OPPOSITE: Bob Sheeks, kneeling in foreground, broadcasts surrender appeals through jeep-mounted loudspeakers to cliffs in background on Saipan where Japanese military and civilian personnel are hiding.
I was born of American parents in Shanghai in 1922 and grew up there, until age thirteen. My father and my mother moved to Shanghai not long after the First World War, and he worked there as a business executive. We lived in the French Concession, a well-to-do section of the city where affluent American and European families resided. My mother died when I was ten years old, and in 1935 my father, brother, and I returned to the U.S.
After grabbing Manchuria, Japanese forces attacked at Shanghai in 1932 to quell anti-Japanese demonstrations, boycotts, and also some Chinese civilian and military armed resistance. Japan later labeled the action “The Shanghai Incident,” but it was very real, extremely brutal warfare.
It was in 1932 that I saw evidence of Japanese military atrocities in Shanghai. These had been profusely and gruesomely illustrated in newspaper photographs, but I also was an eyewitness to something Japanese soldiers did. One day Dad drove us to the evacuated residence of a British family in the Northern Shanghai suburb of Hongkew. We had learned that our friends had fled from Shanghai and taken temporary refuge in Hong Kong. We had visited their beautiful, large home and broad gardens before and began looking around. The house had been looted and was a mess. Then, in the back garden, we saw something horribly revolting. Two servants, still there as caretakers, had been tied onto poles by the Japanese and then literally grilled to death.
The torturers had built fires in the garden, trussed their victims like hogs, and roasted them to death. Japanese soldiers did things like that. Why? Well, our Chinese friends had an explanation. The Japanese thought the Chinese servants would know where money or other valuables had been hidden. They figured the servants would do anything to escape pain and when tortured would reveal everything. So the Japanese persisted. As a result, I carried for years a heavy load of hatred of Japan and believed that Japanese by nature were cruel and bestial. One might stomach their arrogance, but not their needless torture of helpless Chinese people. After we resettled back in the States and while I was going to junior high school in California, on my bedroom dresser I kept a death shrine. There was a hate picture of the Japanese Emperor and the Crown Prince, which I had clipped from a magazine. I hoped to kill them some day.
Harvard accepted me and granted scholarship support, so off I went to college. Right after Pearl Harbor, the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington compiled lists of people with any Asian language background, Japanese preferred. I had a little Chinese language ability, and no Japanese. But the Navy needed recruits and was scraping the bottom of the barrel. They were even taking people who had studied Egyptian hieroglyphics, because it was thought they would be good at learning other languages or doing code work. A U.S. Naval officer, Commander A. E. Hindmarsh, came to Harvard looking for candidates to send to the Navy Japanese Language School.
He was a Harvard graduate and had been in charge of the Navy’s Japanese language school at Pearl Harbor, which was being relocated to the University of California at Berkeley. So Commander Hindmarsh recruited me at Harvard, and also some of my friends and classmates. That is how we ended up at Berkeley learning Japanese a month after Pearl Harbor was attacked. I was there only half a year before the Navy relocated the language school to the University of Colorado. This was done so that our Japanese-American instructors would not be sent to internment camps. On the West Coast, Japanese-American families were being rounded up and sent voluntarily, or otherwise, to inland locations for the duration of the war.
So there I had been at Berkeley, now at Boulder, immersed in Japanese language training. I had carried a burning, quite poisonous hatred of things Japanese since leaving Shanghai. But who was now training us but Japanese Americans. They were among the finest, most admirable people I had ever met, thoughtful, cultured, kindly, excellent teachers, and doing more for the war effort than I ever had done. In spite of the fact that they had relatives dispossessed and sent into grim camps, having lost all their family property and savings in California and other West Coast states, they were training us future “warriors” to go out and fight people of their ancestry. When we were shown confiscated Japanese movies at CU for our language training, and after I read about Japanese history and culture, the exposure and contact began to heal my warped, poisonous childhood emotions. Long before the war ended, I became an admirer of many elements of the Japanese character and culture. I began to think, well now, except for those militaristic totalitarian types the Japanese aren’t bad. Soon I was able to keep hating Tojo and the Emperor and the Japanese military, but certainly not all Japanese people.
Our Japanese language course was intense, and we had to learn fifty new words a day. The load accumulated fast. We had four hours of class every day and were expected to put in eight hours a day minimum of study, perhaps even ten hours. We had exams every Saturday, all day long, and we were expected to know everything we had learned, cumulatively. We were supposed to be able to read, write, and speak, but there was too much to learn so quickly. We were under such pressure that, of our small class of thirty-five or so we later had two suicides. I heard that among trainees from other graduating classes, there were suicides later in the war. After we graduated, we pretty much went in different directions. I was assigned to Camp Elliot, outside of San Diego, where I was to brush up on terminology suitable for Marine combat operations. The Navy school had provided almost nothing that pertained to fighting on land, so at Camp Elliot we were taught the Japanese for words such as “mortar,” “grenade,” “howitzer,” etc.
The Marine Corps then sent me to the Second Marine Division, which was being reinforced in New Zealand, with a shipload of replacement recruits on the SS Lurline, a former luxury liner that used to carry tourists to Hawaii. The ship zigzagged for safety, making its way across the Pacific to Wellington via stops in Samoa and Melbourne. Marines on board were replacements for casualties at Guadalcanal and to increase the size of the Second Division.
We stopped briefly in Samoa, for one day and one night. But while there I saw a little bit of Pacific island culture. I had been assigned to Shore Patrol, wearing a big “SP” armband and on alert for “any trouble,” meaning drunken rowdiness. I had never done any police duty or anything like it. We were checking to see if any sailors or Marines were too drunk or boisterous, or offending the Samoans. Mostly it was a matter of liquor. I don’t know what I would have done if I had run into a major problem. I took a short break from SP patrolling to witness a “taupo” festival, honoring an especially distinguished village maiden, who is treated like a queen.
It was beautiful. At the ceremony, in a Polynesian-style thatch meeting house, the Samoans were very serious and dignified. The atmosphere was churchly, the women dressed in full-length sarongs. There was a big community kava bowl, from which drinks were dipped. Men looking like chiefs would stand up and give talks. There was beautiful choral singing, and some swaying dance to the music. One of the elders saw that this young kid in uniform was genuinely interested in the event, so he kindly explained to me what it was about. I have thought I would like to return to Samoa someday to see and hear such a ceremony again.
We went from Samoa to Melbourne, and then on to Wellington. At that season, Wellington was cold and wet, and we had to march over slippery and wet hills. It was winter there, August, and we were living in tents. Later I got lucky and was provided room space in a regular farmhouse.
I knew a little about the next invasion before it happened, but I didn’t know any specifics about Tarawa. Only when we were on our way there were we told that the target was Tarawa. The ship I was on, the Monrovia, was the second-level command ship, and the Marine commander onboard was General Leo Hermle. When we arrived at Tarawa, bombardment had already started. We were to land on this tiny island called Betio, just an islet that was part of Tarawa Atoll. Everybody aboard the Monrovia thought no Japanese could survive the intense aerial bombardment and naval shelling of Betio, because the whole little island was a mass of smoke and flame. U.S. planes were dive-bombing and strafing. We thought they were eradicating and evaporating the entire island. That went on and on.
Soon it dawned on us that indeed somebody was left alive on the island when they started shelling us, and their big shells were coming in close to our ship! The Navy decided they didn’t want to have ships sunk and withdrew, delaying the landing, leaving landing craft circling and waiting. Then more planes, more bombing, more shelling. Again we thought certainly nobody could survive. It was amazing. When we looked at the tiny island, with all its palm trees shattered, it looked more like the surface of the moon. But we had a few old battle hands like Colonel Edson, who said, “You’ll be surprised. There’ll be plenty of resistance.” No one believed him, but we began to feel a bit nervous.
Soon the interrupted landing restarted, and the boats and amtracs headed in to the beach. Some of the first guys got in okay because the Japanese were holding their fire until more troops were wading in and the beach got crowded. Then they let us have it. We couldn’t evacuate casualties immediately, but later, at Saipan, returning boats came back right away with wounded. At Tarawa, everybody went in and nobody came back right away. So those of us still onboard ships didn’t really know what was happening. We could hear a lot of firing going on, so we could surmise that the Japanese were still very much alive and it wasn’t just us shooting them. We were not getting radio reports, other than bad news that boats were being sunk, and that casualties were high.
It was then that I started to see a few guys returning from landing attempts, one with the side of his face shot off, one missing a hand. On the beach, all hell had broken loose and communications weren’t working too well. We heard blurted voices saying they need water and plasma and ammunition. People were kind of in shock.
General Hermle, on my ship, was second in command of the division and the landing operation, but part of the force was held in reserve onboard ships. The situation was so serious that it seemed essential that some group go in and find out what was going on. Hermle volunteered to lead this group, and it was really something for a general to do that.
I was ordered, but had volunteered, to be part of his group. We loaded up and went in in our Higgins boat, one of the wooden landing craft with a drop-front ramp. It was hit by bullets, and the coxswain was shot in the muscle under his arm, so he couldn’t steer very well. He was really bleeding, but he kept saying, “I’m all right, I’m all right!” We wanted to be sure to get to shore and not be stuck on the reef. A nearby amtrac, an amphibious tractor that had discharged its people was headed back to the ships. We flagged it down, and General Hermle commandeered it for our use. We all transferred into it from the boat. It was somewhat safer because at least it was metal, not plywood. The amtrac took us to the seaward end of the long main pier.
When we got there, General Hermle said to me, “Sheeks, go in and see if you can get a prisoner and find out what’s going on.” In retrospect it seems ludicrous, but if you are a kid and a general tells you something like that, you just say, “Yes, sir,” and do it. The general stayed in the amtrac because he was in charge of communications and had to report back to the command ship. He kept reporting constantly what he could see, but of course he couldn’t see much of anything! He was too far away and there was smoke and haze.
We were under rather heavy fire, so I went wading and crawling toward shore under the pier in the chest-deep water. It was an awful mess down there, full of wounded guys who had drifted in. They were hanging onto the pier’s coconut log pilings to survive, guys scared out of their wits taking refuge. Others were trying to keep from drowning if the tide rose. Here I was, still with my shiny little second lieutenant bars on, and these guys were saying, “Lieutenant, Lieutenant, help us.”
You weren’t supposed to wear insignia into battle, but I needed to show authority since I was only twenty-one years old and looked even younger. Anyway, I tried to make some encouraging remarks. With one other Marine, I attempted to get up and crawl along the top of the pier. We half crawled, and half walked hunched over. When we were shot at, we jumped back down into the water and stepped back under the pier again. Even crawling on top of the pier was easier than trying to move forward in the water among the pilings.
We had been issued morphine Syrettes and used them all up on the wounded in greatest pain. While somebody went back to get a corpsman, I continued on my mission with several guys wading and crawling toward shore. We naively believed we were going to grab a Japanese prisoner to find out what was going on! I mean the assignment was really pathetic.
Soaked from head to toe with saltwater and grime, I got about two-thirds of the way in along the pier, which must have been at least a couple of hundred yards long. I got to a gap in the pier where a large shell had hit it, and there was a lot of firing right there at the gap. Of course we were scared, but also it seemed pointless to continue crawling toward shore, since obviously I wasn’t going to be able to catch a prisoner. So we went back out to the far end of the pier, somewhat sheltered from the firing. By this time it was late in the day, getting dark, and we were bone tired. It was the farthest point from the beach, and we thought we might get some sleep. During the whole Tarawa battle it seems to me that I got only a couple hours of decent sleep, trying to nod off on hard coral gravel with firing going on, soaked with salty seawater, fearful of snipers. It was a relief when night was over. But then came the fiery hot sun. You are groggy the whole hot tropical day, dozing if and when possible.
On the second day I caught a ride on a passing landing craft out to a headquarters battleship, thinking I would catch up with General Hermle and try to report what I had been able to see at the pier. Unable to find him, I grabbed a few hours sleep on deck. When you are so short of sleep you don’t really crave anything else. After that nap, I could move around on my own, because duty for me was not so organized. I didn’t have any companions in this language racket until later the second day. At that time, I went back onto the island, having learned that Green Beach, on the west end, was okay for landing. So we did an end run, but the tide had gone out, and the reef water was really shallow.
On shore it was a big problem finding where everybody was. Finally I ran into a couple of our senior Japanese language officers, Captains John Pelzel and Eugene Boardman. They were in a terrible place, bogged down in a taro pit. Japanese snipers were in the tops of palm trees firing at them, but we couldn’t see them. At least one was firing directly at us, and somebody finally shot him. The sniper had been quite close, about thirty or forty feet away, in one of the few palm trees that hadn’t been completely blasted by bomb and shell explosions. We should have been more suspicious earlier.
It seemed impossible to capture live prisoners. From then on our efforts were aimed at retrieving maps and documents from the bodies. I thought some of them were alive, just wounded, you know. I imagined one of them was moving and had survived, but he hadn’t. It was pretty hard to find any live enemy. In these firefights nobody was giving up. Some of the Japanese we later did take prisoner had been stunned by grenades, so Marines were able to drag them alive out of emplacements. Toward the end of the battle, we did get a number of Korean laborers who surrendered themselves. They knew about putting hands up, but they didn’t have white flags, and they didn’t really know how to surrender. The Japanese military had never been told that surrender was a possibility, and they never imagined surrendering. But as you can imagine, if you are a Korean labor battalion guy and aren’t thinking you are a samurai, you’re more likely to surrender than the regular Japanese military types. Some of the Japanese troops committed suicide to avoid capture. They either blew themselves up by hand grenade, or put a rifle under their chin and pulled the trigger with a toe.
There were strange gushing noises at night, especially off of Green Beach. It turned out to be great schools of fish coming in to feed on the bodies and body parts. They weren’t sharks, just fish. You could hear fish jumping and splashing. The bodies would wash around, and fish would swarm in to feed on them.
By the time the battle was over on the fourth day, we were gathering together what few prisoners we had. MPS were bringing them along to the beach. I tried to quickly interrogate the ones who were dying to see what they knew before they died. Eventually several batches were pulled together, and I was ordered to take them out to a ship that was standing by. I was to accompany them back to Pearl Harbor, interrogating them all the way enroute.
I learned a lot from Tarawa. I became aware of a major obstacle to capturing prisoners alive: How could you possibly communicate with the enemy when you could hardly hear yourself think during the fighting? War is really noisy! One time I was near Dave Shoup, who really made a name for himself as a powerful combat leader at Tarawa. We were talking loudly among ourselves, there was firing going on, and Colonel Shoup made a memorable remark. He did not say the war was getting on his nerves or that it was dangerous. He complained only about the noise. He said, “God, how can a man think with all this noise going on!” You never consider noise as the worst part of war, but for Shoup it disturbed his thinking.
For communicating with the enemy during battle, even if you had a loudspeaker it probably would be useless. If you had a good situation you could try shouting, but shouting in a foreign language is not easy. If you have a loudspeaker, you could stay farther back, behind an obstacle, and your voice could still be heard. At Tarawa I couldn’t really speak to anybody. In the first place if you got up and tried to shout you might not survive. So you needed a loudspeaker to project your voice. I thought if I had been able to talk to some of the Japanese before we killed or captured them, we might have got some more prisoners, and capturing them might have been much simpler.
The other thing I learned at Tarawa was that the Japanese did not know how they were supposed to surrender. They had no familiarity with our customs involving surrender, like using white flags. In fact, the Japanese didn’t think surrender was even an option. The top brass had indoctrinated the troops that no Japanese in all of history had ever surrendered! They believed that anyone who gave up was no longer Japanese, not a citizen any more, could never go home, would be a disgrace to family and Emperor and Japan as a nation. This was driven into them. There were no instructions about what to do if they did happen to be captured. So you could see what we were up against, and it didn’t really dawn on us early in the war that the Japanese mentality was so very different from ours. We really needed somehow to let Japanese troops know that survival and surrender were feasible, that some troops had already surrendered safely, and that the idea was not unthinkable. I pondered this matter while going back from Tarawa to Hawaii with our Japanese and Korean prisoners. We had something like sixteen or eighteen prisoners, none of them of high rank, no officers. They didn’t have much information, so we didn’t get much out of them.
In Hawaii I was assigned temporarily to the CINCPAC headquarters of Admiral Chester Nimitz at Pearl Harbor. I lived in a BOQ in Honolulu with some language officer colleagues who were also at Pearl Harbor. The office I worked in was right next to where decoding was done. We non-specialists weren’t allowed in there although we were Intelligence officers doing classified work. Even where my desk was located was walled off from others, because I was working on stuff they thought should be highly classified. I helped to write reports, illustrated books really, about Japanese military buildings on fortified islands. I prepared two volumes about Betio Island, using Japanese maps and captured structural drawings, and photographs we had taken.
Then, by chance, I met a spectacularly beautiful gal at the wedding of a friend. She was in the wedding reception of my friend George Ewart, an English-Chinese Eurasian lad from Shanghai, who had just married a Chinese-American girl named Gladys. Much to my delight, when I was introduced to the glamorous girl we started conversing. She was about twenty and looked like a supermodel. I learned that she was of Portuguese/Chinese/Hawaiian descent. That was my exposure to cultural anthropology. It turned out she was a singer and dancer in a musical review restaurant in Honolulu. The place had an awful hybrid name, “La Hula Rhumba.” She invited me to visit the restaurant as her guest. It was a large night club right in the main part of Waikiki that served dinners, fancy and expensive. She was a leading showgirl and performed very graceful, slow hula dances while singing in Hawaiian. She was marvelous to watch: tall, slim, curvaceous, long black hair, wonderfully decorative. I realize that I should have suspected there would be a husband or equivalent boyfriend around someplace, but there had been no sign or mention of one at the wedding reception. I should have asked George or Gladys Ewart about her marital status, but perhaps I did not really want to know.
That girl was so beautiful and seemed so available. Of course, I was very available and unmarried. We enjoyed drinks and conversation together at the reception and agreed it would be nice if we could see each other again soon. We certainly did so, almost immediately, and began an affair that was surreptitious in accordance with her preference. It had to be surreptitious because, I was told, she was still living at home with her old-fashioned parents. When we went out together, she always wanted it to be lunchtime, rarely for an early dinner, because of her evening hours at La Hula Rhumba. That went on for weeks and then months.
Suddenly one day, around noon, I was startled to get a personal phone call from her at my office. She said, “I have to see you immediately.” I asked if it could wait until evening, after my office hours. She said it was very urgent and could not wait. You can imagine that the first thing that sprang into the mind of an amorous young man was, “My God, she’s pregnant! “ But that wasn’t the reason for the urgency. No, that wasn’t it at all. I rushed from Pearl Harbor to downtown Honolulu to meet her at a coffee shop. She immediately began explaining, “I’ve got to apologize, and, Bob, I have three things to tell you. First, I’m married. Second, my husband has found out about us. And third, he wants to kill you! “Just like that! I felt like I had been shot right between the eyes.
When I regained calm, I said, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” She said, “You are going to ask me why I didn’t tell you I was married.” I replied, “No, that isn’t my first question. My first question is, how did he learn about you and me?” Then another shock. She said, “I told him.” She explained, “The two of us were having an awful, fighting argument about something. I told him that our marriage was hopeless, and blurted out that I was in love with a Marine officer. I said it to hurt him. He already knew who you were through your mutual friend George, but nothing about our relationship. One time he had seen us lunching together, but I had explained we were just friends, had met at the wedding, and had run into each other at lunch time. Today he talked with George Ewart about you and wanted to know how to find you. He told George, ‘Your Marine friend that my wife met at your wedding is having an affair with her.’“ I said to her, “It doesn’t surprise me that he’s upset!”
She and I discussed what we were to do, and we agreed not to see each other for a while. The next few days were full of apprehension. We did not meet in person, but did speak by phone. Suddenly fate stepped in. Out of the blue, orders came for me to rejoin my division at Kamuela on the Big Island of Hawaii, where it was stationed at the huge Parker Cattle Ranch, preparing for the next campaign. Suddenly I was on my way out of Honolulu. It was a relief to be going off to war.
That girl was so lovely, it was hard to believe her beauty was entirely natural, but it was. I knew I could not forget her, but I also realized that her husband might be waiting to kill me in Hawaii. That memory also haunted me through all the rest of two more years in the Pacific, through the invasions, all the dangers, and everything. Of course I was in much more imminent danger during battle, but the threat of being killed by a jealous husband in Hawaii remained in my mind, especially as I would be going back through Honolulu sooner or later if I survived the war.
During my time in Hawaii, we devised things like a so-called “Surrender Pass,” which had instructions in Japanese (also English) about surrender procedures, use of white flags, etc.
I was able to get a variety of leaflets printed by the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper, as their contribution to the war effort. We made bundles of about five hundred leaflets each, delivered them to friends who were pilots and aerial artillery spotters, and they dropped them from small, light aircraft at prearranged locations. We feared that most might be used as toilet paper by the enemy, but some did get through. Mostly the texts were about Japan losing the war, about surrendering, etc. It was an improvised, amateurish project, but later seemed to show some results.
There were no official funds available, and the only financial source we could come up with for propaganda supplies and equipment was the division’s recreation budget. So we diverted recreation funds to pay for loudspeaker equipment to use for voice beaming to Japanese soldiers in fortified emplacements and caves.
The whole idea at the time seemed outlandish to most Marines, as everyone was convinced that no Japanese would ever surrender. I wasn’t that sure myself that any of these things would achieve important results. However, by the time we were loading up for the Marianas campaign, I was pleased that we had cartons of wrapped leaflets ready for dropping, and hand-held, battery-powered megaphones, and jeep-mounted loudspeakers powered by small electric generators. We requested that the Division Command have all this stuff off-loaded early in the landing.
The other major part of this effort was to try to convince Marines that it was important to take Japanese prisoners alive, in spite of the risks involved. I went around to various units to talk about the value of intelligence information, how it can save lives, and how much better it is to know in advance where the enemy is instead of finding out the hard way. Few believed this, and most were very skeptical, especially the tough, pre-WWII “old breed” sergeants. I was always trying to convince Marines that it was in their best interest to try to take prisoners, and for language personnel to try to talk Japanese into coming out of caves and surrendering.
Such efforts were difficult, but at Saipan and Tinian we were more successful than I would ever have thought likely. In spite of tough talk, a lot of Marines were quite cooperative and even kindly toward prisoners, both civilian and military. When they saw the miserable condition of refugees they tried to help them, gave them water, and bandaged them up. Most Marines were kind guys, basically.
On many occasions I found myself in the odd position of trying to save the enemy from my own people. One of my regrets is that I did not have the foresight to prepare more Jeep-mounted loudspeaker equipment with power enough to be heard well at a distance. I had only one such unit, with power provided by a small gas engine generator strapped onto the back seat of the jeep The generator would stop in heavy rain, and sometimes fail at a crucial moment.
I landed on Saipan early in the afternoon on D-day, going straight in to the beach, which was fairly steep and getting badly mortared at the time. We went over the side of the amtrac and slid down onto the beach. Then it turned around and left. Some vehicles to the right had been hit and were still smoking, so we were lucky there. I knew approximately where we were, and I knew about where we were supposed to set up the D-2 position. With me was Navy JLO Otis Cary, the Japan missionary lad. The Navy had sent along an old Korean man from Hawaii, brought there for Navy Civil Affairs duty to talk to the Koreans on the island. There was also another Navy language officer, Bill Decker. We were just plopped down on the sand and getting ready to go inland. Some Marines right near us were crawling inland, when two of them jumped into a ready-made hole. I don’t know if it was a shell-hole, or what, but it was just fifteen feet in front of us. We saw them going forward and jumping in there to take temporary shelter. Just at that moment a Japanese mortar shell went right in that hole. There was an explosion and these two guys just evaporated. We couldn’t see any sign of them. They were disintegrated, just mixed in with the sand and vegetation and scattered all over the place. Otis Cary, Bill Decker, and the Korean were terrified. This was the real thing, and it was right in front of their eyes. I had been at Tarawa so the shock was minimal for me.
I stayed on the beach until dark, after the others had returned to the ship, and then crawled and walked inland, finally locating the D-2 and headquarters area, which was really just some coral rocks, some foxholes, and pandanus trees. In the night we had a mortar attack. The next day a few Japanese tanks came rumbling down from a nearby valley. We were not affected, but altogether it was enough to keep us awake. The mosquitoes seemed especially fierce and numerous. We would chew tobacco to get enough spit to rub on mosquito bites to stop the itching. We thought it kept the mosquitoes away, but mostly we would get under a poncho and smoke a cigarette to get some relief from the mosquitoes.
After the main fighting was over and we were getting into the mop-ping-up phase, we would go to a likely area and clean it out. We would try and get the Japanese to give up because they were hiding all over the place. I would try to get some results using the loudspeaker. I had my hand-held battery-operated megaphone, and I would say set phrases like, “shimpai shinaide” (“don’t be afraid”) and “te o age” (“put your hands up”). Sometimes there was time to try to say more, like, “The war is over, we have water for you, many people have given up already.” So then sometimes someone would answer. Sometimes there was nothing, but maybe you would hear a sound, or they would make a noise as they were getting ready to detonate something, and usually you would have a little bit of warning, and then all of a sudden, boom! But I always tried to talk the Japanese out of the caves first, and if there was no result or no response then the demolitions guys would take over. They often thought I was really just delaying their work.
We declared the island “secured” sometime in July. So when I would go out on daytime mopping-up patrols and night recon and security patrols, our job was to try and capture somebody. You might have to kill them if they were trying to penetrate our lines. Anyway, I could hear people, so I knew they were there. I would ask those who surrendered, usually civilians, how many more civilians are out here? Do you know of any troops ? What units ? What routes do they take moving around ? After that time on patrols and mop-ups we got something like seven or eight thousand, and there were still more out there. I don’t know how many we ended up with totally in the POW and refugee camp, but probably well over ten or twelve thousand. These included Japanese, Koreans, Chamorros, and Carolinians from Truk.
It is hard to believe that three divisions of our troops, sixty thousand men, going across a narrow little island, almost walking hand in hand, could not sweep out all those hiding in the hills. But the Japanese and the others could and did hide; they could even infiltrate back and forth at night. Months after the war, there was that Captain Oba, with his soldiers not just surviving but doing fine! It’s still a mystery.
Soon after Saipan was secured, Time magazine came out with an article written by Robert Sherrod. It had a question headline, “Suicide for 20 million?” implying that all the Japanese in Japan might fight to the last man, woman, and child. At the time I was writing a short article about Saipan and what had happened to the civilians. I especially wanted to correct the impression that based on what had happened on Saipan we were up against a mass suicide of everybody in Japan. Of course it’s very dramatic if you see one or two hundred people, including whole families, jump off a cliff one after another. It makes you think the world is coming to an end. But the world was not coming to an end; it’s one or two hundred people jumping off a cliff. There’s a difference. So the way I wrote the article, I took a little sideswipe at Sherrod and Time magazine for writing something that possibly could be misleading.
Anything that anyone writes on active military duty has to go out through a censor. The division censor called me in and said, “Hey, Sherrod’s a great friend of the Marine Corps and we don’t want to publish criticism of him like this, do we?” I replied, “Well, I’m not writing it about him. I’m writing it about facts compared to the impressions he is giving the American public about war with Japan.” He said, “I think you better cut out all of this section.” So I said I would, or otherwise the article wasn’t going to get published at all. I modified the text and it was later published.
Except for some time spent during the Tinian campaign and a diversionary operation at Okinawa, I was on Saipan for fourteen months. Believe it or not, while we were at Saipan and getting ready for the invasion of Japan, we were still getting people out of caves. Not many, but I would say several every few days.
At Tinian, Colonel Dave Shoup sent for me because he was curious about a Japanese warrant officer who had surrendered but was helping us get other Japanese out of caves. He had gone back into several caves to help me. On his second day he went into a cave to talk some Japanese into surrendering and they shot him, shattering his arm. He came out badly bleeding, so I got him patched up and gave specific instructions at camp to keep him separate from other military prisoners. Later I think somebody suspected what he had done and roughed him up a bit. So Shoup wanted to talk to this guy.
I had a distinct impression that Shoup was kind of an uneducated guy, very rough and tough. What I didn’t realize or appreciate at the time was that he was mentally very inquisitive and alert. He wanted to go see this guy he had heard about and wanted to psychoanalyze the prisoner, to learn why he would help us. But the way he went about it was crude. The first thing Shoup said to me when we were in the tent with the prisoner was, “So, now Sheeks, find out, ask him, why is he a traitor?” Of course this went against all my training, which was aimed at trying to be subtle enough to get information out of people. I didn’t translate it directly, but made it sound like, “My colonel wants to know why you want to assist us?” My Japanese was not very fluent so it took me quite a few words to explain things and what it was that the colonel wanted to understand. That talk went on for quite a while. The Japanese guy responded patiently and quietly, explaining his thoughts and background, and reasons for helping to rescue people. Colonel Shoup got impatient and wanted to know what he was saying. Then Shoup went on with other questions. I guess he was suspicious of the Japanese warrant officer. I wasn’t. He was an older gentleman, a decent guy, sensible, he wanted to save some lives, he didn’t want to see civilians die needlessly. He was quite helpful to me. I was trying to interpret what Shoup was saying accurately. The warrant officer didn’t understand any English but he got the tone of Shoup’s questions. Eventually he said to me, almost like an uncle, “I know this is not easy for you, and I can see you are having difficulty with your superior officer, but you do understand my situation so why don’t you just explain it to him. You know what to say.”
So I tried, but Shoup kept asking more and different questions. The Japanese man gave calm, sensible answers. But Shoup was very impatient. Finally Shoup said to me “Okay, Sheeks, let’s go.” And on the way back in the Jeep, I will never forget it, Colonel Shoup shook his head and said, “We’ll never know what makes these Nips tick!” I realized that I knew what made the Japanese officer tick, but I didn’t know what made Shoup tick! Colonel Shoup was super-thorough in his role, which was to secure the island as rapidly and efficiently as possible by military means. The Japanese warrant officer happened to be an intelligent, humanistic person, keeping his dignity in a situation of utter and devastating defeat. It was a total mismatch of minds, with no communication. Language was not the barrier.
It was very gratifying to be awarded the Bronze Star for the work I had done to facilitate the surrender of Japanese troops and civilians during the Saipan and Tinian campaigns. You know, most Marine officers are decorated for killing the enemy. I think I may be one of very few Marines in WWII who got a medal for saving enemy lives!
By mid-1945 we were gearing up for the Okinawa campaign. I was on a transport with the Second Marine Division waiting in reserve at Okinawa. The high command decided they didn’t need a reserve division, so they sent us back to Saipan. The landing was April 1, and I think I got back to Saipan on April 8. As that was my birthday, I thought that survival was a great birthday present—I didn’t need cake!
From Okinawa I returned with the Second Marine Division to Saipan, where we were to prepare for the assault on Japan proper. I had accumulated a great many service points by then and was long overdue for home leave. I was supposed to get a month in the U.S. So I was on a Navy PBY from Saipan to Hawaii, sleeping on the floor. It was uncomfortable, but I didn’t mind. I was headed for home. Not a cloud in the sky, except I had to transit Honolulu.
This return to Hawaii had been on my mind since I left the year before. To say the least I was concerned that there was an angry husband waiting for me. Remember, he had told his wife that he aimed to kill me. So all the way from Saipan to Honolulu, what was I thinking about? Should I even let my pal George know that I was there? I decided I was going to call him immediately when I arrived and ask about that couple.
I got to Honolulu and right away reached George by phone, and he insisted that I come on over for dinner. He asked me, “Do you remember that girl and her husband?” And I said, “Well, yes, I do. Much more than slightly.” Of course I remembered them. How could I forget? George then told me something I could never have imagined. He said, “You know, it’s a funny thing. They had been having a terrible time, hadn’t been getting along with each other. Their marriage was almost breaking up, and then you came along. Now they talk about you fondly, and they feel that in a strange way you had helped them to get on with their lives together. They refer to you as her ‘second honeymoon,’ and they wanted to meet you if you ever came to Honolulu.” Her second honeymoon! And this after all my many months’ worry. Of course I was tremendously relieved, but told George, “Well, I don’t think I had better see them.” And George said, “I think it would be okay if you want to.” “No,” I told him, “I think I had better leave things just as they are.” So here I had lived with an uneasy conscience, plus fear, thinking I might have to sneak in and out of Hawaii. Then it turns out I was a “second honeymoon” that saved a marriage! Life really can be so unpredictable. I was in Hawaii for only about a week, then shipped out on a baby flattop named the USS Makassar Strait. It was exiting from the Pearl Harbor channel when many guns began firing. It was announced on the ship’s PA system that the war had ended, that two atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan. All of us on board wondered, “What the hell is an atomic bomb?” The main thing for us was that the Japanese had decided to surrender. The ship still had to zigzag and keep lights out all the way to San Pedro, California, because there still could be Japanese submarines that hadn’t gotten the word or wouldn’t accept that their war was over. By the time I arrived back in the U.S. the war really was over and folks were tired of it. I had looked forward to being a returning Marine and talking about the campaigns, but most Americans were already bored by the subject of warfare. They wanted to talk about gasoline rationing and all their wartime problems.
I went to Washington D.C., where I saw General Watson, our ex-commandant of the Second Marine Division, now Commandant of the Marine Corps. I told him that I wanted to go with the Marines to China if possible, or at least to Japan. He asked what my longer-term plans were, and I said I wanted to stay in the Marine Corps for the next few years. He then asked what had been my vocation. I told him that I had only been an undergraduate student at Harvard. He very kindly advised me that I could get back into the Marine Corps at any time, and that I should first go finish up at Harvard. Then if I really wanted to be in the Marine Corps, I would have plenty of years to serve as a Marine. I said, “Yes, sir.” I never went back to duty in the Marines, but I was active in the Marine Corps Reserve for the next twenty years, with the rank of major.
I ended up working in Asia. I continue to do consulting work in Taiwan, and I’m now eighty-one years old. It is unlikely that I would have worked in Asia all those years after the war if I hadn’t been a JLO. The Japanese language training completely changed and determined the path of my life. When I went back to Harvard after the war, I studied government, dropping entirely my prewar major of biology, then ended up getting a degree in what was called “Far Eastern Studies,” not as good a word as “Asian,” but in those days they thought of that area of the world as the “Far East.” Afterward, I completed a two-year masters degree program at Harvard in China Regional Studies, and I have lived and worked in various parts of Asia ever since.