The Storm on Our Shores

by Mark Obmascik

  It’s not clear whether Laird truly believed he had to become an officer to be allowed to marry, or if he was just using the murky rules of the U.S. Army as a convenient excuse to duck responsibility for his girlfriend’s pregnancy. Either way, Rose was crushed. She would have her baby out of wedlock.

  This time, though, she was determined to stay out of the Crittenton home. Giving up her baby for adoption last time had scarred her heart with guilt, anger, and despair. She didn’t think she could survive another adoption. Whether Laird wanted to help or not, Rose was determined to keep this baby. But how?

  Rose had no family to help work over her dilemma, but she did have the next best thing: Her boardinghouse roommate, Peg, had married and moved forty miles east, to Springfield, Ohio. The roommate and her husband, Don, invited Rose to live with them. On September 18, 1937, Rose gave birth in Don and Peg’s house. She named the baby Peggy Laird, though she would call her baby P.J., to avoid the confusion of having two Peggys in the house.

  There was no confusion of having two fathers in the house. Don was a great help with the baby, but Laird was mostly absent. He visited occasionally, and seemed more interested in the baby than the mother. As the weeks passed by, Laird visited less and less, until one week he did not visit at all. He abandoned Rose, and he abandoned their daughter.

  In her diary, Rose described this period as “a very black point in my life.” As for Laird, he didn’t really describe it at all. On the baby’s first birthday, September 18, 1938, Laird received his honorable discharge from the Army.

  After two years in the Army, Dick Laird had his new life. He still hadn’t come to terms with it. He returned to Bellaire, Ohio, where he pooled his life savings, $84.68, with his brother Cliff, and bought a Chevy dump truck. The plan was to start a coal-hauling business, but many of his customers were broke and didn’t pay. At one point, while trying to pry off a flat tire on a winter day, Laird accidentally whacked himself in the mouth with a sledgehammer handle, splitting his lip and knocking out his two front teeth. The accident led Laird to tally up the bodily damage toll of his first twenty-one years of life—one broken leg, two broken ribs, four broken fingers, a left foot broken twice, and a nose broken twice. His list omitted Rose’s broken heart.

  A few months of life back in Bellaire had convinced him, once again, that he didn’t want to live there. The military remained his best chance for a ticket out. Why not try again? Joined by a buddy, Laird reenlisted in the Army on August 1, 1939. The Army fixed his busted teeth. He was assigned to the Brooklyn Army base, then shipped out via the Panama Canal to San Francisco and, ultimately, the Fort Shafter Army Base in Honolulu, Hawaii.

  He was 4,600 miles from Rose and his toddler daughter. Rose figured he wasn’t coming back. She was broke, lonely, and scared. Hoping for something better, she met and married a poker-playing cab driver named George Breckenridge. “I was looking for a family who would love me,” Rose wrote, “and he was looking for a doormat. I became one for a time.” Rose quickly became pregnant again. Soon after, her new husband started beating her hard enough and often enough for their landlords to take notice. When their daughter, Nancy Lou, was born, Rose realized that her husband was losing so much money on the gambling tables that he couldn’t pay the bills. Rose went back to work. She felt her life falling apart again. Her daughter with Laird was being raised by friends. Her daughter with Breckenridge was being raised by her mother-in-law. Rose was being beaten time and again. She could not imagine any way out.

  And then, one day, out of the blue, in 1941, Laird returned home on leave from Hawaii. He came to see his daughter, Peggy, but spent the most time with Rose. He felt ashamed for abandoning them. Laird told her he had grown up during his second Army enlistment and that he was a new man. He fell in love again with Rose. The feeling was mutual. “I knew I could never live without him,” Rose confided to her diary.

  Laird returned to California for Army duty, but Rose made up her mind. She wanted a life with him. Aided by landlords who testified to the savagery of her beatings, Rose went to court to divorce her husband. A judge ended the marriage and ordered $20 a week in child support, but Rose never saw a penny. Reality set in. She had two daughters, an iffy bookkeeping job, and an exhausting struggle each month just to make the rent. She couldn’t take it anymore. She dropped off Peggy with friends, packed up her other daughter, Nancy Lou, and left on a train for California to take Laird at his word.

  When Rose arrived in Los Angeles, however, Laird was nowhere to be found. Rose panicked. She had spent nearly all her money to travel 2,300 miles to see Laird. Was he abandoning her again? Rose had no idea how to contact Laird other than writing him a letter. That would take days. With a toddler in a train station and no place to stay, Rose had little time to spare.

  Desperate, she hurried to a Red Cross office and begged for help. Workers there were able to figure out that Laird was in the Mojave Desert on Army maneuvers run by General George Patton. For ten days, Rose waited in a $2-a-day hotel.

  When his military maneuvers finally ended, Laird knew what he wanted to do. For the first time, he could envision a life, a good life, beyond work and Appalachia. He had no engagement ring. Rose didn’t care. Outside his Army base in San Luis Obispo, Laird and Rose found a justice of the peace and married. They were together at last, and they couldn’t be happier.

  PART THREE

  WAR

  8

  * * *

  Pearl

  In the span of two hours, the world changed. Starting at 7:48 a.m. on December 7, 1941, the Japanese killed more than 2,400 Americans; sank or damaged 21 ships; and damaged nearly 90 percent of the U.S. aircraft in Hawaii. In the process, they rocked the United States out of its isolationism and into World War II.

  Dick Laird and Nobuo Tatsuguchi were stationed thousands of miles from the carnage, but Pearl Harbor was the boulder that triggered the landslide that would certainly, inevitably, force them together.

  At the time of the sneak attack, Laird was training with his 7th Infantry Division in Northern California. In the days following the attack, he and his unit were deployed as emergency defense troops across the Pacific Coast. They girded for battle when patrols reported that the Japanese fleet was assembling just ten miles off Monterey, then 164 miles from San Francisco. They braced when another report held that enemy paratroopers had landed just east of California State Route 1. All these alerts turned out to be false, but Laird and his fellow soldiers were on edge.

  After three months of chasing rumors, Army commanders concluded that the Japanese weren’t invading California, at least for now. They reassembled troops and began training for a counterattack. Laird practiced loading boats at the Monterey Pier and he repeated amphibious landings at the mouth of the Salinas River. By April 1942, Laird and his fellow soldiers were moved to the Mojave Desert, where, they assumed, they were preparing to take on the Desert Fox, Nazi Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, in the sands of North Africa. After all, they were a motorized division that specialized in tanks and trucks. Laird learned how to withstand the heat and to make water last in the aridity. He took salt pills to prevent heat stress. Guns, mortars, and transports were all broken down and adapted to work in the wind and grit of the desert. He was issued desert boots, desert clothes, and desert canteens. Dick Laird was ready to fight Nazis in the desert.

  Then plans changed.

  Because Japan recorded time on the opposite side of the International Date Line, Pearl Harbor day in Tokyo was December 8, 1941. To the Japanese, it was not a Day of Infamy. It wasn’t much of a day of anything. Their country had already been at war for four years and suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths and casualties in China and Indochina. Yes, the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor had been an outstanding military success, but it was also just another front in a fight thousands of miles from the homeland.

  Nobuo Tatsuguchi knew it was much worse.

  The new war broke his heart. He loved Japan, but he also loved America. He could not
understand how his countrymen believed they could defeat a nation so vast and mighty. Even the military mastermind of the Pearl Harbor attack, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, doubted the path his country had chosen. “Should hostilities once break out between Japan and the United States,” Yamamoto wrote to a wealthy Japanese businessman and politician, “it would not be enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. To make victory certain, we would have to march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House. I wonder if our politicians have confidence as to the final outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.”

  More than any other top Japanese leader, Yamamoto knew the United States. He had traveled across the country and even studied at Harvard for a semester to learn English. He believed Japanese generals had arrogantly overestimated their own power and downplayed the strength of the U.S. “It is a mistake to regard Americans as luxury-loving and weak,” he told former classmates from Nagaoka in September 1941, just three months before Pearl Harbor. “I can tell you that they are full of spirit, adventure, fight, and justice. Their thinking is scientific and well-advanced. Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic was an act characteristic of Americans, adventuresome but scientifically based. Remember that American industry is much more developed than ours, and, unlike us, they have all the oil they want. Japan cannot vanquish the United States. Therefore we should not fight the U.S.”

  Despite Yamamoto’s opposition, Japanese generals and politicians were convinced more of their greatness than their limitations. Just ten hours after their stunning attack at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese launched another front to the south and invaded the Philippines. They decimated U.S. planes on the ground, forcing the remaining U.S. Navy fleet in the Philippines to flee to Java. Five months later, the Imperial Army had vanquished General Douglas MacArthur and his ground troops, too. More than 60,000 American and Filipino servicemen were taken as prisoners of war; as many as 10,000 died or were killed by Japanese brutality during the sixty-mile Bataan Death March.

  Every new battle, every escalation in war—it all rocked the Tatsuguchis. Because of Pearl Harbor, the loyalty of Nobuo Tatsuguchi was questioned every day. He assured any and all who listened that he was faithful to Japan, but he could not escape the whispers. Why had he lived so long in the United States? Why did he keep some American customs? Could Nobuo Tatsuguchi be a spy? He knew the questions were ridiculous, but, as far as he knew, he was still the only surgeon in the Imperial Army who hadn’t been rewarded with the status and pay of an officer. He was an honorable Japanese military man. His doubters could not be sated.

  The suspicions spanned the Pacific. On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed an executive order that forced the relocation and incarceration of 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry. Deepening the racial wounds of the war, Roosevelt’s order meant that internment camps were for people who looked like the war enemy in the Pacific, not the white German or white Italian war enemies across the Atlantic. If the Tatsuguchis had remained in California and applied for citizenship in the United States, they would have lost all assets and been imprisoned throughout the war. Internment camp in the United States or forced military service in Japan—the Tatsuguchis faced only bad options.

  In Japan, Nobuo Tatsuguchi’s loyalties were questioned, but his medical skills were needed. His native country could no longer afford to allow a talented doctor to stay home in Tokyo.

  Tatsuguchi soon received two pieces of life-changing news: His wife was pregnant. And he was being reassigned to serve overseas.

  He and his wife were crushed. Taeko had a toddler at home, with another baby on the way, and the whole family was scraping by on the meager salary of an enlisted man. Now her husband was being sent away in wartime for an indefinite period. How was she going to do this?

  All Tatsuguchi could do was offer calm reassurance. Remember—he was a surgeon, not a warrior. He would fulfill his duty to his faith and his country by healing, not killing. Besides, doctors were supposed to remain out of the line of fire, weren’t they?

  His deployment did offer one possible advantage. Serving his country overseas should remove all doubt about his dedication to his homeland. In his heart, Tatsuguchi was an optimist. He did not want to fight, but he did not want to be doubted, either. This was his chance to prove his fidelity to his homeland.

  And so Tatsuguchi was dispatched 3,000 miles from home, to the real prize of Japan’s war in the Pacific—the oil fields and rubber plantations of the Dutch East Indies. The Japanese Southern Force had launched the assault against Borneo ten days after Pearl Harbor. Within two months, fifty Japanese warships and 50,000 troops had claimed the entire region, from Singapore south and east in a three-thousand-mile swath to Sumatra, Java, and New Guinea. Tatsuguchi arrived seven months after the fighting was over, in October 1942. He was assigned to Rabaul, New Guinea, the main military base of the Japanese in the South Pacific, and found comparatively little medical work. The entire military operation had claimed the lives of fewer than a thousand Japanese. However, the subsequent Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies was heartless and brutal, killing an estimated four million through famine, disease, lack of medical attention, forced labor, and executions of prisoners of war.

  If Tatsuguchi witnessed war atrocities in the South Pacific, he didn’t tell his wife about them. He was a proud Japanese soldier, but a proud Seventh-day Adventist, too, and he returned home to his pregnant wife in Tokyo later that same month without confiding any crisis in either his religious faith or his military oath.

  Taeko could not help but wonder how Nobuo’s military indoctrination was changing his outlook on life. The Japanese Infantry Manual pushed for the creation of fighting zealots. “A striking feature of the doctrine is its excessive emphasis on ‘spirit,’ ” wrote Japanese military historian Saburo Ienaga. “The literature is full of phrases about ‘the attack spirit,’ ‘confidence in certain victory,’ ‘loyalty to the emperor,’ ‘love of country,’ ‘absolute sincerity,’ and ‘sacrifice one’s life to the country, absolute obedience to superiors.’ ”

  Even more ominously, troops were taught that surrender in battle carried the ultimate shame. “A commander who allows his unit to surrender to the enemy without fighting to the last man or who concedes a strategic area to the enemy shall be punishable by death,” the manual stated. “If a commander is leading troops in combat and they are captured by the enemy, even if the commander has performed his duty to the utmost, he shall be punishable by up to six months confinement.” Once in war, Tatsuguchi knew his choice would be victory or death.

  On temporary leave back home in Japan, Tatsuguchi began to display an unusual interest in the North Pacific. Like all soldiers, Tatsuguchi had been banned from discussing any future troop movements, even with his wife. Still, Taeko couldn’t help but notice his newfound curiosity about islands to the north of Tokyo and beyond.

  While her husband studied maps and books about flora and fauna of the North Pacific, Taeko had more pressing concerns at home. This second pregnancy was much more difficult. She suffered morning sickness when she woke up, and fought to keep down food the rest of the day. She felt frazzled. Were her nerves on edge because of her pregnancy, or her husband? Taeko worried about both.

  She had good reason. On a rainy night shortly after returning from New Guinea, her husband came home and delivered the abrupt news: He was shipping out immediately to an undisclosed location.

  There was no time to delay. The weather was bad. Taeko was not feeling well. Their young daughter, Misako Joy, was already asleep, so Taeko decided it would be better not to accompany her husband to the base to bid him farewell before his next deployment.

  As the days passed, Taeko was filled with regret. Had she made the wrong decision to not send him off with a heartfelt goodbye at the base? He had returned home from Papua New Guinea after only a few weeks. Surely he would return home soon from this new but secret deployment. Still,
this was war. Was the comfort of a sleeping child more important than a chance to spend the most time possible with a husband being shipped out to some mysterious new war assignment? Where was Nobuo? When would she see him again?

  She knew the Imperial Army limited his communications home. Spies could scan love letters to wives and girlfriends looking for any mention, however inadvertent, of troop movements or likely attacks. This meant Nobuo was banned from mentioning a date or location in his letters. The easiest way for whole swaths of his letters to be blacked out by military censors was for him to hint at any future plan. Yet Taeko longed to hear any news.

  Finally, after several weeks, she received a postcard from the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. “You must have been wondering what happened to me since I didn’t write for quite some time,” Nobuo wrote. “The autumn flowers are blooming near the barracks and surrounding mountains.” To win passage through military censors, Nobuo’s letters had to be intentionally vague. Still, there was one sentence, wedged between his more mundane talk of the scenery and military food, that stood out: “I might see my classmates from med school.”

  Taeko began to suspect the worst. The attack on Pearl Harbor was almost a year ago. The United States had been driven out of the Philippines. At this point, Taeko knew the only way for her husband to meet his medical school classmates was on a battlefield.

  One day she received a package in the mail from Nobuo. It contained the officer’s uniform he had purchased for 400 yen. Taeko did not know what to make of it. She worried that the return of the uniform meant he had given up any expectation of being appointed as an officer. That would be devastating, both to him and to her. So many of their hopes had been pinned on his promotion, which would have meant more money for the family, but, more importantly, would have signaled that he had finally earned the trust and respect of the Imperial Army. Why was Nobuo the only surgeon who had been held back from being named an officer? The package from Nobuo contained no explanation. All Taeko could do was guess. None of her guesses were pleasant.