A Tomb Called Iwo Jima

by King, Dan

  One of his fellow stragglers was an army corporal named Hiroshi Kurihara who could speak English and claimed that he was familiar with America. Mita wrote, "Corporal Kurihara told us that the Americans would never torture or kill POWs." On April 13th, Corporal Kurihara tried to convince the others to join him in surrendering, but he exited the bunker alone.

  "Even in elementary school we were told that the Americans were kichiku (cruel beasts). We heard of the things our own soldiers did to Chinese prisoners so was afraid of what the Americans might do to us," wrote Mita.

  In the end of April, Haruji Mita and a few others tried to make their way to the eastern shoreline in hopes of escaping on a raft. They were discovered and attacked moments after leaving their bunker at Tamana-yama. Haruji Mita was hit in the left buttocks and barely made it back into the cave.

  Ten days passed and Mita's left leg became infected and swollen. After another round of surrender calls, Mita and seven survivors decided to surrender. Mita passed out as he crawled from the cave into the bright sunlight. He woke up in a tent, feeling disorientated. An American medic treated him to a smile and a pack of cigarettes. A Nisei soldier named Inoue told Haruji Mita that after he fainted he was put on a stretcher, loaded onto a jeep, and taken to the field hospital where a surgeon removed two grenade fragments from his buttocks. Mita even received a blood transfusion from an American donor. In the process of being nursed back to health, Haruji Mita felt ashamed for believing the wartime propaganda about the Americans. "Was this the behavior of cruel beasts?" he wondered.

  Haruji Mita's leg was put in a cast and later he was able to walk with crutches and spent two months in the field hospital. When it came time to board the ship to Guam, an American medic named "Sergeant Bocha" (a man from St Louis, Missouri, who told Mita that his fiancé was a school teacher) said through a Nisei interpreter, "I hope you get better soon and can return to your family in Japan. I want to go home, too." Mita said that those words were forever etched on his heart. After another month in a field hospital on Guam, Haruji Mita was shipped to a detention center on Oahu.

  "The only war medals I ever got were the scars on my backside," wrote Mita.

  Saved by a Dog

  Tsuruji Akikusa says he came to his senses in a US Army field hospital on Guam on June 1, 1945. He says that he was awakened by Miyashita, the mailman who had been in the bunker with him. Miyashita explained that Akikusa had been discovered by a war dog and taken to the US Army field hospital on Iwo Jima, and then shipped to Guam. Try as he might, Akikusa says he can't remember anything for the two week period after Kumakura's suicide. "I owe my life to that American soldier and his dog who rescued me," he says.

  Another POW with a similar experience is Private Kiichi Abe, the combat engineer that was sent to the island to dig tunnels in April 1944. Kiichi Abe's bunker was under attack by a flamethrower when he blacked out.153 He woke up in the US Army field hospital tent on Iwo Jima with no recollection of being captured.[83]

  The Anguish of Surrender

  Ensign Satoru Ōmagari and his naval aircraft maintenance men were able to hold out a little longer. One night, their air raid shelter began to fill with water. Ōmagari was confused because there had been no standard pre-attack warning from the Americans. In addition, it was the middle of the night, and from his experiences he understood that American soldiers never attacked in the dark. The stragglers choked and coughed, was it poison gas? Ōmagari joined the others in clawing their way out for fresh air; they were armed to the teeth and ready for a fight. But when they reached the surface it was dark and absolutely quiet. Where were the Americans?

  The ground was sopping wet, which was evidence that a heavy rainstorm had recently passed over the island. The hard-packed airfield must have been unable to absorb the runoff that flowed down into the air raid shelter. Mud had clogged some of the small ventilation shafts that normally permitted the noxious fumes (from human waste and naturally occurring sulfur) to escape.

  The men decided to wait until dawn before re-entering the air raid shelter. Later that morning, the Americans discovered the tracks in the mud left by the Japanese, and realized that there were more holdouts underground. The US Army troops sent in a POW to relay a message of surrender.

  After talking to the POW, the occupants reached a decision following two hours of deliberations. The men would agree to surrender only if Ensign Ōmagari, as an officer, issued them a direct order. The enlisted men and petty officers felt that if they were following direct orders, they could not be executed once they returned to Japan. Ōmagari told the stragglers that he would take full responsibility. With that assurance, thirty-six holdouts emerged from the air raid shelter, leaving twenty or so behind. Most of those who emerged were in their underwear except Ōmagari who says he was wearing a flight suit. The time was 4:00 p.m., May 17, 1945. Ōmagari said he didn't know for certain what became of the twenty men who chose to stay behind.

  Ōmagari's group of POWs was taken to a flimsy stockade of tents enclosed in barbed wire and ordered to bathe with seawater. "They gave us American uniforms with the letters "PW" painted on the back," Ōmagari said. He spent two weeks in a temporary camp with about eighty other POWs gorging on a steady diet of freshly baked bread, canned rations, crackers and cola. They watched B-29s come and go, living with the guilt that their failure to hold the island meant that bombs were falling on their native soil.

  Roughly two weeks after Ōmagari surrendered his men, a PO2/c Koyatsu and three other stragglers made a late night break for the shoreline hoping to build a raft and float to freedom. They made it as far as a cave on the water's edge where they were discovered in the morning and captured by a US Army Corporal.154

  Ōmagari, Akikusa, Higuchi, Mita, Koshi, Ishii, Koyatsu and the others were shipped to Guam. Ōmagari said, "On Guam, the interrogaters asked me about our so-called ‘new secret weapon'. I didn't know what they were talking about. During one interrogation by a Japanese-speaking Caucasian intelligence officer, Ōmagari answered all his questions honestly, but the American angrily accused him of lying.155 After several more interrogations about "a new fireball weapon that flew slowly," Ōmagari put two-and-two together and realized they were referring to the "foolish contraption" he mocked during the testing phase.

  "To me, the rocket-bombs were not a ‘new secret weapon' but a desperate field expedient." Ōmagari believes that during the first four days of the invasion when the rocket-bombs made their debut, the Japanese launched between fifty and sixty of the 60 kg rocket-bombs, and between twenty and forty of the 250 kg rocket-bombs.[84]

  The average Japanese serviceman was not familiar with the Prisoner of War Convention of the Geneva Accords of 1929; neither Japan nor the United States had ratified it. The War Department furnished Japanese POWs with a translation of the "Geneva Convention Relative to Treatment of Prisoners of War, July 21, 1929." As the days passed with no abuse or torture, the Japanese POWs' fears of torture and execution subsided. "They fed us well. We were treated by both American and Japanese medical personnel," said Akikusa.

  The POWs were transported from Guam to Oahu for formal processing. On June 30, 1945, at a naval detention center on the island of Oahu in the Territory of Hawaii, Akikusa received his "Basic Personnel Record" with POW serial number 41J-4561-MI. The document states he was captured on May 15, 1945. The fingerprints on the document show that Akikusa was missing three fingertips. Akikusa signed the second page of the document that had the following disclaimer: "I have been fully advised of my rights under the Geneva Convention, and hereby declare of my own volition that I do not desire to have either my government or my family notified of my capture." As a result, Akikusa's name was not submitted to the International Red Cross Prisoner Information Bureau.

  Akikusa, Ishii and Ōmagari all said they were held at a US Navy detention center near Pearl Harbor, near the beach, then transferred to a US Army facility located in the mountains
about thirty minutes away by truck.[85] Both Shūji Ishii and Haruji Mita wrote that the US Army camp held about 800 POWs including recent arrivals from Okinawa, many of them teenagers. Some of the POWs were Koreans who had volunteered or were drafted into the Japanese military and were held in a separate part of the facility away from the Japanese.

  Both Shūji Ishii and Satoru Ōmagari described meeting a warm-hearted Japanese-speaking US naval intelligence officer in Oahu; Lieutenant Otis Carey, whose parents and grandparents had worked as missionaries in Japan. Lieutenant Carey was born in Hokkaido and attended elementary school in Japan, which explained his oral language proficiency.156

  Another bi-lingual naval intelligence officer that they spoke highly of was Lieutenant William "Billy" H. Gorham III. Lieutenant Gorham's father was William R. Gorham II; an American engineer who first brought his wife and sons to Japan in 1918. William R. Gorham II was an engineer for Nissan Motors in the early 1930's, and eventually rose to the position of plant manager at Hitachi's Kameari military tank factory in Tōkyō.[86] He also conducted research on the highly classified area of jet aircraft engines.157

  Young Billy Gorham went to the Unites States to attend high school, and was enrolled at Caltech when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. He entered the US Navy in 1943, after his college deferment ended, and worked for the Office of Naval Intelligence in Pearl Harbor as an interrogator.

  About a half year before the Pearl Harbor attack, due to restrictions on foreigners living in Japan, and faced with possible deportation, Mr. and Mrs.William R Gorham II renounced their US citizenship and become naturalized Japanese citizens. William R. Gorham II legally changed his name to "Katsundo Gōhamu."[87]

  Ishii wrote that since B-29s were bombing military production facilities across Japan, naval intelligence officer Lieutenant Billy Gorham asked every POW if they knew if his father's tank factory was still standing. One day, a POW told Lieutenant Gorham that he had worked at his father's tank factory in the fall of 1943, and reassured him that he had seen the lieutenant's father.158

  Akikusa's POW records show he left Oahu on June 27, 1945, on a ship bound for San Francisco. Ōmagari would be sent the following month to Seattle, Washington. After arriving in San Francisco Bay on July 5th, Akikusa transferred to a ferry that took him to the Prisoner of War Processing Center at Fort McDowell on Angel Island; it is here that Japanese POWs received immunizations and were tested for various diseases before being sent to POW camps across the United States.

  The food continued to be plentiful, and in short time "I began to worry about getting fat," said Akikusa. A typical day of meals at Angel Island: Breakfast: sausages, rice, apples, coffee, milk and sugar; Lunch: sukiyaki, cabbage salad, rice, caramel pudding; Dinner: Spaghetti and hash, baked tomatoes, lettuce and tomato salad, rice, cake and hot cocoa.159 Akikusa claimed he took in more calories in a single meal as a POW than he received in several days as a straggler on Iwo Jima.

  Life in the USA

  On August 3rd, naval radioman Tsuruji Akikusa, aircraft maintenance crew man Haruji Mita, and army medic Shūji Ishii were among the enlisted POWs that took an eye-opening train ride across the continent with stops of various durations in Ogden, Utah; Omaha, Nebraska; and Chicago, Illinois. "I could not believe the scale and beauty of North America," said Akikusa. The POWs ate C-rations, but the escorting MPs made sure the POWs received coffee and donuts when they were made available. They eventually arrived at Camp Michaux, also known as Pine Grove Furnace POW Interrogation Center, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on August 6, 1945; the same day the Americans dropped the Atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

  The 100-acre Pine Grove Furnace Camp was used to house German U-Boat crews and naval officers. It was expanded to include prisoners from Field Marshall Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps. Pine Grove Furnace POW camp was primarily utilized by the Provost Marshal General as an interrogation camp for enemy officers, but Akikusa's records prove that Japanese enlisted men were also housed at the installation. Akikusa and Ishii were just two of the 161 Japanese that passed through the gates during the war.160

  Dictaphones hidden in the ceiling could record the high-value German POWs' conversations (The inventor of the German Buzz Bomb was held here). The camp was under supervision of the Intelligence Department of the Army with a private telephone line to Washington, D.C. It was home to 1,500 prisoners and 150 American personnel. To maintain secrecy, if questioned, guards were instructed to say they were stationed at Carlisle Barracks located thirty minutes away. Pine Grove Furnace POW Camp was also known as Camp Michaux, 3300 SCU, and Camp S-51-PA.161

  Ishii wrote that the enlisted POWs had been separated from their officers for a long time. He noticed an air of resentment at Pine Grove Furnace POW Camp when a few Japanese officers were brought back into the mix. He wrote, "They still had an air of authority. They ordered us to heat up their water so they could take hot showers!" The enlisted POWs had been watching how the American enlisted men interacted with their officers and had grown accustomed to the comparative informality and mutual respect.

  Every morning and evening the Japanese POWs would form up for "colors" and "retreat" and render honors to the stars and stripes. "The Americans didn't force us to salute their flag, we did so naturally," Ishii wrote.

  Ishii said that there was even a piano in the chow hall, which was unthinkable in the Japanese Army. The POWs watched a film once a week. Ishii recalled one film in particular that was so popular they requested an encore showing the following week; the 1940 comedy, The Road to Singapore starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. "Even though we didn't understand, what we couldn't stop laughing at the sexy comedy."162

  Tsuruji Akikusa said the hills surrounding the camp in Pennsylvania were filled with beautiful deciduous trees. Some POWs went on work details at a lumber mill. However, the injuries to Akikusa's right hand kept him inside the camp on grass cutting detail. Akikusa was surprised to learn that POWs were paid for their labor. Enlisted men received roughly 80 cents a day, and officers received $1.00 per day. Just like in the military, the officers were charged for food, clothing, and laundry.163 The money was placed in a US Treasury Trust Fund, and distributed in the form of coupons that could be redeemed at the camp canteen. POW camps were required by the Geneva Convention to operate a canteen where POWs could purchase item such as cigarettes, candy, soft drinks, crackers, toothpaste, shoe polish, handkerchiefs, and local produce.164 "I didn't smoke back then, so I bought cigarettes to use as poker chips when we played card games like Hanafuda," said Akikusa.

  In regards to the canteen system, Ishii wrote that he felt that while his countrymen back home were suffering under strict rationing, POWs could buy almost anything they wanted from the canteen with the money they "earned." He said a bar of Lux soap cost 4 cents, and a pack of cigarettes was 9 cents. Ishii wrote, "There was a friendly camp guard named George who used to joke saying, ‘I can't wait for you boys to leave so I can get out of the Army and go home, too.'"

  About a month after Akikusa left Hawaii, Ensign Satoru Ōmagari was sent to the Port of Seattle, Washington. "When I stepped off the ship I thought I was in the middle of a giant automobile factory. There were so many cars!" said Ōmagari. He and other officers were put on a train bound for Oakland California, which is where he learned of Japan's capitulation. At one of the stops, three black soldiers boarded Ōmagari's railway car holding up a newspaper with the bold headline, "JAPS SURRENDER." The men danced and mocked the POWs. Ōmagari knew it was an inevitable, but wished he could have learned of it in a more dignified manner. The date was August 15, 1945, exactly one year after Ōmagari first set foot on Iwo Jima. It seemed like an eternity had passed.

  Later that day, he arrived in Oakland where MPs and a Nisei interpreter escorted the POWs to trucks that took them to a wharf. The POWs took a ferry and headed north passing under the Oakland Bay Bridge, past Treasure Island and Alcatraz to Angel Island POW Processing
Center. It was on the ferry that Ōmagari experienced the wonder of the Golden Gate Bridge. Ōmagari said, "Its enormous size and graceful design were strikingly beautiful;" for a moment he forgot about the war.

  The ferry passed a white hospital ship anchored near the bridge; it had crosses painted on all sides. The Nisei soldier said, "That's one of your disguised military ships. We captured it transporting troops and ammunition to the Philippines. What kind of cowardly nation does this?" The Nisei said that his parents taught him that Japan followed the Bushidō code of honor. "But my parents were wrong," he said. Unable to respond, Ōmagari's face flushed hot with shame.

  One such wolf in sheep's clothing was Tachibana Maru, captured August 2, 1945, by destroyers USS Conner (DD-582) and USS Charrette (DD-581) in the Banda Sea, north of Timor. It was carrying 1,500 healthy troops from the 11th Infantry Regiment who were disguised as medical patients. The ship had left the New Guinea area bound for Singapore loaded with crates marked "medical supplies" containing rifles and machine guns, mortars, and ammunition. The entire incident was caught on film.165 Among other things, the footage shows US sailors opening wooden crates marked with red crosses and pulling out helmets, leather belts with ammunition pouches, rifles and light machine guns. The cameraman caught stacks of bundled rifles, 75 mm artillery shells, and "patients" dressed in hospital robes marked with red crosses on their sleeves. Yuji Nishihama was one of the soldiers that were captured on this ship. He described how the Japanese created false medical records for the troops, and confirmed that they packed their gear in wooden crates marked with crosses. The soldiers were told the ship would be scuttled if it were hailed by an Allied vessel. Nishihama attributed his survival of the war to this event.166 The taking of the Tachibana Maru marked the largest single capture of Japanese troops during the war.[88]