t wanted by King, two colossal egos in charge has never worked. The solution was to park him in the far west Pacific where he couldn’t interfere with Admiral King’s navy and its goals.

MacArthur was not pleased. Stuck in Brisbane, Australia with few troops other than the Anzacs to command, not a situation that made the Australian and New Zealand military very happy, he had to beg FDR and Marshall for American units. The Navy, very grudgingly allotted a small naval command to serve under his command. He also had the use of the Australia’s small navy and on top of that commandeered whatever craft he could find including small sailing vessels once used for inter-island transport.

Politics meant that there would be two parallel efforts to fight the way to Japan. The Navy and Marines were to fight an increasingly brutal series of invasions. Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, Saipan and Iwo Jima are all famous in American history and most important in the history of the Marine Corps. There is little difference between those battles than the uphill slaughter of the British at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Assaults directly into the face of an entrenched enemy such as Fredericksburg or Petersburg in the civil war had not changed. The Marines paid a horrible price in the Navy’s Pacific battles.

MacArthur on the other hand had a much, much larger land area to contend with. The island of New Guinea is the second largest on earth, just slightly larger than the state of California. As Californians we have some idea of how large that is. Sending limited numbers of troops and a small air force the length of the state would be dauntingly difficult. Instead MacArthur conceived of a plan to skip and hop across New Guinea. Using what he had, he planned on taking key areas where he could stage for the next leap and leaving the now isolated Japanese garrisons behind to wither and die.

Arriving in Port Moresby your father was ashore while the final battles in New Guinea were wrapping up. The army had trekked over 1,500 hundred miles, roughly the distance from Los Angeles to Dallas Texas. MacArthurs Eleventh Corps was pulled of the line to rest and refit and tp prepare for the initial phase of the return to the Phillipines. The Australians were left to finish the retaking of New Guinea which would take to the end of the war.

The eleventh Corps which included your dad’s unit was made up of the 23rd, 31st, 38th, 41st, 93rd (Colored) and the 503rd parachute infantry regiment was preparing to move on the Phillipines. They needed an airfield close enough to to Leyte island so the Army Air Corps could provide combat support and logistics. A small island named Morotai off the tip of Halmahera island in the Indonesian Archipelago was selected.

Landing on Red Beach, Morotai Island Dutch East Indies, September 15th, 1944

In the meantime the XI army got a little rest where they were resupplied with weapons and uniforms. The 93rd (Colored) built showers, laundries, mess halls and broke out the baseball equipment. The MIS boys were still hard a work but at least they had time to hang a coffee can from a wire, light a fire and brew up some coffee. In their tents at night, a soup can with some gasoline and a length of tent rope made a small stove for cooking up whatever they could scrounge from the mess boys. The natural alliance between the Nisei and the African Americans of the 93rd paid dividends for the MIS.

3rd Division (Colored) patrolling on Morotai. October, 1944

The MIS men had been stationed in Brisbane Australia for nearly two years but with the advances in the Solomons, Marshalls and New Guinea they began to be deployed in smaller groups to individual combat groups. The Navy, Marines, Army Air Corps, British, Dutch and ANZAC forces had seen their value and had asked for and received MIS Nisei support. This changed entirely the organization. Fourteen Japanese Americans were now serving in combat with Merrill’s Marauders in the China Burma theater. MIS boys had worked with the Marines in New Georgia, Saipan, Eniwetok and at the bloodbath at Peleliu where the Ist Mar. Div. and the Army’s 81st division engaged in a new kind of battle for which the were unprepared. For the first time they ran upon defensive caves which were to be the main feature of the amphibious campaign for the rest of the war. General “Chesty” Puller’s first Marine Division took casualties of nearly seventy percent and was put out of the war for nearly six months it was so badly devastated. Out of over twelve thousand Japanese on the island only a little over 300 were taken prisoner, mostly because of wounds.

The “Flusher” was born at Peleliu. These were volunteer MIS linguists who put down there rifles, took off their helmets and put their heads in or crawled inside fortified caves to attempt to talk the Japanese soldiers inside into surrender. Because the Nisei believed they would be killed if armed they tried to show the cave dwellers that were no to be afraid. They themselves must have been terrified. I find it difficult to comprehend the courage it took to do this.

Nisei MIS Linguist coaxing Japanese soldiers out of a fortifies cave, 1944

In researching this letter I have not been a able to find any reference to the Nisei that performed this volunteer duty. I found no citations for bravery and no medals awarded. The MIS men were part of a secret organization within the military but still the lack of recognition is troubling. The only photos available that show MIS flushers at work were taken by other soldiers and not combat journalists who kept their unit’s diaries which chronicled daily action down to company sized units. In every sense the Nisei were combat soldiers. They were rifleman which is the name combat soldiers take for themselves as a point of pride. “Every Marine is a rifleman” in the Marine Corps no matter what his job.

The 1306th MIS team, New Guinea, 1944. Note the white officer, no Nisei was yet in command of any group. US Army photo.

An important point to make here is that though the translators were formally attached to General MacArthurs command they were scattered amongst all combat units and were moved as needed. Rarely can you find a photo of a MIS man wearing a division patch. Your dad served with more than just the eleventh Army, he was with the 168th Infantry Regimental Combat Team, an element of the 32nd Division from Michigan and Wisconsin when they were transported by LST from Lae, New Guinea for the landing on Morotai Island. Morotai is part of the Indonesian archipelago which consists of over 18,000 separate islands. Roughly 2,300 miles from New Guinea it was 300 miles closer to the southern Philippines than Peleliu.

LST- 742 on the beach at Morotai, Dutch East Indies. Battered and bruised like all of her sisters she was one of the workhorses of the Pacific War. Unsung, no-name little ships hauled everything and went everywhere.

Not for the first time, your Dad traveled with his team on one of these ships. There were no accommodations for enlisted passengers so you rolled your blanket out on the steel deck and slept under a truck or up on the galleries that ran down the sides of the cargo hold. By this time Hilo wouldn’t have batted an eye at the lack of luxury.

Two islands were invaded on the same day, September 15th, 1944. Morotai in the Dutch East Indies and Peleliu in the Palau islands. Results could not have been more different. The Army and Marines on Peleliu suffered grievously. It was the deadliest invasion of the Pacific war where the Army’s 81st “Wildcat” Division and the 1st Marine division were ground down by two months of insane combat on an island five miles long and scarcely a mile wide.

Morotai by contrast was secured by troops from the 32nd “Red Arrows” Divison. Morotai was like most of the islands the men of the Southwest Pacific had become familiar with, it was mountainous and covered with rain forest. The first day of the invasion had one casualty, a soldier killed by a falling limb. The MIS processed the few prisoners captured and began studying their documents. As was their experience life would be wet and miserable until they left for the Invasion of the Southern Phillipines on Luzon in January 1945.

Officers Quarters and Enlisted Quarters. Southwest Pacific 1944.

From Thomas Tsubota, a translator with Merrill’s Marauder in Burma, 1944 He said, “They had just stumbled across ten Japanese soldiers in a small jungle clearing, he says. “Boom,” he said, in a split second they killed them all. He described how his commander, Colonel Beach, called him over to inspect a photo album taken off one of the now dead Japanese soldiers

They looked through the album. Tsubota told Col. Beach there was nothing of military importance in it but as they came upon the last page of the album, there was a picture of a mother and a daughter.

Tsubota said Colonel Beach’s eyes got red, filled with tears and he said, “Thank you, Tom.”

While crying, Tsubota ended the interview by saying this is why he isn’t enthusiastic about talking about the war. Too painful. He doesn’t want to think about that sad moment. Tsubota is 96 years old at the time of the interview.

Dear Dona

Page 10.

Luzon, Phillipines to Okinawa in the Ryukyus Island, part of the Japanese Homeland.

Coming on January 25th, 2025

Cover Photo: MIS Boys interrogating a captured Imperial Japanese army officer, Peleliu island, Palau Group, October 1944

Michael Shannon is from Arroyo Grande, California. He grew up with the children from the concentration camps. He knew the fathers.

Dear Dona,

Page 6

Author: Michael Shannon.

Auckland, New Zealand. 1943 population, 1.642 million people with a revolving population of soldiers and Marines. The New Zealand government was very concerned about the Japanese because without the Americans to defend the island they were in trouble. You see, the Anzacs were in Italy, the Mediterranean and North Africa, as well as Japan in south-east Asia and other parts of the Pacific. They weren’t home and the islands, just like Australia were desperate for the Americans to help defend them. Japanese submarines were patrolling the waters between New Zealand and Australia. In 1942 the United States navy had just barely stopped the planned invasion of Port Moresby in New Guinea. The reason was its close proximity to both Australia and Asia. The Japanese viewed Port Moresby as a key point to launch aerial attacks on the northern part of Australia. They could have closed the sea lanes from the U S to Australia and New Zealand. Troops fighting to defend New Guinea, the Anzacs, Dutch and MacArthur’s undertrained, rag tag 32nd division from Wisconsin and Michigan were slugging it out with Japanese in the fetid, rainy jungle of the southeast of New Guinea trying to push the Japanese back along the Kokoda trail and down the Owen Stanley range toward the coast. Soldiers on both sides had to literally crawl on their hands and knees because the slopes were so steep and slippery from the constant rain. There was no more brutal fighting in WWII. Nisei translators later found Japanese diaries which describe starving soldiers butchering and eating the Australian dead. The Japanese were literally starved out.

Soldiers were granted time away from the ship in Auckland. It was a chance for the Americans to sample a culture quite different than their own. For the Nisei who were well acquainted with ethnic hatred it brought to mind some curious observations. The Kiwis’ didn’t consider the translators outsiders. Neither did they dislike the black support troops from the ship and ones stationed at the army camps ashore. This was a big difference from the way white Americans treated their fellow citizens. On the voyage over, great care was taken to segregate troops of color from their fellow soldiers. Contrary to what is written in history books, violence towards minorities was common in our military.

On June 12, 1942, five transport ships carrying US Army troops arrived in Waitematā Harbour in Auckland. This marked the beginning of the “American invasion” of New Zealand, which lasted until mid-1944. The New Zealanders were quickly disabused of their inherent like of their fellow allies.

US troops march down Queen Street, Auckland, 1942. New Zealand Herald Archives photo.

Between 15,000 and 45,000 American servicemen were stationed in New Zealand, mostly in camps in or near Auckland and Wellington.There were cultural differences between the Americans and New Zealanders. New Zealand women found the US servicemen to be handsome and polite, and they had more money than New Zealand soldiers. They were better dressed than the local troops and being young and very far from the moral strictures of home had few reasons to show anyone respect. Women of all kinds were “fair” game, the way they saw it. This led to romantic entanglements between American troops and New Zealand women. “Overpaid, oversexed and over here” was the watchword for the New Zealanders. The locals saw it as an “American invasion”. Many New Zealand soldiers resented the idea of relationships between New Zealanders and American soldiers, leading to tense relations between the two parties.

Another source of tension was US servicemen’s attitudes towards the Māori. White soldiers from the 31st “Dixie Division” from the south were not “comfortable” with Māori soldiers. The government published a guide book for US servicemen, titled “Meet New Zealand” which reminded the Americans that “the Maori today occupy a position in society socially and politically equal to that of any pakeha or white New Zealander”. The Prime Minister’s office said that New Zealanders should “be friendly and sympathetic towards the colored American troops, but remember that they are not accustomed in their own country to close and intimate relationships with white people. Anyone finding themselves in the company of both white and black American troops was advised to “avoid unpleasantness”. Quite the understatement.

During this time, hotel bars closed at 6 pm and masses of drunk soldiers were then ejected into the streets. This was known colloquially as the ‘six o’clock swill’. Around 6 pm on the evening of 3 April 1943, fighting broke out between US servicemen and New Zealand soldiers and civilians outside the Allied Services Club. The brawls spread to the ANA (Army, Navy, and Air Force) Club in Willis Street and then to Cuba Street and continued nonstop for hours. Civilian and military police attempted to break up the fights, but only finally subsided as the US soldiers left town on trains back to their camps. 6×6 army trucks returned the passed out drunk and those damaged by the shore patrol and the MPS. Courts Marshalls were ordered then cancelled for lack of any evidence, another understatement.

The Japanese also understood the value of propaganda. Japanese leaflet. 1943 US Army Archives

When your dad arrived with the other Nisei, the New Zealanders accepted them as equals but their own countrymen, far less so. Any thought by the translators that their service would reduce the racism of white troops was an unlikely dream. They had to be very careful.

A fight on 12 May 1945 in Cuba Street involved over 150 Māori and US servicemen. This fight was definitely racially motivated: Māori troops were angry at their treatment by the Americans, who tended to treat them the way they treated black Americans. Military reports stated that “Maoris from whom statements were taken allege they have been insulted by the Americans and have been told by Americans not to ride in the same tramcars, drink in the same bars, eat in the same cafes and that they should walk via back streets or step off the sidewalk when American soldiers approached. The Americans call them black curs an N*****s and have consistently insulted the Maori race. Imagine traveling halfway around the world only to find the same intolerance and hate as in your own home town. The only modifying thing was that the New Zealanders accepted both the Blacks and Japanese translators with no reservations. They were welcomed in New Zealand’s establishments and into their homes as well.

Because the MIS translators were considered so valuable, General MacArthur ordered them to be sent to Brisbane, Australia immediately. When they stepped off the ship in Brisbane, and were driven to army headquarters the first thing they were told was to avoid places where American soldiers hung around. Just like Auckland and Wellington, Brisbane had seen vicious riots on more than one occasionAmericans had worn out their welcome.

By late summer of 1943 the offending division had been moved to the front in New Guinea where they again failed to distinguish themselves in the vicious fighting on the Kokoda trail where the Imperial Japanese army had been pushed back over the Owen Stanley range of mountains by the Anzacs. At nearly 14,000 feet, the battles in the clouds as the news called it, the Aussies not only fought the Japanese but triple digit heat, little water, almost no food and what they did have had to be hauled up the nearly vertical mountains by the New Guinea natives who supported the Anzacs, the so called Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels. “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels” was the name given by Australian soldiers to Papua New Guinean water carriers who, during World War II, were recruited or forced into service to bring supplies up to the front and carry injured Australian troops down the Kokoda trail during the Campaign. Over the four arduous months, the Fuzzy Wuzzys helped secure an Australian victory by forming a human supply chain along the Kokoda Track, moving food, ammunition up and wounded soldiers down from the front lines. 625 Australian soldiers were killed during the Kokoda Campaign, and over 1,600 wounded. Additionally, in excess of 4,000 soldiers became casualties due to illness. More than 150 Papuans died as members of the Papuan Infantry Battalion or as carriers of critical supplies and wounded along the Kokoda Trail.

New Guinea auxiliaries helping an Australian soldier down from the Owen Stanley mountains. Australian War Museum photo.

the Australian and New Zealanders finally defeated what was to be Japan’s last attempt to invade Australia and cut the sea lanes from the United States. The battles now moved to the northern end of New Guinea. Port Moresby was secure and planning was underway for the next step up the island chain towards Japan itself.

MacArthur moved his headquarters from Brisbane to Port Moresby in New Guinea. Your dad and his other translators packed up and went with him. They were working seven days a week. Hundreds of thousands of diaries, letters home and military communications were being processed every week by the MIS translators. Rather, as you might imagine just a primarily local project, it had become necessary due to the volume of documents being found in caves, the bodies of dead Imperial troops and radio intercepts to establish a communication network that encompassed the men with MacArthur like your father and the cryptographers at Pearl Harbor, the language school at San Francisco’s Presidio and the school at Fort Snelling in Minnesota. A network was set up to handle the radio traffic between places and to provide air transport to move the thousands of crates of captured documents.

Leaving the comfortable billets in Brisbane, your father and his crew packed up and moved to the decidedly less cushy environs of Port Moresby, New Guinea. They would have to get used to the new arrangements. It would be a long time before they saw a solid roof over their heads or a decent shower. It would be canvas and cold water from here on out.

Tent 29. Camp Chelmer, Indoorooplily, Queensland, Australia. November 1943. Joe Iwataki photo

Dear Dona . Page 7 Coming December 27th.

Dear Dona,

Page 5

By Michael Shannon.

The group of sixteen translators from your dad’s class arrived by train at the siding in Pittsburg, California. Pittsburg was the major debarkation point on the west coast for those heading for the Pacific War Theater. After a week confined to barracks at camp Stoneman, Hilo and his fellow graduates found they would be leaving by ship in a few days. They could see the skyline of San Francisco shimmering under clear sky’s just across the bay but were not allowed to visit owing to the high commands orders that all Nisei be confined to base for their own safety. The danger from their fellow soldiers was real, particularly the Marines who were across the bay. To prepare Marines for what was coming all Japanese were brutally vilified in speech and print. Such indoctrination is common to all wars no matter the country. Propaganda yes, but no less dangerous especially to those who had not been exposed to combat yet. There had been several serious incidents where Nisei in uniform were assaulted by groups of soldiers and sailors. Feelings ran very high.

Camp George Stoneman, Pittsburg, California, 1943. National Archives

Stoneman was brand new, completed just two months before your dad arrived. The camp was named after George Stoneman*, a cavalry commander during the Civil War and later Governor of California. In addition to almost 346 barracks (63 man), 86 company administrative and storehouses, 8 infirmaries, and dozens of administrative buildings, the 2,500 acre camp held nine post exchanges, 14 recreation halls, 13 mess halls, a 24 hour shoe repair and tailoring business, one post office, a chapel and one stockade. Overall, the camp was a city unto itself. It had a fire department and observation tower, water reservoir, bakery, Red Cross station, meat cutting plant, library, parking lots and 31 miles of roads. For recreation, Stoneman boasted two gymnasiums, a baseball diamond, eight basketball courts, eight boxing rings and a swimming pool and bowling alley. Officer and enlisted clubs provided everything from reading rooms to spaghetti dinners. The camp also contained the largest telephone center of its day, with 75 phone booths and a bank of operators who could handle 2,000 long distance calls a day. Stoneman even had USO shows featuring stars such as Groucho Marx, Gary Moore, and Red Skelton. Lucille Ball once donned a swimming suit to dedicate an enlisted men’s club.

Camp Stoneman had a maximum capacity of 40,000 troops and at one time ran a payroll of a million dollars per month. Leaving camp to the docks where transport ships waited meant departing the camp at the California Ave. gate and marching down Harbor St. to and catch the ferry at Pittsburg landing. Many “Old Timers” recall the day when they would shine shoes, sell newspapers, round up burgers and and cokes in service to the troops to earn some coin. It is said that when the troops were departing or being “shipped out” they would toss their remaining coins or dollars to the local children as their was no longer any need for American currency where they were headed.

Camp Savage was pretty small by comparison and the Nisei soldiers must have been amazed. Mostly farm boys from California or fisherman’s sons and plantation workers from Hawaii, Stoneman dwarfed old Fort Bliss. The fort covered half the acreage of the entire Arroyo Grande valley and had forty times it’s population.

After a week the men were told to pack and be ready to catch a ferry across the bay to pier 45** where they would board for an unknown destination.

Foreground, pier 45, 1943. U S Naval vessels in background.

The Army and the Navy had chartered dozens of passenger ships from home fleets and foreign flagged companies. Operating out of San Francisco were several that had flown the company flags of the Dollar Line,*** American President Lines and the Matson Line. Famous luxury liners in the Hawaii trade such as the SS Lurline, Monterey, Matsonia, Maui and the Malolo were now being operated by the US Army Transport Service. These ships in particular, because of their size and speed were referred to as “The Monsters.” Just three of them, They traveled alone, rarely needing warships for protection as most naval vessels couldn’t match their speed. This was considered protection enough from Imperial Japanese submarines. They could also make the 6,725 nautical mile trip to Auckland, New Zealand without refueling. Thats where they were headed though only the Captain knew it. Everyone else was in the dark.

USAT Lurline pulling out of San Francisco, fully loaded with over 6,000 soldiers, sailors and Marines. US Heritage Command Photo. 1943

Steaming under the Golden Gate bridge and out past the Farallone Islands she left the treacherous Potato Patch to port and headed southwest. She picked up her escorts, three Fletcher class destroyers and the Cruiser USS Indianapolis. The officer of the watch rang up full ahead on the telegraph, the engine room lit off all the boilers, smoke poured from the stacks, bow wave arched higher and they headed for the sunset.

The Nisei found their quarters for the trip and were pleasantly surprised. They were to stay in two converted first class cabins on the promenade deck. A pre-war cabin for a trip from San Francisco to Honolulu cost $200.00 in 1940. ( $4,509.49 today ) The boys joked that they were getting a really good deal. They also felt lucky because they knew the berthing decks where the soldiers were stacked as much as six high in their pipe bunks breathing the odorous air, a mix of cigarette smoke, and dirty smelly clothes. The ships laundry was out of operation for the trip. There were too may passengers, so going on deck for some fresh air had to be done in shifts. Likewise chow. You stood in long lines for hours in order to eat. Almost as soon as the ship hit her first Pacific roller, the unbelievably foul smell of vomit began sluicing around the below decks. There were pails but they soon overflowed. Miserable doesn’t describe it. They were young though and adjusted as best they could. There was no where to escape anyhow.

At the beginning of the voyage the Nisei were restricted their cabins for fear that there might be trouble with the soldiers and the crew. Later it was thought that perhaps getting to know them was the better course of action. Everyone was notified of the decision and everyone was allowed to mingle. During the day the decks were completely covered by soldiers, mainly replacements for the 32nd, Red Arrow, Wisconsin National Guard, the 37th, Buckeye Division, Ohio National Guard, the 41st, The Sunshine Division from the states in the Pacific Northwest and the 23rd or Americal Division. All of them involved by this time in heavy fighting in New Guinea.

Each day the soldiers practiced with the bayonet, cleaned their rifles, sharpened knives and convinced themselves how tough they were. They averaged just about twenty years and their hubris came from being young and having almost no exposure to life outside the mostly rural areas they came from. Many had never seen a Japanese in their lives.

For the Nisei the release from their cabins turned out to be a mostly positive thing. As they got to know each other they found out how much alike they really were. A farm boy is a farm boy no matter his ancestry. In the trek north to Japan the soldiers would come to value very highly their new Nisei friends who would share all the hardships of combat with them and whose translation skills would save hundreds of lives.

Still they talked about the problems communicating directly with the enemy, in the language of one’s parents. The idea was incredibly fraught with personal feelings especially for the Kibei who had the greatest exposure with Japan proper. To some it presented difficult questions about identity and heritage. For many Japanese Americans, it was difficult to reconcile using the Japanese language for American victory when their dog tags bore the address of the camp back home in the United States where your parents were incarcerated. In many cases, the translators had had no opportunity to even visit families and the addresses that listed Manzanar or Tule Lake California, Gila River and Poston Arizona, Amache Colorado or Rowher, Arkansas must have caused pain every time they looked at them.

So here they were, a small contingent of specialized troops traveling with thousands of Caucasians whose suspicions and hatred was dangerous to them, whose families were locked behind barbed wire in concentration camps and whose President had written about his decision to intern Japanese Americans was consistent with Roosevelt’s long-time racial views. During the 1920s, for example, he had written articles in the Macon Telegraph opposing white-Japanese intermarriage for fostering “the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood” and praising California’s ban on land ownership by the first-generation Japanese. In 1936, while president, he privately wrote that, regarding contacts between Japanese sailors and the local Japanese American population in the event of war, “every Japanese citizen or non-citizen on the Island of Oahu or in California who meets these Japanese ships or has any connection with their officers or men should be secretly but definitely identified and his or her name placed on a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp.”

Imagine the confusion on the one hand and the desire to fight for a country that didn’t want you on the other. Like my father said when questioned about the issue, “You cannot understand it because you haven’t lived it.” And of course thats true as far as it goes. Today, we have far more documentation of those events than was possible during the war when the public was restricted to almost none.

Steaming day and night the group of ships headed southwest, zig zagging to reduce the chance of torpedo attack and on the seventh morning those on deck sighted Diamond Head. A soldier from Ohio turned to the Nisei next to him who was from Kaimuki, Oahu and asked if that was what Japan looked like to him, the Nisei replied “It looks like home to me.” As Bob Toyoda told the story years later he laughed at the confusion on the face of the Ohio boy who was going to war against a country he knew nothing about, not even where it was.

SS Mariposa, USAT enroute to Auckland New Zealand, July, 1943. Australian War Memorial photo****

Much to the dismay of the passengers, especially the translators from Hawai’i, the escorts turned to starboard and headed for Pearl Harbor but the Mariposa turned to port and picked up a compass bearing of 150 degrees south-southeast (SSE). It was going to be another long, long three weeks aboard.

Dona page 6

From the promenade deck, Hilo and the other translators could just make out the smudge on the horizon that they knew by now was Auckland, New Zealand. Six thousand seven hundred miles and a month at sea and no one aboard was any more anxious to get to shore than they were.

*General George Stoneman was a cavalry general in Grant’s army. He is mentioned in the song “The night they drove old Dixie down.” His name would have been well known to southern boys.

**Todays home of The San Francisco Maritime Museum and known as the Hyde Street Pier.

***The old Dollar Line owned by Robert Dollar has through mergers become the American President Line.

****This very likely the ship Hilo traveled on.

Cover Photo: SS Lurline in war paint leaving San Francisco for the southwest Pacific.

Michael Shannon is a writer from Arroyo Grande California.

Dear Dona

Written by Michael Shannon

Page Four

Unlike the American military where mail was censored and journals and diaries forbidden the Japanese Imperial Army thought the differences in language would make ordinary Japanese as indecipherable as any code to an American reader. The head instructors at the MILS schoolalso knew that Japanese soldiers were brutalized by their superiors and would likely be resistant to the treatment the British were using on captured Afrika Corps German troops where violence and intimidation were routinely used to coerce confession and information. As many of the instructors had lived in Japan for extended periods of time they knew the Japanese were generally very kind and the spirit of co-operation was instilled in them from birth. The culture of Japan was bound to duty to the Emperor and higher authority, but they also believed that force would not be enough to get prisoners to break down. Instead the language program not only include reading a writing and the general makeup of the Japanese soldiers battlefield strategy and tactics but a heavy emphasis was put on Japanese society, geography and religious beliefs. The idea was to draw a picture of the individual soldier in an attempt to establish rapport with him. They planners knew that they would resist brutality because that was a soldiers daily life in the Imperial Army. Instead a cautionary approach was adopted where kindness and not only assurances of kind treatment but whenever possible knowing about the persons home. Differences in prefecture, religion, the social mores of a particular part of Japan helped build trust between the interrogator and the prisoner.

American government sponsored propaganda was designed to present the enemy as a monolithic structure, all Japanese being of the same mind. Depictions of the Japanese were as vile and hateful as the propagandists could make them. It was impressed upon the American public that they needed to be eradicated. This conveniently swept under the rug the fact that, just like the US they were a diverse people with many different beliefs. Led by a military dictatorship whose war aims were no less than domination of the entirety of east and Southeast Asia.

The two largest religions were Shintoism, the official state religion and Bhuddism which originally came from China and was characterized as a forign religion. Various western religions were also represented particularly the Methodists. In 1940, Christians in Japan united in a declaration of church unity after the Religious Organizations Law required all Protestant churches to merge into one.

Japan had religious freedom during World War II and there was separation of church and state. It was not a theocracy. It is correct to say that most religious people were pro-war at the time.

During the pre-1945 period, Japan moved into political totalitarianism, ultranationalism, and fascism culminating in Japan’s invasion of Chinese Manchuria in 1931. This was part of an overall global period of social upheavals and conflicts.

Regardless of the political reality the instructors knew that the average Imperial Japanese soldier would have far less interest in politics and much more allegiance to his family, friends and the local village life. All of these observations dictated a much more friendly and kind approach than the Germans were getting from the British. Establishing a connection between the Nisei interpreter and the prisoner was an important part of the curriculum at Camp Savage.

The very first class which started on June 1, 1942 was made up of 200 enlisted men, 193 Nisei and 7 Caucasians. The entire class, which had been moved from the Presidio was made up of soldiers who had already enlisted before the war and were considered regular army. Their studies had begun in San Francisco and it wasn’t until after order 9066 was signed in February of ’42 that they moved east.

There were three types of student classification. There were Caucasians who had studied abroad or attended universities where they studied Japanese The majority were Nisei, American born citizens who had varying degrees of language experience. Some had attended locally run Japanese schools which they attended after regular public school classes and came from homes where the Japanese was spoken. The third classification were the Kibei, A subset of Nisei who spent a significant part of their youth in Japan, usually for education, and then returned to the U.S. They ranged from students who had gone to elementary school, many from Japanese high schools and some University students. The Kibei were terrific asset to the MIS because of their familiarity with Japanese culture at all levels.

The terms the Japanese used to describe what generation they were from were introduced to Western American cultural language in the late thirties. Hilo’s immigrant parents were referred to as Issei or First Generation. The 2nd generation like Hilo and his brother were Nisei or 2nd generation. Sansei were their children, the ones I went through school with.

Families wealthy enough to send children to Japan were relatively uncommon. Kibei (帰米, literally “go home to America”) was a term often used in the 1930’s and 40s to describe Japanese Americans born in the United States who were studying in or had studied in Japan. Many Kibei got trapped in Japan when war broke out between Japan and the U.S. In a sense, they became stateless because they were Americans living in Japan, labeled as the “enemy” in both.

The Kibei were the foundation blocks of the school at Camp Savage. Because the service would need soldiers to read fluently, translate to careful english, have some background in Japanese cultural, both civilian and military classes were on educating each student in a curriculum that matched both his background, Nisei or Kibei, and the specialty he was being trained for. Graduates would operate in teams where each member had one of the key components they studied at Savage.

Savage was an apt description for both the curriculum and the school. Foremost in their minds must have been the consequences they likely faced if they failed. The military is essentially faceless. You have a serial number because thats how you are identified. Transfers aren’t exactly blind but primarily rely on number that are needed here or there. For the Nisei soldiers at camp Savage, that meant that failure meant transfer back to your original unit. In Summer of 1943, nearly all Nisei in the various units of the army were transferred to the 100th Infantry Regiment, a mostly Hawaiian unit made up from the Hawaii National Guard. Trained in Mississippi and Wisconsin they shipped out to Italy in September of 1943 and were immediately thrown into the battle for Salerno in southern Italy near Naples. They spent the next eight months in nearly constant combat in some of the most vicious fighting of WWII. Every Nisei at Savage knew of this and what the price of failure would be, immediate transfer to the 100th as a replacement. They weren’t cowards, far from it, but they also understood the reality.

Your father lived in one of those tarpaper shacks for six months. I’m sure he had his turn rolling out of his cot at 4:30 am and priming the stove. He may have been lucky in the placement of his bunk, next to the little coal stove would have been as good as it got. Having a bunk on the end of the row would not be the best place to be in Minnesotas winter. Tarred paper is not among the greatest insulators. In fact it dwells pretty near the bottom. You can poke a pencil through it with no effort. Those shacks were drafty and pretty close to sleeping out of doors. In the morning they must have smelled. A confection of bad breath, farts, nearly dead hunks of coal giving off a noxious vapor and the clinging smell of cigarettes and uniforms they were not able to keep clean. Hanging just below the rafters a white cloud of condensed vapor from the mens breathing which would melt a drip as the room and the day heated. Soldiers had to do their own laundry, in tubs and basins outdoors with rough alkaline soap. Avoiding that chore would have been paramount.

Barracks at Camp Savage with stoves. US Army photo. 1943

Being young and soldiers they would have laughed at their predicament and blamed the army in no uncertain terms. Grousing soldiers have alway found the military to be the villain. SNAFU* was the word in WWII.

The classrooms were a better place to be. Semi-permanent buildings, well heated and clean would have been a relief. Luckily student were relieved of all the most basic duties that a soldier normally carried out. There was no drilling or inspections, no standing post in the middle of the night, all the little annoying things that the regular private has to put up with. The Army was desperate to prepare them for their combat jobs and made sure they had no more distractions than absolutely necessary.

After six months in the classroom, class C-10 at Camp Savage walked out of the classroom for the last time and stood in front of one of the remaining log buildings and stood for a class picture. Everyone smiling and glad to be through the grinding curriculum.

1942 1943 Camp Savage MIS Niseis. Your fathers class.

Hilo received a promotion to Tech five, an enlisted rank slightly below Corporal.** Like the others, he walked back to his hutment to open his official orders. He would have opened the manila envelope with the printed label, Official, Department of the Army and like all soldiers held his breath while he slid the paperwork out. Along with his service record was a single page warning him that he was now a holder of a Top Secret Clearance and was liable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Official Secrets Act not to share or divulge any information as to his assignment or duty station under penalty of law.

Every MIS soldier carried a Secret designation. Information on the school and its graduates, their purpose was to be a closely held secret. This designation was to be enforced for a period of fifty years after WWII. The Military was concerned about the fact that they had interpreters in the Pacific theater whose importance could not be overstated.

Hilo’s parents who were housed at the Gila River, Arizona concentration camp had been visited by the FBI. Every MIS graduate had been thoroughly vetted before they were ordered overseas. This must have been very confusing to Hirokuni and Ito who would have been interrogated by two agents who gave them no information at all about the reason. Hilo wasn’t even mentioned during the questioning. The were and would remain completely ignorant of the reason until the war was over.

The second sheet of paper stated his destination; future duty station and was clipped to a set of official orders and travel vouchers. He was to report to Army headquarters in Oakland where he would travel by available transport to the Southwest Pacific Theater of Operations immediately. There would be no leave as Nisei soldiers were not yet allowed to enter the restricted zone to see family.*** Censorship rules meant that he could not tell them his destination just that he was being ordered overseas.

MIS interpreter PFC Geo Hara leaving for the Pacific, 1943. Densho Archive photo

Hilo himself wouldn’t have known his actual destination. He wouldn’t find out until his ship passed Hawaii so sensitive was military command. Some of the instructors at Savage were returnees and would have shared general information but not too much. He could have likely guessed that it would have been the Western Theater of Operations under General MacArthur but where? He was left to wonder.

Page Five coming Saturday November 23rd.

Destination, Southwest Pacific theater of operations and the real war.

Notes on text:

*SNAFU, Situation Normal, All f****d Up.

**The Army forbid the Nisei commissioned rank until late in the war. All MIS personnel were enlisted or noncommissioned rank.

*** Restrictions on visitation were lifted for servicemen in late 1943.

Links to other chapters in the series.

Page one: https://wordpress.com/post/atthetable2015.com/12268

Page two: https://wordpress.com/post/atthetable2015.com/12861

Page three: https://wordpress.com/post/atthetable2015.com/12872

Michael Shannon is a writer living in the Central Coast of California. He went to school with many children, whose parents were survivors of the camps in his little farming community of Arroyo Grande, California..

	Erma Kendrick on Play a Waltz from 1910
	Debby Cardinali on SAILING
	Debby Cardinali on SAILING
	georgekastner on A Walk In The Yard.
	Gregory Pisano on 442nd RCT Erased.

	Erma Kendrick on Play a Waltz from 1910
	Debby Cardinali on SAILING
	Debby Cardinali on SAILING
	georgekastner on A Walk In The Yard.
	Gregory Pisano on 442nd RCT Erased.

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