Bridge to the sun, p.1
Bridge to the Sun, page 1
ALSO BY BRUCE HENDERSON
Sons and Soldiers
Rescue at Los Baños
Hero Found
Down to the Sea
Fatal North
True North
Trace Evidence
Time Traveler (with Dr. Ronald L. Mallett)
And the Sea Will Tell (with Vincent Bugliosi)
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2022 by Bruce Henderson. Afterword copyright © 2022 by Gerald Yamada. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Henderson, Bruce B., [date] author.
Title: Bridge to the sun: the secret role of the Japanese Americans who fought in the Pacific in World War II / Bruce Henderson.
Description: First edition. | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, [2022] |
Identifiers: LCCN 2021053217 (print) | LCCN 2021053218 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525655817 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525655824 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Participation, Japanese American. | Japanese American soldiers—History—20th century. | Japanese American soldiers—Biography. | World War, 1939–1945—Japanese Americans. | World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Pacific Area.
Classification: LCC D769.8.A6 H46 2022 (print) | LCC D769.8.A6 (ebook) | DDC 940.53089/956073—dc23/eng/20220107
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053217
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053218
Ebook ISBN 9780525655824
Cover photograph: U.S. Army Signal Corps
Cover design by Jenny Carrow
ep_prh_6.0_141032870_c0_r0
For them all
CONTENTS
Introduction
Prologue TOKYO BAY: SEPTEMBER 2, 1945
PART ONE
One THE TYPE OF SOLDIER WE WANT
Two “HARM THEM…HARM ME”
Three “WHERE IS PEARL HARBOR?”
Four EXECUTIVE ORDER 9066
Five ROPE IN THE OPEN SEA
PART TWO
Six CAMP SAVAGE
Seven SOLOMON ISLANDS
Eight NORTH TO ALASKA
Nine THE COUSINS
Ten A HAZARDOUS MISSION
Eleven MERRILL’S MARAUDERS
Twelve MYITKYINA
Thirteen THE ADMIRALTIES
Fourteen SULPHUR ISLAND
Fifteen THE LAST INVASION
Sixteen CHINA
Seventeen RETURN TO JAPAN
Epilogue OKINAWA: SPRING 1995
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SOURCES
ROSTER OF NISEI VETERANS OF THE PACIFIC
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INTRODUCTION
Bridge to the Sun tells the little-known story of the U.S. Army’s Japanese American soldiers who fought in the Pacific theater during World War II, and their decisive role in the defeat of Japan. Thousands of Nisei—first-generation American citizens born in the United States whose parents were immigrants from Japan—served as interpreters, translators, and interrogators throughout the Pacific, participating in all the major battles. Guadalcanal. New Guinea. Solomons. Iwo Jima. Burma. Leyte. Okinawa. Tantamount to a secret weapon in the war against Japan, they were intent on proving their loyalty even as their families were being held in internment camps. They fought two wars simultaneously: one, against their ancestral homeland; the other, against racial prejudice at home.
After America’s declaration of war against Japan following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese immigrants (Issei) living in the U.S. were branded as “enemy aliens.” Their Nisei offspring were seen by many Americans not as fellow countrymen but as the face of the hated enemy. It was unsafe for them to walk down the streets of some U.S. communities. As a result of this nation’s failure to correctly gauge their loyalty and patriotism, coupled with the widespread xenophobia regarding anyone and anything Japanese, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942 that authorized the removal of some 110,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry from four western states to hastily built camps run by the War Relocation Authority. An estimated two-thirds of them were U.S. citizens. Stripped of their constitutional rights, they were rounded up and forced into internment camps.
In a few short months, the War Department, desperate to find sufficient numbers of Japanese speakers to serve in the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) in the Pacific, concluded that training the Nisei for this vital role might be the answer. But there was a key question to be addressed: Would Japanese Americans be willing to fight against their ancestral homeland? The Army sent recruiters to relocation camps to find out. In one camp after another, the irony was inescapable to the internees. They were being kept behind barbed-wire fences because the U.S. government questioned their loyalty, and now the Army needed them to volunteer in the war against Japan, the very country they were suspected of being sympathetic toward? Even the most patriotic Nisei harbored strong feelings that their rights as U.S. citizens had been violated. And yet, from their bleak, barracks-like quarters inside guarded compounds in desolate locations, waves of young Japanese Americans answered their nation’s call. Implored one tearful mother to her departing nineteen-year-old son as he left to join the Army: “Make us proud.”
In 1942, the first Nisei recruited by the U.S. Army for the newly opened Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS) arrived at Camp Savage, Minnesota. Initial plans called for a new class to graduate every year, but the pressure to have Japanese-speaking MIS teams in the field resulted in a compressed timetable, with graduation in half that time. The War Department ordered the school to supply enough Japanese-language teams to support every division fighting in the Pacific. As a result, each succeeding class was larger than the one before it, with the curriculum ever more focused and specialized. By spring 1946, the MISLS had produced nearly six thousand graduates.
The war planners in Japan believed their language so complex that few Westerners would fully understand it. As a result, many Japanese military communications were sent in the open without being coded. Trained Nisei linguists in the field were able to rapidly translate these messages and other captured documents and provide U.S. commanders with timely intelligence about enemy defenses and plans, the condition and morale of its troops, and technical specifications of their weapons, all of which were put to use in winning battles and saving American lives.
The story of the Japanese American soldiers who served in the Pacific theater is one of action, pride, courage, and sacrifice. That U.S. combat units fighting throughout the Pacific had the ability to understand the enemy’s language and read their communications was among the best kept secrets of the war. In the decades that followed, a veil of secrecy stayed in place over matters pertaining to military intelligence. Even when the World War II records started to be declassified decades later, much of this story remained untouched in dusty storage bins at national archives. The buried and scattered records of their service were often incomplete or not easily found. The fact that their small intelligence teams were attached to larger units made finding detailed accounts of their wartime activities all the more challenging. Astonishingly, no roster of the Japanese American soldiers who served in the Pacific was ever compiled by the Army. (See Appendix for the first list of more than three thousand Nisei veterans of the Pacific war.)[*]
For decades, there were no reunions of the MIS Nisei; they had gone through the war without having much contact with others like themselves except for the few men on their own team. After the war, they were disinclined to join veterans’ organizations, as their race and ancestry made them unwelcome in the usual circles of military fraternal groups. Some local posts of the Veterans of Foreign Wars prohibited Japanese Americans from joining. Many Nisei veterans, satisfied with having done their duty and proven their loyalty to America, did not speak openly of their wartime experiences for years, even to their families.
Bridge to the Sun tells this dramatic, poignant, and inspirational story at a pivotal time in this country’s history. Japanese Americans, with ancestral ties to a nation with which we were at war and distrusted for that reason, became huge assets to the U.S. military because they knew the enemy better than anyone and were highly motivated to defeat them. In an America that too often prejudges people based on race and ethnicity, their timeless message of courage and patriotism should not be forgotten.
Bruce Henderson
Menlo Park, California
Skip Notes
* Before the war ended, approximately thirty-one thousand Nisei served in uniform, the majority of them sent to Europe. While more than three thousand Japanese American soldiers served in the Pacific with littl
PROLOGUE
Tokyo Bay: September 2, 1945
The sky was dull gray with low-hanging clouds over the battleship on which the war that began with the attack on Pearl Harbor more than a thousand days before was to now end with Japan’s formal surrender.
The USS Missouri’s trio of sixteen-inch guns mounted in forward turret No. 2 had hurled one-ton, armor-piercing projectiles in bombardments of Iwo Jima and Okinawa months earlier, and more recently at the Japanese homeland. But now the sixty-six-foot-long barrels were pointed straight up to provide headroom on the verandah deck, where some of the highest-ranked military leaders of the victorious Allied nations were standing in designated spots. The teak deck shone with the colors of red-striped Russians, beribboned British, olive-drab Chinese, and khaki-clad American admirals and generals. In the center of the narrow space was a long, collapsible table borrowed at the last minute from the crew’s mess and covered with a coffee-stained green cloth from the officers’ wardroom—stand-ins for a showy mahogany table (a gift from the British Navy for the momentous occasion) that proved too small to spread out the surrender documents for signing. A straight-back chair had been placed at either side of the table. In the superstructure rising high above, every level and catwalk was filled with hundreds of cheering white-capped sailors gawking at the scene below as the ship’s band played a rousing rendition of the Navy march song, “Anchors Aweigh.”
Standing thirty feet away on a subdeck with a group of U.S. news correspondents was twenty-seven-year-old Thomas Sakamoto, a tall Japanese American with thick black hair and large, penetrating eyes whose intelligence and dedication to duty had been rewarded with two promotions in the past four months. Born in San Jose, California, he now wore a single gold bar collar device as one of the newest second lieutenants in the Pacific. On a chain around his neck was the same “Press” tag worn by the newsmen he had escorted from Manila two days before as their official interpreter.
At precisely 9:04 a.m., the gaiety aboard the battleship ceased when a small launch came along the starboard side carrying a delegation of Japan’s government officials and military officers. One by one they climbed a steep ladder to the Missouri’s gangway. First to the top was Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, who had trouble on the ladder because of his wooden leg—the result of a Korean terrorist attack a decade earlier. No American reached out to help as he pulled on the ship’s ropes to bring himself up the last rungs. Like his two aides from the Foreign Office behind him, Shigemitsu was dressed in formal attire: a frock coat, striped trousers, and a silk top hat. Leaning heavily on a cane, he awaited the rest of his party, which included three representatives each from Japan’s War and Navy Departments. He then hobbled slowly with them to where they were directed to stand mid-deck near the signing table. Shigemitsu was known in diplomatic circles for his efforts to stave off armed conflict with America; a year before Pearl Harbor, he spent two weeks in Washington trying to arrange a face-to-face meeting between Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a summit that never took place. Shigemitsu had been appointed foreign minister a year before. By signing the surrender on behalf of Japan’s government this day, Shigemitsu would be formally ending a war he had never wanted.
Next to Shigemitsu stood Japan’s other signee to the surrender: a grim-faced General Yoshijiro Umezu of the Imperial General Staff, his uniform replete with dress gloves and knee-high boots, and his chest covered in campaign ribbons and draped with loops of gold braid. His dress uniform usually included his steel-bladed samurai sword, but this morning he was not wearing his prized shin-guntō. Umezu, who had commanded armies in China and Manchuria, had opposed surrender to the last moment. Even after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than a hundred thousand of his countrymen, he had lobbied to fight on and force the U.S. and their allies to sustain such heavy losses in an invasion of the homeland that Japan would be able to negotiate for peace under better terms. Considering himself a soldier born to command an army, he had threatened to commit hara-kiri in protest if ordered to sign the surrender. It took the emperor’s personal persuasion before Umezu reluctantly accepted his appointment as the signee to the instrument of surrender on behalf of Japan’s armed forces.
Surrender ceremony aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, September 2, 1945
In the hush that followed the delegation’s arrival, Tom Sakamoto could hear only his own breath. The Japanese party waited, not knowing what to expect, as there had been no rehearsal or other instructions given them. Nothing spelled defeat more than having to board their enemy’s massive battleship anchored in the bay of their own capital city, and they were left to stand as the vanquished before a thousand hate-filled stares. A Chinese general swiped his hand under his chin in a cut-the-throat gesture. It reminded Sakamoto of the thumbs-down sign that sealed the fate of defeated gladiators in the Roman Colosseum. The Japanese, their downcast eyes having gone dull, stood like statues in the harsh silence. Had they looked at a nearby bulkhead, they would have seen the gray surface painted with row after row of miniature rising suns representing the number of Japanese planes and ships shot down or sunk by the Missouri.
When General Douglas MacArthur at last stepped out from a sea cabin, he strode stiffly to a cluster of microphones. The only sign of emotion Sakamoto detected from the man who had orchestrated the defeat of Japan in a strategic island-hopping campaign through the Southwest Pacific was the slight trembling of his hands as he held his prepared remarks.
“We are gathered here, representatives of the major warring powers, to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored,” he said in the sonorous voice familiar to many. “It is my earnest hope, and indeed the hope of all mankind, that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past—a world founded upon faith and understanding, a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfilment of his most cherished wish for freedom, tolerance, and justice.” Promising to discharge his duties as supreme commander for the Allied powers in the peaceful occupation of Japan with “justice and tolerance,” MacArthur said, “I now invite the representatives of the emperor of Japan and the Japanese government and the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters to sign the Instrument of Surrender at the places indicated.”
Sakamoto realized that no attempt was made to translate MacArthur’s message for the Japanese delegation, and he wondered just how many of the vanquished understood the words of the victor.
Shigemitsu was the first to sit at the table. He signed his name in three distinct Japanese ideographs inside a pair of forty-by-twenty-inch bound books; one held the surrender document in English that would be taken to Washington, and the other had a Japanese translation he would take to Tokyo later that day. Next came Umezu, the swordless old warrior who had pushed for his country to fight on.[*]
As MacArthur approached the table, he motioned forward two of his generals, Jonathan Wainwright, who was captured when Corregidor fell, and Arthur Percival, the British commander who surrendered Singapore; both had been prisoners of the Japanese since 1942 until being freed two weeks earlier. Hurriedly flown in the day before to attend the surrender ceremonies, they were still shockingly emaciated. With pressed uniforms hung on bony apparitions but heads held high, Wainwright and Percival stood at attention behind MacArthur, who took from his pocket five silver-tipped fountain pens. He began his signature, then stopped and handed the pen to Wainwright, who saluted and stepped back. Percival received the next pen. Of the three remaining pens MacArthur used to complete his signature, one was for him, one would be kept aboard the Missouri for posterity, and one sent to President Harry S. Truman. Then a succession of representatives of the nine Allied nations at war with Japan strode one by one to the signing table to add their signatures.
