Re: POW and Interrogator - Friends for Life

Date: June 16, 2004

"1944 POW and interrogator: Friends for life

by James Brooke NYT

SAIPAN, Northern Mariana Islands When Takeo Sato first met John Rich, the 25-year-old Japanese Imperial Navy officer had just been pulled, shellshocked, from the ruins of a sniper cave. Placed on a volcanic rock, he braced himself for interrogation by the battle-hardened, 26-year-old U.S. Marine.
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“I expected that as a captured enemy soldier, someone would hit me,” Sato recalled Monday. “But John-san was a real gentleman. He was very level-headed. He was not forceful.”
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Giving his side of the story, the former American first lieutenant said, “We realized we had a very intelligent and wonderful man.”
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That first encounter, a prisoner interrogation as the sun set over the Western Pacific, marked the start of a friendship that now has spanned six decades. It was this lasting bond, between onetime victor and onetime vanquished, that brought Sato, now 85, and Rich, now 86, back to Saipan this week for the 60th anniversary of the battle that broke the back of Japanese military power in the Pacific.
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With the American capture of Saipan and nearby Tinian, both in July of 1944, American bombers were able to launch direct attacks on Japan's main islands, including the nuclear bomb missions that flew out of Tinian in August, 1945.
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In the fighting that raged for 25 days over this 72-square-mile, or 186-square-kilometer, volcanic island, about 40,000 Japanese were killed, 3,144 American soldiers died, and 10,952 Americans were wounded.
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For the roughly 40 American veterans who traveled this week to Saipan, about 3,700 miles, or 5,920 kilometers, west of Hawaii, it was not the numbers but the faces that brought them here.
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“So many of the young fellows did not come back, so many good young boys,” David McCarthy, a former navy medical corpsman, said Monday night at the bar of the Pacific Island Club, a water-park resort built on one of the beaches where marines first stormed ashore just after dawn on June 15, 1944.
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But Saturday night, over dinner, McCarthy, now 81, years old, saw on a badge the name of a hometown he had not heard about in 60 years: Maple Hill, Kansas. Its owner was Melvin Dieter, his tent mate for 18 months. They kept the bar open until 3:30 that morning, catching up on the last six decades.
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But perhaps the most singular reunion pair has been the former Japanese prisoner of war and his onetime American interrogator. The bond was strong enough to bring them back together one more time, traveling here from their seashore retirement homes, one from Maine, the other from near Yokohama. For Sato, it was his first return to the scene of his ultimate humiliation as a Japanese soldier - capture by the Americans.
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Both men say they cannot understand news reports of American military abuses of prisoners in Iraq. Cautious about drawing wider conclusions from their own wartime experiences, they say their friendship of six decades illustrates how onetime mortal enemies can overcome the passions of the past.
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On Monday, as cows munched on forest grass and roosters crowed in the distance, the two men toured the cliffs and caves of northern Saipan, the jungle redoubt where Japanese defenders retreated to make a last stand against the inexorable advance of American troops backed by tanks and awe-inspiring naval artillery. In the final days, some 4,000 Japanese women and children jumped off northern cliffs in mass suicides prompted by fear of capture by U.S. soldiers. “I was in a cave like this,” Sato told Rich as they stood in a high-ceilinged limestone cavern, with vines and roots obscuring the light from the overcast day. Their wives, Doris Lee Halstead Rich and Kishiko Sato, stood on the dry leaves of the cave's snug interior, quietly absorbing new insights into men they have known for half a century.
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“When the Americans landed on Saipan, we knew the Americans meant business,” recalled the former officer, who had attended one of Tokyo's top technical universities. “We all knew we were going to die, it was just a question of when. “Occasionally, one of our snipers would fire at American soldiers walking nearby,” said Sato, who as a lieutenant in a navy construction unit had been on the island for four months, building a military airfield. “The Americans would return fire, but we knew they never fought inside the caves. They threw in grenades, used flamethrowers.” That final moment seem to come when an American naval shell hit the cave, blowing open a wall and half-burying Sato. Deafened in his right ear, he came to his senses and saw a marine taking aim.
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“'Don't shoot him,' I heard another American say,” Sato said in a mix of English and Japanese, translated by Whitney Rich, one of John Rich's sons.
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John Rich, who arrived on the scene about an hour after the attack, said: “When they say that marines don't take prisoners, that's a lot of baloney. We lost men taking prisoners. A man standing next to me was once killed trying to take prisoners.”
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After the interrogation - “He talked freely but he didn't blab anything that he shouldn't have as a Japanese officer,” Rich said - Sato was sent on a long journey that culminated in an officers' prisoner-of-war camp in Honolulu.
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One day he received a visit from the marine interrogator, whose home base was in Hawaii.
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“We became friends with them,” Rich recalled, saying his team of interrogators was eager to improve their Japanese-language skills. “We played volleyball with them at the camp.”
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Six months after the war ended, in February 1946, Rich was posted to Tokyo as a wire service reporter. Armed with photos and addresses of six of “my POWs,” he visited their homes.
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“Two little girls in wooden clogs led me up a little alley to Takeo's house,” he recalled of the visit. “His mother and his kid brother, a college boy, were there. His picture was draped in black."
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The family had thought Takeo was dead.
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For Rich, a one-year assignment to Japan stretched into almost 40 years of comings and goings.
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“One day Takeo introduced me to this cute schoolgirl. He ended up marrying her,” he recalled, out of earshot of Kishiko, now a 77-year-old grandmother of four.
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For both couples, sons arrived at roughly the same time.
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“We used to go down to their place on the shore for New Year's Eve,” Whitney Rich, now 46, recalled, driving a rental car down Saipan's main road. “In the summers, it was go-karting, swimming in the public pool, camping in the mountains."
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Over this weekend, both former soldiers have reflected on their close encounters with death and war.
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John Rich visited Unai Chulu, a beach at Tinian where, 60 years ago, he spent a night dug in the sand just below the firing angle of five Japanese tanks. On Sunday afternoon at the beach, he watched the flash of flippers as his 7-year-old granddaughter Madelaine and his 10-year-old grandson Dylan snorkeled for sea slugs.
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“You think of the ones who did not survive, who did not get married, who did not have kids,” he reflected.
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“Takeo is a great guy, one of my best friends,” he said, grasping the hand of the man who was once his captive. “Wars end. People can get along right, if you treat them right.”
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The New York Times
© 2004 the International Herald Tribune"