- 2 days ago
A lone American translator walked unarmed into a cave on Saipan and talked eight Japanese soldiers into letting 122 civilians come out alive. The man was Bob Hoichi Kubo, a Hawaii-born Nisei soldier whose own army had once taken away his rifle, and the setting was one of the most desperate corners of the Pacific War: a limestone cliff, a rope, and a cave full of exhausted people with rifles pointed at the entrance.
This military history story follows the battle for Saipan, the collapse of the Japanese garrison, and the dangerous work of Japanese American linguists who were sent to interrogate prisoners, read captured documents, and negotiate in places where loudspeakers and leaflets could not reach. It also shows why Kubo’s uniform, his family background, and a line from a 700-year-old Japanese tale mattered more than force.
If you enjoy World War II stories, Pacific War history, military documentary narration, and dramatic true accounts of battlefield negotiation, this story delivers a powerful mix of history, language, and courage. It is ideal for listeners searching for WW2 stories, Japanese American soldiers, Saipan history, and forgotten war stories.
Created for fans of World War 2 history, military history narration, Pacific theater documentaries, WW2 stories, and historical storytelling about Japanese American translators, battlefield rescues, and Saipan cave operations. A strong fit for anyone looking for gripping history stories, war narration, and forgotten WWII accounts.
This military history story follows the battle for Saipan, the collapse of the Japanese garrison, and the dangerous work of Japanese American linguists who were sent to interrogate prisoners, read captured documents, and negotiate in places where loudspeakers and leaflets could not reach. It also shows why Kubo’s uniform, his family background, and a line from a 700-year-old Japanese tale mattered more than force.
If you enjoy World War II stories, Pacific War history, military documentary narration, and dramatic true accounts of battlefield negotiation, this story delivers a powerful mix of history, language, and courage. It is ideal for listeners searching for WW2 stories, Japanese American soldiers, Saipan history, and forgotten war stories.
Created for fans of World War 2 history, military history narration, Pacific theater documentaries, WW2 stories, and historical storytelling about Japanese American translators, battlefield rescues, and Saipan cave operations. A strong fit for anyone looking for gripping history stories, war narration, and forgotten WWII accounts.
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LearningTranscript
00:00On the 26th of July 1944, near the northern tip of Saipan, an American soldier stood at the edge
00:07of a limestone cliff about 100 feet high and looked down at a rope. At the bottom of that
00:14cliff was a cave. Inside the cave were eight Japanese soldiers with rifles. Also inside were
00:23122 civilians, men, women, and children, who had been underground for 10 days with almost no food
00:31and no clean water. The soldiers had already sent their answer up the cliff. If the Americans came
00:39down, the civilians would be killed first. The man standing at the top of that rope was not an
00:46infantry officer, and he was not a commando. He was a translator. His job, for the last
00:53six weeks, had been reading captured papers and asking questions of prisoners. His name
00:59was Bob Hoichi Kubo, and he had come to this war from Pukoli'i, a sugar plantation camp on
01:06Maui. He had been studying agriculture at the University of Hawaii when the draft found him
01:11in June of 1941. Nobody ordered him to go down. The official record is careful about that word.
01:17He descended, voluntarily, and the men at the top could not cover him once he was inside.
01:23He was wearing his American uniform. He was carrying a .45 automatic underneath it,
01:29and he had already decided what he was going to do with that pistol, and it was not what you
01:33would
01:33expect. Two hours later, all 122 civilians came out of that cave alive, and then the eight soldiers
01:42came out behind them and surrendered. That is the part that should stop you. Not the rescue. The eight
01:50men. These were soldiers of an army that, on this island, in this month, had killed itself almost to
01:58the last man rather than be taken. Twenty-five thousand of them were already dead in the ground
02:04around that cave, and one American walked in, alone, and talked them out in the time it takes
02:10to watch a movie. How? That is what we're going to answer. And I'll tell you now, the answer is
02:18not
02:18he spoke Japanese. Hundreds of Americans on Saipan spoke Japanese that summer. Loudspeakers had been
02:26shouting perfect Japanese across those cliffs for weeks. You are about to see exactly how well that
02:32worked. If you'd like more stories about what American soldiers actually did in the Pacific,
02:37built from records and citations, not from legends, take a moment to like this video and subscribe.
02:44It helps. Now, hold on to a date. The 9th of July, 1944. Seventeen days before Kubo touched that rope,
02:54Saipan was declared secure. Officially, the battle was over. The flag was up. The press had moved on.
03:02Here is what secure actually meant. The Japanese garrison had numbered roughly 32,000 men. By the
03:10middle of August, American burial parties had counted more than 25,000 of them. Prisoners. And I want you to
03:18hold these two numbers next to each other. Prisoners came to 1,810. That is the ratio the United States
03:26Army was working with on Saipan. For every man who came out with his hands up, about 14 had to
03:33be killed
03:33in place. And the place they had to be killed was underground. Saipan is coral limestone, and limestone
03:41is full of holes. Caves, fissures, sinkholes, gullies with overhangs. The Japanese had not so much
03:49built a fortress on Saipan as moved into one that was already there. The American answer had been the
03:55only answer anyone had. A flamethrower team worked in close under machine gun cover and put fire into
04:02the mouth of the hole. If that didn't do it, engineers packed the entrance with TNT and brought
04:08the roof down. If that didn't do it, a bulldozer pushed the hillside over the opening and sealed
04:14whatever was inside, alive or otherwise. It worked. It worked the way a hammer works. But there was
04:23something in those holes the hammer could not solve. And by the second week of July, it was standing in
04:29the open where every man in the fleet could see it. On the cliffs at Marpy Point, at the top
04:36of the
04:36island, Japanese civilians began killing themselves. Parents threw their children onto the rocks and
04:43jumped after them. Whole families walked into the sea. American interpreters stood there with
04:50megaphones, pleading with them in their own language, promising food, promising that nothing
04:55would be done to them. Some listened. Hundreds did not. Marines watched from a few dozen yards away and
05:05could not stop any of it. Between eight and ten thousand civilians died on Saipan, out of a population
05:12of about 26,000. Remember that number, too. It is the reason the United States Army was about to change
05:19the way it
05:19thought about a hole in the ground. Because those people were not simply hiding, and the 122 in Kubo's
05:27cave were not simply hostages. Twenty days before he went down that rope, a Japanese general on this
05:33island wrote his last order and then sat down on a rock to die. What he put in that order
05:39is the reason
05:40eight soldiers sat in the dark with 122 civilians and believed they were doing the honorable thing.
05:47Start with the 6th of July, 1944, in a ravine on the north end of the island that the Americans
05:53had
05:53already started calling Paradise Valley. Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito had been running the
05:59defense of Saipan for three weeks, and he had almost nothing left to run it with. His artillery was
06:05gone. His tanks were burned. His wounded lay in the open under the cliffs. His men had been living on
06:12what they could find. And what they could find was not food. At 10 o'clock that morning, Saito cleaned
06:18a spot
06:19on the rock himself, sat down facing east, said the words for long life to the emperor, and cut himself
06:25with his
06:26own sword while his adjutant put a pistol against his head. They burned his body that evening. Within about a
06:33day,
06:33on the same island, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo also killed himself. That is a name worth stopping on.
06:41Nagumo had commanded the carrier force that struck Pearl Harbor. The man who launched the attack that
06:46started the war for America died in a cave on Saipan, two and a half years later, by his own
06:53hand.
06:54But it is Saito's last order that matters here, not his death. He told the garrison to make one
07:01final attack, and he told them what the exchange rate was to be. Seven American lives for each of
07:09theirs. And the order carried one more line, and I want you to hold on to it, because everything that
07:16happens in this story turns on it. It's said that there was no longer any distinction between civilians
07:23and troops. Read that again in your head. It does not simply tell soldiers to die. It dissolves the line
07:34between a soldier and a farmer's wife. It makes a fisherman's children part of the garrison.
07:42And 20 days later, in a cave near Marpy Point, it is the reason that eight riflemen sitting in the
07:48dark
07:48with 122 civilians did not see themselves as men holding hostages. In their understanding, there were no
07:57civilians left on Saipan to hold. At about four in the morning on the 7th of July, the order was
08:03carried out.
08:05Somewhere between three and four thousand Japanese came down the flat coastal ground of the
08:10Tanapag Plain in the dark, and they came into the 27th Infantry Division. That is Bob Kubo's division.
08:18Keep that in your pocket, because it means our translator was on that ground when this happened.
08:24Some of the attackers had rifles. Some had bayonets lashed to bamboo poles. Some were wounded men on
08:31crutches who had been pulled out of the aid stations to make up numbers. Lieutenant Colonel William O'Brien of
08:37the 105th Infantry had told his officers the day before that they would not be giving up ground.
08:44When the wave hit, he was firing a pistol in each hand. He was last seen alive standing in an
08:50exposed jeep,
08:51working a .50 caliber machine gun into a mass of men who were nearly on top of him. Sergeant Thomas
08:57Baker
08:57had already been shot and refused to be carried any farther, because being carried meant two men were
09:03carrying instead of shooting. He asked to be propped against a telephone pole, and left with a pistol and
09:10eight rounds in it. When American troops came back over that ground, Baker was dead in that position,
09:16and there were eight enemy dead in front of him. Both men received the Medal of Honor. Neither lived to
09:24know it. By full daylight, more than 3,000 Japanese bodies were on the plane, and American casualties
09:32ran to something close to 1,000. It was the largest attack of its kind in the entire Pacific War.
09:39And here is the part that almost never gets said about the 7th of July. That attack did not end
09:46the battle. It ended the army. Everything still breathing on Saipan after that morning had no
09:53headquarters, no supply, and no orders, because the men who gave orders were dead. What was left broke
10:01into pieces of 5 and 10 and 30 men and went into the limestone. They did not go alone. They
10:09took the
10:09civilians with them, and the civilians came willingly because of what they had been told for months.
10:15That the Americans were sadistic, red-headed, hairy monsters. That American tanks would crush
10:22prisoners flat. And that the men would be mutilated before they were killed. Those are not my descriptions.
10:29Those are the images that had been put into civilian heads by the garrison, deliberately. And after the
10:369th of July, there was nobody left to take them back out. So look at the problem now from the
10:42American
10:42side of the line, because it has changed shape completely. The island is secure. The battle
10:49is officially over. And underneath the island, there are thousands of separate holes, each one
10:56containing soldiers, or civilians, or both, mixed together in the dark and impossible to tell apart
11:03from the outside. The United States Army did have one instrument built exactly for that problem.
11:09Exactly one. It was a small group of American soldiers, and two years earlier the army had
11:15confiscated their rifles. By the summer of 1944, every one of them working near the front had another
11:22American assigned to stay at his shoulder at all times, and not to protect him from the Japanese.
11:26Go back to the 7th of December, 1941, at Schofield Barracks in the middle of Oahu.
11:33Bob Kubo had been in the army for six months. He was a draftee, one of thousands of Hawaii-born
11:40sons
11:40of Japanese immigrants serving in the island's National Guard regiments. And that morning, he stood outside
11:46and watched aircraft with red circles on the wings work over Pearl Harbor a few miles away.
11:52Within hours, the men around him had been handed shovels and put to digging trenches. In the months
11:58that followed, the army collected their rifles and their ammunition. Think about what that means
12:04for a moment. These were American soldiers, in American uniform, who had sworn the oath and drawn
12:12the pay. And the country they had enlisted to defend was not certain enough about their faces
12:18to leave a weapon in their hands. They were not discharged. They were reorganized.
12:24On the 28th of May, 1942, about 1,400 of these men were assembled at Schofield as the Hawaiian
12:31Provisional Infantry Battalion and shipped east to Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, as far from a Pacific beach
12:37as the army could reasonably put them. And that is where the army came looking for Kubo, in June of
12:44that
12:44same year, for a completely different reason. Somebody in Washington had done arithmetic that
12:50nobody had wanted to do before the war. The United States was fighting an enemy whose language almost
12:56no American could read. Every captured map, every diary, every operations order taken off a dead officer
13:04was worthless paper unless somebody could turn it into English within hours. And the largest concentration of
13:10people in America who could do that was the same population the country had just decided it did not trust.
13:16So the army built a language school, first at the Presidio in San Francisco, then moved to Minnesota
13:23when Japanese Americans were barred from the west coast, and pushed roughly 6,000 of them through it before
13:29the war ended. Kubo graduated in June of 1943 and shipped out that November. Here is what those men were
13:38actually worth.
13:39And this is the fact I want you to remember when we go back to the cliff.
13:44A Japanese soldier taken alive had no idea what to do. Not because he was stupid. Because his army had
13:52never
13:53taught him. Every other army in the war trained its men for capture. Give your name, your rank, your number,
14:00and nothing else. The Japanese army did not run that training. Because in its doctrine, being captured
14:08was not a situation that could occur. A man who was taken had already fallen off the edge of the
14:15world.
14:16He had no script. So the Nisei interrogators would sit down across from a man who had accepted that he
14:22was already dead, speak to him in the language of his parents, offer him a cigarette and water, and ask
14:28him questions.
14:30And he would answer them. Not under threat. Just answer them. Because nothing in his life had prepared him for
14:37a reason not to.
14:39Unit strengths. Positions. Names of officers. Where the ammunition was.
14:45By the end of the war, those men had translated something over 20 million pages of captured documents.
14:5220 million. That is not a support function. That is an entire second front, run by about 6,000
15:00Americans, in a language their own country had spent two years treating as evidence against them.
15:07Now here is the detail that tells you everything about what it cost them personally.
15:12Every Nisei linguist working near the front line had another American assigned to stay beside him.
15:18A white soldier. At his shoulder. All day. Not for protection from the Japanese. For protection from
15:25Americans. Nisei had been shot at by their own side, and in more than one case killed, by men who
15:32saw a
15:33Japanese face in the brush and did what they had been trained to do in half a second. One of
15:39them said
15:39afterward that they may have been the only soldiers in history who needed bodyguards to keep their own
15:45army from killing them. Kubo's was a private first class named Lyle Nelson. Remember that name.
15:53Nelson is going to be standing at the top of the cliff on the 26th of July, watching his man
15:59go down
15:59a rope into a hole he cannot follow him into. And there is one more thing about Bob Kubo. And
16:07it is
16:07the thing this entire story eventually turns on. So I am only going to plant it here and leave it
16:13alone
16:14until later. From the Japanese side of that war, a man like him was not supposed to be possible. Not
16:22unlikely. Impossible. The empire's entire understanding of blood and loyalty, and where a
16:30man's obligations came from, had no shelf to put him on. When Kubo opened his mouth in that cave,
16:37the eight men in front of him were not simply hearing an enemy who spoke Japanese.
16:41They were hearing something their world said could not exist. But we are getting ahead of the story.
16:48Because in the middle of July, the Americans were not sending men down ropes at all. They had built
16:54something else to open those caves. Jeeps, wire, and a newspaper printing press in Honolulu. And it was
17:01pulling people out of the ground by the thousand. It worked better than anything anyone had tried in
17:07the Pacific. There was exactly one kind of hole it could not open. Kubo's cave was that kind. Back up
17:14eight months, to the 20th of November, 1943, on a coral island called Tarawa. A marine lieutenant
17:23named Robert Sheeks was crawling under a wooden pier in waist-deep water, under fire, trying to do a job
17:30that sounded simple when it was written on paper. Catch a Japanese alive. Find out what is on the other
17:36side of the island. Sheeks had grown up partly in Shanghai and had studied Japanese, and he was one of
17:43a
17:43handful of Americans in that fight who could have used a prisoner if he got one. He barely got one.
17:49In 76 hours on Tarawa, out of a garrison of about 4,500, the marines took fewer than 20 Japanese
17:58prisoners. Almost everyone else died in place. Sheeks came off that island with a conclusion that he wrote
18:05down plainly afterward. That leaflets and loudspeakers were essential if anybody wanted to
18:11reduce the number of men who had to be burned out of holes one at a time. So on Saipan,
18:17he built the
18:18thing himself. He got hold of amplifiers and rigged them to run off truck batteries, mounted a speaker
18:24and a generator on a jeep, and drove it up to places where a sane man does not drive a
18:29jeep.
18:29The lip of a ravine. The mouth of a valley. Close enough that a human voice, amplified,
18:36would reach into rock. And then he made a decision about vocabulary that is worth the whole rest of
18:43this section. He did not broadcast the Japanese word for surrender. The Japanese word carried
18:50everything the garrison had spent years pouring into it. Disgrace. A family shamed at home. A man erased
18:58from his own village. A civilian hiding in a hole with children heard that word and heard a door
19:05closing. So Sheeks broadcast a phrase closer to plain daylight instead. Come out. Two words that ask a
19:14person to walk, not to submit. Come out. There is water. There is food. Nothing will be done to you.
19:24He put the same idea on paper. Four leaflets. Three in Japanese. One in Korean. Because there were
19:31Korean laborers on that island too. And nobody else had thought to write to them at all.
19:36They told people how to approach American lines without being shot. In the open. In daylight. Empty
19:42hands. The Honolulu Advertiser printed them by the thousand and would not take money for it.
19:49Marine spotter planes carried bundles of about a hundred, tied with a string that broke in the
19:54slipstream and scattered them over the cliffs. Now measure what that did. By the end of the campaign,
20:01roughly 15,000 people came out of the ground on Saipan. Japanese civilians, Okinawans, Koreans,
20:09Chamorros, Carolinians. Families who had been told that Americans would crush prisoners under steamrollers
20:15walked out into the hands of Americans and were fed. Armed soldiers started coming out too,
20:22in small groups, after hearing the broadcasts. Sheiks got a bronze star with a V for it in August.
20:28Hold those numbers against each other, because this is the whole argument. The hammer, flame,
20:34satchel charge, bulldozer, had produced 1,800 prisoners out of a garrison of 32,000.
20:42A lieutenant with a jeep battery and a printing press pulled 15,000 human beings out of the same
20:47rock. Same island. Same month. Same enemy. That is the American learning curve in one comparison,
20:56and it happened in about six weeks. But I told you at the end of the last part that there
21:01was
21:01one kind of hole this machine could not open, and now you can see exactly why. A loudspeaker works on
21:08a
21:08person who can hear it and who is free to move. Both conditions have to hold. Sound does not turn
21:15corners in limestone. It dies about as far in as the light does. And in the deeper caves, the people
21:22who were closest to the entrance, the ones who could hear the voice, who could read a leaflet that blew
21:27in, were almost never the civilians. They were the soldiers. The soldiers held the mouth. That was the
21:35whole point of holding the mouth. Which produced a specific and ugly arithmetic in the last weeks of July.
21:42Somewhere in the north end of the island were holes containing families who wanted to come out,
21:47and armed men between them and the daylight who had been ordered by a dead general to make no
21:52distinction between a soldier and a child. You cannot broadcast your way past that. The people
21:59you need to persuade cannot hear you. And the people who can hear you are the problem. The only way
22:05to
22:05reach the back of that cave was for an American to get to the back of that cave. And on
22:09the 26th of July,
22:11on the north end of Saipan, two civilians, who by any reasonable expectation should have been dead,
22:17came stumbling into an American position with a story. They were Okinawans. They had been underground
22:24for 10 days. And what they said, once somebody found a man who could understand them, put an infantry
22:31company, a lieutenant named Roger Pear, and one translator, on the top of a hundred-foot cliff by
22:37that afternoon. The 26th of July, 1944. The north end of Saipan, in the broken country inland from the
22:45cliffs at Marpy Point. Two Okinawan civilians came into an American position that day, and what they
22:51had to report was this. About 100 feet below the lip of a cliff, in a cave, eight Japanese soldiers
22:58with rifles were holding 122 people. Men, women, and children. They had been down there 10 days.
23:06The water was gone, or close to it. There were people in that cave who were no longer able to
23:11walk
23:11out even if somebody opened the door for them. And the soldiers had made it plain that if the Americans
23:17came, the civilians would not be handed over. They would be killed first. Bob Kubo was the man who
23:24took that report, because he was the only man there who could. Now look at the ground, because the ground
23:30decided everything. The mouth of the cave opened out at the base of a cliff. You could not get at
23:36it from
23:36the front without walking across open rock in full view. You could not get at it from above, except by
23:43going over the edge on a rope, one man at a time, hanging in the air with nothing to shoot
23:48back with.
23:49And any weapon that could actually reach the inside of that cave, flame, satchel charge, artillery,
23:57a bulldozer over the top, would kill every person inside it in the same second it killed the eight
24:02soldiers. Put yourself in the boots of First Lieutenant Roger Pair for a moment, because he
24:09is the officer standing there with this in his lap. He has three options. He can send men down the
24:15rope
24:16and take the entrance by assault, and lose the men on the rope, and lose the hostages, because the
24:22soldiers below have already told him exactly what they will do. He can seal the cave. The engineers can
24:29do it in an afternoon. 122 people go into the rock permanently, and the position stops being a problem.
24:37Or he can wait. And waiting is not neutral, because the people in that cave have already been 10 days
24:44without food. Waiting kills the civilians first, one at a time, in the dark, slowly. It just does it
24:54without an American having to give the order out loud. That is the entire menu. It is the 26th of
25:01July,
25:01the battle has officially been over for 17 days, and there is no fourth option on the list.
25:08So Kubo made one. The citation the army wrote afterward is precise about this, and the precision
25:14matters, because the army does not use that word carelessly. He descended voluntarily. Nobody sent him.
25:23And the same document records the two conditions he accepted going in. That he could not be protected
25:29by American troops once he was inside, and that he knew the enemy soldiers had threatened to kill
25:34the civilians if they were forced to surrender. He got ready in about the least dramatic way imaginable.
25:41He stayed in his American uniform. That was deliberate, and we will come back to why it mattered more
25:46than anything else he did that day. He filled his pockets with K-rations, as many as he could carry,
25:53and underneath the uniform, he had his .45 automatic. Private First Class Lyle Nelson was up top.
26:01Nelson's entire assignment in this war was to stay at Kubo's shoulder and make sure no American shot him
26:06by mistake. And Nelson now had to stand at the edge of a cliff and watch the man he was
26:12responsible for
26:13go over the side into the one place on Saipan where he could not follow him. Kubo went down the
26:19rope,
26:20about a hundred feet of it. Hands, boots, open air, no cover, in daylight, with eight rifles somewhere
26:29underneath him, and nothing at all he could do about any of it. He got to the bottom. And the
26:35rifles
26:35were there. They did not believe him. Understand what they were looking at. A man with a Japanese face,
26:42in an American uniform, standing at the mouth of their cave, speaking their language perfectly.
26:49There was exactly one explanation available in their world, and it was that this was a trick. A
26:56spy. A Japanese man who had gone over, sent down to talk them out so the Americans could kill them
27:02all
27:03in the open. And Kubo answered that accusation with the plainest sentence he had. He told them that he,
27:10too, was the son of Japanese parents. That he had been born in the United States. That the United
27:17States was his country, and he fought for it. Then he did the thing that everything else in this story
27:25hangs on. He took out the pistol, slowly, in front of eight men with rifles, and he put it down
27:33on the
27:33ground in front of them. He gave away the only object he had that could have saved his life. And
27:40he did it in the first
27:41minute. On purpose. Then he emptied his pockets of the rations and pushed the food toward men who had not
27:48eaten
27:48properly in ten days. They had a pot of rice going. They told him to sit down. He now had
27:56roughly two
27:56hours to move eight men off a position their own general had put them on before he died. And the
28:03argument he chose had nothing in it about America, or the outcome of the battle, or the fact that they
28:08had lost. It was built entirely out of their world. And one line of it was more than seven centuries
28:15older
28:16than the war. Inside, it was hot. And it was dark. And it stank of ten days of human beings.
28:23A hundred and twenty-two people were back in that rock. Some of them had been sitting in the dark
28:28long
28:28enough that they had stopped talking. There were children in there. There were old people in there.
28:34And between them and the daylight sat eight soldiers with rifles, who had also not eaten, and who had
28:40no officer, no orders, no radio, and no army left to belong to. Their general had been dead for twenty
28:49days. Everything above them belonged to the United States. Kubo sat down with them by the rice.
28:56Now, here is what he understood that a jeep with a loudspeaker on it could never understand.
29:01And it is the center of this entire story, so stay with me. Those eight men were not holding
29:07out because they thought they could win. They knew what had happened on this island. They were holding
29:12out because every exit they could see led to disgrace. For them, and for their families at home,
29:18who would be told what they had done. Sheiks' broadcasts offered food, water,
29:25water, medical care, safety. All of that was an offer of survival. And survival was the one thing
29:32these men had already decided they did not want, because of what it would cost the people whose
29:37name they carried. So Kubo did not offer them their lives. He built them a door they could walk through,
29:45with their honor still on. He started with his own family. He told them his grandfather had fought for
29:52Japan in the war against Russia, the war of 1904, the one that made Japan a great power and that
29:59every
30:00man in that cave had been raised on. He was not standing there as a foreigner explaining Japan to
30:06Japanese. He was a man with the same grandfathers they had. Then he did something that I do not
30:13think anybody else in the United States Army could have done, and it took one sentence. He quoted them
30:19a line that is more than 700 years old. It comes from the story of the Taita clan, the tale
30:26of the Heike,
30:27which is not obscure literature in Japan. It is the national epic. Every man in that cave had it read
30:34to
30:34him as a boy. In that story, there is a nobleman named Taita no Shigemori, who is caught in an
30:41impossible position, because his father has turned against the emperor. He owes absolute loyalty to the
30:47emperor. He owes absolute duty to his father. He cannot do both. And the line that survives him is this.
30:56If I am filial, I cannot serve the emperor. If I serve the emperor, I cannot be filial.
31:04Listen to what that sentence does in that cave. It does not attack the emperor. It does not argue
31:11that Japan is wrong. It says that a man can be trapped between two duties that are both real,
31:17through no fault of his own, and that this is not treason. It is tragedy. It is the oldest kind
31:25of Japanese story there is. And Kubo applied it to himself. He was born in America. America was the
31:33country he owed. His parents' country claimed the other half of him. He could not serve both,
31:39and he had chosen the one that had a right to him, exactly the way Shigemori had. In one line,
31:46he moved himself out of the category of traitor, which is a thing you shoot, and into the category
31:53of a man caught in a duty he did not choose, which is a thing you can sit and eat
31:58rice with.
31:59Then he raised the pressure. And he did it with something these men could not argue with,
32:05because their whole world ran on it. He was a sergeant in the United States Army.
32:11The men in front of him were riflemen. He told them that his own country had honored him with that
32:17rank, and that in that cave, at that moment, he was the senior man present. In an army where rank
32:25was not a job description but an order of the universe, that landed. He was no longer negotiating
32:31with them. He was, in a sense they understood in their bones, above them. And from there,
32:38he took them to the only question that was left. What happens to these 122 people?
32:45The battle was over. It had been over for more than two weeks. Killing the women and children in
32:51the back of that cave would not delay the Americans by an hour, or cost them a single man. It
32:57would
32:57accomplish exactly one thing. It would be the last act Japan performed on this island. And it would be a
33:04disgrace attached to Japan's name permanently. He told them that this was not what soldiers do after
33:11the fighting has ended. Nearly two hours passed down there. Eight rifles, one pot of rice, and one
33:19American who never picked his pistol back up off the ground. At two o'clock that afternoon, they began
33:26sending the civilians out. And within minutes of the first of those 122 people reaching the top of that
33:32cliff, an American on that cliff was dead. Not one of the eight men in the cave fired a shot.
33:40Getting 122 people up 100 feet of cliff is not a moment. It is an afternoon of work.
33:47They came out of the mouth of that cave into daylight they had not seen in ten days,
33:52and they were in the condition you would expect. Kubo's own description of them later was,
33:57ill-nourished women and children. Some could climb with help. Some had to be tied on and hauled.
34:04Every one of them had to go up that rock one at a time, in the open, with American soldiers
34:09leaning
34:10over the edge above and eight armed Japanese standing behind them below. And everyone involved
34:16simply had to trust the arrangement and keep working. And then, somewhere in the middle of that,
34:23a rifle went off in the jungle nearby. It had nothing to do with the eight men in the cave.
34:29It was one of the loose groups still scattered through the north end of the island. Men with no
34:34orders and nobody to surrender to, doing the only thing left in their instructions. The shot killed
34:39First Lieutenant Roger Pear instantly. He went down and his body went over into the shaft. Kubo lost it.
34:48This is one of the few moments in the whole account where you get the man rather than the performance.
34:54Two hours of the most disciplined talking any American did in the Pacific that year,
34:59and then a friend is dead on the rocks below him. And he turned around and went at those eight
35:04soldiers in their own language and told them exactly what had just happened and what it meant.
35:10And here is the part I would not believe if it were not in the record. They were ashamed.
35:17Four of the eight went down into that shaft and brought Lieutenant Pear's body back up.
35:22They carried an American officer out of a hole because a sergeant told them that honor required it.
35:29Then all eight of them surrendered. 122 civilians. Eight soldiers. One dead American. Two hours.
35:40Kubo said afterward that for a couple of days he had no desire to save anyone at all.
35:45Then he said this, and the word to listen for is the first one.
35:49However, when we saw those ill-nourished women and children, we went in again to many other caves.
35:57We. Him and Lyle Nelson, the private first class whose job was to keep him from being shot by his
36:03own side, going back down into the rock together, one hole after another, for the rest of that summer.
36:12So, the question we started with, why did it work? Not because he spoke Japanese. I told you that at
36:20the beginning, and now you can see the proof. Perfect Japanese had been broadcast over those cliffs for
36:25weeks by men with better equipment than Kubo had, and the people who needed to hear it could not,
36:31and the people who could hear it were the ones holding the rifles. It worked because of who was
36:37standing there. Every argument he used required a man who lived in two worlds at once and was not
36:44pretending about either of them. The grandfather at Port Arthur. The 700-year-old line about a son trapped
36:51between two loyalties. The rank. He could reach into their world because it was half his, and he could
36:59stay outside it because the other half was American, and he never once hid that. Which brings us back to
37:05the uniform, and why I said in Part 5 that it mattered more than anything else he did. He could
37:11have gone
37:12down that rope in Japanese clothing. It would have been easier. It would also have made him a spy,
37:18and not only in their eyes. A man who takes off his own uniform to work behind an enemy position
37:25can be shot for it under the laws of war, by anybody. By keeping it on, he forced the transaction
37:32to be what it actually was. Eight soldiers of the Japanese army did not give themselves up to a
37:39Japanese man who had betrayed them. They surrendered to a sergeant of the United States army who happened
37:45to have their grandfathers. And now the last turn of it, which is the hardest thing in this story to
37:52look at straight. The reason that argument could not be answered is that the empire those men served
37:57had built its entire understanding of loyalty on blood. On that theory, Bob Kubo could not exist.
38:03A man with a Japanese face who genuinely belonged to America was not a rare case. He was a category
38:11error. In 1942, the United States army had believed something uncomfortably close to the same thing,
38:18and had taken the rifles out of his hands at Schofield Barracks to prove it.
38:23The difference, and this is the whole difference, is that America was wrong for about six months,
38:29and then changed its mind and put the men it had disarmed into the one job in the Pacific that
38:35no
38:36other American on earth could do. Japan was wrong about them until the last day of the war.
38:43In January of 1945, Bob Kubo received the Distinguished Service Cross,
38:48the highest decoration awarded to any Nisei in the Pacific War. Then he went home, opened a grocery store in
38:55California, and spent the next 50 years barely mentioning any of it. Which is why, in 2017,
39:03his son had to start making phone calls to strangers to find out what had happened to 122 people.
39:09The 122 people who came up that rope went where all the others went, to Camp Susupe on the southwest
39:16side of the island, a fenced camp of tents and salvaged lumber that eventually held around 13,000
39:22Japanese civilians, along with several thousand Chamorros, Carolinians, and Koreans. They were
39:29registered, fed, treated, and counted. The camp stayed open until the summer of 1946.
39:36Whatever you want to say about a camp, and there is a great deal to say,
39:41every one of those 122 people was alive in it.
39:45The island itself was not finished. Captain Sakai Oba, who had come through the 7th of July,
39:52kept about 46 men and something like 200 civilians alive in the northern hills for the next year and
39:58a half. He came down on the 1st of December, 1945, three months after Japan had surrendered,
40:05more than 15 months after Saipan was declared secure, and only because a Japanese general officer
40:11was flown to the island to give him a direct order to stop. That is how long it took to
40:17empty the caves
40:18on one small island, and it is the measure of the problem Kubo was working on. Nine months after
40:25Saipan, on Okinawa, that same problem came back at ten times the size, and the same kind of men did
40:32the
40:32same work. Japanese Americans walking up to holes in the ground and talking to the people inside.
40:39MacArthur's intelligence chief said after the war that the Nisei linguists shortened the Pacific
40:44war by two years and saved perhaps a million lives. Six thousand men, out of a population their own
40:51country had spent the first year of the war treating as a security risk. First Lieutenant Roger
40:57Pair never left Saipan, he was killed doing the least glamorous thing an infantry officer can be
41:03killed doing. Standing at the top of a cliff, supervising the hauling up of exhausted civilians,
41:09one rope at a time. The men who carried him out of that shaft were the enemy soldiers he had
41:15come
41:16there to capture. Bob Kubo went back down into other caves that summer with Lyle Nelson beside him,
41:22and then he came home. He opened a grocery store in San Jose, California. He raised a family. He sold
41:30people their bread and their milk for decades. And he did not talk much about the 26th of July, 1944.
41:38He died in 1998, at 78 years old. In 2017, his son Lawrence, then in his late 60s, began trying
41:48to find
41:49them. The descendants of the 130 people who came out of that cave. Not to be thanked, he wanted to
41:56hear their stories, because his father had never told him theirs. So go back to the top of the cliff
42:02one more time, to the second before any of it happened. A hundred feet of rope, eight rifles at the
42:09bottom, 122 people in the dark behind them who had been ordered by an authority higher than any of the
42:15men guarding them, to be treated as combatants. Every weapon in the United States arsenal within reach,
42:22and not one of them able to solve it. And one American sergeant from a plantation camp on Maui,
42:30in the uniform of a country that had taken his rifle away from him two years earlier, going over the
42:36edge with his pockets full of K-rations. He did not go down there to beat those eight men.
42:43He went down there to build them a door. And he was the only American alive who could build it
42:49out
42:49of materials they would accept. The first thing he did when he reached the bottom was give away his
42:56pistol. Thank you for staying with this one all the way to the end. If it held you, a like
43:01genuinely
43:02helps. It is what puts a story like this in front of people who would never go looking for it.
43:08Subscribe and turn on the bell if you want more about what the American soldier actually did in
43:13the Pacific, built from citations and records instead of legends. And tell me two things in
43:18the comments. First, where in the world you are watching from? Second, if your father, your grandfather,
43:25or an uncle served in the Second World War, give me his name and his unit. I read them. All
43:32of them.
43:34People should get to say those names out loud.