My story for the interested disinterested people I met was that I was a graphic arts student. I was attending school at one of the local private concerns on the government veterans programs, commonly called the G.I. bill. I even went so far as to buy a drafting board; sketch pads; pencils; pastel and water colors; several quality portrait sketches; and an assortment of oil paints that set the company back a lot of money. Every morning I reported to the school and participated in class work. In the afternoons, armed with my sketchpads and pencils I motored to a vantage point and sketched the harbor with its changing alignment of ships. Twice in one month, I saw a treasure ship; one of the Japanese super’s. Each one of these was suspected of carrying some cargo we were interested in. We quickly ruled out the shipping line as being in collusion with the Yakuza. But some of the personnel were involved with the bringing in of drugs. And Mrs. Frankl had to be aware of this.
The Japanese had an established protocol of using opium as a military weapon. Before they invaded Manchuria and after, they plied the population with cheap easy to acquire opium, heroin and hashish–they also used these drugs to destroy the resolve of the Chinese. They left a trail of subservient addicts from one end of Asia to the other. Mr. Hoover and General Donovan believed they planned to use the same tactic on us. This thinking was confirmed by my report to Mr. Hoover. I told him Aokie said this would happen after they lost the War, regardless of any armistice, treaty or promise they might make with us. He called it the Kempeitai legacy, to be left to the Americans who had the audacity and arrogance to believe they had conquered the Samari thinking Kempeitai.
This then was the reason for the special task force. Once the super-cargo ships went into production, both the new CIA and the old FBI swung into action. And it wasn’t to be temporary. As Frank, had explained to me, this smuggling problem was going to require ongoing attention.
********
My new career goal then was to spend time in the field and then to move to headquarters where the more outstanding agents gravitated. At that point in ones career, it was possible for a stable home life, a permanent home, wife and children.
I spent a lot of time day dreaming and meditating about this. It was my favorite after hours subject for thinking and planning. And at the center of it all was Joyce. Frank had told me it was possible, and it didn’t take much to convince me.
I have to tell you that I didn’t exactly do what Frank told me to do. That is I did contact Joyce without resurrecting her. It was our secret for a long time. But I couldn’t let her sit up there languishing and wondering what was going to happen. She was looking at a long prison sentence and it must have been weighing heavily on her mind.
The first thing I did was write her a letter. I didn’t know whether they would give it to her or if they had orders to send it back. She acknowledged receipt and thanked me. She also said she was lonesome, almost the same thing she told me when I contacted her the first time on the island.
In the second letter we talked about that and how extraordinary it was. And then again in the letter that followed. Each time, I became more interested and determined to see her–and I told her so. But I couldn’t get away. I sent her my picture and more letters. We wrote about how I met her on the island. She was fascinated, and she told me she was deep into the reading and studying of both Emerson and Coleridge.
There is no doubt about it; I was falling more and more in love with her. And she was just as warm as I first concluded she was. That period in my life turned out to be one of the best. If I was ever living inside my mind as Coleridge had been it was now. I was happy, and she told me she was as well. She told me life had completely changed for her. She also told me she understood why I couldn’t get away. She told me she could live with things as they were and not to do anything foolish that would jeopardize the case against Mrs. Frankl. When I told here about Mrs. Frankl plan to take her company and to keep her in prison, she was incensed. That is about as nice a way as I can think to put it.
Chapter 24
I stumbled on it by accident. It really had nothing to do with any surveillance on my part. I had spent the better part of a week watching the unloading and deck activity of the third Matsuii liner I had seen. I became bored and went down to the docks to get a closer look. I locked my motor scooter out of the way after buying a genuine surplus navy pea coat and bell bottomed dungarees from a surplus outlet.
Within a couple of months after the War stopped, the government set up a plan to sell off as much of the accumulated material as they could for the best price they could get. Just about anybody could go into business if they wanted to. About all they had to do was contact somebody by the name of the Fuller Company. This New York Company handled most of the large construction sites, and maybe the smaller textile things as well. All I know is there were many outlets for clothes as well as office paraphernalia and the like.
I topped off my salty ensemble with a black deck cap, pulled down over my ears. All I knew about any of this comes from the movies The Sea Wolf, and Destination Tokyo. Both of these features starred John Garfield. Nobody wore a pea coat like John Garfield. With his hands in his coat pockets and his perennial brooding look, he was the quintessential “swabbi” beached and down on his luck. He was looking for a berth on any tramp steamer sailing between Halifax and Portuguese Macau.
I emulated John Garfield, the proverbial cigarette dangling from my lips. With my head cocked to keep the smoke from my eyes, I could pass for a sea bum anyplace.
I ordered a brew just to have something to do. As I said it was a happening. The joint I had walked into is the same one I watched a Japanese captain enter about a dozen yards away. I crowded closer into the leather torn seat of the nearest booth to the back wall, the one closest to the pay phone.
I recognized him from off the Matsuii Maru, the same super I had been watching for days. And when he walked into the back room as though he had been there before, I became suspicious and called my contact. I explained what I had seen. And when he asked me how I could identify this officer, I recognized the innuendo in his voice. He was challenging me. How did I know, the inference being that they all looked alike. But not to me they didn’t. Maybe to him and most occidentals they did, but not to me. Without further debate, I ordered him to get some trained operators on the site. When the captain came out, I wanted him tailed by two or three alternating agents. I didn’t want him to recognize me if he had been casing the joint and saw me come in. Standard movie-going spy picture protocol, as far as I was concerned.
I never saw them if they did in fact show up. But then I wasn’t supposed to. I waited through another Schlitz before I lit another cigarette. Pulling my cap further down on my ears against the incoming fog, and with my large collar turned-up to cover my neck, l lowered my head and eyes a la Garfield. But before I did, I glanced around furtively and then schlepped passed the front of the bar and into the night.
I concluded on the spot that much of spying consisted of putting on a front and play-acting. That’s why guys like John Garfield were so believable. Dress them up and give them the proverbial cigarette as a prop and they became anybody you wanted them to be. In my case, I was just another seaman looking for a birth, any birth not captained by Jack London’s infamous Wolf Larsen.
My job was done. I never knew what happened that was left to others. I did get a letter of commendation, signed by General Donovan recognizing me for “exemplary action and display of initiative.” He meant that I had a hunch and didn’t screw around with the built in “headwind” on the other end of the telephone. This is the kind of person they were looking for, and this operation and a couple of others got me the promotion I was looking for.
This and two or three others like it also gave the Attorney General the evidence he needed to make the case against two of the major Japanese Shogan’s bent on taking over the docks and the opium trade in California. With the help and direction of the Japanese National Police Agency, they were given long terms in a Ja
panese prison.
Following my sojourn in San Pedro that lasted only a few months, I was reassigned to Washington. I was told my job would be in a branch of the new Central Intelligence Agency. But I hadn't been there long when it became obvious I was there to testify against Mrs. Frankl. That was all right with me, especially when it gave me a chance to see Joyce. I had gotten in touch with Frank the gardener and found out where she was. I told him I had been writing her letters and was now going to see her. He didn't say I shouldn't so I went. Not once but many times.
Mrs. Frankl was likewise convicted. She was charged by a federal grand jury of disrupting international commerce, illegal importing of controlled substances, the smuggling of illegal immigrants, and trafficking in Asian women for purposes of prostitution. All of which ended in the settling of a trust suit in the favor of Joyce Frankl. As part of this legal procedure, Joyce was given a new trial and new evidence presented resulted in a setting aside of her former conviction. She received an apology from the court and was freed, as is the custom.
I was waiting. I had been waiting for a long time. Unafraid of the Yakuza now for a year or so, I had made it a point to introduce myself as a friend of her husband on my first of many visits to the prison. She knew who I was when first we met. No need to ask her how she knew.
Joyce was a beautiful woman. My good friend Navy Lieutenant Harry Frankl had impeccable taste, just as I knew he would.
She was about to have dozens of eligible suitors, much more eligible than I am. But I had the inside track. I knew it and so did Joyce. Neither Emerson nor Coleridge would have asked how she knew.
Author’s Note
Mr. Hoover did know about the giant submarines. In fact, our navy was most interested in keeping much of the technology from the Soviets in anticipation of what came to be called the “Cold War.”
The Tanaka Memorial known as the Greater East Asiatic Co-prosperity sphere was not a work of fiction. It did in fact become the national war plan that led to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese Secret Military Police were known as the Kempeitai. They had a notorious background of murder and rape. Tens of thousands of prisoners and civilians were systematically murdered raped and tortured.
Wikipedia, quoting a number of official sources of both the United States and Australia, documents numerous acts of vivisection and cannibalism. One such atrocity involved the downed crew of Lieutenant Marvin Watkins of the 29th Bomb Group. They were transported to the Anatomy Department of Kyushu University where they were systematically dismembered in ongoing medical experiments. Thousands of similar acts were committed on Chinese prisoners without anesthesia in the belief that anesthesia would spoil the outcome of the experiments. According to this same source, Emperor Hirohito signed authorization documents for the gas attacks on Chinese soldiers, using phosgene and other forbidden World War I gases. In most of the convictions for atrocities, including those documented by Wikipedia, where courts handed down death sentences, General MacArthur either commuted the sentence and/or drastically reduced it. The exception to this is the hangings of key officers at the head of the Japanese government.
The character of Shig or Shigamitsu was not a fictional person. He was well known to the author when the author was a boy. The statements he made were also non-fiction, but the author has no way of knowing if they were true or not.
The author did spend his younger years as neighbors to several Japanese farmers. Incidents involving them and other Japanese born in this country are true and no animosity toward them is implied or should be insinuated.
Wikipedia is used here for atrocity documentation because it is believed to be the most reliable. Anybody wanting to read the full scope of the subject should consult this source. Only a small part of the outrage, and the role the Mikado and General MacArthur played in this most infamous time in history, is set forth in this book. A more thorough treatment of the subject can be found in the document quoted, which can be read via the Internet.
About the Author
Darrell Egbert was born in Layton, Utah, in 1925. He learned to read and write in a three-room schoolhouse, located in a mining town in the Oquirrah Mountains of Utah. He studied more serious writing while at the Universities of Nevada and Utah, and the art of “readable writing” while at the Air University in Montgomery, Alabama.
Like most young boys, he built model airplanes and dreamed of becoming a military pilot. His dream became reality, when, at the age of seventeen, he was accepted into the Army Air Corps. Soon after his eighteenth birthday, he was called to active duty where he spent the next two years of the War as an Aviation Cadet. He graduated from twin-engine school as a Flight Officer and first pilot of a medium bomber just as the atom bomb ended the War.
Upon graduating from the University of Utah, he applied for active duty, which coincided with America’s entry into the Korean War. He spent most of his career until retirement in 1969 in staff positions involving the maintenance of bombers and missiles, both air to ground and inter-continental. His overseas assignments included such diverse places as French Morocco and Thule, Greenland. At Thule, he took a ground part in special photoreconnaissance missions, which helped bring about the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
He began writing for publication when his first historical novel came to the attention of Barnes and Nobel.
Shortly after leaving the 44th Bomb Wing he met and married Miss Savannah of the Miss Georgia Beauty Pageant. Lieutenant Colonel Egbert and Betty, his bride of 57 years, are retired and live with their dog in Washington, Utah. As he is fond of saying, “I never had it so good”
Somewhere West of Fiji Page 21
