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[COMMENT: We need a new generation of warriors to fight
the spiritual battle which we have been losing for two centuries or longer --
Christian men who will protect their families from the spiritual assault coming
from all directions. The present "conservative" leadership is not up to
the job. We must have men and women, but men primarily, who have
found their intellectual, moral, and spiritual grounding, who can take the
offensive against those who, knowingly or ignorantly, attack and compromise our
Biblical foundations. It is not enough to win the military war, we must
fight the spiritual war going on until Jesus returns. All military warfare
is a subset of the spiritual war going on all the time. E. Fox]
http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/ for much more of this story, visit
this website...
Tad Nagaki by Mary Previte
Tad Nagaki was full of memories when I tracked him down 52 years later.
I cupped the long distance phone to my ear and listened to his voice. Wave after
wave of memories blurred my eyes. I was a wide-eyed 12-year-old again listening
to the drone of the airplane far above the concentration camp. Racing to the
window, I watched it sweep lower, slowly lower. It was a giant plane, emblazoned
with an American star. Weihsien went mad. I raced for the entry gates and was
swept off my feet by the pandemonium. Grown men ripped off their shirts and
waved them at the sky to flag down the low-flying plane. Prisoners ran in
circles and punched the skies with their fists. They wept, cursed, hugged,
danced as the B-24 circled back, its belly open. Americans were spilling from
the skies, drifting into the fields tall with ripening gaoliang grain beyond the
barrier walls of the Weihsien Concentration Camp in China. The Americans had
come!
In 1945, I was a child prisoner in that concentration camp. "Weihsien Civilian
Assembly Center." That's what the Japanese guards called it. Tad Nagaki was an
American hero in the office of Strategic Services (OSS), one of the seven-man
Duck Mission" that liberated 1,400 Allied civilian prisoners there. For five and
a half years, my brother and sister and I had not seen our missionary parents.
August 17, 1945. I shall never forget that day. Tad Nagaki was the
Japanese-American interpreter on the rescue team.
In a cross-country search, I tracked him down - I found them all - in 1997, 52
years later. By then, Tad was a widower, 78 years old and farming corn and beans
and sugar beets in Alliance, Nebraska. I had to pull. Tad is comfortable with
the solitude of his tractor and his fields. These 0SS men were trained to keep
secrets. I was not! I was a woman from New Jersey - full of questions.
So, I pulled - with half a continent between us - trying to be polite but
tumbling the questions like a breathless child. Today, I call that rescue a
suicide mission - six Americans and one Chinese interpreter against how many
armed Japanese guards in 1945. Slowly, slowly, Tad Nagaki talked about that
windy day, the low-flying drop using British parachutes so the Japanese would
have less space and time to shoot the rescue team. It was only his second
parachute Jump, he said.
I remembered out loud the crowds of child prisoners. Oh, yes, we trailed these
gorgeous liberators around, begged for their insignia, begged for buttons, and
begged them to sing the songs of America. They were sun-bronzed American gods
with meat on their bones. My 12-year-old heart turned somersaults over every one
of them. We followed them day and night like children following the Pied Piper.
"What did it feel like?" I asked Tad Nagaki.
"Like being put on a pedestal," he said. That was the understatement of the
century. We made them gods. Tad remembered a girl cutting off a chunk of his
hair so she'd have a souvenir..
What Tad didn't say - that's what surprised me. Didn't he know that as an ethnic
Japanese, if the Japanese caught him in 1945, he'd be the first they would
torture and would kill? Didn't he know their most ghastly interrogation
techniques would come first? Didn't he know - of course, he did - the ritual
executions of Americans, would follow - oh, yes - by the Japanese warriors' code
of Bushido, which prescribed execution by be-heading? I shudder still to think
of it.
And, in Burma or in China, what if American soldiers thought you were the
Japanese enemy? I asked.
"I never gave it any thought," he said. "I was American." H e made it sound so
simple. "I was American!" I kept prodding.
"In war," he said, "if you're going to think about that, you're not going to
make a very good soldier."
So, how did a Japanese-American soldier - mistrusted as a Nisei and limited to
pruning trees and landscaping the grounds on a wartime military base in World
War II - arrive in an elite team of Japanese-Americans serving in the
China-Burma-India Theater? How did he become part of the first espionage unit
the United States used behind Japanese lines?
Minoseke Nagaki, Tad's father, emigrated from Japan to Hawaii in the early
1900's when American employers were recruiting Japanese to work in the mines,
forests and canneries. Tad's father worked first on plantations in Hawaii then
moved to the mainland to work on the railroad. By 1906, 13,000 first Japanese
were working on the railroad. Pay was 95 cents to one dollar a day. The Central
Pacific Railroad climbed the High Sierras, wound through the Donner Pass and
stretched through Nevada. Along the way, small groups of Japanese remained
inland to open restaurants, laundries and slaughterhouses, to mine coal and
copper, and to farm. Minoseke Nagaki settled in a valley with 40 or 50 Japanese
families near Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and, like many Japanese men, he sent to
Japan for a "picture bride." The law then said Japanese were not permitted to
become American citizens. But, he started farming. He grew a family.
Tad and other Japanese-American children started speaking English when they went
to the two and three-room schools around Scottsbluff, but someone started a
Japanese language school in the summers so Nisei - native U.S. citizens born of
immigrant Japanese parents - would also read and write Japanese. This gift of
two languages would shape his future.
War was brewing across the ocean. Tad Nagaki was drafted into the Army in
November 1941, the first of the Nagaki brothers to go. Born in Nebraska, he was
America. His Japanese-born parents considered it Tad's duty to go. Tad was 21.
Men of the Scottsbluff Elks Lodge sent him off and the other 18 draftees from
the valley with a buffet supper. The Nagakis celebrated with a goodbye
get-together. Tad would defend America. It was a simple equation: You love your
country, you must be willing to fight for it.
But, for Japanese-American soldiers it was more than that. Military service
would prove their patriotism. It would show America. Tad Nagaki's mother posted
a proud sticker in the farmhouse window, boasting that her boy was serving his
country.
Any American who was alive on December 7, 1941, can tell
you where he was when he heard the news. Joseph Harsch of The Christian Science
Monitor wrote from Honolulu, "Planes with red balls under their wings came in
through the morning mist today and attacked America's great mid-Pacific naval
base and island fortress here."
If Japan's sneak attack at Pearl Harbor shook America with anger and shock,
Japanese-Americans felt instant terror. Many smashed their Japanese recordings
and burned or buried letters from kinfolks, books, ceremonial dolls, Buddhist
family shrines and Japanese flags.
Japanese had killed or wounded 4,612 Americans, many of them buried under the
waters of Pearl Harbor. "REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR" - the slogan fanned the flames.
In the war hysteria, the Rose Bowl football game was moved out of Pasdena for
fear of an air raid. Burma Shave signs sprouted along highways: SLAP THE JAP.
Some Asian-Americans began wearing "I am Chinese" or "I am Filipino" pins: they
would differentiate us from them. When a nation is attacked, how does it judge
loyalty? Before long, the Selective Service System classified Nisei "4-C" -
enemy aliens not subject to military service. Some were mustered out of the Army
and sent home. Some were disarmed and assigned to menial labor.
Tad Nagaki didn't notice any change of people's attitude towards him at first -
not until his training buddies in the signal corps were all shipped out - and
Tad was not. Like everyone else, Tad was itching for action. He had always
dreamed of flying. He passed his physical and collected recommendations to
become an air cadet. Then came the personal letter from his commander: They
could not accept him because he was Japanese-American. Shipped to Ft. Thomas,
Kentucky, he now was assigned to a barracks with about 40 Japanese-Americans.
Other American boys were doing important stuff - going to war, fighting for
America. Tad and his Nisei buddies were pruning trees and landscaping the post,
loading food onto troop trains. But, what kind of job was that for a gung-ho
American soldier when a war was going on?
On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066,
evacuating people of Japanese descent from coastal areas.
Just before the war started, a tiny handful of Army Intelligence specialists
were alerting superiors of the importance of training Japanese language
interpreters to master the incredibly complex Japanese language. But, could
youth of an alien race - only one generation removed from the land of their
ancestors - be trusted in battle or in top secret intelligence work? While one
hand of the Army was removing Japanese-Americans from the West Coast, another
was searching for qualified Nisei for its language and intelligence effort. In
San Francisco, the Army opened a small-scale language school in a converted
hangar at Crissy Field, The Presidio. It hand-picked 58 Nisei for its first
class - sitting on apple boxes and orange crates. When the top brass saw its
value, the school was transferred to Camp Savage, Minnesota, where it was
reorganized as the Military Intelligence Service Language School.
In 1943, as Tad Nagaki and Nisei volunteers from the relocation camps were
increasingly frustrated to spend the war trimming trees and loading food onto
troop trains - two years of menial labor - the War Department posted an
announcement on the camp bulletin board. It was a plan to accept volunteers for
a special Nisei combat unit. "Every chance we got, we had tried to get into a
combat unit," he says. "They kept saying. 'No"' Now Nisei from Hawaii and across
the mainland rushed to volunteer. Half of the mainland men volunteered from
America's relocation camps. Absolutely, yes! Duty, honor, and country. They
would fight for America.
At Camp Shelby, Mississippi, the Nisei formed the 442nd Regimental (Go for
Broke) Combat Team. The average I.Q. of the entire 442nd was 119, nine points
higher than that required for Officer Candidate School. The 442nd's shoulder
patch sported a hand, holding high. a torch of liberty against a blue sky.
Deployed mainly in Europe, they would earn that patch. The 442nd would become
the most highly-decorated American unit in World War II, receiving 18,143
individual awards, not including Purple Hearts which are estimated at 3,600. "Skeets"
Nagaki, Tad's older brother, served in the 442nd.
Just as Tad Nagaki was joining the 442nd in July 1943, the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS) asked for Nisei volunteers for "highly secret" intelligence work.
"More hazardous than combat," some of them were told, "a one-way ticket." At a
height of 5' 5", Tad wasn't thinking about being a hero, but his choice was
better than pruning trees. He enrolled and found himself selected for an elite
team of Nisei in 0SS Detachment 101. Of the 23 men who started, only 14 made it.
Some people dubbed the OSS "Oh So Social" - because so many came from the Ivy
League. There was nothing Ivy League about the Nisei group. Tad Nagaki was a
farm boy from Nebraska. Three were from California and the rest, from Hawaii.
"Oh So Secret" was a better nickname. The assignment was hush-hush from the
start. Rule Number One: You didn't ask questions. You didn't write home to Mom
about what you were doing or what you had seen. The team was bound for
no-one-knew-where. Whatever was going on involved more than one service. If you
asked an insider, he might tell you the 'OSS' was a crazy mix of the FBI and the
Office of Naval Intelligence rolled together, plus Errol Flynn in one of those
war movies where he parachuted behind enemy lines and took the whole enemy army
by himself." The OSS trained the Nisei team first in radio school in Naperville,
Illinois, then the Military Intelligence Service Language School in Fort Savage,
Minnesota, then six weeks of survival and demolition at Toyon Bay on Catalina
Island. They toughened up with fitness training in the mountains, exercised with
water drills from LST boats. They could survive by fishing or shooting mountain
goats. Catalina Island was ideal for c
oastal surveillance and commando training. It was 1944, after begging for action
since 1942, the Nisei were about to get their chance.
In December 1941, Japan had moved to protect its gains in Southeast Asia, cut
off Allied supply routes to China, and gain additional rice and oil by invading
the British colony of Burma. It took them only three months to capture Burma. a
country about the size of Texas. War in this China-Burma-India Theater would be
fought over control of supply routes to China. In Burma, troops fought Guts War.
You melted with intense heat. You slogged through monsoon rains and jungle rot.
Your gut gushed and your body melted with tropical diseases. Your feet blistered
with long marches. You fought off - slapped off - leeches, poisonous snakes, and
biting insects. Supplies often came only through parachute drops.
Burma churned out an unpredictable mix of jungle war, mountain war, desert war,
and naval war. It was a death match of hand-to-hand combat appropriate for the
Stone Age and air transportation, whole divisions and their artillery and
vehicles flying through the sky, a marvel even for the 20th Century. Soldiers
landed by glider on remote jungle strips. Troops inched through acres of muddy
paddy-fields under solid sheets of monsoon rain that rotted their boots as they
moved. Boats probed mangrove swamps.
Dropping into Northern Burma in January 1943, OSS Detachment 101 was the first
espionage unit the United States used behind Japanese lines. Deployed in China,
Burma and India, it had 250 officers and 750 enlisted men trained in
parachuting, radio operations, infiltration, survival training, hand-to-hand
combat, cryptography and guerrilla tactics. An American-led intelligence outfit
with unconventional methods, it was led by Carl Elfier and William "Ray" Peers.
But, what an in-hospitable place for Allied soldiers who were inexperienced in
jungle warfare! Repelled as they were by the tribal practice of collecting ears
of the dead, Detachment 101 needed native talent. To recruit the local Kachin
tribesmen and gain their trust, they slept in villages and took part in village
festivals, watched Kachin musical processions, joined their games, foot races
and feasts. They lead 10,000 Kachin tribesmen - Kachin Raiders - from villages,
mountains and jungle hideouts against the Japanese
in Burma. With support of the Kachins, U.S. troops could feel the jungle was on
their side. They used the 'jungle grapevine." They pinpointed enemy targets for
Allied bombers. By late 1943, Detachment 101 had eleven radio stations reporting
regularly from Japanese controlled areas.
In 1943, when the Japanese announced that captured flyers would be given "one
way tickets to hell," Detachment 101 and their Kachin Raiders began rescuing
downed crews. Morale of Allied airmen in the Tenth Air Force - many of them
flying over "The Hump" - improved. Detachment 101 rescued some 400 Allied
flyers.
Soldier's Medal: Sgt Tadash Nagaki, intepreter, and T/4 Raymod N. Hanchulak,
medic, are awarded the Soldier's Medal for heroism in'Shanghia, 1945, for their
part in liberating 1,400 Allied prisoners from the Weihsien Civilian Assembly
Center in China's Shantung province, August 1945. Photo courtesy Mary T. Previte.
If Detachment 10 l's Nisei team was glued together with the unparalleled
brotherhood that men find in battle, they were also bonded as a blood
brotherhood hell-bent on proving their patriotism. Every one of them knew when
he volunteered that it was much more dangerous for him as a Japanese-American
than for others.
Late in 1944, Tad Nagaki arrived in Myitkyina (pronounced mich-chi-naw). Burma,
at a bend in the Irrawaddy River. Myitkyina was the strategic key to the entire
plan in the north. It had the only hard-surface, all-weather airstrip in Burma,
north of Mandalay. This was the airfield the legendary Merrill's Marauders had
seized. From there, Nagaki helped establish headquarters in Bhamo. Burma was his
introduction to living in straw thatched huts (bashas), riding bare back on
cargo-bearing elephants, slathering insect repellant, and eating K-rations.
C-rations and native rice and chicken curry.
The Nisei plunged into the work of sabotage, guerrilla warfare, hit-and-run
harassment operations. translating Japanese documents preparing propaganda
leaflets, interrogating prisoners and building airfields. Calvin Tottori, a
member of the Nisei team, documents their exploits in a fascinating collection
of unpublished memories, The O.S.S. Niseis in the China-Burma-India Theater.
Dick Hamada attached to 2nd Battalion in Central Burma. He recalls: "Second
Battalion was constantly on the move, setting up ambush, using punji
(smoke-hardened bamboo spikes) set on both sides of the trail to impale the
enemy. The punji were crude, but very effective. After one skirmish with the
enemy, the Kachin Rangers brought some clothing and captured weapons. I
inquired, 'How many enemy soldiers were killed?' 'Twenty,' said the soldiers.
When doubt spread across my face, they quickly took 20 ears from their pouch.
From that day on, I never doubted their claims."
The team was supposed to interrogate Japanese prisoners. "I never had the
chance," Tad Nagaki says. They resisted capture with fanatical zeal. Surrender
would bring shame to their family and country. "The Japanese always committed
suicide," he recalls, "blew themselves up with grenades."
Being mistaken for the enemy was always a possibility. Nisei Lt. Ralph Yempuku
was assigned to the 1st Battalion Kachin Rangers under Captain Joe Lazarsky. The
Kachins hated the Japanese. Japanese had tied villagers to trees and bayoneted
them to death. "The Kachins were initially very wary about me because I was a
Japanese-American," Yempuku recalls. "On the first day, Captain Lazarsky paraded
me in front of the whole battalion introducing me as an 'American' and ordering
them to study my face so that I would not be mistaken for and shot as an enemy
Japanese."
"I told them Lt. Yempuku was 'BIG DUA,' like the rest of us white men, Lazarsky
says. Lt. Yempuku lead his own country of Kachin guerillas in ambushing and
attacking Japanese-held villages behind enemy lines near Lashlo and along the
Burma Road.
Every Nisei knew, death would be better than capture. Cal Tottori's first
mission was to gather intelligence on Japanese troop movements in the area north
of Maymyo. "Since there were only two of us, we were expected to protect each
other. I recalled what we had been told over and over during our training -
always save the last bullet for ourselves." Combat bred its superstitions. After
the first recruit was wounded, Tottori's team felt very strongly that a tattoo
on one's body had some mystical power of protection. "In a moment of sheer
madness, we had a Burmese priest (pongyq do the tattooing on us, Tottori
recalls. "Mine was a Burmese tiger on my left forearm and is a constant reminder
of what I went through in that country."
Nagaki plunged into his assignment of training two platoons. Kachin tribesmen in
the north and Shan in Central Burma. It was a breathtaking mix of combat danger,
Red Cross coffee and colossal boredom. In the field, he parachuted behind
Japanese lines to monitor Japanese troop movements and gather information. At
headquarters in Bhamo, he processed reports.
As the war wound down in Burma in the summer of 1945, Detachment 101 Niseis,
battle-hardened in India and Burma, were deployed to China, to report to OSS
Detachment 202 headquarters in Kunming. Tad Nagaki, who had been driving
tractors on the farm in Nebraska since he was twelve years old, drove an Army
6x6 truck in the truck convoy over "The Hump" to China on the Burma Road.
As America closed in on Japs in late summer 1945, reports
reached American headquarters in China that Japan planned to kill its prisoners.
Rescue became a top priority. American commander, General Albert Wedemeyer,
directed agencies under his control to locate and evacuate POWs in China,
Manchuria and Korea. He pulled together seven-man rescue teams. including
medical, communications specialists and interpreters. OSS had two assignments:
rescue prisoners and gather intelligence.
OSS organized eight rescue missions, all under code names of birds: Magpie
(heading to Peiping), Duck (Weihsien), Flamingo (Harbin), Cardinal (Mukden),
Sparrow (Shanghai), Quail (Hanoi), Pigeon (Hainan Island), and Raven (Vientiane,
Laos). The 14th Air Force was ordered to provide the necessary staging areas.
The teams took off from Si'an (today called xi'an).
Nisei Dick Hamada was a member of the team that parachuted into Peiping (Bejing)
to liberate 624 Allied prisoners including survivors of the Doolittle raids on
Tokyo. Nisei Fumio Kido parachuted with the team that rescued American General
Jonathan Wainwright, hero of Bataan, and 1,600 other Allied POWs in Mukden. Cal
Tottori was a member of the OSS mercy mission that flew to Taiwan to seek
release of Allied POWs there. Ralph Yempuku parachuted into Hainan Island with
the team that evacuated 400 starving prisoners there. On August 17, 1945, Tad
Nagaki parachuted from a B-24, named "The Armored Angel," with five other
American heroes to rescue me and 1,400 other prisoners from the Weihsien
Concentration Camp in China's Shangtung Province.
Tad Nagaki and members of these rescue teams were honored with the Soldier's
Medal for heroism. He was one of about 25,000 JapaneseAmerican men and women who
served in U.S. Armed Forces during World War II.
"The Nisei bought an awful hunk of America with their blood, said American
General Joseph Stilwell, who commanded U.S. forces in the China-Burma-India
Theater. "You're damn right those Nisei boys have a place in the American heart
forever!"
Tad Nagaki says he's not a hero. He says he did what any
American would have done. After helping to establish an OSS base in Tsingtao,
China, he returned to America in 1946 and married his Nisei fiancee, "Butch." He
had met her on a blind date while he was attending Military Intelligence Service
Language School in Minnesota. "Butch" and her Issei parents had been imprisoned
in the Poston relocation camp in Arizona. After America changed its laws in
1950, Tad Nagaki's parents became American citizens. They never returned to
Japan. Today, Tad Nagaki farms corn and beans in Alliance, Nebraska, not far
from where he grew up. He is 82.
Mary Previte is an Assemblywoman in the New Jersey legislature. Address:
351 Kings Highway East, Haddonfleld. NJ 08033.
Reprinted with permission from the June 2002 Ex-CBI Roundup.
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