The Iron Graves of Saipan – Dan King on the Japanese 9th Tank Regiment

Podcast Episode

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Digital Fortin Media proudly presents the What's the Scuttle Butt Podcast with your hosts, Don Abernathy, Jeff Copsetta, and Dennis Blocker.

SPEAKER_03 0:16

Welcome everybody to another episode of the What's the Scuttlebutt Podcast, your favorite World War II based podcast, and we are back for another great episode with a return guest that we're excited to talk to. Without any further ado, we're just gonna get right to it. Dennis, how are you doing, fella?

SPEAKER_04 0:29

Doing great. Doing really good. Excited about our episode tonight.

SPEAKER_03 0:34

Now I know you and our guests are in Texas, I'm in Florida. It's been cold all over the planet. So for those of you up in the north and midwest who are freezing, granted, we're not freezing as bad as you are, but we feel the pain too. I was just explaining to Dennis and Dan here that it's supposed to feel like 28 degrees in Florida tomorrow morning at 42 right now. So hopefully, while you're drinking your coffee and driving to work tomorrow with your heater blasted on high, you're listening to the show, and uh perhaps a good topic about subtropical climates will warm up your soul. Without any further ado, Dennis, let's get to it.

SPEAKER_04 1:06

Yeah, so we're very excited to have with us again uh uh a friend of mine and um a tremendous author, Dan King, who has got himself a very unique niche in World War II history. And what's awesome about it is that it just kind of it just kind of sprang into being. And um it was a uh a love of of history, and um I'm I'll let him tell his own story, but but I am all about that about the uh the the universe giving you signs and you hopefully being paying attention to them and taking advantage of the opportunities you're given and just what wild rides that will take you on. Um this is in particular one of those uh human stories that I love so much. Um Dan's written several books, um, Blossoms from the Sky, firsthand accounts from the uh Japanese naval pilots who um volunteered to fly the uh Oka uham. The Yellow River Boys, and that one's about um Dan's father's aircraft, the uh B-29 cruise. And that's so that's the Korean War. A tomb called the Iwo Jima. That's a book that I referenced a lot when I was doing my uh book with Mitch Weiss, The Heart of Hell. Specifically because, and this is what we're gonna get into is that there are viewpoints from the Japanese side, and that's what Dan is all about. And that is amazing. Um, The Last Zero Fighter. Um, and then this one here, The Iron Graves of Saipan, and that's his newest book, and we're I've and I've enjoyed it. I've got mine all marked up and dog eared and and highlighted, and I've got even got notes that I've written in the margins here. Um, so we're we're very glad to have you with us, Dan. And thank you so much for joining us again. Thank you. I appreciate it a lot.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

And thanks for helping promote my book, The Ingrade of Saipan. I want to say the photo on the back I took uh on Saipan uh about a year and a half ago. And this was the uh training range for the fourth tank company on Nalog Beach. And this is where they actually fired at mock targets for General Saito, who praised them and gave them all like a special liberty pass. But I thought it was just so amazing to stand on this beautiful, quiet, solemn beach and know that you know back in 1944 they were they were blasting away at American mock-up tanks on this beach. So there's all those kind of stories here in that book.

SPEAKER_03 3:55

Speaking of that photo, and and it never really occurred to me before, but speaking of that photo, when you're reading um or researching areas and you find uh historical documentation about battlegrounds or battlefields area where an attack happens, do they often list the latitudes and longitude, which would then help us modern day find those areas with GPS, or is there a little more um treasure hunting involved in that?

SPEAKER_01 4:17

Yeah, there's a lot of treasure hunting. There's like locations as far as from what I've seen, like on the Japanese side, it's it's tougher to find longitude and latitudes. But this is a pretty famous speech there in Saipan.

SPEAKER_03 4:30

And real quick to Dennis' opening point, I agree with him wholeheartedly. Um, the I love the way, not only in this book but in your other books, how you're presenting the story from a side that often that people aren't used to. You know, if you live in America, you tend to read American-based books about what the Army, the Marine Corps, airborne does. And if you live in UK, oftentimes you read the Allied side as well. And sometimes when you do read from the axis of evil, quote unquote, or the enemy side, sometimes it's it's done, but it still kind of feels a little propaganday-ish. Whereas yours you tell an honest, open-eyed, like this this is about the Japanese viewpoint of the battle of Saipan. But at no point do you do I, as a reader, feel like there's any sort of you know, pro-Japanese, pro-axis of evil propaganda or storytelling here. This is just a straight, this is what happened to these guys, this is what they went through, this is their experience. It's a true, honest telling.

SPEAKER_01 5:30

And I'm so glad to hear that.

SPEAKER_03 5:32

And it's very reminiscent of what we heard the guys at the beginning of Band of Brothers say, Hey, you know, we're not talking about the SS guys, but we realize that if if we weren't at war and if we were somewhere else, maybe fishing or on vacation, right? They're just like us, we would get along. And that's what you walk away with with this book. Yes, and we'll get into it. And one of the early scenes of that, which I really enjoyed, was when you get into talking about the boot camp, them going to the post exchange, buying the candy and the different things. You really take that boogeyman aspect away, and you're like, these are just young men who were fighting for their country, much like we were fighting for ours. And I really appreciate that. And we need more of that so people get a well-rounded view of these campaigns and the tragedy on both sides, really.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Definitely enjoyed talking to the Japanese veterans and hearing about their experiences. And like you said, you know, if you met them at a different time or location, you'd probably be friends with them. And they, in their mindset, they were told that an enemy is coming to take over the country. What does every red-blooded Japanese man do? Defends the country. Anybody would do that, and that's what they were told, that's what they believed. And of course, you know, the propaganda told them the Americans were bloodthirsty, demons, monsters, they're gonna eat your babies and do all this crazy stuff. So, you know, a lot of their um their kamikaze attacks and their last ditch efforts totally make sense. If if you think you're the last line of defense between your mom and your sister and your you know, your little brother being destroyed or mutilated, barbecued, then of course you'll give you up, you'll give up your life for that. Anybody would. I don't care whether you're American, Russian, Chinese, Canadian, any normal patriotic person would give their life to the family and their friends. It's very normal, normal attitude. And you know, as Americans, I grew up hearing the Japanese were crazy and the kamikazes and they were drunk and they were, or they were like chained to their cockpit so they couldn't get out, and they had and all these stories because our mindset just couldn't understand that they were just like us in that way, you know, that they wanted to defend their homelands. And and I think being able to talk to the veterans in their own language, and then I could read their letters that they would send me, because I also read and write Japanese, and then um I would always promise them I'll tell your story, I will not any add anything, I will not deduct anything. So if you tell me something that happened to you, I'll put it in. And I won't try to make it more dramatic, or I won't try to make you look like a good person or a bad person. I'll just tell you, I'll just share what you tell me. And I think over over time I got more introductions from other veterans, they would say, Oh yeah, don't worry, he's he's okay. Because the Japanese veterans hate journalists in Japan, they hate the media because the media almost always, from what they said to me, was that they take our stories and they twist them and they make us look like bad guys.

SPEAKER_02 8:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:30

In the media, everything is nanking, even in the Japanese media, everything is nanking, nanking, nanking. And the Japanese veterans I met were like, I never went to China. I I flew an aircraft, you know, in Saipan, and I don't know anything about what happened over there, but what I did was honorable and right, and I'm proud of what I did.

SPEAKER_03 8:49

Dennis, uh, you and Dan both interviewed a lot of people as well as I and I just had another thought too. The fact that you spoke the language and wrote the language, it had to help so tremendously. And for the audience at home, here's the best way you can describe it. If you ever see a and somebody doing an interview via satellite, like on a big news channel, there's a buffer, right? There's a delay. Well, if you're trying to interview these Japanese survivors and you're doing it through a translator, you gotta tell the translator question, they gotta translate it. But when you're speaking directly, the timing's there, the intimacy is there. You're the the survivor's telling a story, and he might be on the cusp of breaking through. But when he's got a pause, wait for the translator, and then you two, and then you it breaks up the story, it breaks up the timing, it breaks up the the authenticity and the intimacy of it. So that probably led to more um natural memory that occurred out of nowhere. Whereas if they had to sit there and wait, that memory was slipped away.

SPEAKER_01 9:51

I found that true. Like if we talk to the veteran and he'll tell me a story and he'll mention something, I was like, wait, what was that? And then he'll just go right into it. Whereas if you had to use a translator, that person has to kind of filter what was said. And the thing is, like being a World War II nerd, right? So I know all the special language that the veterans use. I know what they called like a bayonet, they call it a gobo root, right? Gobo roots are real long and they use it to a burdock root, and they'll say, Oh, I grabbed my burdock root and I blah blah blah. And I go, Oh, yeah, you're your type 30 bayonet. And they go, Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. But if you go through a translator, they say, Oh, why you have a burdock root? Why you have a bobo root? Oh, why you have a pumpkin? Oh, why you have and they don't know all the phrases and terms.

SPEAKER_03 10:36

They're looking at you saying, He's a salt, he's not a bonsai charge with a with a vegetable.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

So, what's going on? So, you know, and the way they tied their chin straps is very unique. They they they they imitated the samurai style of tying those two-foot-long chin straps that went around twice and made a little bow, all these little details of how they wrapped their their leggings, these little things that they would talk about. And I noticed, like, if I gave the guy a pair of leggings, I said, Do you still know how to tie these? And he would start tying them, and then a lot of memories had fled back, and it was really like the body connected to the mind. And there was one veteran, he's he's gonna be in a later book, but he committed a lot of war crimes in China. But I gave him a pair of leggings I bought at a flea market, and he put one on in about 30 seconds, just like so fast, and just tied it, and it was solid and tight. And he started the second one, and then he stopped. He said, I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this. And he unrolled it, unwrapped it, made it real tight again, handed it back to me. And he said, Too many bad memories about this. And then I well, well, like what happened? And then he started talking about it, and then that led to this story that'll be in a future book. It's very sad and uh scary, but but this book is just about Saipan.

SPEAKER_03 11:50

For continuity's sake, this book, The Iron Graves of Saipan. Now, on a previous episode, you kind of led into how this project came to be. So, for our new listening audience, let's discuss how you got to meet this vet, and because of your authenticity and your your demand to make sure that representation of some tanks in a movie and your role as a historical drug um advisor on a uh Hollywood movie led to this book. So, if we could, for our new audience, bring that up and then we'll go into the book.

SPEAKER_01 12:21

Okay. Well, uh I I've done a lot of consulting for history channel shows and various documentaries and um Hollywood movies and things, and one of them was the movie Wind Talkers, and I was hired as the Japanese consultant. So the director John Wu gave me carte blanche to control like all aspects, like the uniforms, the the markings on the vehicles, the tanks, what kind of weapons are used, all that. It was really great. So I provided the the correct tank markings for the 9th Tank Regiment to the property department when they were building these tanks, and I went out to check them one day in Hawaii at the warehouse, and this is just a few months before filming, and I noticed that the Japanese tanks were just like painted up with flags on the side, like any old 1950s Hollywood movie would do. And I asked the guy, I said, What happened to the authentic markings I gave you? He said, Oh, uh, they're here somewhere. That's no big deal. There's just jet tanks and no one's gonna know. And I said, No, no, no. Well, what if a Japanese soldier watches this movie and recognizes the unit markings on the tank and then tells everyone in Japan, wouldn't that be great marketing? And he's like, Yeah, I guess, but you know, it's gonna take like a whole day to redo it all. And I said, Okay, I'm just gonna go tell, you know, the director why you didn't have it, you know. Okay, and he's like, Okay, okay, okay. So he redid it, and I appreciate that a lot. I'm very grateful. Yeah, for sure. Because, like the next year, I'm at home and I get an email from a man who told me that he took a Japanese tanker veteran to go see the movie Wind Talkers in Osaka. And the old gentleman was sitting there in the theater and watched the tanks go by, and the correct markings were on the tanks, and he jumped up and said, My tanks! And he was so excited that he asked the man who took him to find out who was in charge. And they found me through the internet, and he invited me to come to Osaka to talk to him about the battle of Saipan. So the next few months later, I went to Japan and I got to meet him, and he was like shaking my hand. He's like, Oh, those were my friends that died in that tank. Oh, I can't, I can't thank you enough. And it turns out he's the one who brought the tank back from Saipan that's on display at the Yasakuri shrine. And his eyes were glazed over and he was shaking my hand. And so I said, You know, your story deserved to be turned into a book. So he started telling me his stories, and we started writing letters back and forth. And another interview a couple years later, and it blossomed into this book.

unknown 14:51

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

And all because I was a stickler for details. You know, if it had been just a Japanese flag painted on the side of the turret that flashed by, the Japanese veteran would have said, Yeah, well, typical Americans, you know, what are you gonna do? And they would have just stopped right there. I never would have met them, and this book never would have come to be. Yeah, yeah. I was very, very, very, very grateful and very thankful for that.

unknown 15:15

Gosh.

SPEAKER_01 15:16

Those little details. I know. I I love that stuff. And and you know, as like when I write books, I write them for myself. I always think what kind of book would I want to read? What kind of details do I want to learn about? Like, what do they eat? What do they drink? Did they ever get in fights? Did they have little parties or celebrations? And in the book, you know, I talk about the special like sporting events they had and how they dressed up in costumes and they dressed up like women, you know, for this special festival day, and all this stuff that the average American wouldn't think about. You think, oh, the Japanese will never do that, they'd never put out lipstick to pretend to be women, or they'd never wear these funny frog costumes, and or they'd never have uh, you know, rally uh relay rallies or running, you know, against each other to to get you know a sake bottle for a prize, and they wouldn't find and they wouldn't steal from each other, heavens no, but they did all that. And and so people, yeah, then you read that, you kind of go, Well, they're they're not that different. Yeah, at the end of the day, they're 18, 19 year old boys.

SPEAKER_03 16:22

Yeah, they're young guys, they're hungry, so they stole food. And just like in the United States with our 18, 19 year old boys, um, joining the military, some of the first time these guys have been out of their villages, their little towns, or little they're a little part of that island and they're experiencing life just like our our boys did.

SPEAKER_01 16:41

Right, right. They're getting seasick on a ship, you know, these all these little details you don't think about. And but when the veterans tell their their stories to me, I always I record everything on an audio disc, right? And I also take notes, and then I write back and forth with them afterwards just to confirm things because I have questions a lot of times. And I like to hear about like their parents, their families, their sisters, their brothers, and the little personal details without trying to glorify them, without trying to make them look like victims of war, or because you know they they're not, right? They're soldiers. Just to give a little warmer personal uh uh understanding of what they were like.

SPEAKER_03 17:22

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 17:28

I have a a two-part question. Um the Japanese of the accounts that I've read, many of the Japanese talk about the brutality of their basic training. Yes. Um so my first question is is that true? Is that kind of universal for them? And then two, uh, if you could expand on that and talk about if you think it was it made them better soldiers in the long run, or if you think it maybe was detrimental um to their unit cohesion and and whatnot, or you know, whatnot.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

Yeah, I think their education system started off really young with that discipline and then obedience to orders. And as elementary school students, they had to stand up in the classroom, right, to address the teacher, show respect to the teacher, bow to the portrait of the emperor. And they had their PE classes involved military drill and marching and saluting and marching with training rifles. So from the time they were, you know, seven, eight years old, they were already got that mindset going of becoming soldiers. And that was just part of life. As you went to school, you served in the military for two years or three years of your navy, the army, and then you went on, you got a wife, got married, got a job, it was just part of your life. It was expected. And in the military, they were very harsh uh about hierarchies and about instant obedience, and there was no discussion, there was no democracy, and they meted out uh attitude corrections with the open palm slap and then the closed hand punch. And almost every veteran I ever talked to, if I'd say uh grit your teeth, they go like this, then they'd laugh because they knew a punch was coming. Because the the NCO would say, Grit your teeth, because they don't want to break your teeth. So you write your teeth down and you wait and then you take it and you get knocked down. And if you don't get up right away, then you get another, another, another. So they they would tighten their teeth and like prepare for a punch that I wouldn't give them, of course. But then they would kind of smile and laugh and go, Oh, I don't like that at all. You know, punched around, slapped around. But it taught them like instant, instant obedience uh to orders for anyone even just one rank above you.

SPEAKER_04 20:00

We saw in uh Korea in particular the uh the mass uh with the Chinese, the mass just flow of troops being thrown at hills. And um I guess my question is more of does it make them to where they're not allowed to be? For instance, I think the American um model was that if the captain is killed, the lieutenant takes command, if the lieutenant's killed, the master sergeant takes command, the master sergeant is killed, even on down to PFC, they all know the mission and they're all allowed to make decisions on how to fulfill the mission and make command decisions. And it was that the same with the Japanese army, is did it break down that way, or was it it to me?

SPEAKER_01 20:52

It seemed like once the battle started and the move it was going forward, it didn't matter who was in command. You all had the mission, everyone knew we're supposed to go to that hill. And even if you're the only guy who makes it there, it's your job to go there. And of course, in in the Japanese army, if you have one more star than me, you know, PFC versus a private, then I have to obey every order you give me. You're my spirit commander, even if you're we're fellow enlisted man. So they were they were pretty that hierarchy was very strict. And I think on one hand, it made them um it took away their ability for creative thought and spot judgments as that they were just told to move one way and act one way and listen to orders. Whereas maybe an American GI had uh had more life experience, I wanna say, as a student and dealing with cars and farm equipment and going on dances and dates and and things like that that give you more uh ability to think in different situations. Whereas the Japanese were very strict on their education system.

SPEAKER_03 22:00

Yeah, I was thinking, you know, you were mentioning the childhood, they started early with the the the standing, the saluting, and all that. Obviously, it's not the idea of childhood, but from the military standpoint, when you already have your inductees into your boot camp, if you will, already having that training, that's so that that's the past two weeks of of you know breaking them in, right? Oh, for sure. So the first you know, few days or a week, whatever it is, an American boot camp, it's break them down, build them up, teach them how a soldier. But and for them, that that's already been done. That's been done for 12, 13 years.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

So now you just get right to the the right sacks. They they knew how to shoot guns and machine guns and rifles, they know how to tie their leggings, they know how to wear the backpacks and the haversacks and the canteens, and they knew how to march in orders and move in squads. And they they had that's just part of their PE class. And they had military soldiers, reservists in each school, in each class, in charge of teaching each group of boys. And so they were exposed to seeing guys in uniform every day at school. It seemed very common, very normal to them. Guys, you know, holding swords in the uniforms, the whole deal. So there was no resistance to obeying orders because that's how you did it as a kid, from the time they were little.

SPEAKER_04 23:16

There's this um and exactly that point where we were talking about on page 92 in your book. And forgive me for mispronouncing names and whatnot, but it it you're right. There was a loud bang. Shimoda's driver barked, We're hit! The engine's dead. The crew commander screamed, Everybody out! Shimoto passed his machine gun up through the turret and grabbed an armful of magazines. He and the others slid down the tank and crawled into an infantry trench. With colorful tracers snapping overhead, they watched a Chiha roll past. The markings identified it as from the third tank company's second tank platoon. The tank suddenly stopped as smoke and flames bellowed from the engine compartment. Sergeant Kawakami climbed out of his burning tank, drew his sword, jumped down, and ran forward. Gripping his machine gun, Shimoto rose up on one knee. But Sergeant Nakao hauled him back down, saying, Stop! Don't be in such a hurry to die. The fight has just begun. Trust me. Nakao was a grizzled combat veteran of the Namohan incident and knew what he was doing. He ordered his crew to keep their heads down. Angry tears of frustration rolled down Shimoda's cheeks as squads of infantrymen ran past them, only to be mowed down like wheat. Man.

SPEAKER_01 24:43

Yeah. He he recalled that to me. And when he was telling that story, I could see his eyes were like fixated on a point in the distance, and he was just remembering it and telling me. And he could hear it and smell it and feel it. And I felt like I'm just I'm watching something be replayed in someone's head. It was fascinating to me.

SPEAKER_03 25:05

Just to provide a little context for our audience when it comes to the Iron Graves of Saipan, uh, basically, we follow the story of the veteran that you spoke to after the after he saw your premiere. And we basically follow him from pre-military through boot camp through the battle. Just for the sake of our audience, um introduce them to your main character and just give us the you know a little overview so that when we're talking about these excerpts from the book, they're they're kind of known who we're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 25:34

Oh, his name is Shiro Shimoda, and he enlisted in the army. He wanted to be a tanker, and he was assigned to the 9th Tank Regiment, 3rd Tank Company headquarters platoon, and it was uh stationed in Manchuri on the border with Russia. And so he spent about two years uh enduring the icy cold weather, and they trained in the heat of the summer and the freezing cold, icy winters, expecting to fight against the Russians. And their whole mindset was the enemy is Russia, and so there with the time they were small children, the enemy was always Russia. The 1904-05 Russia war was with Russia, and they beat the Russians in uh the Baltic Sea, and all their heroes had fought against Russians, and so that mindset was against Russians, and so they didn't prepare for any kind of tropical warfare or tropical fighting or anything in that mindset. And when they received their orders to transfer away from Manchuria, they assumed they're going back to Japan to participate in like a victory parade of the Emperor's birthday or something, and then go back to Manchuria. Then they found themselves being sent to Guam in Saipan. And the commander of the unit, uh, Mr. Colonel Goshima, had to scramble because he had no training on defending an island, no training on uh defending against naval artillery because they didn't have it in Manchuria. There would be no battleships firing at him in Manchuria, and so he had to rush to try to scramble and get maps and charts and information uh from one of his former staff at the Army Officers Academy. And it seemed like so haphazard and so disorganized and so rushed. And I felt like, well, these guys are just being right sent into a situation that's no good for them. And they had to bring all their own food, supplies, ammunition, medical supplies, oil, gas, grease, spare tracks, tanks. And they filled these ships up. They just stuffed everything in there and just rushed to get down to Saipan as fast as they could. And once they got there, they had to set up, they set up in the school buildings because the school buildings already had water electricity. They kicked all the kids out of the school buildings because Saipan had um decades of you know colonizers, right? Workers there. They had elementary school Boy Scouts, uh, tennis clubs, everything, just like a regular Japanese town. So these tankers went in and they took over all the elementary schools and set up their buildings there. They started digging tunnels as fast as they could, hoping to get underground before the Americans showed up.

SPEAKER_03 28:17

To that point, when I was reading the book and you're talking about the sugarcane plant, the sugar cane plantations and that infrastructure, it raises another one of those questions. How different would this battle have been if there was no sugar cane plantations, if there was no infrastructure, no school buildings, no uh warehousing for shipping hacking? You just, as you just said, you're talking about them scrambling, you know, hey, we've been training for Manchuria, now we're going to Saipan. If only there was a 1928 uh National Geographic with some maps on it, like there was Guada Canal, man, they could add a little little uh support. But how much different do you think this battle would have been if it would have just been an island with nothing but the opportunity to build an airport or staging area and not have all that valuable infrastructure there?

SPEAKER_01 29:02

Right. Oh, that's a good point. I never thought about that. Those civilians were definitely very unlucky folks getting caught up in all that because they they were just there as regular Japanese, regular Koreans, regular Taiwanese, who were promised, you know, 40 uh 40 acres and a mule. You come to Saipan and you get to farm your land, you get to make money, sell the sugar cane back to the company. And it's they call that the land of eternal summer. Coconuts, pineapples, papaya, it's bonita fish, and you need great sunsets, and the uh the brochures that they gave out to people to get them to immigrate to Saipan were amazing, and it was this tropical, wonderful paradise. They would have had no idea that it'd be a battle zone later on. So the place was filled with schools, churches, temples, you name it. And I think when the Americans arrived, you know, all those people had like nowhere to go. So they rushed into the hillsides and were trying to squeeze into every little nook and cranny they could get into. And a lot of them were victims of the war, and actually kind of slowed down the Japanese defense because they had all these hordes of you know people rushing to the roads trying to get away from the battle, and the Japanese soldiers are trying to get to the battle, and it just it actually was, I guess, to our benefit that it messed up their infrastructure because all the civilian civilians were moving around. But I have a lot of uh empathy for those folks who were just regular farmers, regular people trying to eke out an existence on Saipan.

SPEAKER_04 30:40

Yeah, yeah, that was I wrote that short story about what the end result of all that, the bonsai cliff. But um that what stood out to me too was that but the civilians caught on the the civilians that survived were the ones who caught on quick that at night we need to lay low and quit moving. And that was very evident too in reading that the the smart civilians would yell out to the other ones, hey you're you're gonna make noise and you're gonna get killed by either side. And then they wouldn't listen or they were desperate or they were hungry, or they so they would keep moving, and then you would hear that. And sure enough, the next morning they'd go and they'd find their friends and neighbors were were killed. Exactly what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_03 31:41

Well, maybe it's a good question for the both of you since you've both written books on Saipan and the impact on the civilian population. Do you guys feel that when it comes to the battle of Saipan, that the um scale of the civilian population is often overlooked by historians or the people creating the content or the media about that particular battle?

SPEAKER_01 32:03

I think so. There is a lot of innocent people there, a lot of children, uh a lot of families, a lot of elderly people there who I think are just kind of overlooked. And we focus on the valor and the courage of the two fighting forces. And there are a lot of stories written by Japanese survivors who are civilians, and a lot of them are like the teenagers or younger, and they they talk about the battle from their viewpoint. And and I tried to to blend some of that into my book, but I still got to focus on Mr. Shimoda and his unit. You know, because my book's not about the battle for Saipan, it's not about the Marianas, it's about this tank unit and about this one tanker who's in this one tank. And I try to keep it without you know, otherwise the mission scope gets way too wide.

SPEAKER_03 32:54

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SPEAKER_04 33:56

Yeah, that was that was very evident to me in when writing about Saipan and the Marianas myself and the research I did on my grandfather's gunboat group. And that research is when I first heard about the uh suicide cliffs at Marpe Point in Saipan. And um, I just heard the sailors talking about islands of bodies floating. And I thought, you know, surely they were exaggerating. And um, and then there was just so many accounts. And uh it was like, oh man, but you know, Don, and to answer your question too, that you posed, I mean, it was their their story was so uh glaringly not told that I I felt that I needed to make it the first of my short story series, their their story. Because it just especially that that Japanese pastor at the end of my book there, who who goes there to the cliffs and he hears the voices crying out to him in the 1980s for them not to be forgotten. And you know, that sealed the deal for me. And I was like, okay, well, I am definitely going to make my little attempts to make sure that those folks are not forgotten and just devote it to them. But um, you know, I can't I when I read about books like this, and everyone really focused caught a lot of attention is focused on Europe, the European theater. And the Pacific, for some reason, has always been the books. If you were to stack the books of the Europe against the books from the Pacific War, there's a glaring disparity there in the numbers. And the the reality is that the Pacific for America is where it started, and and those battles were one thing that I really like, and and another thing that our countries and other countries always do is they try and demonize the enemy. Right. They make him make him into the boogeyman, they make him the Japanese and the posters always had really thick glasses and buck teeth, and they couldn't see and they couldn't fly and they couldn't see at night, and this and that.

SPEAKER_03 36:22

But to be a little fair to all governments, because they all do that, right? If you're trying to get your civilian population to stomach war so that they quote unquote support it by going to work and fueling the machines of war, you have to kind of dehumanize your enemy, or your populace is not going to be down for the cause. And so, regardless if it's United States, Japan, China, but yeah, that I mean that is the key component of propaganda on all sides is we gotta dehumanize the enemy in order to for our populace to stomach this movement, whatever it may be.

SPEAKER_04 36:53

Well, I'm side fan. The Marines were said by the Japanese, the Marines were said to be murderers and cannibals and rapists, and you had to murder your family to to become a Marine. But what I love about uh one of the things that uh I love about the two movies that Clint Eastwood made, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. If folks you talk to folks who have seen both, almost to in person, they all will say that they enjoyed Letters from Iojima more. And that is the case with me as well. I actually wept.

SPEAKER_03 37:26

Yeah, because it's fresh eyes on the on a story you've known before.

SPEAKER_04 37:29

Yeah, I actually wept. And because Clintis would brilliantly uh made them personal. And that's what you do here, Dan, in uh page 59. You say in his farewell letter to his father, Shun used courtly, formal honorifics to convey his appreciation to his parents for bringing him into the world and for taking such good care of him. He expressed his remorse that he would be unable to repay them for their kindness in their older years as a good son should. He ended the letter by stating that he, quote, made the decision to serve the nation faithfully without regrets, even if it meant becoming a corpse in the battlefield. And you end that with this one sentence his body was never recovered. Yeah. Those kind of sentences there. It sounds like it was written by some kid from Ohio.

SPEAKER_01 38:22

Yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, they're love their parents, you know, they love their brothers and sisters, and they love their country, and they were proud of their country, and they wanted to be remembered as warriors as their fathers were, and their grandfathers were, and their great-grandfathers were. And it was they're just the next to step in line to do their duty to defend the nation. And she said earlier, you know, the Americans were portrayed as these monsters, right, who would kill and destroy and eat the babies and all this other stuff. So the civilians were told, do not let yourself become captured, because they'll do horrible things to you. And so, you know, I was talking to Guy Gobaldin many years ago uh when I visited Saipan, and we had a really nice long talk about the stuff that he saw people jumping off the cliffs and throwing babies off the cliffs, and he was trying to yell at them to stop. He was like trying to wound this one lady in the leg to get her to so that she wouldn't make it to the cliff, right? And he was just so angry that these people believed the lies that the Americans would hurt them, and he wanted to help them, and he just was so angry at the government. So whenever he referred to Japanese civilians, he would call them Japanese. But when he referred to the government or the soldiers, he used the shorter term that we're not usually familiar or saying to each other, you know. So he said there's different, there's this innocent civilian Japanese people who I love and I wanted to help them as civilians, even as a Marine. But then you had the soldiers who were lying to them, and I hated them and I wanted to kill them. And it was so evident the way he was so passionate about that.

SPEAKER_04 40:00

Do you mind telling our listeners about him? Because there I I've I know the name and I know he was called the Pied Piper of Saipan.

SPEAKER_01 40:07

Pied Piper of Saipan, yeah. He uh do you mind telling our listeners about him? Yeah, he um he was a Marine who uh went to language school because he had some Japanese American friends growing up in LA. And he went to Camp Elliott and he he learned how to to speak Japanese grammatically accurately and to learn basic writing in Japanese. He became a recon guy, 2nd Marine Division wound up on Saipan, and he was going out on recon missions from the very beginning, and he was trying to get Japanese to surrender. And he figured if I if I got them to give up, then I don't have to kill them later. So he was credited with with bringing in over 800 people, men, women, children, everyone. And he was recommended uh for the Navy Cross that got downgraded to the Silver Star, and he was wounded pretty bad on Saipan. That's another whole it's in the book too. Um, but it was it was interesting to me as how much he loved and admired the people while hating the soldiers so much. You see, he had the Dr. Jekyll Hyde personality with flip. He really hated the soldiers, and and he would talk about shooting them and killing them and doing all kinds of things to the enemy soldiers, but wanting to carry out the children, help the babies and help the people and to tell them we're not here to hurt you, we're here to save you and help you. So I thought he was just an amazing person. Um, he's written a couple of books. I think one's called America Betrayed. And um, if you go online, you can find both of his books. And they were gonna do a remake of the movie that was about him in the 50s, and he told me that they were in the process of negotiations, but they wanted to take out a lot of the language and soften a lot of the battle scenes, but he refused and he wouldn't sign off on it, and so it it never happened.

SPEAKER_03 41:59

We kind of touched on government and hating government. Um, obviously, we want people to read the book, so we're not going to give too much away, but you mentioned earlier that this particular vet was responsible for the recovery of a tank. What I thought was interesting is when he set out to do that mission, he found some tanks that were basically buried, covered up, and forgotten about by the local populace. And as it seems to happen a lot, once somebody with interest and some um abilities and some means shows interest in something, all the people who want to get their beak wet come out, and all of a sudden, now something that's been forgotten about, pushed over here and just get it out of the way for 30 years. Now it's whoa, whoa, settle down. This is valuable to us. This represents our history. Really? It's been buried under here for 30 years. I can only when you when you're interviewing him and he's talking about that stage of his life. Did that frustration still carry through all these years later when reminiscing about what the government was doing to try to prevent it?

SPEAKER_01 43:05

He was not happy, he was not happy with the way he was treated by both sides. And when he was talking about that tank, it was in a trash dump, trash dump covered up with all sorts of garbage when they set it on fire. Because back then it was a different world, and people just burned their trash in big piles on Saipan on the beach. And uh, when they drove past it, the cab driver was taking him and his wife to Saipan for the first time uh since the war. And he just wanted to go back and look at everything and kind of pray for his friends and just kind of see what was still there. And then he sees that top of a tank sticking out of a massive pile of garbage and it just destroyed him. And he couldn't believe how that had not been rescued or couldn't be rescued or pulled out of the garbage. So that's that's a whole long saga that he went through and he was not able to rescue that tank. It's still on Saipan, but it was pulled out of the garbage, and now it sits where the second Division landed on top of a concrete bunker. So he was proud of the fact that he got it out of the garbage, got it cleaned down and painted, and it's like a display now. But how he found the other two tanks is almost like he attributes it, he attributes it to kind of like a spiritual uh like ghosts reaching out to him or something for the other side helping him to make this happen against all odds, against the Japanese government, the US government, the Saipan government, were no one was really helping him that much. And it still managed to pull it off.

SPEAKER_03 44:29

And at that point, this was what 1982, 1970.

SPEAKER_01 44:34

He went on his honeymoon, took her to Saipan, and she was like, Oh, Hawaii sounds wonderful. He goes, No, we're going to Saipan. She's like, What? And I I went to Saipan in '92, and there was nothing there. Like, there wasn't one streetlight. It's not what it looks like today.

SPEAKER_03 44:51

Well, the reason I bring the up the the time that the years that this happened. Right. It's not like nowadays where you can get online and call a company to come out with one of those ground printed trading radars to do to grid out a football field. He's literally out there with uh a backhoe and a hunch. Yes, yes. And it was it was literally okay. I'm told some old timers believe it's over here.

SPEAKER_01 45:14

Over here in this area, and you have two days to dig. That's all we're giving you. And he had to rent all the backhoes and pay all the workers and buy the gas and hell. And they're like, Oh, let's try here. And they and they found a US tank, like, oh close, no cigar. And they they had to cover that up and had to try another spot. And that's why he was feeling that it's somehow something was guiding him and helping him. And his son was with him, so he he that turned into this like father-son adventure where the son got to go travel his father's footsteps back to Saipan and help us dad discover the old tanks. And of course, we found the name of the crew who died in there, and there were some bones in one of them, and it was a very emotional experience for that father and son. And I felt like, wow, I got to see this, you know, I got to witness this. And they're they're both gone. Mr. Shimoda and his son are both gone. But I'm happy to be able to share their story and tell it to people who also like those kind of adventure stories, those father and son stories. And you know, you're you know, he was only there was uh out of his out of his company, he was the only guy. That's it. One guy out of the whole third company, everyone gone, just Mr. Shimoda. Out of the whole regiment, there was only 30. 20 from Saipan, 10 from Guam. That's it. So it wasn't there wasn't like he had a whole community of fellow survivors to help him.

SPEAKER_03 46:48

You know, a lot of times when we interview historians, especially when it comes to the Allied stuff, a lot of their research is at least you know, 20 years ago, a lot of it was um accompanied or assisted by veterans groups um getting together every couple years for uh anniversaries or reunions. Um but oftentimes when you're um a veteran of the military who quote unquote lost a war, sometimes their modern-day military or the civilians have less of a interest in preserving those memories. Right. When it comes to the Japanese civilians and the veterans and modern-day military, how does that hold up comparatively speaking to um some maybe the modern allies groups?

SPEAKER_01 47:36

Yeah, uh they they started making their veterans' groups like in the 70s and 80s. Before that, the guys were too busy just trying to make a living and to to survive in the post-war Japan. And they didn't really talk about their war because they'd lost it, right? And there was no glory or honor talking about the war. And a lot of the veterans, the Japanese veterans, were treated kind of like our Vietnam veterans were. They were disrespected and they were ignored, and they were you lost the war. Look what you did. You guys started the war, you got our country destroyed. So, but with Mr. Shimoto's group, there were um the 30 survivors who survived combat, plus there were another 40 or 50 or so who didn't go to combat, who stayed in Manchuria, or hadn't completed their training. So when he found the tank and brought it back just to Tokyo, they had this big giant reunion and they all got to reunite with each other, and they all started sharing their stories and sharing their letters and their diaries, and they made a nice big thick unit history, which I was able to get you know a copy from him and read through all this this information that's not public anywhere, even in Japan. Yeah, unless you have that unit history, you're not gonna know. So I have information that's in my book that's not even in Japanese books, because they didn't have that. Wow, and what I one of the biggest contentions was the commander of the Ninth Tank Regiment, his name is Goshima, his last name is Goshima. But every everywhere in the US and Japan, he's called Goto. Marine Corps history books, US history books in schools, uh online, Wikipedia, everywhere you go, his name is Colonel Tadao Goto.

SPEAKER_03 49:16

Why is that? Where did that stem from?

SPEAKER_01 49:19

Yeah, part of that. And that was, you know, the Japanese writing system is they use uh called kanji characters and they'll they'll put their names together. And Goshima means five islands, go Shima. But that the word island is also pronounced to. Like now we say Iwo Jima, but the Japanese also say Iwoto. So the word the word island can be pronounced Shima, Jima, or to. And so when the the Nisei translators back in 1944 on Saipan, when they discovered documents with the uh Colonel uh Goshima's name on them, they just naturally read it as Goto. Because to was the most common pronunciation of the word island. So that got pushed and then corrected and copied and copied and copied and copied through the decades. It just became Goto became, but in the unit history, they mention that and they say, No, no, it's Goshima, and they put the little hiragana next to the kanji go to two two spots. They put it Goshima. And then Mr. Shimoto said, Hey, hey, remember it's Goshima, it's not Goto. I say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it, I got it, I got it. But everywhere I looked, every single document I looked, everywhere from 1944 onwards said Goto. And I've argued with people, believe it or not, who are saying, I'm wrong. But I'm like, no, the guy who served under Goshima knows it's Goshima. And the unit history that they made like 1978 or something has Goshima written in Hirogana next to the kanji in two spots. But I guess I guess they're all wrong. You know, I guess the guy who did the Wikipedia page knows better. Oh, of course, they always know better. That's the that's the the one drawback is you gotta fight against information that's wrong, or that since it's been around for so long, it becomes canon. You're just like, well, I'm sorry, that's not true. And what who cares, right? But in my viewpoint, those guys they all they all fought honorably, right, in their in their world. And why would you not do anything you could to show the correct pronunciation of the name? Absolutely. And it's like Smythe versus Smith, right? My grandfather's name was Smith, but if you kept telling me it was Smythe, I was like, it's not Smythe, it's Smith, and it matters. So his name was Goshima, Ta Dao Goshima. Wow, and his body was never found either.

SPEAKER_04 51:40

Yeah. Have you heard that that uh quote about I think it's a crit attributed to Hemingway that every man serves has two deaths? Have you heard of that? Yes, yes, yes, that when he dies and goes in the grave, and the time then the moment that his name is said for the last time. So that's what I love about what you've done here is that these guys, their names are down. Goshima is down, the name is printed, and they'll they're gonna live long after I'm gone.

SPEAKER_01 52:15

I I felt I felt very grateful to Mr. Shimoda that they had that unit history with the names and the sum of the crew members' names, we just couldn't get, we couldn't find them, or the guys had been replacements, and no one had jotted down the new guy's name on the roster that was found. But to the best of our ability, we try to include everybody's name on every tank crew and where they died and you know where they're from. To the best of our ability, we tried to preserve that just for that reason, so that they're dead, but they're not totally forgotten. Right.

SPEAKER_04 52:45

Yeah. I think about those just thousands and thousands of Japanese that went into Burma. Oh, yeah, the jungles, and they just vanished. Like they're never gonna be found. Yeah, never, just thousands and thousands of them. And how sad that is for their families for um just just to disappear. And they had you know, they wanted to have a family and they wanted to take care of their parents, and they you know, and they were just gone. Those guys were I I've seen video of the Marine and the Japanese soldier meeting in their 80s and 90s, and they almost always break down crying when they what is what's going on there?

SPEAKER_01 53:40

I've I've seen that on Iwo Jima and Petalu and Guam, with Americans and Japanese, and they meet each other. And what comes across when I translate for them is like uh okay, so there's uh Woody Williams, right? Iwo Jima, and he met Mr. Akikusa, who is actually on my Iwo Jima, but that's Mr. Akikusa right there. But he and Mr. Akikusa got to meet on top of Mount Suribachi in 2015, and I got to translate for them. And Woody said to Akikusa, and he said, You and I, we were the only ones who were here at that time. Out of everyone on this island right now, all the participants, the Japanese, the Marines, all that you know, the family members, they don't know anything about what happened. They really don't. It's just me and you. We're the only two people who were there then that are here now. And they were like shaking their arms, shaking hands, slapping each other, and kind of smiling. And and I went, This this is needs to be shared. And there were there was no animosity, there was no hatred, there was no you blankety blank, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I saw that on Peterloo with Mr. Suchita and Bill Darling, and they were hugging each other, crying, saying the same thing, you know, because all their friends are dead on both sides, but somehow you are my my friend because you were here, and we both experienced this same like horrific thing together. We both survived this horrific experience, and it brings us together. And I don't care what you look like, I don't care what language you speak, your soul survived, mine survived, and they had this weird, weird connection. Wow. Yeah, I mean, so you saw that on Guam too. I saw it on Guam with Japanese naval pilots, Mr. Harada, who bombed Pearl Harbor, and he was very happy to meet American veterans, and they said jokes like, Well, if I knew it was you on that ship, I wouldn't try to drop the bomb. You know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, you know, and they're like, Oh, if I was if I knew it was you in the airplane, I wouldn't try to shoot you down, you know. So they say these jokes to each other, but there's underlying mutual respect of meeting someone who survived something horrific, especially when no one around you can understand when you try to talk about it. I don't understand really. I was never in in the military, never in combat. And like when with my with my own dad, he uh he was a POW in North Korea. This is this is his book, The Yellow River Boys. But he he would never talk about the war, about shooting at MiG-15s over North Korea or being captured or being tortured or beaten and all that, unless he was talking to another POW on the phone that I would kind of listen in on as a kid, right? I think if I asked him, he would just get really mad at me because you don't understand, you can't understand, you know, me alone. So I think when the when the veterans can get together on Guam or Pelerloo or Iwo Jima, they don't have to explain anything. Each side knows what it was like. There's no like background information, it's just like you were here, I was here, you know, you know.

SPEAKER_03 56:58

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 57:01

I made a notation in the book here that when he was talking about that he was looking for the tankers, and um I I made a little I wrote in this in the uh the fly leaf there that I I my question was is does Japan uh see to if they find remains, do they take DNA from that? Do they get that into it, or is it just a matter of let's let's bring them and cremate and you know who was responsible for that was Clint Eastwood.

SPEAKER_01 57:33

He got that whole ball rolling with that movie. Because up until then, the Japanese government viewed um the unrecovered war dead as just something from the past, and so the little veterans' families or the children or the grandchildren of the dead vets would take it upon themselves to go to the Philippines and try to find the bones and personally and privately create little ceremonies for them, and they bring a Buddhist priest, and they it was all self-funded. And that went on for a couple of decades. And then when um Clintiswood's movies came out, there was a huge upcry from the Japanese population saying, Why are you not doing more? Why isn't the US government, the Japanese government, doing what the Americans do? Finding the bones, doing DNA, and recovering our war dead, who are honorable men. And Clint Iswood's movie showed the Japanese people, hey, your soldiers were honorable men who fought honorably. You should be proud of them. And until then, their media had always told them, oh, your soldiers are Nan King murderers and babykillers, and they're very they're kind of left-wing over there in their media. And it flipped the script on its head. And so all these family groups started demanding action. So now the Japanese government has sponsored groups going to um the Palau Islands, uh, Mariana Islands, the Philippines, China, all these places. And I've been really lucky to help them uh at the CD Museum in Point Wainimi. I found a map, an unmarked map that had uh 1,085 Japanese bodies buried on Pelalu. Oh and it had like a little bitty cross on it and a little square. And I was like, that looks like it could be like a symbol for a grave or something. So we got we got some finances from the Japanese government, and I went back to Point Wanema for two weeks with two Japanese researchers. We went through thousands of folders, found more evidence, and we presented it to the Japanese. They got money to go to Petalu. They did a couple of test digs, they found some guys right where they were on this hand-drawn map, and they kept 1,085 guys who come out of that gigantic grave area and doing DNA tests on all of them. Massive, massive story. And I got I got some really nice letters like, oh, you know, King Song, this started with you. And I was like, No, no, I just happened to be a conduit. I I was just trying to help with my friend John Edwards. He passed away, but he and I went to Pet One like 15 times, and so he and I went to Point Wayne and we were just looking around to see what we could find, and just like something said, Here, take this, and it you know, showed it to us. So, and then it went off from there, and it had a mind of its own. And one of the Japanese researchers who was went there to help dig up the body said, It was like the bodies were calling out all this time to be found and brought home. And I was like, Oh, good, good, like I could be involved, right? In a small way. That is amazing. And people were driving over them, walking over them, you know, they had like a restaurant on top of that, and they I walked over, I didn't know, right? For yeah, all the times I've been there. Wow, yeah, it's pretty good.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:45

And they're doing DNA testing too, huh? They're treating who they were and their families. Do you know of are they having success with that?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:52

They found six. Well, as of last month, last time I heard they found six so far. Because a lot of the the drawback is a lot of the the siblings are gone, right? And then the parents are all gone, and a lot of children didn't even know where their grandfather or grandfather died. After the war, they said, Oh, your your your your your father or grandfather died in the Pacific. Right. So whatever, right? So now that the Japanese government is uh placing out calls to say if you have a loved one who died in the Palau Islands and you would like to give a DNA sample, you know, we'll we'll take it for free and then we'll create a database. So it's it's slow going, but they're doing it. Special databases, I just had a thought.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:36

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:37

Yeah, it's amazing. And uh it all started with Clintiswood, I'm telling you, no joke. He got uh Rising Sun Third Class Medal from the Japanese government at the LA Embassy, you know, with the real neck ribbon and the big red thing. And he he is his name is gold over there among the veterans' families groups. We have a lot of respect for what he did. Oh wow.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:58

I wonder if someone were to take some maybe some hints, documentation, something that somebody's looked at in the past to try to use this as you know, here's some evidence of where some graves may be, or where someone, you know, about to have happened where some men died, but they just could not get the results to look for. I almost wonder if you digitize that and ran it through Chat GPT or any other sort of AI engine and have them look for patterns or symbolisms or landmarks that we might be able to use that technology. Because obviously DNA was technology that came you know through 30 years ago and now we're using it for good. I almost wonder if we were to digitize some documentation that just has not led anywhere and run it through some uh AI if it would help you know perhaps lead people to some more discovery. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:44

And there's a lot of Americans still unrecovered from Peter Lee and Guam, Saipan, and uh Iwo Jima even, right? Kanaus, haven't found him yet.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:54

What was the old documentary from about 15, 20 years ago? Returned to Tarawa, and they're talking to the contractor, and he's like, Yeah, every time we pour a slab or break ground to put in plumbing, we're pulling up you know, uniforms. He's you know, he he was talking about how the Japanese are at that time, this is years ago, were repatriating their recovered bodies quicker than the United States was. He was talking about how he had some Marine Corps um bodies sitting under his drafting table for an enormous amount of time before it opened anybody. Yeah, because he's talking to a contractor in that documentary Return of Tarawa. He's like, Yeah, anywhere you go around here, he's like, You you just sift through the gravel and you'll pick up a fingertip or anything just because of the destruction. The landmass is so small and the amount of carnage was so large that even 20 years ago you do any sort of construction and you're more often not find some sort of remnant. Wow. Jeez. Any uh final questions Dennis?

SPEAKER_04 1:03:53

I mean, I I have I have a ton, but we'll we'll save it for another time. Dan, if you want to go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:59

I appreciate you guys helping, you know, promote my book, and there's so much in here like photographs that have never been published in the US or Japan. Maps, documents. Um, I even went and shot a Japanese tank machine gun in Las Vegas because Mr. Shimoto was a tank machine gunner, and I found lots of photos in the archives that that I've never seen the light of day, or they're just they're too common, too, too boring to make it into a book. You know, and that's something that we didn't get in the book, but yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:34

You have all kinds of charts, charts and descriptions, and even like the uh types of tanks, like all the names of the crew.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:46

Yeah, they have the names of the crew. Yeah, I I I love I love those types of details. Like I said, I wrote the book for myself. What kind of book would I like to read? And I like to read a book that's got names and details and place and information, and the little pranks and jokes and stuff they played on each other with stealing things and cigarettes, and I'm glad you brought out the cigarettes because one of the notes I have is there.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:11

I mean, granted, this book is it's a book about war, but there are little laugh out loud yourself moments, and one of those moments was the reference to the oh, this this tobacco's gotta be from Virginia, it must be good. Right, right, right. Right, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:26

So just the little things like that. Smokers like to smoke, right? And they know what tastes good.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:31

I mean, and there's probably at least a hundred photographs in here, isn't there?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:36

I think so, yeah, about a hundred. A lot of them came from Mr.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:39

Shimoda, some came from archives, others came from other researchers. I'm telling you, folks, you need to get this book. It is chucked full of photographs, graphs, all kinds of really cool illustrations, maps, and the first hand accounts, which you aren't going to get anywhere else.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:01

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Um, obviously, me, Dennis, Jeff, we we really um key into the Pacific. If your listeners are like us and you're and you're building a home library like we do, and you have a lot of Pacific theater award books, you really need to add this one to your library to help round off as we were talking about earlier, the perception and to get to see the other side. And it's also interesting because there's only so many books out there, there's only so many movies, there's only so many, you know, if you can actually find them, um, TV series from the 70s and 80s about the topic. And a lot of its stuff we know it so well because a lot of it's so repetitive and it's so refreshing to get new content about something that you've known. It's like, okay, we've seen this, we've seen this every other episode similar. Here's fresh content, and it's so packed for information. And once again, you're getting a first-person account, you're getting a soldier's story, not propaganda, not anything else. Now, here's what you should really know. It's just here's what this guy and his crew went through. Here's what it was like at their home, here's what their family members went through, here's the struggles, here's them trying to survive. You know, now you can see we've read, you know, the you know, all the the combat and and seen from the American perspective. And you're like, well, what was it like on the other side? Well, now you can read what it was like on the other side. Yeah, well rounded, well-rounded perspective of some of these campaigns. Dan, where can people find you on the internet?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:29

Well, uh, if uh they want to buy the books, they're all available on Amazon.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:33

And we will link to those through WTSPworldwar 2.com. Um, I know you kind of hinted earlier you have another project in the works because you're always working on projects.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:42

Yeah, yeah, I've got so many uh in the works. Uh the next one is about the Kitan suicide submarine pilots. Um, and those were naval aviators who had graduated from their basic training, were preparing to go to flight school, but were diverted over to the submarine program and said, No, you're going to be naval submarine pilot of kamikaze. And they're like, Okay, I guess that's what we are now. Wow. So they wore their flight suits, flight helmets, all the flight gear, and they're climbing into little miniature kaiten submarines being pilots underwater. And I got uh those stories coming up, how they trained and what they were told to do. And I've been to their training bases and I interviewed them in their homes.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:25

Now, those submarines, is that similar to the submarine that they have the National Museum Pacific War from Pearl Harbor, or are they smaller than that one?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:31

Smaller, yeah. The Kaiten is basically a type 91 torpedo that's got a little cockpit stuffed in the top, and it's pulled out just a little bit to put a bigger warhead, and that's it.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:43

I never knew that was a thing. See, here's Dan King bringing more information about things you didn't know about.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:48

They they have a uh complete replica at a museum in Japan, and I got to climb inside and see it and play with it and see how tiny it was and the hatch works and everything. And it's I got photos that'll be in the new book as well. Were they launched like torpedoes? They were they were um attached to the deck of a submarine. In fact, the the I-58, the one that sunk the USS Indianapolis, had torpedoes, these Kitan torpedoes on its back. And they're preparing to launch those against the Indianapolis. But the the submarine commander had said, no, we've been out at sea a little too long. The bearings that are holding those Kitan subs to our deck might not release right, and it's gonna cause problems. I just want to get this ship. So he used regular torpedoes to take out the Indianapolis. But the plan was to take them out with these human-guided torpedoes. And that and I I got to interview one of the guys who was a submariner on the I-58. He was in the torpedo room, chief petty officer Yamada Goro. He was my he was my ex-wife's uncle in Japan, in Gifu. And I interviewed him, and that was like 35 years ago, and I I had the little papers, the little envelope, and I was like, I'm glad I saved all that. So I'm gonna finally tell his story.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:09

Yeah, well, I'll definitely we'll definitely have you on for that because my first question is how do you uh and obviously we're not gonna get into it now, but it's like talking to a veteran who prepared himself for literally, you know, we often hear that the cliche all is a suicide. No, this literally was you're being trained for an actual suicide mission. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:29

How do you and the the man the man you'll be meeting went on a mission? And two of the submarines that were on the deck, the two the kitens ahead of him, strapped in front of him, both lifted up and took off. And he could watch them through his periscope. But he he has two bands holding his uh Kitan to the deck, one of them lifted off, the other one was rusted shut. So mechanical malfunctions, and he was watching and he was like yelling and screaming and hitting the Morse go button, you know, let me go, let me go, and that was it. And then he they returned back to base. And so he talks about the two men that actually went off on the mission. It's a great story. It's looking forward to it. Wow. Goodness gracious.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:21

Well, thank you for your time. Thank you for the books. Um, it's a well-written, beautiful book. Um, as I was saying earlier, for those of you listening, just head over to WTSPworldwar 2.com. Right on the homepage, you'll see Dan King. You'll see a thumbnail's book. We'll link to the Amazon, we'll link to his website and all pertinent information. And as always, um, we want to hear from you all. Send us an email to mail call at WTSP WorldWar II.com. Um, we're getting close. I'm gonna be out your way here real soon. Yeah, looking forward to that.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:48

Seeing you out here.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:49

It'll be the first time in a while me and Jeff have been occupying the same space, but it'll be the first time ever that Dennis and I have occupied the same space. But I was thinking about this the other day, Dennis. We've been doing this so long that to me it feels like oh, we're we're gonna get together and hang out as if we went to high school or together. It's like I don't feel like you and I have never occupied the same physical space, but we haven't. But it's just we've been doing this so long, I just feel like oh, yeah, Dennis and I went to high school together, it's just been a few years, but we're gonna have a reunion. But no, we will actually be occupying the same space, me, Jeff, and Dennis, and a very fantastic um event coming up in San Antonio, which you guys can go back to the last episode to get more detail on it. Dan, thank you so much for your time. And as always, for myself and Dennis and Jeff, who wish he could have been here, we will talk to you all next week.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:36

This has been a digital four 10 production.