“Where have all the flowers gone?
Gone to graveyards every one.
When will we ever learn?”
- derived from “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” (Pete Seeger, 1955 song)
Like some (perhaps many) of you, I try to watch 60 MINUTES when I can. I find it usually informative, often entertaining, and sometimes moving.
A recent (April 7) segment on someone named Paul Tatsuguchi piqued my interest. Japanese, Paul had attended school in the USA and became a physician.
He returned to Japan and, as a surgeon in the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII, was killed on Attu, westernmost point in the USA and home to some of the most forbidding weather on the planet.
What happened subsequently I found intriguing.
Here’s a link:
https://www/60minutes/videos/339150766729387/?v=339150766729387
More recently, I received an e-mail from a fellow resident from postgraduate school. He recommended the book the segment was based on.
I decided to procure it.
I learnt more and will now issue a spoiler alert that some of what I write below you may not wish to know until you have read the book.
What was not stated in the 60 MINUTES segment was that Paul had attended Pacific Union College and College of Medical Evangelists (now Loma Linda University), graduating from medical school in 1938.
He wed and, for family reasons, returned to Japan.
In 1941 he was conscripted in the IJA (Imperial Japanese Army).
A few weeks after he left for Attu (a place perhaps familiar mainly to crossword puzzle aficionados), a destination he was not allowed to share with wife Taeko, the IJA delivered a lock of his hair to Taeko. They did this whenever a soldier was sent to a high-risk combat zone.
The Japanese had first occupied Attu, in the Aleutian Islands, in 1942 (during the battle of Midway). Paul arrived in 1943 and helped set up a small hospital. Eventually close to 2900 Japanese soldiers would occupy Attu.
In May 1943, Americans arrived to retake the island (which, at least in retrospect, seemed of greater symbolic than strategic importance). Outnumbered 5 to 1, the Japanese moved into the mountains. Paul records troop movements in his diary, which he kept during his time on Attu.
Before going to Attu, Paul was indoctrinated with the mindset of the IJA, which meshed with that of bushido, the credo of the samurai: No surrender. Victory or death. Death before dishonor (death is as light as a feather).
With rare exception, Japanese soldiers followed this credo. They were known as fierce fighters (and equally fierce captors; it was much preferred by American combatants in the war to be captured by the Germans than the Japanese).
On May 30, the Japanese leader on Attu, Yamasaki, decided the best defense is a good offense.
In a banzai attack, he attempted to storm the Americans, hoping to capture weaponry and turn it against their erstwhile users.
The book recounts actions in the fracas by one Dick Laird, an American who hurled a grenade at a group of nearby Japanese who had commandeered an American mortar, killing 8, including Paul.
The Japanese effort failed. Less than 1% of the initial 2900 were taken captive. The rest had either been killed or committed mass suicide (many by holding grenades against their bodies and detonating them). Suicide was also the fate of patients in the Attu hospital.
About 550 U. S. soldiers died.
It was the only battle during WWII fought on North American soil.
Laird found Paul’s diary among his personal effects and sent it to his superiors. The diary was then ostensibly lost, but not before it had been translated into English and distributed. It put a face to the enemy and belied the notion that all Japanese soldiers were ruthless barbarians.
Some were fathers and husbands, with feelings not so different from our own.
At least 10 versions of the diary exist.
One Internet version of Paul’s demise has him emerging from a cave, holding a Bible, saying, “Don’t shoot! I’m a Christian.” He got shot anyway by a soldier accompanying Laird (it can be hard to hear above the howling wind, which can gust up to 200 km/hour on Attu).
Laird disputes the above account.
If Obmascik’s book is to be believed, Laird suffered mightily thereafter with what we might today call PTSD.
He wrestled with the issue of whether he had, in fact, killed a fellow American, albeit one who fought with the enemy. Paul had studied in America, loved American things, and was a presumed pacifist and noncombatant. He wasn’t supposed to have been there.
Laird decided to reach out to Paul’s family and contacted Laura Tatsuguchi Davis, one of Paul’s daughters who never knew her father, in Sherman Oaks, CA.
Taeko, whose parents were missionaries, lived with Laura for more than 3 decades after Paul’s death. She encouraged her daughter to interact with Laird if it would bring peace.
Perhaps understandably, Laura initially did not wish to hear more from the man who claimed to have killed her father.
It was not until years later, when her son was at university in AZ, that she contacted Laird, who was by this time retired in the area.
This story reminds me somewhat of that of Louis Zamperini, protagonist of UNBROKEN, the incredible true recount by Lauren Hillenbrand.
Zamerpini, a world-class runner, was shot down in wartime and captured by the Japanese. Tortured in prison camp by a particularly diabolical captor called ‘The Bird,’ Zamperini later heard Billy Graham, converted to Christianity and forgave his Japanese tormentor.
He even traveled to Japan to meet with ‘The Bird,’ to little avail.
But I digress.
After their meeting, during which much information was shared, Laura wrote a letter to Laird.
She wanted to provide atonement and, in the process, possibly peace.
Here is some of that letter:
“Dear Mr. Laird,
I am writing this letter to express… my gratitude to you for coming to my house so many years ago, and to ask you to let go of any feelings of guilt or pain you still have over what happened between you and my father at Attu. What happened there was neither your fault nor his. Neither you nor any of your comrades chose that particular battle or that particular time to fight. If fault lies with anyone, it lies with those commanding generals, all long dead, who decided to spend the lives of their men in what many believe to be a stupid battle over a useless and barren piece of land. That includes the Japanese generals who invaded, for what must have been symbolic purposes, small and frozen islands that they could neither defend nor use, and who left men stranded there. It also includes the American military commanders who chose the worst of seasons to stage a battle that never needed fighting.
The only thing that dignifies and sanctifies that terrible battle was the bravery, duty, and loyalty to country that those of you… displayed under the most terrible circumstances. You were an American soldier. Your native land had been attacked, and you accepted the task of defending it. You did the duty thrust upon you bravely and ably. So did your comrades. So did the men on the other side. None of you, on either side, chose to make this horrible war happen…
My father’s medical school classmates told me how my father felt in the later 1930s about the then-brewing conflict between Japan and the United States. My father loved America, and would have happily remained here to practice had family necessities not required him to return to Japan…
What happened happened. You are not at fault. The men you fired upon that day would have fired upon you. Had you not fired when you did, you and more of your comrades may have died. How could you know that there was an American trained physician, and a father and husband facing you? And what could you have done, other than what you did, even had you known?
Whatever happened out there that day, and whatever painful flashes of memory still visit you, I ask you to let them go. I ask you to accept what happened and forgive yourself and to be at peace… “
The night after their meeting at a restaurant, Laird told Laura he slept without nightmares.
The book could have benefited from tighter proofreading/editing. But these are minor quibbles.
If you read it, you will be enlightened.
I was.
One thing reading the book reminded me of, unrelated directly to the story of Paul Tatsuguchi and Dick Laird:
Near the end of WWII, some tough decisions were made.
Henry Stimson, U. S. Secretary of War, estimated it would cost a million lives if the Allied powers invaded Japan. Harry Truman, POTUS, decided to test nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in an effort to end the war with less loss of life.
He decided to give Japan warning.
At a subsequent press conference in Tokyo, Prime Minister K Suzuki dismissed the warning as ‘mokusatsu,’ translated as ‘unworthy of public notice.’
The U. S. then dropped millions of leaflets over Japan, urging citizens to evacuate at least 4 cities named on the leaflets.
Only thereafter, 3 days apart in August 1945, were “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” deployed.
It was once like this in Biblical times.
Noah purportedly preached for years while the ark was being built. In the end, only 8 humans were saved from the Great Deluge.
Before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, angels in the guise of men came to warn Abraham and Lot.
They warned Lot’s family not to look back as Sodom went up in flames.
One of the family didn’t make it.
At the end of time as we know it, it will be business as usual before the Paruousia.
Who will be ready?
