- 2 days ago
Japanese soldiers who were captured in the Pacific War became some of the most useful prisoners the Americans ever questioned, and the reason starts with a doctor, an ice cream bribe, and one carefully chosen word. From Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima, the story follows how men who had been taught that surrender meant disgrace ended up drawing maps, naming units, and even returning to caves to call out their own comrades.
The narration traces the shift from brutal battlefield resistance to intelligence work, showing how U.S. Marines, Army linguists, and Nisei translators built a system that turned prisoners into sources. It also explains why Japanese POWs responded differently from German prisoners, and how “stop resisting” replaced “surrender” in American leaflets to make capture more acceptable within Japanese military culture.
At the center are real wartime scenes: Taizo Sakai on Iwo Jima, Bob Kubo on Saipan, interrogations on Guadalcanal, and the larger campaign that led to Okinawa. This is military history, World War II documentary narration, and Pacific Theater storytelling for listeners who enjoy forgotten war stories, POW history, and intelligence operations.
Created for viewers searching for WW2 stories, Pacific War history, Japanese POWs, Marine Corps history, military intelligence, and narrated World War II documentary content. Also a strong fit for history listening, long-form war stories, and anyone interested in how language, honor, and battlefield psychology changed the course of the war.
The narration traces the shift from brutal battlefield resistance to intelligence work, showing how U.S. Marines, Army linguists, and Nisei translators built a system that turned prisoners into sources. It also explains why Japanese POWs responded differently from German prisoners, and how “stop resisting” replaced “surrender” in American leaflets to make capture more acceptable within Japanese military culture.
At the center are real wartime scenes: Taizo Sakai on Iwo Jima, Bob Kubo on Saipan, interrogations on Guadalcanal, and the larger campaign that led to Okinawa. This is military history, World War II documentary narration, and Pacific Theater storytelling for listeners who enjoy forgotten war stories, POW history, and intelligence operations.
Created for viewers searching for WW2 stories, Pacific War history, Japanese POWs, Marine Corps history, military intelligence, and narrated World War II documentary content. Also a strong fit for history listening, long-form war stories, and anyone interested in how language, honor, and battlefield psychology changed the course of the war.
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LearningTranscript
00:00March 17, 1945, 5 o'clock in the morning on the northern end of Iwo Jima, where the black volcanic
00:07sand still held the heat of the previous day's shelling.
00:10A platoon leader named Candy Johnson was working his way through a half-destroyed concrete casement when he found something
00:17that fit nowhere in his training.
00:19A Japanese soldier was crouched down among stacked ammunition boxes, wearing nothing but a jockstrap and a pair of field
00:26boots.
00:27His hands were on his head. In one of them, he held a surrender leaflet, the kind American aircraft had
00:34been scattering over the island for weeks.
00:36And he held it the way a man holds a ticket he is afraid of losing.
00:41Johnson didn't speak a word of Japanese. He got on the field telephone to his company commander and asked a
00:47question that tells you almost everything about the Pacific War in the spring of 1945.
00:52He asked whether they were taking prisoners.
00:56And while he was asking it, a rifle bullet punched through the front of his helmet, traveled around the inside
01:02of the steel, and dropped out the back.
01:05Johnson wasn't hurt. He was yelling into the telephone about the hole in his helmet.
01:10And the man in front of him didn't move, didn't run, didn't reach for anything.
01:16I want you to hold on to that moment, because everything in this story turns on what happened in the
01:22next ten seconds.
01:24Johnson had every reason to shoot.
01:27Marines on those islands had seen men walk out with their hands up and a grenade under one arm.
01:32Nobody would have written a single line in a report if that Japanese soldier had died right there among the
01:38ammunition boxes.
01:40Johnson found him a set of Marine dungarees instead, and walked him to the rear.
01:45The company commander was a captain named Fiorenzo Lopardo, who had studied languages at Notre Dame.
01:52He tried German.
01:54Nothing.
01:55He tried Italian.
01:57Then Spanish.
01:58Nothing.
02:00And then the prisoner asked him, in careful schoolroom French, whether the captain happened to speak French.
02:07Lopardo did.
02:09So the two of them climbed down into a foxhole in the black ash, and the captain began taking notes
02:15in French, on the back of his field order from March 7th.
02:19And the prisoner began to talk.
02:21His name was Taizo Sakai.
02:24He was the man who handled the coded traffic between General Koribayashi's headquarters and Tokyo.
02:31That was around 5.30 in the morning.
02:34By mid-morning, that same man was standing at the mouth of a cave on Iwo Jima.
02:39Calling in Japanese to the soldiers inside, telling them to come out.
02:44Before we go further, if you value the story of the Americans who built this system, told with the hard
02:50details left in,
02:51take a second to hit like and subscribe.
02:54It helps this history reach the people who care about it.
02:58Now stop and look at what just happened, because it is one of the strangest things in the entire Pacific
03:03War.
03:04This was not a man broken by weeks of pressure in a cage somewhere.
03:09This was a soldier of an army that had spent three years teaching the world it did not surrender.
03:15He had been an enemy combatant at five in the morning.
03:18He was working for the United States Marine Corps before lunch.
03:21Nobody threatened him.
03:24Nobody beat him.
03:25In the interrogation report that eventually followed him up the chain,
03:29an American officer summed him up in a phrase that reads almost like a shrug.
03:33Above average intelligence.
03:35Fully cooperative.
03:37And Sakai was no freak case.
03:39He was part of a pattern American intelligence officers had been quietly documenting since Guadalcanal.
03:45And that pattern is very hard to square with what everyone thought they knew about the Japanese soldier.
03:52Because look at the arithmetic of the same war.
03:55On Attu, in the Aleutians, in May of 1943,
03:59the Japanese garrison lost 2,351 men killed or dead by their own hand.
04:0628 were taken alive.
04:09Not 28 percent.
04:1128 men.
04:13On Tarawa, that November, roughly 4,600 Japanese defenders died
04:19on an island the size of a small airport.
04:22And 17 of them ended the battle breathing.
04:26Hold those numbers, because we're going to come back to them.
04:29And when we do, they're going to mean something different than they mean right now.
04:33That is an army that does not surrender.
04:36That is, by any measure,
04:38the most suicidally committed fighting force any American had ever faced.
04:43And yet the men from that same army,
04:46the handful who did end up in American hands,
04:49turned out to be, in the flat language of the intelligence summaries,
04:52the easiest prisoners in the war to question.
04:55Not the hardest.
04:57The easiest.
04:59They drew maps.
05:00They named units.
05:02They identified their own commander's headquarters.
05:05Some of them, like Sakai,
05:07walked back toward the caves with an American officer
05:10and talked to their own comrades through the rock.
05:13So the question this whole story is built on is not why they broke.
05:18Breaking is something you can understand.
05:20The question is why they helped.
05:22And the first answer to that question isn't Japanese at all.
05:25It's American.
05:27Because in December of 1942,
05:29a captain in army intelligence came off Guadalcanal
05:32and wrote a report about what was happening to Japanese prisoners
05:36on the trail between the front line and the rear.
05:38It was blunt enough to embarrass everyone above him.
05:42And the two fixes he demanded were so strange
05:45that when you hear them,
05:46you will not believe they came out of a wartime intelligence directive.
05:50December, 1942.
05:53Guadalcanal.
05:54The fighting for Henderson Field had been going on for four months.
05:58And in the American rear areas,
06:00there was a problem nobody in Washington had thought to plan for.
06:03The prisoners weren't arriving.
06:06Not that there were many to begin with,
06:08but of the Japanese soldiers taken alive at the front,
06:11a strange number never reached the stockade.
06:14They died on the trail.
06:16The reports said things like,
06:19shot while attempting escape,
06:20and they were filed,
06:21and nobody asked a second question.
06:24Because in that first year of the Pacific War,
06:26nobody wanted to.
06:28The man who did ask was a captain named John Burden.
06:32Before the war,
06:33he had been a plantation doctor in Hawaii,
06:35treating Japanese laborers in their own language for years.
06:38Which is why he was one of the first Americans in uniform
06:41who could sit down with an enemy soldier
06:43and simply talk to him.
06:45He came off Guadalcanal and wrote a report on what was happening to prisoners
06:49between the front line and the rear.
06:51And he wrote it in language blunt enough to make his own officers look bad in print.
06:57Here's what I want you to notice, though.
07:00Burden wasn't making a moral argument.
07:03He was making an intelligence argument.
07:06Every man killed on that trail was a map that never got drawn,
07:10a unit designation that never got confirmed,
07:13an American life somewhere down the line that didn't get saved.
07:18And the fix he pushed through was not a regulation,
07:21and it was not a threat of court-martial.
07:23It was a bribe.
07:25Any soldier who brought a live Japanese prisoner into the rear
07:29got a three-day pass.
07:32And ice cream.
07:34Sit with that for a second.
07:36The United States Army,
07:37on an island where men were dying of malaria faster than of bullets,
07:42decided the way to get the enemy delivered alive
07:45was to trade him for 72 hours of rest and a dish of ice cream.
07:51And it worked.
07:53That unglamorous, practical thinking
07:55is one reason the Americans kept getting better at this war,
07:58while their enemy kept doing the same thing harder.
08:01But Burden had a bigger obstacle than the men on the trail,
08:04and this one wore stars.
08:07When he recommended the Japanese-American linguists
08:10be brought forward to the fighting units,
08:12General Alexander Patch turned him down.
08:15Patch's position was not complicated.
08:18He wasn't interested in taking prisoners.
08:20He preferred them dead.
08:22And Patch was not some outlier crank.
08:25He was expressing what most American officers
08:27and almost every rifleman on Guadalcanal already believed.
08:31And they believed it for reasons written in the blood of their friends.
08:35Because they had watched Japanese soldiers use the white flag as a weapon.
08:41So Burden did it sideways.
08:43He found a Nisei linguist named Masanori Minamoto,
08:46who was driving a jeep in Tonga, of all places,
08:49and two more in Fiji,
08:51and he got them transferred into the Solomons.
08:54And then the reports started coming in.
08:57Not summaries written a week later in Australia.
09:01Translations of enemy documents delivered while the information was still worth something,
09:06and interrogations done within hours of capture.
09:10Patch read them.
09:12And Patch changed his mind.
09:14Which is a harder thing for a general to do than most people understand.
09:18He not only allowed the Nisei forward,
09:21he began recommending them to other commanders.
09:25Now watch what those linguists were actually doing in the tents.
09:28Because this is where the whole thing starts to get strange.
09:32The senior practitioner of the art was a marine major named Sherwood Moran,
09:36of the 1st Marine Division.
09:38He was 57 years old.
09:40He had spent decades in Japan before the war,
09:43and he was on Guadalcanal in the first wave.
09:46A Japanese prisoner would be brought in,
09:49filthy, half-starved from weeks in the jungle,
09:52absolutely certain that he was about to be tortured and then killed,
09:56because that was what he had been told Americans did,
09:58and it was also, more or less, what his own army did.
10:03He would be put in front of Moran,
10:05and Moran would ask him what village he came from.
10:08Then Moran would tell him about the river near that village,
10:11the bridge, the temple,
10:14because he had been there.
10:16He knew the place.
10:18Something happened in those tents that the Americans did not fully expect.
10:22The man would start telling his story.
10:25Not military information first.
10:27His story.
10:29Where he was from.
10:30Who was waiting for him.
10:32How he had ended up on this island.
10:35And the military information came out of that,
10:38in the flow of it.
10:39Sometimes without the prisoner ever seeming to notice he was giving it.
10:43In July of 1943,
10:45Moran wrote down how he did it and sent it up the chain.
10:49That document is still taught inside the American military today,
10:53more than 80 years later.
10:55So there's your first answer,
10:57and it's the one most people stop at.
10:59The Americans were decent to them,
11:01and decency worked.
11:03Except,
11:04that answer collapses the moment you test it.
11:07American interrogators were decent to German prisoners, too.
11:10German prisoners gave them name, rank, and serial number,
11:13and then shut their mouths,
11:15exactly as they had been trained to.
11:17The Japanese, in hours,
11:20gave up their order of battle.
11:21Same interrogators.
11:23Same decency.
11:25Completely different result.
11:28Which means the real explanation
11:30isn't in the American tent at all.
11:32It's in the pack of every Japanese soldier
11:35who walked into it.
11:36Because there was a small book in there,
11:38issued to the entire Imperial Army
11:41on the 8th of January 1941,
11:44and one line in it
11:45had already decided
11:46what would happen to that man
11:48long before an American
11:49ever laid eyes on him.
11:51The book was small enough
11:52to carry in a pocket.
11:52It went out to the Imperial Army
11:55on the 8th of January 1941
11:57under the name of the War Minister
11:59Hideki Tojo,
12:01and every soldier who shipped out
12:03to the Pacific carried one.
12:05It covered a great many things.
12:08Bearing.
12:09Discipline.
12:10Duty to the Emperor.
12:11But the line that mattered,
12:13the line that would end up
12:15shaping the deaths
12:16of hundreds of thousands of men,
12:18was one short instruction.
12:21Never live to experience
12:23the shame of being a prisoner.
12:25Most people hear that
12:27and think it means
12:28Japanese soldiers were brave
12:29or fanatical
12:31or willing to die.
12:32That's the surface.
12:34And the surface
12:35is the least interesting part.
12:38Here is what it actually meant.
12:40And it took the Americans
12:41nearly two years to work it out.
12:43If capture is impossible,
12:45then you do not need
12:47to prepare a man for it.
12:48Think about what an army normally does.
12:52An American soldier was told
12:53what to expect if he was taken
12:55and what he was required to give.
12:57Name, rank, serial number.
13:01Nothing else.
13:02He knew he had rights
13:03under the Geneva Convention.
13:05He knew he was still a soldier,
13:07still on the roster,
13:08still expected home.
13:10Captivity was a defined situation
13:12with rules,
13:13and a man who knew the rules
13:15could hold a line inside them.
13:17The Japanese soldier
13:18was given nothing.
13:20Not because his army was careless,
13:22but because his army had declared
13:24the situation could not occur.
13:26No lecture,
13:28no page in the book,
13:29no drill.
13:30Nobody had ever told him
13:32he was permitted
13:32to say only his name.
13:34He didn't know
13:35the Geneva Convention existed.
13:37So picture what that looks like
13:39from the American side of the table.
13:41A Nisei sergeant
13:43sits down in a tent
13:44with a man
13:45who was pulled out of a cave
13:46three hours ago.
13:47The sergeant expects resistance,
13:49because that's what
13:51an interrogator trains for.
13:53He asks which unit
13:54the man belongs to,
13:56and the man tells him,
13:57not defiantly,
13:59not as a trick.
14:01He answers,
14:02the way you answer a question
14:04when nobody has ever
14:05told you not to.
14:07The sergeant asks
14:09where the regiment's
14:10headquarters is.
14:11The man tells him that, too.
14:13Then he starts drawing it,
14:15because a drawing
14:16is clearer than words,
14:18and being unclear
14:19would be rude.
14:21The Americans
14:22in those tents understood,
14:23slowly and then all at once,
14:25that they were not fighting
14:27through a wall
14:27of trained resistance.
14:29There was no wall.
14:31Japan had built
14:32the most fanatical infantry
14:34on earth,
14:35and,
14:35in the same stroke,
14:37the most defenseless prisoners
14:39in the war.
14:40The order that made
14:42a Japanese soldier
14:43nearly impossible to capture
14:44made him,
14:45once captured,
14:47an open book.
14:48But we're still not
14:49at the bottom of this,
14:51because everything
14:52I've just described
14:53explains why a man
14:54answers questions.
14:56It does not come close
14:57to explaining
14:58why a man walks back
14:59to a cave
15:00full of his own comrades
15:02and calls them out.
15:04For that,
15:05you have to understand
15:06what the same line
15:08in that little book
15:09had already done
15:10to him back home.
15:12When a Japanese soldier
15:13went missing in action,
15:14his family was not told
15:16he was missing.
15:17He was reported dead.
15:18A box was sent to them,
15:20sometimes containing ashes,
15:22sometimes containing
15:23nothing at all
15:24but a slip of paper
15:25with his name.
15:26There was a funeral.
15:28Neighbors came.
15:29His name was entered
15:30where the dead go,
15:31and the war moved on.
15:33The man himself
15:35might be sitting
15:35in an American stockade
15:37on Guadalcanal,
15:38eating better
15:39than he had eaten
15:40in a year,
15:40with a bandaged leg
15:41and no fever
15:42for the first time
15:43in weeks.
15:45Alive.
15:46Erased.
15:48American officers
15:49went through
15:49the Red Cross procedures
15:51with these men,
15:52the same procedures
15:52they used for Germans
15:54and Italians.
15:55They asked each prisoner
15:56where he wished
15:57to be sent
15:58after the war ended.
15:59Almost none of them
16:00said Japan.
16:02Read that again.
16:04Men who had been ready
16:05to die for their country
16:07weeks earlier
16:07would not put down
16:09the name of their country.
16:11Some asked to be sent
16:12to Africa,
16:13which was simply
16:14the furthest
16:14and most unreachable place
16:16they could picture.
16:17Roughly half of them
16:19gave false names.
16:20Many refused to allow
16:22any message
16:22to be sent home at all,
16:23because a message
16:24would mean their families
16:25learning they were alive,
16:27and their families
16:28learning that
16:28would be worse
16:29than the funeral.
16:31And there's Taizo Sakai
16:33on Iwo Jima
16:34before they took him
16:35back to regiment.
16:37He handed Captain Lopardo
16:38the photographs
16:39he was carrying
16:40of his wife,
16:41of himself
16:42with his family,
16:43and told him
16:44to keep them.
16:45He said it very simply.
16:47He could never go back.
16:49He was officially dead.
16:51Hold that phrase.
16:53Officially dead.
16:54It's going to come back
16:56at the end of this story.
16:57And when it does,
16:58it's going to mean
16:59something you can't see yet.
17:01So we now have a man
17:03who has been erased
17:03by his own nation,
17:05sitting in front
17:05of the only human beings
17:07on earth
17:07who still treat him
17:08as a person who exists.
17:10That's a powerful thing.
17:12It explains a great deal.
17:14It still doesn't explain
17:15the cave.
17:16Because talking in a tent
17:18is one thing.
17:19Walking up to a hole
17:20in the rock on Saipan,
17:22where eight of your own soldiers
17:23are sitting with rifles
17:25and grenades
17:25and more than
17:26a hundred civilians,
17:27and going in there alone
17:29is something else entirely.
17:32On the 26th of July, 1944,
17:35an American did exactly that.
17:37And what he said
17:38inside that cave
17:39to make it work
17:40was not an argument,
17:42and it was not a promise.
17:44It was one sentence
17:45from Japanese history,
17:47and it took their weapons
17:48out of their hands
17:49without a shot.
17:50The 26th of July, 1944,
17:53the northern tip of Saipan,
17:5517 days after the island
17:57was declared secure,
17:58which on Saipan
17:59meant almost nothing at all.
18:01An infantry company
18:02of the 165th Infantry
18:04had a problem
18:05in the rock below them.
18:07Down the face of a cliff,
18:08roughly a hundred feet,
18:09there was a cave.
18:10Inside it were
18:11eight Japanese soldiers
18:13with rifles.
18:14Also inside it
18:15were more than a hundred
18:16Japanese and Okinawan civilians,
18:18men, women, children,
18:20and the soldiers
18:21were not letting them out.
18:23Everyone on that cliff
18:24knew how this normally ended.
18:26They had watched it
18:27for weeks on Saipan.
18:29Civilians went off the cliffs
18:30at the north end of the island
18:32in family groups.
18:33Soldiers pulled the pins
18:34on grenades in crowded caves.
18:37The man who went down the rope
18:38was a technician 4th grade
18:40named Bob Kubo
18:41from Lahaina on Maui.
18:43He was 25.
18:45He had been drafted
18:46in June of 1941,
18:48six months before Pearl Harbor.
18:50And after the attack,
18:52the army had pulled
18:53the Hawaii Nisei
18:54out of their units,
18:55shipped them to Wisconsin,
18:56and spent a while
18:58deciding what to do
18:59with men whose loyalty
19:00it was not sure about.
19:03He carried a loaded .45
19:04stuck in the back of his belt,
19:06under his shirt,
19:07where they wouldn't see it.
19:09Then he walked
19:10into the cave alone.
19:13Think about the arithmetic
19:14in that cave.
19:15Eight armed men.
19:17Better than a hundred hostages.
19:20One American,
19:21with a pistol
19:22he could not have reached in time,
19:24and could not have used
19:25if he had.
19:26Nothing about that
19:28is survivable by force.
19:30Kubo knew it.
19:32The soldiers looked at him
19:33and saw something
19:34they had no category for.
19:36A Japanese face
19:38in an American uniform.
19:40They had a pot of rice going.
19:42They invited him
19:43to sit down
19:44and eat with them.
19:45He sat.
19:47He shared out
19:47his K-rations.
19:49And they asked him
19:50the question
19:51that was going to decide
19:52whether anyone
19:53came out of that cave alive.
19:55They asked how he could
19:57possibly be fighting
19:58against Japan.
20:00Kubo told them
20:01about his grandfathers.
20:02Both had served
20:03in the Imperial Japanese Army
20:05in the war against Russia,
20:06in the 5th Division
20:08out of Hiroshima,
20:09and the 6th
20:10out of Kumamoto.
20:12He was not a stranger
20:13to what these men believed.
20:15He came from it.
20:17And then he gave them
20:18a sentence
20:18out of Japanese history.
20:20One they all knew.
20:21Centuries old.
20:23If I am filial,
20:25I cannot serve the emperor.
20:27If I serve the emperor,
20:29I cannot be filial.
20:32Sit with what
20:33that sentence does.
20:35It doesn't say
20:36Japan is wrong.
20:37It doesn't say
20:38America is right.
20:39It says a man
20:40can be caught
20:41between two loyalties
20:42that cannot
20:43both be honored.
20:45And that choosing
20:46one of them
20:46is not a betrayal
20:48of the other.
20:49It is the tragedy
20:50of being a man
20:51with duties.
20:53Kubo was born
20:54in America.
20:56America was the land
20:57he owed.
20:58He was not
20:59their traitor.
21:00He was,
21:01by their own logic,
21:03an honorable man
21:04on the wrong side
21:06of a wall.
21:07They understood him
21:08at once.
21:10For two hours
21:11he stayed down there
21:12and talked.
21:13He told them
21:14what the situation was,
21:16plainly,
21:16without threats.
21:17And he made an argument
21:19about honor,
21:20which was the only currency
21:21in that cave
21:21that had any value.
21:23The battle was over,
21:24and killing non-combatants
21:26after the fighting
21:27had ended
21:27would not honor Japan.
21:29It would stain her.
21:31At two in the afternoon,
21:33the first of the civilians
21:34came up over the ledge.
21:36There were 122 of them.
21:39Then the eight soldiers
21:40came out
21:41and surrendered.
21:42In January of 1945,
21:45Bob Kubo received
21:46the Distinguished Service Cross.
21:48It remains the highest
21:50decoration awarded
21:51to any Japanese-American soldier
21:53in the Pacific War.
21:55Now,
21:56I've told you that story
21:57because of what it proves.
21:58And the proof
21:59is the piece
22:00most accounts
22:01of the Pacific War
22:02leave out entirely.
22:04Those eight men
22:05were not persuaded
22:06that they should lose.
22:08They were not bribed,
22:09frightened,
22:10or tricked.
22:12What Kubo did
22:13was hand them
22:13a way to stop
22:14that did not require
22:15them to become
22:16dishonorable men.
22:17In the moment
22:18such a route existed,
22:19they took it.
22:21Within two hours.
22:23The thing standing
22:24between the Japanese soldier
22:25and surrender
22:26was never really courage.
22:28It was that his entire culture
22:30and his army
22:31had left him
22:31exactly one exit.
22:33And that exit
22:34was death.
22:36Give him a second exit
22:37that his own values
22:38could accept,
22:39and the wall
22:40that had cost the Marines
22:414,600 dead defenders
22:43on Tarawa
22:44turned out to be a door.
22:47Bring back the main question now,
22:49because this is the hinge
22:50of the whole story.
22:52We asked why
22:53captured Japanese soldiers
22:54went to work
22:55for the Americans
22:55who took them.
22:57Kubo just showed you
22:58the shape of the answer.
22:59These men were not looking
23:01for a way
23:01to betray Japan.
23:03They were looking
23:04for a way
23:04to serve something
23:05without disgrace.
23:06And when their nation
23:08erased them,
23:09that need
23:10did not switch off.
23:11It went looking
23:12for somewhere else
23:13to land.
23:14The American war machine
23:16over the following 12 months
23:18learned to build
23:20exactly that landing place,
23:22deliberately,
23:23on an industrial scale,
23:25with printing presses
23:26and loudspeakers
23:27and aircraft.
23:28And the first thing
23:29it ran into
23:30was a problem
23:31so small
23:32it sounds absurd.
23:34American aircraft
23:35were dropping
23:36millions of leaflets
23:37across the Pacific,
23:38telling Japanese soldiers
23:39to surrender.
23:40And almost nobody
23:42was picking them up.
23:43The leaflets
23:44were accurate.
23:45The Japanese
23:46was correct.
23:47The promises in them
23:48were real
23:48and were being kept.
23:50The problem
23:51was a single word.
23:53And the man
23:54who worked out
23:55how to replace it
23:56changed the last year
23:58of the Pacific War
23:59more than most generals did.
24:01The word was
24:01surrender.
24:03In English,
24:04it's a military term.
24:05A unit surrenders,
24:07a garrison surrenders,
24:09and everyone goes home
24:10when the war ends.
24:12In Japanese,
24:13for a soldier
24:14holding that little book
24:15in his pack,
24:16the word did not
24:17describe an action.
24:18It described
24:19what you became.
24:20It was the end of you
24:22as a man with a name,
24:23a family,
24:25a place among the living.
24:27So the American leaflets
24:29were asking Japanese soldiers,
24:30in clear and courteous Japanese,
24:33to do the one thing
24:34their entire world
24:36had defined as impossible.
24:38Millions of sheets of paper
24:40went out of the bomb bays,
24:41and the men in the caves
24:43read them,
24:44understood every word,
24:45and stayed where they were.
24:48There was a second problem,
24:49and it was physical.
24:51A man who was seen
24:52picking one up
24:53was in danger
24:54from his own side.
24:56Officers searched packs.
24:58To be caught
24:59with an American leaflet
25:00was to be caught
25:01planning your own disgrace.
25:03The fix came out
25:05of the American
25:05psychological warfare shop,
25:07working with the translators
25:09of the Allied Translator
25:10and Interpreter Section.
25:12The outfit stood up
25:13under General MacArthur
25:14in Brisbane
25:15in September of 1942,
25:17run by a colonel
25:18named Sidney Mashbeer,
25:20who called his own operation
25:21a production line
25:23for brain power.
25:25And the fix
25:26was four words.
25:28Instead of asking
25:29a man to surrender,
25:30the new leaflet said,
25:31in Japanese,
25:33I cease resistance.
25:36Slow down here,
25:38because on the surface
25:38this looks like nothing.
25:40A man walks out
25:41with his hands up
25:42either way.
25:43He ends up
25:44in the same stockade
25:45either way.
25:46The Americans get
25:47exactly the same thing.
25:50But he is not
25:51doing the same thing.
25:53Surrender
25:53is something you become.
25:56Ceasing resistance
25:57is something you do.
25:59A man can lower
26:01his rifle,
26:01walk out of a cave
26:03with a piece of paper
26:03in his hand,
26:04and tell himself,
26:06truthfully,
26:06by his own code,
26:08that he never surrendered.
26:10He stopped fighting.
26:11He was taken.
26:13There is a hair-thin difference
26:16between those two things.
26:17And it was,
26:18for tens of thousands of men,
26:20the entire difference
26:21between living and dying.
26:24The rest of the leaflet
26:25was rebuilt
26:26on the same principle,
26:27and it is some of the most
26:28careful writing
26:29anyone did in that war.
26:31There were no insults
26:33to the Japanese soldier in it.
26:34His courage was acknowledged,
26:36and acknowledged sincerely,
26:38because the men
26:39writing the text
26:40had been fighting him
26:41and knew exactly
26:42what he was.
26:43The blame went to the leadership
26:45that had spent his life
26:46for nothing.
26:47Then it made
26:48a historical argument,
26:50and this is the detail
26:51that tells you
26:51how deep
26:52the American research went.
26:54It reminded him
26:55that after the war
26:56against Russia,
26:57more than 2,000
26:59Japanese soldiers
26:59had come home
27:00from Russian captivity,
27:02and that some of those men
27:03held respected positions
27:04in Japan
27:05to this day.
27:06In other words,
27:08your country
27:09has not always
27:10thought this way.
27:11This rule
27:12you are about to die for
27:13is younger
27:14than your father.
27:16Some versions
27:17carried photographs
27:17of Japanese prisoners
27:19eating,
27:20being treated by doctors,
27:21alive and unharmed.
27:23The faces in those photographs
27:25were deliberately obscured.
27:27Not to hide anything
27:28from the American side,
27:30but to protect the men
27:31in them
27:32from being identified
27:33back home.
27:34The Americans were,
27:36in effect,
27:36protecting the honor
27:38of enemy soldiers
27:38in their own propaganda.
27:41Look at the scale
27:42this machinery reached.
27:44That section in Brisbane
27:46began with 25 officers
27:48and 10 enlisted men.
27:50By 1945,
27:51it employed
27:52close to 4,000 people.
27:55Over the course of the war,
27:57it interrogated
27:57more than 14,000 prisoners,
28:00worked through
28:01roughly 2 million
28:02captured documents,
28:03and put out
28:04over 20 million pages
28:06of intelligence
28:07on the Japanese armed forces.
28:0920 million pages.
28:12Stack that on a desk,
28:14and you would need
28:14a building.
28:15And most of the Americans
28:17doing that work
28:18were Nisei.
28:19Nearly 6,000 of them
28:21passed through
28:22the Army Language School
28:23at Camp Savage
28:24in Fort Snelling.
28:26Recruiters signed up
28:27a number of them
28:28inside the camps,
28:29where the United States
28:30government was holding
28:31their mothers and fathers
28:32behind wire.
28:33Those men learned
28:34the enemy's military
28:35vocabulary in the morning,
28:37and wrote letters
28:38to relatives in internment
28:39in the evening,
28:40and then went to the Pacific
28:42and saved American lives
28:43with a language
28:44most Americans thought
28:45made them suspect.
28:4817 of the linguists
28:49in that organization
28:50were killed doing it.
28:53Now go back to where
28:54this story started,
28:55and look at that first scene again
28:57with everything you now know.
28:59Five in the morning
29:00on Iwo Jima,
29:01a Japanese master sergeant,
29:03the man who handled
29:04General Kuribayashi's
29:06coded traffic,
29:07crouched among ammunition boxes
29:09with nothing on
29:10but a jockstrap and boots.
29:12And in his hand,
29:14held like a ticket
29:15he was afraid of losing,
29:16a piece of American paper.
29:19He hadn't picked up a leaflet
29:21asking him to surrender.
29:23He had picked up
29:24the redesigned one.
29:25He was holding,
29:26in that hand,
29:27the permission
29:28that his own army
29:29had spent his whole life
29:30denying him.
29:31And he had stripped
29:33nearly naked
29:33so that the Marines
29:34who found him
29:35could see at a glance
29:36that he carried
29:37no weapon
29:38and no grenade.
29:40Every part of that scene
29:42was engineered.
29:43The wording in his hand,
29:44the promise behind it,
29:46the fact that the lieutenant
29:47who found him
29:48asked a question
29:49instead of firing.
29:50None of it was luck.
29:52But paper only gets a man
29:54out of the rock.
29:55What happened next
29:57went considerably further
29:58than anything
29:58the Americans had planned for.
30:01Because within months,
30:02the prisoners themselves
30:03were writing the leaflets.
30:05They were standing
30:06at the mouths of caves
30:07with megaphones,
30:08calling to men
30:09who had been
30:10in their own platoons
30:11a week before.
30:13And on one island
30:14in the spring of 1945,
30:16that would produce
30:17a number nobody
30:18in the Pacific
30:18had ever seen before.
30:20Go back to the foxhole
30:21in the black ash
30:22on Iwo Jima.
30:24Because we left
30:25that scene early.
30:26It's still the 17th of March,
30:281945.
30:30Still dark.
30:31Captain Lopardo
30:32is writing French
30:33on the back
30:34of an old field order.
30:35And Master Sergeant
30:36Taizo Sakai
30:37is telling him things
30:39that will end up
30:39in front of Admiral Nimitz.
30:41Lopardo pulled out a map
30:43and asked about
30:44the islands to the north.
30:45Sakai put his finger
30:47on Okinawa.
30:47If the Americans
30:49landed there,
30:50he said,
30:51they would be expected.
30:52The Japanese staff
30:54were rarely surprised
30:55by American landings,
30:56because American strategy
30:58followed a logic
30:59you could read
30:59off a map.
31:00He dismissed Formosa
31:02because of how close
31:03it sat to the Chinese mainland,
31:05the same conclusion
31:06American planners
31:07had reached.
31:08The invasion of Okinawa
31:10was two weeks away.
31:12Sit with the position
31:13Lopardo was in.
31:15Still dark.
31:17A rifle company commander
31:18in the middle of a battle,
31:19and an enemy sergeant
31:21has just told him
31:22where the next
31:22American invasion is going
31:23and that the Japanese
31:25are waiting for it.
31:26He could not have known
31:27the timetable.
31:28He knew what he had.
31:30But the thing Sakai did next
31:32is the part of this story
31:33I keep coming back to.
31:35There were still
31:36Japanese soldiers
31:37in the caves
31:37under that end of the island.
31:39Sakai offered
31:40to help find them.
31:41He would call to them himself
31:43and tell them to come out.
31:45And then he warned Lopardo
31:47what would happen.
31:48Some of them,
31:49he said,
31:50would not come out.
31:51They would charge,
31:53shouting for the emperor.
31:55Lopardo's answer
31:56was as flat as a shovel.
31:58Tell them if they do that,
31:59we will kill them.
32:01So they went out
32:02to the first cave
32:03in the dark.
32:04The marines set up
32:05a machine gun
32:05and waited.
32:07Sakai called into the rock
32:08in Japanese,
32:09and the men inside
32:11came out the way
32:11he said they would.
32:12At a run,
32:13shouting,
32:14straight into the gun.
32:16Sakai turned his back
32:18while it happened.
32:19When it was over,
32:20he said one thing
32:21about the men
32:22who had just died,
32:23and it was two words.
32:25They're fanatics.
32:27They repeated that
32:29at cave after cave
32:30until mid-morning.
32:32I've given you
32:33a lot of explanation
32:33over the last half hour.
32:35This is the moment
32:36it stops being explanation
32:38and becomes a man
32:39standing on volcanic sand
32:41with his back turned.
32:43Six hours earlier,
32:45those were his own soldiers.
32:47He had shared their rations,
32:49their code books,
32:50their war.
32:51Now he stood
32:52with his back turned
32:53while Americans
32:54shot them down,
32:55and the word he had
32:57for them
32:57was fanatics.
32:59That is not cowardice.
33:01Look at it carefully.
33:03That is a man
33:04who has already been
33:05through the door
33:06and out the other side.
33:08His army declared him dead
33:09the moment he was taken.
33:11His family will hold a funeral.
33:14The country he served
33:15has closed
33:16over the space
33:17where he was.
33:18What is left in front of him
33:20is a captain
33:21who protected him,
33:22put him in a foxhole,
33:24told a radio man
33:25to make sure
33:25he didn't get hurt,
33:26and talked to him
33:27in French,
33:28like a human being,
33:30for two hours
33:31in the dark.
33:33And here is the answer
33:34this whole story
33:35has been building toward.
33:37Ask what a man
33:38like Sakai
33:39thought he was doing
33:40when he called
33:40into that cave.
33:42He was not
33:43betraying Japan.
33:45In his own mind,
33:46he was doing
33:46the only thing left
33:48that could still
33:48be called service.
33:50Getting Japanese soldiers
33:51out of a hole alive,
33:53in a war that was over,
33:55for a country
33:56that had already
33:57thrown them away.
33:59That is why they worked
34:00for the Americans
34:01who took them.
34:02Not gratitude.
34:03Not fear.
34:05Not conversion.
34:06Their own nation
34:07had cancelled
34:08their existence.
34:09And the men
34:10who had captured them
34:11were the only people
34:12on earth
34:13still treating them
34:14as living beings
34:15with something useful to do.
34:18When Japan erased them,
34:20the need to serve something
34:21didn't die with the record.
34:23It attached itself
34:25to whatever was
34:25in front of them.
34:27And what was in front of them
34:28was the United States military.
34:31Sakai was gone up the chain
34:33by the end of that morning.
34:35Regimental interrogators
34:36took one look
34:36at what he knew
34:37and pushed him higher.
34:38The man was too valuable
34:40to hold at their level.
34:42He went to Nimitz's headquarters,
34:44and then to Washington,
34:45and then to Virginia,
34:46for weeks of questioning.
34:48He filled in the picture
34:49of Japanese code work,
34:51of what Tokyo had
34:52and had not read
34:53of American operational orders.
34:55His information helped confirm
34:57which Japanese units
34:58were waiting on Okinawa.
35:00He gave them the mood, too,
35:02which no captured document
35:03ever does.
35:04He described his own code units
35:06smashing their expensive equipment
35:08as the end came,
35:09cheerful about it,
35:10because they had been given
35:11a cheap war,
35:12cheap food,
35:14cheap clothing,
35:14and it felt like justice
35:16to destroy something valuable
35:17at last.
35:19And he told them
35:20about a message.
35:21On the 15th of February,
35:24Kuribayashi had signaled Tokyo
35:25that the entire American fleet
35:27was sitting off Iwo Jima,
35:28and now was the moment
35:30for the Japanese Navy
35:31to come and destroy it.
35:33Tokyo answered
35:34that on the 1st of April,
35:35the fleet would set forth
35:37gloriously.
35:39Sakai knew what that answer
35:40was worth.
35:41So did the Americans,
35:43reading his interrogation.
35:45The Imperial fleet
35:46was mostly a memory by then,
35:48and the 1st of April
35:49was two weeks
35:50after the men on Iwo Jima
35:51had run out of time.
35:53And on Iwo,
35:55in those same weeks,
35:56something was happening
35:57in the tunnels
35:58under the island
35:59that no one
36:00on the American side
36:01had thought possible.
36:03An entire Japanese unit,
36:05underground,
36:06doing something
36:07that their army's code
36:08did not merely forbid,
36:10but had never even imagined
36:12a Japanese soldier could do.
36:14Iwo Jima had been
36:15declared secure,
36:16which, on that island,
36:17meant the same thing
36:18it had meant on Saipan.
36:20There were still hundreds
36:21of Japanese soldiers
36:22living underneath it,
36:23in a network of tunnels
36:25that ran 14 miles
36:26through the rock.
36:28The job of clearing them
36:29fell to the 147th Infantry Regiment,
36:32known on the island
36:33as the Cavemen,
36:34who spent their war
36:36going down holes
36:37with flashlights.
36:38One of their officers,
36:40a lieutenant named Kolb,
36:42found a hole
36:42with a great many men in it.
36:45About 100 feet down
36:46was a Japanese field hospital
36:48of the 2nd Mixed Brigade,
36:4972 men,
36:51including the wounded.
36:53Kolb sent for his Nisei interpreter,
36:55Sergeant Tanaka,
36:56and Tanaka talked down
36:58into the rock
36:58to the officer in charge,
37:00a major named Inoaka,
37:02a senior medical officer.
37:04What Tanaka told him
37:06was not a threat
37:06and not a promise.
37:08It was an accurate description
37:10of the choice.
37:11They could come up,
37:12or they could be burned
37:14and buried where they were.
37:16And then Major Inoaka
37:17did something that no line
37:19in the Japanese Army's code
37:21accounted for,
37:22because his army
37:23had never conceived
37:24that the question
37:25could be asked at all.
37:27He put it to a vote.
37:3072 men,
37:31100 feet underground,
37:33on an island
37:34where their commander
37:34had already died
37:36and their nation
37:37had already written them off,
37:38voted on whether to live.
37:41The count was 69 to 3
37:43in favor of coming up.
37:46One of the three,
37:47a corporal named Kojima,
37:49killed himself immediately.
37:51The rest were helped
37:52to the surface.
37:54That was the largest
37:56single group of prisoners
37:57taken on Iwo Jima.
37:59And I want you to notice
38:01what it means,
38:02because it is not a story
38:04about Japanese weakness.
38:06Those 69 men
38:07had held out underground
38:08in the dark
38:09against the United States Marine Corps
38:11and the United States Army.
38:14They were not broken.
38:16They were given,
38:17for the first time in their lives,
38:19a decision.
38:20And given a decision,
38:21an army of the most
38:23suicidally committed soldiers
38:24on earth
38:25voted,
38:26by more than 20 to 1,
38:27for the door
38:28the Americans had built.
38:31There were roughly
38:3250 Nisei linguists
38:33on Iwo Jima.
38:34They went cave to cave
38:35with a flashlight
38:36and a white flag,
38:38talking into holes
38:39in the rock.
38:40Between them,
38:41they talked about
38:421,200 men out.
38:44Then came Okinawa.
38:45And Okinawa
38:46is where all of this arrives.
38:49Remember the numbers
38:50I asked you to hold
38:50in the first few minutes.
38:52Atu,
38:53May 1943,
38:552,351 Japanese dead,
38:5928 taken alive.
39:02Tarawa,
39:03that November,
39:04roughly 4,600 dead,
39:0717 alive.
39:08Here is Okinawa.
39:10By the 27th of June,
39:121945,
39:14Admiral Nimitz
39:15announced the count
39:16of Japanese prisoners
39:17taken on the island.
39:199,948.
39:22More than 9,000 of them
39:23came in during the final days.
39:26300 surrendered
39:27to the 6th Marine Division
39:29in the last 24 hours
39:30of organized resistance alone.
39:33American patrols reported
39:34men walking toward them
39:35out of the ruins,
39:36holding up the leaflets,
39:38hands empty.
39:39Put the two ends
39:40of this war side by side.
39:42In late 1944,
39:45American forces
39:45in the Pacific
39:46were taking roughly
39:47one Japanese prisoner
39:48for every hundred
39:49Japanese dead.
39:51By the middle of 1945,
39:53it was closer
39:54to one in seven.
39:56Nothing about the Japanese soldier
39:58had changed.
39:59The same training,
40:00the same book in the pack,
40:02the same officers,
40:03the same emperor.
40:05What changed
40:06was that the Americans
40:07had built a road out,
40:08and then staffed it
40:10with the men
40:10who had already walked it.
40:12Because on Okinawa,
40:14the loudspeakers
40:14were not being worked
40:15by Americans.
40:17In June of 1945,
40:19a Marine Reserve
40:20lieutenant colonel
40:21named George Clark
40:22took a dozen or so
40:24volunteers ashore
40:25in the Karama Islands
40:26to talk a garrison
40:27of about 200 Japanese
40:29out of the jungle.
40:31The men speaking
40:32into those loudspeakers,
40:33telling that garrison
40:34that the fighting
40:35was finished
40:35and that there was
40:36no purpose left in dying,
40:38were Japanese prisoners
40:39of war.
40:41Think about what
40:42those men were doing,
40:43not fighting,
40:45not informing,
40:46standing in the open,
40:48in daylight,
40:49in front of their own
40:50countrymen's rifles,
40:51arguing for their lives.
40:54And then,
40:55in August,
40:56the machinery reached
40:57the top of the war.
40:58A young American
41:00naval language officer
41:01named Paul Bowler
41:02sat down in a Quonset hut
41:04with a group of Japanese
41:05prisoners to produce
41:06a leaflet.
41:07and the leaflet
41:09was about a weapon
41:09that had gone off
41:10over Hiroshima
41:11on the 6th of August.
41:14The prisoners worked
41:15on the text
41:15steadily and calmly.
41:18They wrote a warning
41:19to the Japanese people
41:20about the thing
41:21they called
41:21Genshi Bakudan,
41:23the atomic bomb.
41:25Bowler,
41:26uneasy about what
41:27the world had just entered,
41:28said something to them
41:29about how bad
41:30this new weapon was.
41:32And the prisoners
41:33answered with a question.
41:34They asked
41:35whether it was
41:36actually real.
41:38Read that again.
41:40They had spent
41:41hours
41:41carefully writing
41:43a warning
41:43about a weapon
41:44they did not
41:45believe existed,
41:46because Americans
41:48had asked them to,
41:48and because,
41:50if it was true,
41:51it would save
41:52their people.
41:54Three days after
41:55Hiroshima,
41:56the second bomb
41:57fell on Nagasaki.
41:59Those leaflets
42:00and the men
42:00who wrote them
42:01belong to the same
42:02system that began
42:03with one army doctor
42:05on Guadalcanal
42:05arguing that prisoners
42:07were worth
42:07more alive than dead.
42:09A system whose
42:10first working currency
42:11was a three-day pass
42:13and a dish of ice cream.
42:15Which leaves one question,
42:17and it's the one
42:18that has been sitting
42:18quietly under
42:19this entire story.
42:21These men
42:22were officially dead.
42:24The war ended.
42:25So what happens
42:27to a man who has
42:27already had his funeral,
42:29when the war
42:30he was erased by
42:31is finally over,
42:33and there is
42:33nothing left to do
42:35but go home
42:36to a country
42:36that buried him?
42:38Most of them
42:38went home.
42:39That is the part
42:40almost nobody expects.
42:42The repatriation
42:43ships ran late.
42:45Some men
42:46were not returned
42:46until 1946,
42:48and many of them
42:49stood at the rail
42:49coming into
42:50Japanese harbors
42:51genuinely believing
42:52they were sailing
42:53toward disgrace,
42:54prison,
42:55or worse.
42:56They had rehearsed
42:57their shame
42:58for years.
43:00And then the families
43:01came down to meet them.
43:02The funerals
43:03had been held.
43:04The names had been
43:06entered among the dead.
43:07It made no difference.
43:09Mothers who had been
43:10handed a box
43:11with nothing in it
43:12took their sons back.
43:14And the great majority
43:15of these men
43:16slipped back
43:17into ordinary
43:17Japanese life,
43:18married,
43:19worked,
43:20raised children,
43:21and said almost nothing
43:22about where they had been.
43:24The country
43:25that had erased them
43:26on paper
43:26did not,
43:27in the end,
43:28erase them
43:29in the kitchen.
43:30The Americans
43:31went home too.
43:34John Burden,
43:35the plantation doctor
43:36who refused
43:37to let prisoners die
43:38on the trail
43:38out of Guadalcanal,
43:40went to the language
43:41school at Camp Savage
43:42at the end of 1943
43:43to teach interrogation
43:45to the men
43:45coming behind him.
43:47And from there
43:48to China,
43:50Sherwood Moran,
43:51the 57-year-old
43:52Marine major
43:53who began
43:53every conversation
43:54by asking a man
43:55what village
43:56he came from,
43:57was awarded
43:58a bronze star
43:59and pulled back
44:00to Washington,
44:01where he rewrote
44:02the interrogation manual.
44:04Until then,
44:05it had required
44:06that every prisoner
44:07be questioned
44:08standing at attention
44:09between two guards.
44:11Moran's short paper
44:12on how to talk
44:13to a frightened man
44:14is still taught
44:15inside the American
44:16military today.
44:18Bob Kubo,
44:19who climbed down
44:20a hundred feet of cliff
44:21on Saipan
44:22with a pistol
44:23he never drew,
44:24was discharged in 1945.
44:27He sold canned goods
44:28in Hawaii for a while.
44:30In 1955,
44:32he moved to San Jose,
44:33California,
44:34and he and his brothers
44:35opened a grocery store
44:37called the Aloha Supermarket,
44:39and he ran it
44:40until 1980.
44:42Fiorenzo Lopardo,
44:43the captain
44:44who climbed into a foxhole
44:45in the black ash
44:46and spoke French
44:47with an enemy sergeant
44:49for two hours,
44:50went to Harvard Law School
44:51and became a superior court judge
44:53in California.
44:55And Taizo Sakai vanished.
44:58When the war ended,
45:00he was released,
45:00and after that,
45:01there is nothing.
45:03No address,
45:04no record,
45:05no trace.
45:07Retired Major General
45:08Fred Haynes,
45:09who had been a young captain
45:10in that fight,
45:11spent 25 years
45:13looking for him.
45:14They worked through
45:15the American embassy
45:16in Tokyo.
45:17They approached
45:18the handful of surviving Japanese
45:19from Iwo Jima.
45:21Nothing ever came back.
45:23The likeliest explanation
45:25is the simplest one,
45:27and Sakai had told Lopardo
45:28exactly what it would be
45:30on the morning they met.
45:31He was officially dead.
45:34And a dead man
45:35who wants to stay dead
45:36changes his name.
45:39But he left something behind.
45:42Go back to that morning
45:43one last time.
45:45Five o'clock,
45:46the 17th of March,
45:471945.
45:49Black sand still warm
45:51from the shelling.
45:52A lieutenant
45:53with a bullet hole
45:54through his helmet,
45:55and a man
45:56with nothing on but boots
45:57holding a piece of paper.
46:00Before they took him
46:01back to regiment,
46:02Sakai handed Lopardo
46:03the photographs
46:04he had carried
46:04through the battle.
46:05His wife,
46:07himself with his family.
46:09He said the Americans
46:10would take them
46:11from him anyway,
46:12so the captain
46:12should keep them.
46:14On the back of one,
46:15he had written
46:16two words in French.
46:18Be wise.
46:20On the back of another,
46:22four words
46:23about his own pain.
46:25Lopardo kept
46:26those photographs
46:27for the next 59 years.
46:30He became a judge,
46:31raised a family,
46:32and never stopped
46:33trying to find the man
46:35in order to give them back.
46:37He told his son
46:38that he had loved him.
46:40When Lopardo died
46:41in 2004,
46:43his son took over
46:44the search,
46:44and he has not
46:45found him either.
46:47So here is the answer,
46:49as simply as it can be put.
46:51Japan told these men
46:53that the moment
46:54they were captured,
46:55they had stopped existing.
46:57The Americans
46:57who captured them
46:58treated them
46:59from the first hour
47:00as though they still did.
47:03Every man
47:04who drew a map
47:04or talked into a cave
47:06or wrote a warning
47:07about a bomb
47:08he did not believe in
47:09was doing the only thing
47:11a man in that position
47:13could still do,
47:15serving the only people left
47:16who counted him
47:17among the living.
47:19The Japanese army
47:21thought it had made
47:21surrender impossible.
47:22What it actually did
47:24was make every prisoner
47:26it produced
47:26a man with nothing
47:27left to be loyal to.
47:29And then it sent him
47:31to the one army
47:32in the world
47:32that had figured out
47:33what to do with him.
47:36Thank you for staying
47:37with this one to the end.
47:38If it gave you something
47:39you hadn't heard before,
47:40hit the like button.
47:41It helps this story
47:43reach other people
47:43who care about this history.
47:45And that matters more
47:46than you'd think
47:46for a video this long.
47:49Subscribe and turn on the bell
47:50if you'd like more of these,
47:52told with the documents
47:53and the names left in.
47:54And tell me in the comments
47:56where you're watching from.
47:57If someone in your family
47:58served in the Second World War,
48:00in the Pacific,
48:01in Europe,
48:02at sea,
48:03or in the factories at home,
48:05put their name down there.
48:07This history stays alive
48:09because families keep it.
48:10And I read
48:11every one of those comments.