Infamy (20 page)

There was, of course, both hostility and confusion about the linguists, especially at the beginning. The first time Admiral William Halsey encountered Nisei, two of them, they were interrogating six Imperial Japanese pilots, badly burned when they were shot down by navy planes. They got no information. The two pilots who could talk kept repeating, “Kill me, please kill me.”

“Goddamn you bastards,” Halsey roared, not at the pilots but the interrogators. “What the hell did the government send you to school for?” Later the admiral would change his mind when Nisei intercepting Japanese messages helped guide the navy into some of the greatest sea victories in history. The MIS translators and interpreters were helped by the fact that the Imperial Japanese leaders believed their language was impenetrable. The Japanese military often used rather simple coding, accounting for two critical American intelligence achievements in the Pacific. On April 4, 1943, a Nisei, Harold Fudenna, intercepted a coded radio message detailing the flight plans of the Japanese Pacific commander Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the man who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor. In a bomber escorted by six A6M Zeros, fighter planes, Yamamoto was touring Japanese bases. His plane was attacked by eighteen American P-38s and shot down over Bougainville. Then, almost exactly a year later, his successor, Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome, was killed when his plane ran into a tropical storm and crashed near the Philippines. Local fishermen found a waterproof container in the water near the crash site and turned it over to Americans. The box, which contained the plans for Operation Z, the last major operation planned by the Japanese, was taken to Australia by submarine, where it was decoded and translated by two American Nisei. They were both
Kibei
, Yoshikazu Yamada and George “Sankey” Yamashiro, working at the Allied Translator Interpreter Section headquarters in Brisbane. Two months later, using the translated plans, American ships and planes destroyed much of Japan’s dwindling navy and air force in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Three Japanese aircraft carriers were destroyed in the battle as well as more than six hundred planes in what became known as the “Marianas Turkey Shoot.” The U.S. Navy lost just twenty-three navy Hellcat fighters.

On the islands as the Allies moved toward Japan in one bloody battle after another, the MIS men learned tricks of their new trade. First, they needed captives and Japanese soldiers usually preferred death to surrender, but that began to change some when Nisei using megaphones promised them, in their own language, fair treatment as prisoners. Captured Japanese were obviously worth more alive than dead and word got around that the Americans were no longer shooting prisoners, as they had often done early in the war. The interrogators also learned, or knew from their own American Japanese families, that the key to dealing with the enemy was “honor” and “shame.” One trick that worked was telling prisoners, in the most friendly way, that the Americans would ask the International Red Cross to inform their families back in Japan that they had been captured and were safe. That was the last thing some prisoners wanted—they were afraid of the shame that would envelop their families—and they began to talk about their units and battle plans.

Among the most valuable and dangerous work the MIS men did was “cave flushing.” Thousands of Japanese soldiers and civilians hid deep in lava caves when Americans invaded one island after another on their route to Japan. Nisei volunteered to climb into the caves to try to talk the Japanese into giving up and coming out of the deep darkness. One flusher in Saipan, Corporal Bob Kubo, armed only with a hidden pistol, climbed down a rope and after hours of conversation persuaded 122 civilians and nine Japanese soldiers, trained and conditioned to die before surrendering, to climb out of the cave with him. It was a scene unimaginable to most Americans. As many of his comrades did, Kubo shared boiled rice with the Japanese soldiers, talking about home and family until they agreed to leave their weapons and come out. Most of the flushers were sergeants and corporals; Japanese privates bowed to them or to their rank as they entered the caves.

The other options, there and elsewhere, were to simply block the cave entrances or use flamethrowers to kill anyone inside, including civilians.

One irony was that the most desirable MIS recruits were
Kibei
, the young Americans educated in Japan who not only spoke the best Japanese but also better understood the thinking and culture of the Imperial soldiers they interrogated. Dillon Myer, the WRA director, later wrote that he overheard a conversation between two young men in a camp saying, “It’s only the damned
Kibei
who can get into this man’s army.”

One of the
Kibei
, Kenny Yasui, who had gone to school in Tokyo, posed as an Imperial Japanese colonel and ordered sixteen Japanese soldiers to surrender—and they did. Takejiro Higa, a
Kibei
educated in Okinawa, was interrogating captured Japanese soldiers when he looked up and spotted two of his seventh grade classmates. “Goddamn it. You don’t recognize an old classmate?” Higa said. Suddenly he began to cry and so did the two Japanese soldiers.

He wasn’t the only one. Many of the MIS Japanese encountered old friends, teachers, and, most of all, relatives. The interpreters often asked for permission to visit prison camps holding Imperial soldiers to look for family members.

Staff Sergeant Roy Matsumoto, whose parents were incarcerated at Jerome, Arkansas, served in Burma and was noted for crawling into no-man’s-land between American and Japanese troops at night and listening to the Japanese make their plans for the next day. On one occasion, he came back to American lines and supervised the setting up of a machine-gun ambush at the point he heard the enemy planned to attack. When the enemy came at 3:00 a.m., they were immediately pinned down by the machine-gun fire. Matsumoto, pretending he was a Japanese colonel, jumped up and screamed “
Susume
!”—Advance!—and the Japanese did, right into the American guns.

On the tiny island of Myitkyina, Sergeant Grant Jiro Hirabayashi called G-2 (Intelligence) one morning to say, “Captain, you’re not going to believe this, but I’ve got about twenty females, I think Korean, and I need help.” They were “comfort women” forced to sexually service Japanese soldiers. They were freed and flown out to India—after a going-away party where they sang Korean folk songs to a handful of Nisei from Hawaii.

After the war, Major General Charles Willoughby, General MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, said of the work of the Nisei linguists, “Never before in history did an army know so much concerning its enemy prior to actual engagement, as the American army during the Pacific campaigns. Those interpreters and translators saved over a million lives and two years.”

*   *   *

Ben Kuroki went to war in North Africa. The Red Ass was one of hundreds of American planes providing air support for the desert battles in North Africa between the troops of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and Germany’s Marshal Erwin Rommel. By then the farm boy from Nebraska was a top gunner with a nickname, “Most Honorable Son.” The crew was based near the city of Oran in Algeria. Kuroki’s first combat mission had been over the port of Bizerte in Tunisia on December 13, 1942, bombing German troops and equipment coming in from Italy across the Mediterranean.

Over Bizerte, black puffs of flak, the deadly chunks of metal scattered from antiaircraft guns, surrounded the B-24s. The Red Ass was one of the planes hit; flak from behind almost beheaded the nineteen-year-old tail gunner Roy Dawley. The plane and crew flew nine more missions—Kuroki took over as tail gunner, quietly vomiting on each run—bombing German installations on both sides of the Mediterranean. They served over Tunis, Bizerte again, Palermo in Sicily, Messina, and Naples. Before the first Italian raid, Kuroki said to the waist gunner Joe Fori, “Looks like we’re going to knock spaghetti out of your ancestors.”

“Yeah?” said Fori, an Italian American. “Wait’ll we get to the Pacific and knock the rice out of your most dishonorable ancestors.”

After the last Italian run, the B-24 was scheduled to go back to its base in England. It didn’t make it. The Red Ass was lost in the clouds, the navigator could not figure out where they were, and the plane ran out of gas. The pilot Lieutenant Jake Epting spotted an opening in the clouds and dove through, landing somewhere in the desert. No one was injured and the men were jumping up and down, laughing, until they saw Arab tribesmen on camels coming over the dunes, waving guns and spears, surrounding the crew and their plane. They seemed distinctly unfriendly. Then the cavalry came over the hill to rescue the Americans. It was the Spanish cavalry. The Americans had come down in Spanish Morocco. Spain was a neutral country, bound by international law to detain them for the duration of the war.

The crew was taken to a Spanish air force base where they were held in a barracks watched by armed guards. After a few days, Kuroki told Epting he wanted to try to escape. He got the idea that if he wrapped himself in a blanket and wrapped a white shirt around his head, like a turban, he could pass himself off as an Arab. Fori asked him why he was so anxious to escape and Kuroki said that in California they were holding Japanese Americans in concentration camps and it was his job to prove their loyalty to the United States. He got out of the camp all right, then stumbled along in a heavy rain, falling into ditches and trenches. He was free—for about thirty-six hours. Local Arabs and then Spanish soldiers spotted him and he ended up in a cell with a dozen other men, local crooks. After a night in jail and hours of incoherent questioning in three languages, he was taken back to the Spanish air base.

The next day, he and the whole Red Ass crew were loaded into a German Junkers Ju 52 and flown to an airstrip near Alhama, Spain, a small town with a small, neat hotel. Suddenly they were being treated as guests. The beds had clean, starched sheets, the food was hot and so was the water in the bathtubs, and two maids, sisters, Carmen and Rosa Tomas, were fascinated by Kuroki. They had never before seen anyone who looked like him. There were twenty-one other “internees” in the hotel, mostly pilots, American, British, and two from New Zealand. A tailor from the town came by to make the latest American guests better suits than they ever wore back home. Their new friends told them that American or British diplomats came around every couple of weeks with money and cigarettes for the Spaniards—and were allowed to take away a couple of men to Gibraltar, then usually on to London.

The Air Corps was always determined to get detained airmen back into service—expensively trained crews were being killed or captured by the hundreds, month after month—and after three months the United States embassy in Madrid negotiated the release of the Red Ass crew.

The rumor was that the exchange rate for each man was a new Buick for Spanish officials in Madrid. True or not, Epting’s crew, including Kuroki, had a new B-24 waiting in England. This one they named Tupelo Lass. They had learned that hometown newspapers would not print the name Red Ass. Now they named the B-24 after Lieutenant Epting’s hometown of Tupelo, Mississippi.

Tupelo Lass and the rest of the Ninety-Third Group were sent from England back to North Africa one more time, but never told exactly why—except that they would be training for a secret mission. Day after day, the group flew low-level flights in formation, dropping dummy bombs on dummy targets. There was no room for error when screaming along at top speed ten feet above the desert—and more than one B-24 landed with bomb doors torn off and cradled in palm trees.

*   *   *

The Pearl Harbor day troubles in Manzanar and other camps in December of 1942 brought the evacuation and the camps back into the news—and, predictably, politicians reacted quickly. In Washington, Senator A. B. “Happy” Chandler of Kentucky formed a special investigative committee that held hearings in the Capitol and then went on a slapdash “fact-finding” tour of the relocation camps. With his wife in tow, he spent a couple of hours at each of six locations. At Manzanar, the camp director, Ralph Merritt, accompanied the Chandlers and sent a written report to Dillon Myer saying, “Mrs. Chandler took the opportunity to express her very vigorous opinion about all Japanese, which was summarized by the expression that they should be put on shipboard and be dumped in the ocean … and to various people she spoke vigorously against the whole WRA policy, mentioning the cost to taxpayers.”

At the same time, Isamu Noguchi, the sculptor, back home in New York, wrote of the troubles in the camps in the February 1, 1943, issue of the
New Republic
, saying:

I had been in Poston for a short time before the disturbance there, and I am afraid I must report that the newspaper interpretation of it—the rioters were merely pro-Axis elements—was oversimplified. Pro-Japanese sentiment and a hoodlum element in the center played a part in the trouble. But the situation of which the troublemakers took advantage was produced by other causes, chiefly two: the great sense of frustration, which all members of the camps feel; and the great cleavage between the first generation and the second generation, which has the American-born, who cooperate with the authorities, the subject of attack.… It must be remembered that these 110,000 people are presumably in the camps because they were unable to find places to go, voluntarily, before the mass-evacuation order was issued. They should not be confused with the 1,974 suspect enemy aliens in internment camps.

Methodist bishop E. Stanley Jones, a famous missionary, visited five of the relocation camps and wrote about the experience in
Christian Century
magazine.

Their spirits are unbroken. They took the pledge of allegiance to the flag at a high school assembly, and my voice broke as I joined with in the promise of loyalty “to one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Liberty and justice for all—how could they say it? But they did and they meant it. Their faith in democracy is intact. Their faith in God holds too, in spite of everything.