Japanese American Military Experience Database
Benjamin H. Hazard
Military Intelligence School, University of Michigan 12/1942 - 6/1943.
Military Intelligence School, Camp Savage, MN 7/1943 - 2/1944.
Commissioned 2nd Lieutenant 2/16/1944.
Hdqtrs, 27th Infantry Division, Schofield Barracks, JICPOA (Joint Intelligence Center Pacific Ocean Area); Garrison Force, Saipan; XXIV Corps
Recalled to active duty to Presidio of Monterey, then ATIS, GHQ, Tokyo 1/14/1948
Interrogation Team Leader, Maizuru Repatriation Center 4-6/1948
Bronze Star Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster
Philippine Liberation Medal
ROK Presidential Unit Citation
Campaigns:
Asiatic Pacific Medal with 3 Campaign Stars
East Mandates (Saipan)
Southern Philippines (Leyte)
Ryukyu (Okinawa)
Korean War: With campaign stars:
UN Defensive
UN Offensive
CCF Intervention
Kishiue and I would learn three days in advance of the gyokusai from a Japanese national employed by the Japanese navy to repaint the hulls of seaplanes at Tanapag Harbor. We kept the division informed of the planned gyokusai as prisoners came in from the 105th Infantry Regiment with preliminary interrogations by Hoichi Kubo and Jack Tanimoto. Kishue and I were a short one or two hundred yards beyond the high point of the attack that annihilated the first and second battalions of the 105th Infantry Regiment.
When the island was secured, the language detachment interrogated Japanese nationals from Okinawa about the terrain and beaches of Okinawa. The team made statistical studies of Japanese civilian attitudes and opinions, broken down by sex, age and occupation of the impact of the fall of Saipan, effectiveness of bombing and naval gunfire in the defeat of the Japanese, as well as their opinion on the retention or removal of the Japanese Emperor, attitudes toward the Japanese army and US forces.
The submarine, USS Pampanito, a part of US Navy 'wolf pack' attacked a Japanese convoy and unknowingly torpedoed ships which carried English and Australian POW's being transported to Japan to be used as laborers.
On 9/15/1944, the USS Pampanito picked up 159 British and Australian survivors. Almost two thousand English and Australian POW's perished in the attack. It was not unitl I read the newspaper account of the decommissioning of the USS Pampanito on 9/9/1994, that I realized that I was a member of the debriefing team of the Intelligence Section of Garrison Force, Saipan, who interrogated the survivors. They were soldiers and regretted the death of their comrades, but they were glad to be on their way home. Since the convoy was unmarked, they said, 'it was the fortunes of war.'
When the Division was sent to Espiritu Santo in September and early October the team amd I were relieved and attached to Garrison Force Saipan. There had been 24,000 civilians on Saipan working for the South Seas Development Company. Most were Okinawan indentured laborers working on the sugar cane plantations. Only 10,000 survived the fighting and were collected at Camp Susupe. The team interrogated them on the Ryukus with special attention to fishermen on the beach conditions of Okinawa. I was ordered to Leyte to take over the XXIV Corps teams. I left Saipan on a C47 on New Year's Eve and landed at Tacloban the morning of New Year's Day, January 1945. I spent two weeks with the Sixth Army Language detachment learning ATIS procedures. The major military operations were over by the time I joined XXIV Corps. Prisoners were still being taken. It was clear that we would be destined for Okinawa. Prisoners from Okinawa were given intensive interrogation. Okinawa could not be discussed on the phone and all information pertaining to Okinawa was hand carried to the G-2 section.
Prior to XXIV Corps' departure from Leyte for Okinawa, the detachments were augmented by Lt. Joseph Bothwell, three other officers and three Okinawan dialect speaking enlisted men. The order put me in command of the 306th and Bothwell in command of the 307th. I was in overall command of both detachments as senior by date of rank.
The teams landed in two echelons on D+2(D Day 1 April 1945). XXIV Corps with the III Amphibious Corps (Marines) composed the newly formed Tenth Army (under General Simon Bolivar Buckner). XXIV Corps HQ first set up its headquarters in defilade to the enemy to the south, but open to the sea where the landing force ships sat. That evening at chow time a carrier based F4F fighter stupidly buzzed the beach and all the Kamikaze happy ships offshore opened up and shot it down. Anti-aircraft shells of every caliber were bursting over Corps Headquarters. Hiroshi Itow, a Japnese university graduate and our top man in reading shosho(running cursive script), who would read for the edification of the rest of the two teams in the wee small hours of the morning after the work day from captured handwritten erotica, which he would verbally annotate. Hiroshi with several men from the photo interpreter team and the Order of Battle Section jumped into a trench evacuated by the Japanese as a five-inch shell exploded over them. The photo interpreter master sergeant was killed and several others were wounded. Hiroshi Itow came away without a scratch. Corps HQ lost two killed and twenty-four wounded from friendly fire that evening. Only two men of Corps HQ were subsequently lost to enemy fire. When its forward divisions advanced several miles to the sourth, Corps HQ moved into Nakagusuku Castle where it remained until moved to Seoul when the war ended.
Lt. General Ushijima Mitsuru had relieved the Commanding General of the 32nd Army in August 1944 and brought in as his chief of staff, Lt. G. Cho Isamu, a firebrand in the rape of Nanking. He replaced the staff with young officers from the Imperial General HQ, but the most importnat was his chief of operations, Col. Yahara Horimichi, later Major General. He was, I believe, by branch an Engineer. He was the architect of the defense of the south end of the island. Digging in deeply all artillery pieces and heavy mortars, making the Americans pay dearly for every foot of gound they gained.
On the evening of 18 April 1945, a Japanese artillery forward observers's chart arrived from one of the division's at the Corps language center. The chart had the location of artillery and heavy mortar positions for the Naha-|Shuri-Yonabaru Line. During 4/18/1945 Japanese artillery fire had been light. The chart's importance was quickly recognized and all pertinent personnel were mobilized. Through the night Lloyd Shinsato, Tom Higashiyama and Saburo Okamura, the draftsmen, transposed the Japanese army map symbols to those of US Army on the US ARmy map grid. Meanwhile others translated marginal data, with Hiroshi Itow handling the hadwritten notes on the chart. The overlay was ready to be superimposed on US Army maps of Okinawa at 0500 (5:00AM) 19 April 1945. It was hand carried to the Assistant G-2, who commented, 'Too bad, we are jumping off in two hours.' He did not see fit to expedite the overlay, but routed it routinely to Lt. General John R. Hodge, Commanding General of XXIV Corps. It reached the general at 1700 (5:00PM). In spite of artillery barrage of 190,000 artillery shells, the Japanese line held and the corps suffered heavy casualties. General Hodge was furious, noting the time the tranlated overlay had been logged as being received by the G-2 section. He stated that if it had been delivered in the two hour time frame before the attack, he would have ordered the attack to be halted and replanned the assault. The overlay eventually came in to its own; the general did replan an attack using the overlay and a few days later the Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru Line was breached.
As the weeks ground on, General Ushijima's Chief of Staff, Cho, urged on by the young officers filled withYamato damashi(the Japanese military spirit), persuaded General Ushijima to launch a counter-offensive and mass their artillery over the strong objections of Col. Yahara, whose artillery had inflicted such heavy casualties on 10th Army from dug in positions that protected them from counter battery fire. A last major offensive was launched involving a frontal assault, a double envelopment by small boats on both flanks and parachute assaults on Kadena airfield. I happened to be night duty officer, and every phone was ringing off the hook. I got the CQ to bring the senior Intelligence officers back to G-2 tent and they took over. To mass their artillery fire the Japanese had brought pieces out into the sugar cane fields and camouflaged them. The attack failed for lack of coordination and failure to know where the 10th Army flanks were anchored on the beaches. They landed in front of our line, rather than behind as planned.
On 9/2/1945, I flew from Okinawa on a B-25 bomber to Kimp'o, Korea, with the advance party as the interpreter to begin the initial discussion with Japanese forces south of the 38th parallel, and to arrange for the United Kingdom and American prisoners of the POW camps to be moved to Inch'on for their return to their respective countries.
An ironic aspect of moving the HQ to Seoul, but one that gave great satisfaction to the two teams, was that they were billeted on one floor of the Bando Hotel and their office was on another. They then had full TO&E equipment dumped on them. The war was over. Each team had four jeeps, a 1-1/2 ton truck, a 1-ton trailer, a squad tent, camouflage netting, gas alarm and field telephones. Each officer and enlisted team chief had his own jeep. As they looked back on Leyte and Okinawa when all transportation had to be begged from Corps HQ Company, the situation seemed to have been a great War Department joke.
The occupation of Korea introduced me to Korean history and culture. There our work was directed toward the Russians north of the 38th parallel and the proliferation of Korean political parties. Among my many duties was to be one of the instructors to the first class of the Officer Candidate School of the Korean Constabulary in the winter of 1945-1946. The Constabulary would later be the nucleus of the ROK Army. I found that the best students were those who had been officers in the Japanese army. I left Korea for two months tour in Japan to find my 'noexistent family.'
Elementary School: Worcester, MA and Denver, CO.
Middle School: Los Angeles, CA. Graduated from Central Junior High School, 6/20/1934.
High School: Worcester, West Boyleston, MA and Los Angeles, CA. Graduated from Belmont High School, LA, CA 6/25/1937.
University: UCLA. Major: Chemistry 9/1937-12/1942. Break due to illness during the academic year 1940-1941.
Studied the Japanese Language for two years with Miss Kikuye Okamura in adult public education (night school). In 1940, UCLA saw the possibility of war with Japan and began a course in Japanese language with a kibei young lady. She was evacuated about the same time as Miss Okamura. She was replaced by a Korean national, Chang-hei Lee. I ended up as his reader, he had a little difficulty with Japanese consonants.
My interest in the Japanese language began with my friendship with Frank Inouye at Central Junior High School through to UCLA where my circle of Nisei friends included George Chuman, his brother Frank is better known to older generation Nisei, and Akira Hasegawa with whom I had a number of friendly discussions on what would be the outcome of the war. I saw Frank Inouye off from Anta Anita Race Track for Heart Mountain.
Sometime in November 1942, Major Gould and Major Archibald Stuart from the War Department interviewed the students of the Japanese language class at UCLA. I was among those invited to volunteer for the Military Intelligence School (Japanese) of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, which I did on 15 December 1942, two weeks short of graduation.
Education resumed September 1946 at UC Berkeley. Major: Oriental Languages. Courses included Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin) and Korean; History of Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia. Bachelor of Arts Degree granted 6/19/1947 in Oriental Languages. Began graduate work in 1952 at UC Berkeley. Master of Arts in Asian History 1958, Doctor of Philosophy in Asian History June 1967.
9/1/1948-1/3/1949: Editor of chapters of General MacArthur's Luzon and Mindanao Campaigns, Japanese Volumes, Historical Section, GHQ
1/4/1949-8/4/1950: Chief Development Section, Central Interrogation Center; Edited translations and prepared summaries of translations.
8/5/1950-11/17/1950: Interrogation Officer: Before Advanced Allied Tanslator and Interrogator Service (ADVATIS)was activated, five officers and thirteen enlisted men from ATIS in Tokyo were attached to the G-2 Section of 8th Army in Taegu. In addition to my other duties I was detailed as a liaison officer to the ROK Army, G-2 Section. I discovered that the G-2 and G-3 of the ROK Army had been my students when I was an instructor of the first OCS class of Korean Constabulary in the winter of 1945-1946. They both exclaimed when we met, 'You are still a 1st Lt!' They were both full colonels and they told me that the lowest ranking member of the class was a Lt. Col and several were generals. All the officers and enlisted men of the Taegu group were later decorated on returning to Japan. ADVATIS TDY Korea; 10/19/1950-10/26/1950: Led document recovery team (ROK officers, SGt. Moses Lee to search Wonsan and Hamhung for documents in cooperation with ROK I Corps.
11/18/1950-10/18/1951: Editor, Interrogation Reports, Central Interrogation Center, ATIS, Tokyo.
TDY 9/25/1957-10/8/1951, visited all IPW teams in 8th Army to determine training requirements for replacements.
10/19/1951-11/4/1951: Chief, Industrial Card File Section, Central Interrogation Section, ATIS, Tokyo.
11/5/1951-6/1952: Instructor of Combat Intelligence and Translation of North Korean Military Documents, Far East Command, Intelligence School.
7/15/1952: Relieved from active duty, Camp Stoneman, CA.
10/25/1979:Retired from inactive reserve.
