On the morning of June 17, 1945, an aircraft crossed the southern tip of Okinawa and released its bundles of paper. The leaflets spun down over the last corner of the island still in Japanese hands, where the remnants of an army lived underground. By then, the paper had been falling for nearly three months. Since March 25, a week before the American landing, aircraft had dropped roughly eight million leaflets over the island, and the Tenth Army had kept printing more on Okinawa itself, firing them from artillery pieces inside shell casings.
Some were addressed to farmers, some to soldiers. That morning, the effort had narrowed to a single purpose: get men out of the ground alive. The means weighed about what two men could carry. A portable loudspeaker in the Pacific in 1945 meant an amplifier in a case, a battery or small generator, cable, a horn on a tripod, and a hand microphone.
The horn had to stand close enough to a cave mouth to be heard over gunfire and far enough back to keep the operator alive. The man who finished in front of the microphone spoke in Japanese from a spot every hostile weapon in the area could reach, and kept speaking after the first answer came back. For seventy days, that work had produced almost nothing. Through the first stretch of the battle, the Tenth Army took fewer than four prisoners a day from an enemy force of about 100,000.
The men underground had been told by their own officers, and in writing, that capture meant torture and death, that a captured man was dead to his household and his country, and that the correct end for a soldier in a hopeless position was to arrange his own. Nothing in their training covered any other outcome. There was no procedure for it. An army can be driven into a corner and still have no vocabulary for what happens next.
The attempt to solve that problem had reached the highest level on the island. On June 10, an aircraft had dropped a single message addressed to one man: a letter from Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, commanding the Tenth Army, to Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, commanding the Japanese Thirty-Second Army. Buckner wrote that Ushijima’s forces had fought with great bravery, that their infantry tactics had earned the respect of their opponents, and that, as one infantry general to another, Ushijima understood as plainly as he did that the destruction of all Japanese resistance on the island was a matter of days. He invited him to open negotiations.
Nobody on the American side expected it to work, and it did not. What gets left out is how long it took to arrive. The Japanese command network in the south of Okinawa had come apart so completely that a message dropped from an aircraft on June 10 reached the army commander on June 17, the same morning the leaflets went down. Ushijima and his chief of staff found it funny.
Both men said that entertaining such a proposal was beneath their honor as samurai. That account comes from prisoners taken afterwards, because no surviving Japanese document has either general setting down his own reaction, and both were dead within five days. The second letter in this story was written five months earlier, on another island, about paper. In January 1945, on Leyte in the Philippines, a Japanese-American soldier named Harold Nishimura sat down to assess how the leaflets had performed during that campaign.
Nishimura belonged to the language team attached to the 7th Infantry Division, one of the small detachments of Japanese-speaking Americans parceled out to combat divisions across the Pacific. He noted that in the late stages of the fighting, almost every prisoner had either come in holding a leaflet or said a leaflet had influenced him. Then he added a finding nobody had asked for: of the 127 prisoners the division had taken, nearly all of them objected to a single word printed on the paper. The word was surrender.
Interrogation reports from the theater’s translator organization said the same thing, and went further. The men objected to the word even when it appeared in English, a language most of them could not otherwise handle, because they knew what those letters meant. One soldier was seen to look at a leaflet, drop it, and grind it into the dirt with his heel while saying the term aloud. The term itself carries the sense of going down, of descending from a high place to a low one, and it is not a word that gets said much in Japanese even in peacetime.
The people running American propaganda turned that finding into policy. In December 1944, the Office of War Information issued a classified handbook for its own writers, setting the rule down without qualification: propaganda must never employ the words for surrender or prisoner of war. Everything possible had to help the man keep his face. Photographs of captured men could appear on a leaflet if the printers blanked out the eyes, and the leaflet had to say why.
Prisoners told their interrogators that what frightened them most was their households at home finding out. Japanese prisoners who had volunteered to write leaflets helped work out the replacement phrase. In English, it ran to three words, and it went across the front of every card in that series: I ceased resistance. The distinction sounds like nothing from the outside.
Inside a Japanese infantryman’s head in 1945, it was the whole thing. Since childhood, he had learned he must never surrender. Nobody had ever raised ceasing resistance with him, which meant there was no rule against it and no shame attached to it. The phrase handed him a description of what he was doing that his own upbringing had left unguarded.
By the summer of 1945, the Americans had tested that sentence on the people it was aimed at. That was the sentence going down over southern Okinawa on June 17, printed on a card five by eight inches, red, white, and blue. A postwar study of the leaflet series puts the number of that particular card used on the island at about 600,000, and states its distribution was held back on purpose until the last ten days of organized resistance, so it would arrive when the men reading it had nowhere else to go. The Japanese text carried instructions.
Come toward the American lines at a walk with hands raised high. Come by daylight, never at night. Come singly rather than in a group. Wear a loincloth and nothing else, and clothing will be provided.
Anyone may use this card, Japanese or Korean, soldier or civilian. Anyone without a card may come in the same way and will meet the same treatment. The men who spoke those words out loud came from a school in Minnesota. The army had opened a Japanese language school at the Presidio in San Francisco a month before Pearl Harbor, with a budget of $2,000 and sixty students, and moved it to Camp Savage, Minnesota, in 1942.
Several thousand graduates went through it before the war ended. Most were second-generation Japanese Americans. A great many had relatives behind wire in the relocation camps while they were being trained, and a great many had relatives in Japan. The course ran eight hours a day with two more in the evening.
Men who fell behind were dropped. Graduates went out to combat units in teams of about ten. The 96th Infantry Division’s team, which landed on Okinawa in the second wave on April 1, was headed by Warren Higa of Honolulu and included his younger brother Takajiro. Takajiro was twenty-one, had been born in Hawaii, sent to Okinawa as a small boy, lived there for fourteen years, and left six years before he came back with a rifle company in front of him.
Every one of these men walked with an escort, because a Japanese-American soldier in a Pacific rifle company was in danger from the enemy in the ordinary way and in danger from his own side in a way nobody had solved. The escort existed so that a nervous rifleman at forty yards in bad light would see two Americans instead of one. On June 17, the 7th Infantry Division tried the direct approach. Every unit in the division ceased fire for one hour, an extraordinary thing to authorize on that ground.
While the guns were quiet, the interpreters put the appeal out over portable loudspeakers along the front. Several Japanese soldiers came out and walked toward the American lines. They stopped, stood, watched for a few moments, then went back into the ground. One American soldier was hit during the hour.
Somebody in the caves put three holes through one of the loudspeakers. The army’s official history of the campaign gives the result of that hour in four words: the appeal was wholly ineffective. The second thing that happened that day ran alongside the first, aimed at different people, and the guns went on firing while it happened. Southeast of the village of Nakaza, the southern coast of Okinawa falls into the sea as a rock cliff, and the cliff face is full of natural caves.
Interpreters of the 7th Division set up a loudspeaker at the top of that cliff and started talking down into it. Between five and six hundred civilians came out. Where the man on the microphone had the Okinawan tongue, he used that instead of standard Japanese. Okinawan is its own language, and to a household in a sea cave, the difference was the difference between a stranger and somebody from home.
Takajiro Higa did that work on the 96th Division’s front for three months. He and his brother are credited with talking more than 30,000 Okinawans out of caves and out of the tombs cut into the hillsides. Then the interpreters at Nakaza went through the crowd they had brought out and found more than seventy Japanese soldiers standing in it, men who had left their army before that morning and were hoping to walk out of the war as civilians. The interpreters picked them out of a column of five or six hundred people by talking to them one at a time, because speakers of the language knew what a person from a particular village should sound like.
The card and the loudspeaker gave a Japanese soldier a way out that his own training had left unguarded. The clause covering civilians gave him a second way out on top of the first. And the men with the island’s own language stood at the end of both routes and could tell a farmer from an infantryman. It all existed because a sergeant on Leyte had written down what his prisoners complained about.
There was one more part of the design. The card was large for an air-dropped leaflet, and the front carried bright red, white, and blue stripes with an English sentence across the top. All of that was for the American rifleman the Japanese soldier was walking toward. The designers picked the size and colors so a man in a foxhole would recognize the paper in a pair of raised hands from a distance.
The English text told him what to do about it: The bearer has ceased resistance. Treat him in accordance with international law. Take him to the nearest commanding officer. A day or two before the mass drop began, 10,000 copies of the card went out to units in the line, fifteen to a company, so every soldier there had held one and knew it on sight.
Under the English line, the same card carried its translation, so the man walking in with his hands up knew exactly what the American facing him had been instructed to do. That precaution came at a price. In May 1944, MacArthur’s headquarters had demanded an investigation into reports that Japanese carrying passes and attempting to come in near Hollandia had been killed by American troops, because the situation had to be corrected if propaganda for surrender was to work at all. A psychological warfare officer complained that riflemen at the front were canceling out his whole effort by shooting men who were trying to give up.
Divisional commands ran talks about it. One division offered a case of beer for a prisoner brought in alive. Internal memoranda show another raising the offer to three days of leave and ice cream. The harder half of the problem stood on the American side of the line, and the paper had to be aimed at both halves at once.
After June 17, the numbers moved in a way nothing in the Pacific war had prepared anyone for. Prisoner intake across the Tenth Army had climbed from fewer than four a day to more than fifty a day in the week from June 12 to June 18. On June 19, as two divisions ran forward along the coasts, 343 Japanese soldiers came in of their own accord. On June 20, the day the American 32nd Infantry took the east end of Hill 89 and stood on the roof of Ushijima’s headquarters, 977 prisoners were taken.
In four years of Pacific fighting, there had been no day like it. Men who had come in were volunteering to go back into the caves and fetch their friends, carrying cigarettes as evidence that the promises held. A small landing craft idled a hundred yards off the southern cliffs with a loudspeaker on its deck, and the voice coming off it belonged to a Japanese army sergeant who had come over and grown convinced the treatment was real. He gave the men in the rocks below him orders in his own rank, telling them to leave their positions, strip to their loincloths, and walk north up the coast to the American lines.
Being a sergeant, he was often obeyed. Ushijima and his chief of staff killed themselves in the small hours of June 22 on the seaward face of Hill 89, having eaten a large meal and finished the last of the Scotch whisky carried down from Shuri. Organized resistance ended that morning. How many men came out depends on where the count stops.
The Tenth Army’s accounting for the battle proper gives 7,401 Japanese soldiers surrendered, of whom more than 200 held commissions and close to half were unarmed laborers. The mopping up that ran from June 23 to June 30 brought in 2,900 more military prisoners along with a labor contingent about a third that size. A postwar accounting of the leaflet effort puts the Okinawa figure above 11,000. What can be set beside those totals is the earlier arithmetic.
Tarawa yielded 150 prisoners. Saipan, much larger and fought over for three weeks, produced a shade over 2,000. Iwo Jima, taken without any comparable effort of this kind, ended with about one man in twenty of its garrison in American hands. Okinawa’s figure for soldiers alone came to close to twice those four put together, out of an army that had been ordered to die where it stood and had spent seventy days doing exactly that.
The civilian ledger is larger and was counted on a different basis. Eighty thousand Okinawans came out of the caves at the southern tip of the island during the last two weeks of June, most of them women, children, and the very old, walking north in columns with bundles on their heads. Between a third and a half of them were hurt. Frontline units stopped their own fighting to collect them and walk them back through the lines.
The talking did not stop when the battle was declared over. On August 29, two weeks after the war had ended everywhere else, Colonel Kikuji Hongo, who had commanded a Japanese infantry regiment in the fighting for Kunishi Ridge, walked out of the ground there and handed over more than 400 men. Hongo explained that the fighting for the bridge in the middle of June had broken his people up, that they had been sitting in the caves underneath it ever since, and that they had come out because somebody had talked them out.
An army was talked out of the ground by men it had been taught to think of as traitors, using a phrase its own prisoners had helped write on paper colored for the benefit of the riflemen waiting on the other side.
