Infamy

by Richard Reeves

  Here are but a few of the comments to my suggestion that they cooperate in large numbers to go out and harvest the beet crop: “Why should I work for people who hate me because I am an American born of Japanese parents?” “We are not good enough to be accepted as American citizens, so why should we help Americans?” “They have branded us as traitors—well, if that is the way they want to think about us, let it be that way.”

  One of the young men there told him, “Just one year in this camp and we will all be bums.”

  6

  UNCLE SAM, FINALLY, WANTS YOU

  NISEI ENLISTMENT: JANUARY 29, 1943

  At the beginning of 1943, the closed world of the imprisoned young Nisei changed completely. On January 29, 1943, Secretary of War Stimson issued a press release in Washington that began: “It is the inherent right of every citizen, regardless of ancestry, to bear arms in the Nation’s battle. When obstacles to the free expression of that right are imposed, they should be removed as soon as humanly possible.”

  Four days later, President Roosevelt declared, in an official letter to Stimson, “The principle on which this country was founded and by which it has always been governed is that Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is not and never was a matter of race or ancestry.”

  Wonderful words, at last. But all they meant was that Nisei in the camps could enlist in the army (not the navy). But first, they would be required to complete a military form called “Statement of United States Citizen of Japanese Ancestry.” A loyalty oath. The key questions in the army form were:

  27. Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty or wherever ordered?

  28. Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any and all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese emperor, to any other foreign government power or organization?

  Dillon Myer of the WRA, who was determined to speed up the closing of the relocation camps, quickly realized that the form, with slightly altered wording, could be used to facilitate the release of camp residents too old or too young to serve in the military. The WRA began to print its own forms called “Application for Leave Clearance” and required all evacuees to declare their loyalty. The idea, in his mind, was to define “loyals” and “disloyals” and then separate them and allow “loyals” to leave the camps—as long as they did not try to go to the West Coast.

  The War Department, pushed by Deputy Secretary McCloy, who was in the process of changing sides in Washington arguments, realized as early as mid-1942 that the internment had been a mistake. The notion of recruiting Japanese American soldiers from the camps had been debated, secretly, in the War Department for months, with General DeWitt in San Francisco repeatedly arguing for keeping all the West Coast evacuees behind barbed wire. But McCloy’s new position was being backed by other officials, including Elmer Davis of the Office of War Information, who told Roosevelt, “Loyal American citizens of Japanese descent should be permitted, after individual testing, to enlist in the Army and Navy.” Part of Davis’s argument was that, in broadcasts from Tokyo, the Japanese were effectively using the American concentration camps in a propaganda campaign in other Asian countries, asserting that the war in the Pacific was essentially “a race war”: Caucasians against all Asians.

  * * *

  The American people did not know it, but there were already hundreds and then thousands of Japanese Americans in the army. Even though more than two thousand Japanese Americans in the military were mustered out unceremoniously in January of 1942, others were kept in uniform by local commanders who innocently or deliberately ignored orders from Washington. One all-white army company in Hawaii reported that it had no Japanese Americans when, in fact, the unit’s star softball pitcher was a Nisei. By the time of Stimson’s announcement, a Nisei combat unit made up of former active-duty soldiers from Hawaii and members of the Hawaii National Guard was already training as the One Hundredth Battalion of the U.S. Army at Fort McCoy in Mississippi. Early in 1941, before the war, the military had been building a secret new unit, the Military Intelligence Service, quietly recruiting bilingual Japanese Americans from Hawaii and California to be used as translators and interpreters if there were a war with Japan. This was a difficult task: the army estimated that less than 3 percent of Nisei could speak much more than elementary Japanese and that perhaps one hundred Nisei were actually fluent in the language of their ancestors. Bill Hosokawa, a Nisei newspaper reporter before the war, described his MIS interview this way: “I thought I [had] a fair speaking knowledge of the language, but the interviewer quickly proved me completely inadequate.… First he asked me to read a high school text. I could make out perhaps two or three characters in a hundred.”

  The first instructor hired, in September of 1941, was a thirty-one-year-old army private named John Aiso from Los Angeles, a prewar draftee working as an army truck mechanic. A graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School, Aiso must have been the most overqualified mechanic in the service. He studied at Brown on a scholarship financed by the government of Japan, as did his roommate who became a translator for Emperor Hirohito in Tokyo. Aiso had practiced law in Los Angeles, and also in both Japan and Manchuria where he worked for the British American Tobacco Company. He was fluent in Japanese, which had turned out to be a rare talent among the Nisei. Aiso, who wanted to return to his law practice in Los Angeles, initially turned down the MIS offer made by General John Weckerling. He changed his mind when Weckerling stood up, came around his desk, put an arm on Private Aiso’s shoulder, and said, “John, your country needs you.”

  “No American,” Aiso said later, “had ever told me America was my country.” He also recalled, vividly, that on December 8, 1941, when he and his colleagues were on a trolley going to his office at the Presidio, a hysterical woman waved her arms toward him and yelled to white men in the car, “There’s a Jap. Kill him! Kill him! What’s wrong with you men?”

  The work of Aiso and Weckerling was little known until after the war. In the end, more than six thousand Japanese Americans secretly served in the Pacific—almost all with distinction and almost unbelievable bravery—as translators and interpreters attached to the British and Australian armies, as well as to U.S. Army units.

  The secrecy surrounding the Military Intelligence Service was doubled for a few hundred translators and interpreters in the navy and Marine Corps, which were still essentially segregated services. MIS training originally began at the Presidio in San Francisco, but General DeWitt demanded they be moved out of California and the language school moved to Camp Savage and then Fort Snelling in Minnesota. People up there were different than the Californians. Minnesotans who lived near Camp Savage would wait outside the gates on Friday nights to invite the Nisei to their homes for dinner or the weekend.

  When camp was over, though, their duty was among the most dangerous in the military. The linguists had to worry about friendly fire but also knew they would be executed as traitors if they were captured by Imperial Japanese soldiers. Nisei wearing American uniforms often were assigned white bodyguards in case American soldiers, trained to shoot first and ask questions later, mistook them for Japanese infiltrators wearing uniforms stripped from dead American soldiers. One of the Nisei, Sergeant Fred Tanaka, on a ship headed for the Solomon Islands, went from one white soldier to another saying, “Take a good look and remember me because I’m going in with you.”

  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 du
ration 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.