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Roy Matsumoto turned his Japanese language skills into a battlefield weapon on the hills of Burma, where one American used voice, dialect, and nerve to fool Japanese troops in their own language. From Wallabum to Nhpum Ga, this World War II military history story follows a Japanese American volunteer with Merrill’s Marauders as he intercepts enemy radio traffic, crawls into the dark to listen at close range, and helps reverse an attack that could have destroyed an isolated battalion.
Born near Los Angeles, raised in Hiroshima, and later imprisoned by his own government in Arkansas, Matsumoto was one of only fourteen Japanese American volunteers with the Marauders. The story blends WWII documentary narration, combat intelligence, and forgotten Asian American history, showing how a schoolyard training in Japan and a delivery route in Los Angeles became the key to deception, survival, and one of the most remarkable language operations of the war.
Created for listeners who enjoy World War II stories, military history documentaries, Japanese American history, and narrated true war stories about Merrill’s Marauders, Burma, intelligence work, and battlefield deception. It also fits search intent for WW2 stories, war history narration, and forgotten heroes of the Pacific and Burma campaigns.
Born near Los Angeles, raised in Hiroshima, and later imprisoned by his own government in Arkansas, Matsumoto was one of only fourteen Japanese American volunteers with the Marauders. The story blends WWII documentary narration, combat intelligence, and forgotten Asian American history, showing how a schoolyard training in Japan and a delivery route in Los Angeles became the key to deception, survival, and one of the most remarkable language operations of the war.
Created for listeners who enjoy World War II stories, military history documentaries, Japanese American history, and narrated true war stories about Merrill’s Marauders, Burma, intelligence work, and battlefield deception. It also fits search intent for WW2 stories, war history narration, and forgotten heroes of the Pacific and Burma campaigns.
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LearningTranscript
00:00April 6, 1944. A ridge called Nupumgah in the hills of northern Burma. It is a little after
00:08four in the morning. It is still dark under the trees. The air carries a smell that nobody on
00:15this hill will ever be able to describe to their families. For a week now, the American battalion
00:21dug in up here has been cut off. No trail out, no spring they can reach. Every bullet, every ration,
00:28every drop of water they have left came down out of the sky. A few minutes ago, a wave of
00:35Japanese
00:36infantry came up the slope screaming, straight at a line of American foxholes. The foxholes were empty.
00:43Then the grenades went off, and the guns opened up from 15 yards back, and the first wave simply
00:48stopped. Now, somewhere down the slope, a Japanese sergeant is calling out one word over and over.
00:56The second wave hears it, and the second wave begins to pull back into the jungle.
01:01On the American side, a man stands up. He is 30 years old. He weighs 125 pounds. He wears the
01:10uniform of the United States Army, with the stripes of a technician fourth grade. He is standing in the
01:17open, between two lines of men who are trying to kill each other, and he is about to open his
01:22mouth.
01:24What he shouts in the next few seconds will not be in English. It will be aimed at the enemy,
01:30and it will decide what happens to every Japanese soldier still on that slope.
01:35Hold on to that picture, because this whole story is going to earn it.
01:40The question is simple to ask and hard to answer. How does one American, in the dark,
01:46in the middle of a firefight, speak to soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army in their own language,
01:52and make them believe him? Not one frightened prisoner. Not a radio message. An attacking force
02:00of men trained since boyhood to obey a certain kind of voice. What would you have to know,
02:06and where would you have to have been, to pull that off?
02:10And there was a second question hiding inside the first one, because two years before he stood up
02:15on that ridge, this man's own government had locked him in a horse stall. His name was Roy
02:22Matsumoto, born near Los Angeles, raised in Hiroshima from the age of eight, back in California at 18,
02:30delivering groceries. When the war came, his parents were in Hiroshima, and two of his brothers would end
02:36up in the uniform of the army he was about to fight. If stories of the American soldiers who fought
02:42in Burma, and the Japanese-American volunteers who marched with them, matter to you, give this video
02:48a like and subscribe. It helps these stories reach more people.
02:53The road from that horse stall to this ridge was shorter than you might think.
02:58In 1942, Roy Matsumoto slept in a stall at the Santa Anita racetrack,
03:04then behind barbed wire at a camp in Jerome, Arkansas. That November, he volunteered for the
03:11army. Sixty years later, an interviewer asked him why, and he did not dress it up.
03:17I was so mad being incarcerated, he said, so I joined. Less than a year later, the army went to
03:24the men of its Japanese language school and asked for volunteers for what the recruiters would only
03:29call a dangerous mission. They were blunt about one thing. Casualties might run as high as 85%.
03:38About 200 Japanese-American soldiers stepped forward. Fourteen were picked. Matsumoto was one of them.
03:46On February 24th, 1944, those fourteen moved out with a force codenamed Galahad. The newspapers would
03:55call it Merrill's Marauders. About 2,750 American volunteers walking into Burma behind Japanese
04:04lines against the Japanese 18th Division, the veterans who had taken Singapore. Every man carried
04:11everything on his back. Matsumoto's pack weighed 60 pounds. That is half of what he did.
04:19Now, here is something I want you to remember. A Japanese-American soldier in Burma had two
04:25enemies. The first one was obvious. The second was the nervous trigger finger of the American behind
04:31him. On the march in, Matsumoto asked some American soldiers for a drink of water. The answer was,
04:38hell no, you Jap. Every time a man like him went outside the perimeter at night, the most dangerous
04:44part of the trip might be the walk back in. Keep that in mind. It comes back on the worst
04:50night of
04:50his life. And notice what the army had actually trained these fourteen men for. Paper. Captured
04:58documents, maps, the questioning of prisoners. Nobody had planned for one of them to stand up in a
05:04battle and talk to the Japanese army. So how did a warehouse clerk from an Arkansas camp end up on
05:09that
05:10ridge at that moment, knowing exactly what to say? It did not begin with his voice. It began with his
05:19ears. On March 5th, 1944, near a village called Wallaboom, Roy Matsumoto found a black wire running
05:28through the jungle. And the first Japanese voice he heard on it belonged to a sergeant who was about to
05:34give away the one thing he had been ordered to guard. To understand why that wire mattered, you have to
05:40see
05:40the trap the marauders were sitting in. General Joseph Stilwell's Chinese divisions were pushing south
05:46down the Hukong Valley, straight into the Japanese 18th Division. The American job was to swing wide
05:52through the jungle, come out behind the Japanese, and sit on the road they would need to get out. A
05:58cork in a
05:59bottle. And when you put a cork in a bottle full of veterans, the veterans come for the cork. After
06:05his
06:05battalion dug its perimeter, the men noticed a telephone line running through a tree. Not theirs.
06:12A Japanese field line. Still live. The Japanese-Americans in the battalion took turns listening.
06:19When it was Roy Matsumoto's watch, he took a field telephone, climbed up to a thick branch,
06:25clipped into the wire, and sat. Then he did something small that tells you exactly what kind of mind
06:32we're dealing with. He unscrewed the mouthpiece. A field telephone carries sound both ways. A cough.
06:39A breath. An American voice somewhere behind him. And it could travel straight down that wire into a
06:46Japanese ear. With the mouthpiece gone, the line could talk to him, but he could not talk back. By accident.
06:55He stayed up there for most of the day. He could not come down to eat. He wrote down what
07:00he heard
07:01on a report pad, line after line. At one point, snipers opened up on him. They missed.
07:08Most of what came down the wire was routine. Then a new voice came on. A sergeant. Pay attention to
07:16this sergeant, because he is the first real clue in our investigation. He was guarding an ammunition
07:22dump, and he was worried. He was calling his superior for advice and help, because the Americans,
07:28he said, were at such and such a point. And to explain why that frightened him, he had to say
07:34where he was. Put yourself on that line for a moment. A soldier asking for help has to describe
07:40his position. That is how help finds him. It never crossed his mind that someone else was writing it
07:47down. But there's a catch. And it's the first piece of the answer to our question.
07:53That sergeant was not speaking schoolbook Japanese.
07:57The 18th Division was raised around Kurume, on the southern island of Kyushu.
08:02Its men came from Fukuoka, from Saga, from Kumamoto, and they talked the way country people from Kyushu
08:09talk, full of local slang. Matsumoto had grown up hundreds of miles away in Hiroshima. That speech
08:16was not his. So how did he follow it? The answer is a grocery business in Los Angeles. As a
08:24young man,
08:25he was the delivery boy, carrying orders to the doors of immigrant families from all over Japan,
08:30many of them from Kyushu. Door after door, he told an interviewer. He picked up their slang and local
08:38dialect. No army school taught him that. Some of the most valuable training a United States Army
08:44linguist received in Burma came from carrying groceries in California. The sergeant's words
08:50went onto the pad regarding ammunition dump, and then the location. About a thousand meters from the river.
08:58Now, here's the detail I want you to hold onto. The marauders were carrying British-made maps of
09:04northern Burma. When they spread them out, they found that the Japanese were working from the same
09:10sheets, same grid, same squares. A Japanese sergeant's map reference fell onto an American map
09:18without any guessing at all. The coordinates went out by radio and in code to General Merrill and up
09:25towards Stilwell. Aircraft came in. P-51s. The dump the sergeant had been ordered to protect
09:33went up in the jungle he'd been trying to hide it in. Pull back and look at what that means.
09:40A division trying to break a roadblock lives on ammunition. Every crate that burns is a crate
09:46that never reaches a rifle or a mortar on the road. Within days, the 18th division gave up trying to
09:53force
09:54the American block and slipped away around it. For the veterans of Singapore, Wallaboom was a
10:00painful defeat. The marauders' losses were light. Then the general started asking questions.
10:07Stilwell wanted to know who had pulled that information out of the air. Merrill ordered
10:12someone to find out. The trail ended at a report pad with Roy Matsumoto's initials on it.
10:18Later that year, in New Delhi, Merrill would pin the Legion of Merit on him for Wallaboom.
10:24Remember that medal. Because about a month later, Matsumoto would do something far more dangerous
10:30than sitting in a tree. And for that, the army would give him nothing at all for 60 years.
10:37But notice what Wallaboom taught him about the enemy. Because it's the second clue.
10:43The sergeant had spoken freely, in his own country speech, with his own name for every place.
10:49To him, the Japanese language was a closed room. Nobody on the other side of the line
10:56was supposed to be inside it. He was wrong. And he never found out.
11:02That was the easy version. At Wallaboom, the Japanese army had spoken to Roy Matsumoto through a
11:08copper wire. And all he had to do was listen without breathing too loudly.
11:14Three weeks later, his battalion would be dug in on a ridge with no wire to tap.
11:19The only way to know what the Japanese were planning would be to crawl close enough to hear them whisper.
11:25And the man who would send him out there, Lt. Col. George McGee, was about to watch the
11:31Japanese close a ring around his battalion and cut it off from the only water on the ridge.
11:36March 28, 1944. The 2nd Battalion of Merrill's Marauders climbed onto a ridge above the village of
11:44Nupumga. They hadn't come to stay. The Japanese 18th Division, stung at Wallaboom, was moving north
11:51again. And below the ridge lay a little airstrip at a place called Samxinyang, the lifeline for the
11:57whole American force. Somebody had to sit on the trail and keep the Japanese from coming through.
12:04McGee's battalion got the job. Matsumoto summed up the order years later in one line.
12:10They were told to hold the Nupumga Hill. Notice how the rolls had flipped. At Wallaboom,
12:17the Americans were the cork in the Japanese bottle. Now the Japanese meant to put a cork on them.
12:23On March 29, the attacks began in earnest. Infantry came up the slopes in waves. Between the waves,
12:30Japanese artillery and mortars worked over the perimeter. On March 31, Japanese troops cut the
12:36trail behind the battalion, the one linked to the airstrip and the rest of the marauders. A combat
12:42team from the 3rd Battalion tried to break through and couldn't. That evening, McGee reported three men dead,
12:49nine wounded, and many mules killed. From that day, the 2nd Battalion was an island on a hilltop.
12:58Now, here is a number that will tell you what the next days were like.
13:02The only water on that ridge came from a spring below the perimeter, and Japanese machine guns
13:08covered it. The waterhole changed hands more than once. Then the Japanese kept it. Men were hit trying
13:16to lead the animals down to drink. So in the end, the mule skinners sent the mules down alone,
13:22unharnessed, and hoped they'd come back. Some of the men cut open green bamboo and sucked the water from
13:28the joints. Water started coming in by parachute, along with food and ammunition. When the drops fell
13:36outside the lines, the battalion went without, and the animals kept dying. Matsumoto remembered around a
13:42hundred of them killed by shell fire. Nobody could bury them under fire. Nobody could bury the Japanese
13:48dead in front of the foxholes either. In the April heat, the hill began to rot. The flies came. And
13:55then
13:56the maggots. The men had a name for the place within days. Maggot Hill. Try to imagine the sound of
14:04that
14:04perimeter at night. A ring of holes, a few yards apart. Men awake in turns. Every one of them listening
14:12to the jungle, and unable to see past his own rifle. Some prayed. Some went quiet in a way their
14:19friends
14:19didn't like. Matsumoto said he prayed to everything he could think of. Allah, Buddha, and Christ. And in a
14:28perimeter like that, the darkness was dangerous from both directions. Remember what I told you about the
14:34walk back in? On Maggot Hill, it stopped being a theory. A lieutenant named Lynch went out to check
14:41the perimeter. On his way back, he was shot and killed by his own men. Nobody was court-martialed.
14:48Everybody understood. In the dark, a shape coming toward your hole was the enemy until proven otherwise.
14:56Hold that thought. And add to it the face Roy Matsumoto saw every morning in his steel helmet.
15:04Meanwhile, the battalion had a problem that was worse than thirst. It was blind.
15:11Patrols could barely get out. There was no wire to tap. There was no prisoner to question.
15:17The Japanese could choose any night and any slope, and the Americans would learn which one
15:23only when the screaming started. Colonel Charles Hunter, outside the ring, was pushing the 3rd Battalion
15:30up the trail to break through. He would need days. McGee didn't know if he had days.
15:38On April 5th, the Japanese hit the part of the line held by a platoon under Lieutenant Edward McLogan,
15:44on a knob the men would come to call McLogan's Hill. Among those killed that day was a technician 5th
15:52grade from Company G, named Robert Henneberg. In the fighting, his body could not be recovered.
15:59It never has been. Today his name is carved on the walls of the missing at the Manila American Cemetery,
16:05and the Pentagon still lists him as unaccounted for. That's how close the fighting on that hill was.
16:13A man could fall a few yards from his foxhole and be beyond the reach of every friend he had.
16:20By then, by Matsumoto's count, McLogan's platoon had started the siege with about 50 men.
16:27About 27 were left. So think about that from McGee's chair.
16:32The weakest stretch of his perimeter was half a platoon. And that night, from the Japanese side
16:39of McLogan's Hill, came a noise that nobody could read. It wasn't firing. It sounded more like a crowd.
16:47Voices. Movement. Something happening out there in the dark.
16:52Was it a relief force? A withdrawal? An attack building up? If McGee guessed wrong,
16:59what was left of that platoon would be gone by sunrise, and the Japanese would be inside the perimeter.
17:06There was exactly one man on that hill who could walk up to that noise and understand it.
17:11McGee sent for Roy Matsumoto. What he asked for was simple. Go and find out what they are planning.
17:18What it required was anything but. No wire this time. No mouthpiece to unscrew. To hear Japanese
17:26soldiers talking at night, in a jungle, you had to get close enough to hear them breathe. And then,
17:32if he lived, he had to come back the way Lt. Lynch had tried to come back. Through a ring
17:38of frightened
17:38Americans who had been shooting at shadows for a week. So what do you leave behind when the smallest
17:45sound can kill you on the way out? And your own face can kill you on the way home? Roy
17:50Matsumoto went
17:51out alone. Before he crawled over the edge of the perimeter, he took off almost everything that made him
17:57an American soldier. The pistol belt came off, because metal on a belt can jingle. The canteen
18:03stayed behind. So did the helmet, and the field jacket, and the carbine. What he took was two hand
18:11grenades. Think about that choice for a second. He was crawling toward an enemy force with no rifle.
18:18Two grenades are not for fighting your way out. They're for the moment when there's no way out.
18:24Then he went down the slope, on his belly, through the mud, and the dead leaves, toward the noise.
18:32Years later, when people asked him what the hardest part was, he did not talk about the Japanese. He
18:38talked about his own body. You could not sneeze. You could not cough. Lying in the dirt, a few yards
18:46from men who would kill you in a heartbeat. Every itch in your throat becomes the most dangerous thing
18:51in Burma. He got to within about 15 yards of them. Now, here is where the story stops being about
18:58intelligence for a moment. Because the first thing Roy Matsumoto heard, lying there in the dark,
19:04was not a battle plan. It was men talking about home. Japanese soldiers, sitting in the night, talking the
19:13way soldiers in every army talk when they think nobody's listening. Their families. Their wives.
19:20Their farms. What they were going to do after the war. Countrymen from Kyushu, in the same thick
19:28country speech he'd learned carrying groceries to their cousins in Los Angeles. None of it had any military value.
19:36He lay there and listened to all of it anyway. Because he could not move until he heard what he'd
19:42come for.
19:43And ask yourself what that was like for him in particular. He had lived in Japan for nearly 10 years.
19:50His parents were in Hiroshima. Two of his brothers were in the same army as the men 15 yards away,
19:57somewhere in this war. And he didn't know where. He was listening to men who sounded like the people he
20:02had
20:02grown up with. And his job was to find out how to kill them before they killed his friends.
20:08He never said how that felt. What he said was that he kept listening.
20:14Now notice something about those voices. Because it's the next clue.
20:19These men were talking out loud. 15 yards from an American perimeter. Remember the sergeant on the telephone at
20:26the wall of him? Giving away his own position because it never crossed his mind that the other
20:30side could understand? This was the same blind spot. You keep quiet near the enemy so he won't hear you.
20:38You don't worry about him understanding you. Because what American could?
20:43Then the talk changed. An officer began to speak. And this is the moment I want you to bookmark.
20:49Because everything in this story turns on it. The voice was different.
20:54Not the loose speech of men around a fire, but the clipped, formal language of a Japanese officer
21:00briefing his troops. Matsumoto knew that voice. As a school boy in Hiroshima, military training had
21:07been compulsory in his middle school. He had stood in the ranks while instructors barked orders in exactly
21:13that form. The rhythm. The words. The way a Japanese commander turns a sentence into something
21:20a soldier obeys without thinking. He hadn't wanted that training. He hadn't volunteered for it.
21:27Now it let him understand every word. Here is what the officer said.
21:33There would be an attack. Early morning. A dawn attack. And it would come up the easiest route onto
21:41the hill. Matsumoto knew exactly where that route came out. McLogan's sector. The stretch of the
21:48perimeter held by about 27 men. Now he had what he came for. The only problem left was getting it
21:56home.
21:58He turned and started back up the slope, as slowly as he'd come down. And now we come back to
22:04the thing
22:05I asked you to remember at the very beginning. The walk back in. He was a Japanese face, without a
22:12helmet, without an American jacket, crawling toward a ring of American foxholes, in the dark.
22:18A week earlier, those same men had shot and killed their own lieutenant, coming back from checking the
22:24line. Every rifleman on that perimeter had spent the night waiting for exactly this. A figure coming out
22:31of the Japanese side of the hill. The one thing protecting him was a word passed down the line
22:36before he left. His foxhole partner, a man named Kohler, had been told not to fire on anyone coming
22:43in from that direction. Whether every man along that stretch had heard the same thing, Matsumoto had no
22:49way to know. They held their fire. He came over the lip of the perimeter just before midnight.
22:56So weigh up what he was carrying now. The time of the attack. The target. The route.
23:04That the Japanese had no idea they'd been overheard. And one more thing, which nobody else on that hill
23:11had, and which no report could pass on. He had heard how that officer gave orders. He knew the exact
23:18words a Japanese commander used to send his men forward. Hold on to that. Because in a few hours,
23:25it would become the most dangerous thing he knew. But first, there was a problem no grenade could solve.
23:32Don was about four hours away. Everything now depended on whether a battalion commander would stake what
23:39was left of his weakest platoon on the word of a sergeant who, two years earlier, had been sleeping
23:46in a horse stall as a suspected enemy of his own country. If McGee believed him, he had four hours
23:53to
23:54turn the Japanese plan inside out. If he didn't, 27 men would meet that dawn attack exactly where the
24:02Japanese expected to find them. McGee believed him. It's worth stopping on that for a moment,
24:07because it was not automatic. A lieutenant colonel, cut off for a week, out of water, with his weakest
24:14stretch of line down to half a platoon, was being told by a technician sergeant with a Japanese face
24:20exactly where and when the enemy would strike. If the report was wrong or invented or a trap,
24:28McGee would be moving his men the wrong way in the dark. He didn't hesitate. The man who had pulled
24:35the ammunition dump out of a telephone wire at Wallabum had earned that much. And then the battalion did
24:42something clever. It didn't just get ready for the attack. It turned the attack inside out. The men in
24:49McLogan's sector climbed out of the foxholes they'd been living in for days. Those holes were exactly where
24:54the Japanese officer expected them to be. He had, in all likelihood, studied them in daylight. So the Americans
25:01left them there, empty, and booby-trapped them. Matsumoto rigged the one he'd been sharing himself. Then the men
25:08moved back, about 15 to 20 yards up the slope, and in the dark, in the mud, as quietly as
25:14they could,
25:15they dug a new line. Machine gun crews came over from other parts of the perimeter. Men with Browning
25:22automatic rifles were fitted in between the riflemen. In a few hours, the weakest stretch of McGee's line
25:28became the most heavily armed. And then came the order that was hardest to follow. Don't shoot.
25:38Don't commence fire until ordered to do so. Now, picture yourself in one of those new holes.
25:46You are thirsty. You haven't really slept in a week. Somewhere down the slope, a company of Japanese
25:53infantry is getting ready to come at you, and you have been told that when they come, you are going
25:58to
25:59let them get closer than any instinct you own will allow. You are going to hold your fire until they
26:06are on top of the holes you just left. A sergeant in that battalion, Warren Ventura, later wrote down
26:14what the men were thinking in those hours. It's six words we expected to meet our god.
26:22Let's pull back for a moment and see what was really going on that night, because it's another
26:26clue to our question. The Japanese plan was a good one. A dawn attack is old, proven infantry practice.
26:34You move up in the dark, you hit at first light, when the defenders are at their most exhausted and
26:40can
26:40barely see. The Japanese 18th Division knew this kind of fight better than almost anyone.
26:46The plan did not fail because it was bad. It failed because one man had been lying in the mud
26:5215 yards
26:53away while it was explained. And notice how Walla Boom and this night mirror each other. On the telephone,
27:01a sergeant gave away his ammunition dump because he never imagined anyone on the other side could
27:06understand him. On the hillside, an officer briefed his men out loud for the same reason.
27:13The Japanese had built their whole defense of their own language on a single assumption.
27:18And on McLogan's Hill, the Americans had turned that assumption into a weapon.
27:23At about four in the morning, it came. The Japanese came up a slope yelling.
27:28Matsumoto remembered the words because, of course, he understood them. Death to the Americans. Die. Banzai.
27:36They hit the old foxholes at a run, and the foxholes were empty. For a second, picture what that moment
27:43felt like to them. You charge a position that was full of men yesterday, and there's no one there. No
27:49fire.
27:50No resistance. Just holes. Then the booby traps went off. The Americans up the slope threw grenades into
27:58the confusion. The attackers kept coming because that's what they had been trained to do, and they
28:03reached a point about 10 yards from the new line. That's when the order came to fire. The machine guns,
28:10the bars, and the rifles all opened up at once, at a distance where nobody could miss. The first wave
28:17stopped existing. And now we are back where this story began. The dark is turning gray. The slope
28:24below McLogan's new line is covered with the dead. Down in the trees, the second wave is waiting for its
28:30turn. And a Japanese sergeant, looking at what just happened, does what any sensible soldier would do.
28:38He calls them back. The word he shouted was hike. In Japanese, it means pull back,
28:46withdraw. Hike. Hike. The second wave started to move away, down the hill.
28:54Think about where that left the second battalion. Holding McLogan's hill this morning was a victory.
29:01But a company that withdraws in good order lives to come back tomorrow night, at another point, with
29:07another plan, against a battalion still short of water and still cut off. The men going down that slope
29:14would be the ones who came back. That is the moment Roy Matsumoto stood up. He climbed out of his
29:21hole
29:21into the open, with the light coming up, between the American guns and the Japanese infantry, where
29:27anyone on either side could see him. Ventura would later write that no other man in the battalion
29:32exposed himself the way Matsumoto did that morning. And now the question this whole story was built
29:38around has nowhere left to hide. A Japanese sergeant had given his men a clear order to withdraw.
29:45Why would any of them turn around because of one voice coming from the American side of the hill?
29:51What could a single man shout, in a few seconds, that would overrule their own sergeant?
29:57The answer comes in three layers. The first is the exact words he chose. And they were not the words
30:04you would guess. Roy Matsumoto filled his lungs and shouted down the slope.
30:09Totsugeki-ni! Susume! Tokkan! Tsukkome! Charge. Advance. Rush them. Drive in. That's all it was.
30:20Notice what he didn't say. He didn't shout that the Americans were running, or that reinforcements
30:26were coming, or that the hill was almost taken. He didn't explain anything. He didn't tell a lie that
30:33a frightened man might stop and think about. He gave an order. And an order doesn't need to be believed.
30:40It needs to be obeyed. That's the first layer of the answer. Matsumoto later said he used the
30:47precise form of command he knew from the Japanese army's own drill. The same words, in the same order,
30:52that a Japanese infantry officer would use to launch an assault. Not a translation, not an imitation of what
31:00an American thought a Japanese officer might sound like. The real thing. Learned as a schoolboy,
31:06standing in the ranks of a Hiroshima middle school, while instructors shouted exactly those words at him.
31:13The second layer is the voice. Remember the officer he'd listened to in the dark five or six hours
31:19earlier? Matsumoto had heard how that man spoke. And he'd heard how his men spoke in the thick country
31:26speech of Kyushu he had picked up on a delivery route in Los Angeles. He did not shout like a
31:32school teacher from Tokyo. Lying in his hole, he had decided to sound like one of their own commanders.
31:39Years later, he put it simply. When the men heard his voice in their own dialect, they charged.
31:46And the third layer is the one that makes the first two work.
31:50It's about the men on that slope, and what their army had made of them.
31:55Think about the moment they were in. Grey light. Smoke. The first wave dead in front of them.
32:02Their attack, so carefully planned, had fallen into empty holes and machine gun fire.
32:09And somewhere in that wreckage, the people who should have been giving the orders were down.
32:14When the bodies were counted later, two Japanese officers were among them.
32:18So the order to pull back had come from a sergeant. Now a voice came out of the half dark,
32:23in the formal language of an officer, telling them to attack.
32:28In the Japanese army, a sergeant's order to withdraw, and an officer's order to charge,
32:33do not weigh the same. Rank decided everything in that army, down to the way a man was spoken to.
32:39And the charge had a place close to sacred. The Japanese infantryman was trained, from his first day,
32:45that the attack was the heart of everything he did, and that an order to go forward was obeyed
32:50at once, without stopping to ask why. Matsumoto said exactly that afterward.
32:55The orders worked because Japanese soldiers were trained to obey the command to charge.
33:00So put those three layers together. The exact words. The voice of their own commanders.
33:06And an army that had spent years teaching its men that the order to attack outranks every other
33:12instinct, including the instinct to live. In those few seconds on McLogan's Hill,
33:17Roy Matsumoto did not outfight the Japanese army. He outranked it. The second wave stopped.
33:24It turned. And it came back up the hill. They came up the same slope the first wave had climbed,
33:31past the same empty foxholes, into the same booby traps, toward the same line of hidden guns.
33:38McLogan's men had been waiting for exactly this. The machine guns in the bars opened up again at close
33:44range. The second wave met the fate of the first. Grant Hirabayashi, another of the 14 Japanese
33:52American linguists with the Marauders, later tried to put into words what his friend had done.
33:57It wasn't just the language, he said. It took a lot of guts. And it took a lot of thinking
34:03on the part
34:04of Roy. Both halves of that are true. The guts was standing up in the open between two lines of
34:10fire.
34:11The thinking was knowing, in the space of a breath, which words and which voice would turn a retreat
34:17into a charge. When it was light enough to see, the Americans went down to count. Here's the number.
34:23Fifty-four Japanese dead in the immediate area of McLogan's sector. Two of them officers. One carried a fine
34:31sword, and the Americans learned his name. Second Lieutenant Minoru Tanaka. And on the American side
34:38of that line, in that fight, Matsumoto remembered no losses at all. Pause on that for a moment and set
34:46it next to the day before. On April 5th, the same sector had lost men it couldn't even bring back.
34:52On April 6th, the Japanese threw two waves at it, and the dead were all on one side.
35:00That is how one American fooled Japanese troops in their own language. Not with a trick of
35:06pronunciation. With an ear that had been trained in a Hiroshima schoolyard, on a Los Angeles delivery
35:12route, and up a tree at Wallabum. And then, with a knight spent lying fifteen yards from the men he
35:20was
35:20going to fool. But the story of that mourning doesn't end on the slope. The battalion was still
35:26cut off, still out of water, and the relief column was still fighting its way up the trail.
35:32And there was a sergeant in that battalion who had watched Roy Matsumoto stand up,
35:36and who believed the man deserved the highest honor his country could give. He wrote it down.
35:43He took it to the Colonel. And Lieutenant Colonel George McGee answered with one sentence. A sentence
35:50that kept Matsumoto's name off any citation for that mourning for the next sixty years. He was only an
35:57enlisted man doing his duty. Enlisted men do not get medals for this. That's the sentence as Sergeant
36:04Warren Ventura recorded it. When the question of a medal for Roy Matsumoto came up, that was Lieutenant
36:10Colonel McGee's answer. Ventura did not agree. In the same letter, he wrote that no other man in
36:17the battalion had exposed himself the way Matsumoto did that morning. You might expect the man himself
36:23to be bitter. He wasn't. Asked about it decades later, Matsumoto defended his old commander.
36:30McGee, he said, didn't want to cheapen the medal by giving it to everybody. And when people called him
36:36the man who saved the battalion, he brushed it aside. He was, he said, just a cog in the wheel.
36:45Remember the Legion of Merit from Wallaboom? For listening on a telephone wire, he got a
36:50decoration pinned on by a general. For standing up between two lines of fire and turning a Japanese
36:56retreat into a charge, he got a sentence. And the siege wasn't over. For three more days,
37:03the 2nd Battalion held on, still thirsty, still on airdropped rations, while Colonel Hunter's relief
37:09column fought its way up the trail, one roadblock at a time. On April 9th, 1944, Easter Sunday,
37:17a scout from the 3rd Battalion reached the perimeter. The Japanese pulled back. Matsumoto
37:24would argue for the rest of his life that the 2nd Battalion had not been rescued, that it had held
37:29on its
37:29own, and not everyone agreed with him. But nobody argued about what it cost. The most common count is
37:3757 Americans killed, and 302 wounded in the fighting around Nupumga, with hundreds more evacuated sick.
37:45On the other side, the Americans counted around 400 Japanese dead. Now pull back, because this is where
37:53the scale of the marauders' story comes into view. About 2,750 of them had walked into Burma in February.
38:01After Nupumga, roughly 1,600 were left.
38:051,310 crossed the mountains in May to seize the airfield at Mitkina. By August, around 200 were still
38:12with Hunter when the town fell. More than 80% of the force was gone, most of it to disease.
38:19In August 1944, Merrill's marauders were disbanded. Roy Matsumoto came out of Burma alive. That autumn,
38:27in New Delhi, Merrill pinned the Legion of Merit on him. Then he went on to China, interrogating Japanese
38:34prisoners and gathering intelligence. The war was still on, and his language was still a weapon.
38:40And here is where the story shows its other face, the one that sat underneath that ridge the whole time.
38:47In August 1945, Matsumoto heard the news on the radio, like everyone else. An atomic bomb had been
38:54dropped on Hiroshima. His father was a photographer. The family studio in Hiroshima stood about two blocks
39:02from where that bomb went off. When he heard the news, Roy Matsumoto assumed his parents were dead.
39:07Now go back to the title of this story for a second. Fooled Japanese troops in their own language.
39:14All this time we've been talking about the language as theirs. But think about where Matsumoto learned it.
39:21From his grandfather, in a village outside Hiroshima. In a Japanese schoolyard. From the immigrant families
39:29he delivered groceries to. The words he shouted down McLogan's Hill were the words of the people who'd
39:36raised him. And two of his brothers had spent the war in the army, on the receiving end of those
39:41words.
39:43After the surrender, Matsumoto was still in China, now working through lists of Japanese prisoners held
39:49in camps around Nanking. One day a name on a list stopped him. Harry Omoto. His second cousin.
39:59Before the war, they had shared a house in Los Angeles. Omoto had been drafted into the Japanese army.
40:05So an American sergeant went looking for a Japanese prisoner and found family.
40:11Omoto had news he could hardly have hoped for. Months before the bomb, Roy's parents had moved out of
40:17Hiroshima to the countryside. As far as Omoto knew, they were alive. And there was more. Roy's brother,
40:25Isao, was in China too, in a Japanese unit. Roy went and found him. Think about that meeting.
40:31One brother in the uniform of the United States Army, which had just won. The other in the uniform
40:38of the Japanese Army, which had just lost. Neither had known for years whether the other was alive.
40:45The other brother, who had served Japan, Roy later learned, had been sent to Guadalcanal,
40:51and survived that too. Two brothers in American uniform, two in Japanese, and all four lived through
40:58it. There was one person left he hadn't seen. Hearing from a cousin that your mother is alive
41:05is not the same as seeing it. In 1946, the army gave Matsumoto an assignment that took him to Japan.
41:13And on that trip, he took a local train toward the village outside Hiroshima, where he had grown up.
41:19A ride that ended with the engineer doing something no train schedule allowed,
41:23and with a woman who had once paid for her son's ticket to America, seeing him again in that country's
41:29uniform. In 1946, Roy Matsumoto was sent back to Japan with a duty that fit the times. He was escorting
41:3724 Japanese prisoners accused of war crimes. When the job was done, he had a short assignment in the
41:44country, and he used it to go home. He took a local train out toward the countryside, past Hiroshima.
41:51On the way, he asked to ride up front with the engineer, and somewhere along the line he explained
41:56who he was and where he was going. The engineer did something no railway timetable allowed.
42:02He stopped the train near Matsumoto's village and let the American sergeant climb down.
42:08The village was mostly standing. During the war, a stray bomb had hit a warehouse nearby and killed
42:15five people. His family's house had come through. His mother was there. She cried. She was happy,
42:23he said. That's all he ever said about it. And it's enough. Remember who this woman was.
42:29Around 15 years earlier, when her teenage son decided to leave Japan, she was the one who paid
42:36for his ticket back to California. And as he left, she told him something he never forgot.
42:42You are an American, she said. If you want to go back, go back. But you must be loyal.
42:52He had been. To the country that had put him in a horse stall at Santa Anita. To the country
42:58whose army
42:59had refused him water on the road into Burma. To a battalion that had a habit, in the dark,
43:05of shooting at anything that came in from the Japanese side. He had crawled down that slope for
43:12them anyway, and stood up in the open for them. And he'd come back to his mother's door, wearing their
43:18uniform. He stayed in that uniform for most of the next 20 years. He worked in counterintelligence
43:25and criminal investigation in occupied Japan, using the same language for a different kind of mission.
43:31He retired in 1963 as a master sergeant and eventually settled with his wife on San Juan
43:37Island in Washington state. For a long time, almost nobody knew what had happened on McLogan's Hill.
43:44The work of the Japanese-American linguists had been kept quiet during the war, and for decades after it.
43:51Recognition came slowly. On July 19, 1993, Roy Matsumoto was inducted into the Army Ranger Hall of Fame
44:00for Nupum-ga. The Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame followed. In 2011, along with the other
44:09surviving Japanese-American veterans of the war, he received the Congressional Gold Medal. And about
44:15sixty years after that dawn in Burma, the Secretary of the Army presented him with a bronze star with a
44:22V device, for valor. That's the decoration the Army had decided an enlisted man doesn't get for that kind
44:28of thing. He turned 100 in May of 2013. He died on April 21, 2014, on San Juan Island, 10
44:38days short of his
44:39101st birthday. So let's go back one last time to where we started. April 6, 1944. Nipum-ga. The gray
44:51light
44:51coming up through the trees. A man of 125 pounds standing in the open between two lines of fire,
44:59filling his lungs. Now you know everything he was carrying when he did it. A schoolboy's drill from
45:07Hiroshima. A grocery route through the homes of immigrants from Kyushu. A day in a tree at Wallabum,
45:15with the mouthpiece unscrewed. A night in the mud, fifteen yards from men talking about their wives.
45:24And a walk back through a ring of American rifles, with nothing but a word passed down the line to
45:30keep
45:30him alive. The Japanese Army fought that war, certain that its language was a locked room no American
45:38could enter. It never imagined an American who had grown up inside that room, and who had decided,
45:44behind barbed wire in Arkansas, which side of the door he would stand on. That is how one American
45:51fooled Japanese troops in their own language. And that morning, the Americans of McLogan's platoon,
45:58the men who'd expected to meet their god, climbed out of their holes alive.
46:04Sixty years later, an interviewer asked Roy Matsumoto what mattered most to him about the war.
46:10He didn't mention the medals, or the shout, or the 54 bodies on the slope. He said,
46:16I have the knowledge that we survived, and that's the most important thing for me.
46:20We. We. The men of the 2nd Battalion. He never once said, I.
46:27I. Thank you for watching this story to the end. If it meant something to you,
46:32please give it a like. That small click helps the story of Roy Matsumoto and the American soldiers who
46:38held Napumga reach people who've never heard of them. Subscribe and turn on the bell so you don't
46:44miss the next one. And tell us in the comments where you're watching from. If your father, grandfather,
46:50or uncle served in the Second World War, in Burma or anywhere else, write his name and his unit below.
46:57Every one of those names deserves to be remembered.