Jackson B. Wiley
[b. 4 / 15 / 21]
[002]
“Today is October 8th, 2007. I am Grace Moh and I am interviewing Mr. Jackson Wiley at 7200 North College Avenue. Mr. Wiley is former teacher of Mrs. Farlow, my orchestra teacher. Mr. Wiley is 86 years old and was born on April 15th, 1921. Mr. Wiley served in World War Two and he was in the Naval Intelligence and held the Lieutenant Junior Grade rank.
GM: So, we’ll start with, since you were a Japanese interpreter, when and why did you choose to learn Japanese?
JW: Well, after the 1941, December bombing of Pearl Harbor, when I was a senior at Yale University, the school started a double course in Japanese for the second semester and I was interested in it partly because I knew the person who was teaching it, who was an Italian who taught Chinese at Yale. He urged me to take the course because it was an experimental course, since he didn’t really, even, really wasn’t a Japanese linguist per se. He spoke a little Japanese but he mainly spoke Chinese, but he was running a course in which he relied on a number of young ladies who were divinity students at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He relied on them to come to the class, and first conduct conversation sessions with one young lady and a couple of students, and then we held class generally and, if questions came up as to why one said this and one didn’t say that, he answered the questions by posing various phrases in English to these young ladies who were Japanese natives but spoke good English. They would explain what you said in Japanese. I could add that at the time there were no Japanese language text books available, so this was kind of an experimental way to learn the language. And the course was worth two other, worth two other courses—the time of two courses, and so I dropped two courses which I wasn’t doing too well in anyway [chuckles]. Since it was for the Navy’s sake, they gave me credit for the courses anyway.
[059]
So then I graduated and they during—during the semester that spring, the Navy—the representative of the United States Navy showed up and offered anybody who passed the course to enter the Navy as a Japanese language student. So I accepted and—‘cause I knew that otherwise I would be drafted anyway, and in June I headed—the course was to be held in the University of California at Berkeley, California, near San Francisco. So I took a bus to Chicago where I met a couple of friends from Yale who were also going to join the same—the same outfit. They had received a telegram in Chicago saying that because the Japanese— that anyway, the substance of the telegram was that the school had been moved to the University of Colorado. The reason for that was that because most of the teachers in the school were Japanese, and the Japanese, had been, at that point, moved from the West Coast. So the teachers and their
families moved to the University of Colorado, and I started studying there and was there for a year we had nothing but Japanese classes, conversation classes, and all that kind of thing, and we were classed as Yeoman 2nd Class, which is sort of like, a clerk’s rank. And we didn’t have uniforms on—somebody had told the Navy that Japanese was so difficult to learn that you had to leave people alone and not bother them at all, so we had no—no military doings, no uniforms, no exercises, no nothing, and just lived like college students, that’s all. I met a lot of good friends there, that I still know. After a year, they graduated the class and everybody got orders, as to where to go. They were sent to various places: some were sent to Washington, D.C., mostly where they worked on codes, some were sent to the Hawaiian Islands where the Central Pacific command was, and they also worked on codes, mostly, some of them were sent in action.
[110]
I was sent to Australia, to the city of Brisbane—Brisbane Australia to a place called Allied Translator Interpreter Service, A-T-I-S, ATIS. That was a center for translating, and interpreting Japanese for the Southwest, no—Southeast Pacific Navy Command, which was under General MacArthur, whose headquarters was at Brisbane at the time. The translator interpreter location had in it people from all over. It had a lot of people, who were born in Japan, English—Englishmen or English army people who were born in Japan; anybody who spoke Japanese. And we were new people who had studied Japanese; there were also former—former Russian officers who spoke Japanese, and Dutch, officers. So it was a conglomeration, there were a lot of trans—it was a section that did mostly translating from Japanese manuscripts that were captured and then there was a section for interrogating prisoners.
[133]
And just really by a fluke, I was assigned to the interrogating—interrogating prisoners, which was a smaller unit because there weren’t very many prisoners at the time. I was there for a year and I interrogated army prisoners who were captured in—at the time the war was going on in the eastern part of New Guinea Island, which is north of Australia and there were Japanese army prisoners, and they were brought to a holding place at this little town called Indero Pilly, and we’d interrogate them. We incidentally never interrogated officers, because they really didn’t know very much. Most—we found out that most officers are—they had found out that most officers were only concerned with themselves and their position, and their immediate actions, and also were usually educated and knew that, that they shouldn’t talk, but they enlisted people who were—they had not been told that they couldn’t talk to you, or tell anything. The reason they were—hadn’t been told that was because they were told they should not become prisoners, that it would be better to just commit suicide then become a prisoner, because if they became a prisoner, then they were no longer Japanese, and they were—not be—they would not be allowed to go back to—to Japan, and they were—they were traitor to their emperor, and that was the end. So mostly, it was—there were few prisoners and consequently, they didn’t know, you know, they all talk about torture, but we just interrogated them, I just talked to them like I talk to you that’s all. We���d offer them a cigarette to smoke, and just be friendly. And I knew their language, pretty well by that time—in the school, we learn reading, writing and speaking, I didn’t—I learned it all, but after I got…into the business then I really began to—began to speak more comfortably, and at any rate I knew the vocabulary that they were using in the army and the navy. So you would speak to people on their level and just be friendly and solicitous and then right up a report on what they had to tell you, which usually was not very interesting, and since they were located in some little, little unit in, a fight in the jungle, which was by that time over, it really made no difference at all—
[182]
GM: What kind of stuff would they say, really?
JW: —but we did it anyway. Pardon?
GM: What kind of stuff did they say?
JW: Well, they ‘d tell you what unit they were in, and what their name was, and then where they had come from, and what was going on in the fight that they’d had and when they got captured, or, whether they had to retreat, or whether they’d succeeded in beating the Americans—just things like that. The names of any units that they knew of, so you could identify whatever units of the Japanese army were there, and things like that; all little details. So what the ATIS, A-T-I-S, did, was to—to send units up to New Guinea to the battle they’d send a couple of—a team, of two interpreters, uh, and they would have a thir—three month duty at the war—in the fight, in the war zone. And then they’d come back and work at the—at Brisbane, and I wasn’t sent up until I had been there a year, working, so at the end of, about a year, I was sent to—well, it wasn’t quite a year but I was sent to New Guinea and I was assigned to the Army. At that point, the Navy didn’t have any prisoners to question anyway so they didn’t send any of us to any naval ships because they didn’t—there had been a few battles, you know, on the ocean, but, uh, they hadn’t captured any prisoners, so I—I was sent like everybody else—assigned to an Army unit.
[210]
I was assigned to 1st Corps, we called it “I Corps”, but I was assigned to their headquarters which was then, just, waiting, to do something. They weren’t doing anything—they had been fighting in Eastern New Guinea but at this point they were staging—what they called staging; just waiting to do something else—and they were located in a place called Hollandia which is in the north and the center coast of New Guinea, actually it was, at that time—the British owned the eastern half of New Guinea and the Dutch owned the western half of New Guinea, this was just on the edge of Dutch territory, so the name Hollandia, was a Dutch name. So I was there for several months—couple months—nothing happened. All we did do was find a place where there was a movie in, someplace or go to an officers’ club and drink, and have a pleasant time. It became a big base and at that point MacArthur moved his headquarters from Brisbane to Hollandia and he built a house for himself on top of a hill, and brought his wife, and his art collection, or whatever. I was never in his house but there was an officers’ club nearby—I didn’t say but when we finished the course, the study course, and were sent off, we were at that point commissioned, so at that point I became an ensign, that’s the lowest officer rank in the Navy, it’s like a lieutenant in the Army. And I was there for a couple of months and they had not yet been sent into any further action, but then word came to me that I was going to be transferred to the Philippines.
[238]
At that point, the United States had invaded the Philippines in the Battle of Leyte Gulf and when that had taken place, the Navy had captured a bunch of prisoners, they sank a bunch of Japanese ships; the Japanese came at Leyte Gulf from the north—there’s a river that goes through—well, the Philippines are all islands so there was access from below Leyte Gulf and access from the north of Leyte Gulf. They had a big pincer, actually against the Americans landing on Leyte Gulf and the Americans for various reasons—one I wasn’t there when that happened—but immediately after, when they had 80 or 90 prisoners—naval prisoners to take care of. They wanted a team to do it so they sent another young fellow all the way from Australia, and the man who headed my section of interpreting came from Australia and we three—they flew up to where I was and then we three flew together, hopped to various island and landed in Tacloban, which is the city at Leyte Gulf. And I was there for; I don’t know how long frankly—a number of months? I interrogated the prisoners, which mostly found out what happened at the battle, [door slams] that’s about all that happened—it’s not of much use really, like most of what I did was not of much use, I think. I think it cost the national debt a lot of money but it didn’t really do much good.
[262]
At any rate, at one point I was sent on a—there was a naval excursion led by the cruiser of the Louisville with a couple of destroyers because there had been some kind of an attack by the Japanese on an island called Mindanao, M-I-N-D-A-N-A-O which is south of the—on the east side of the Philippines, south of the gulf where Manila—south of Manila Bay. And there had been some kind of an action—I don’t know what it was, a small action, but anyway they sent us through one of these river, or whatever you call them between the islands, and they sent the Louisville and a couple of destroyers, and I was assigned to a—I guess it was a captain, I don’t think it was an admiral, who ran—who was chief of that small fleet, and we went up there—we arrived at Mindanao at night and nothing was happening but they did—they picked up two prisoners out of the water—they were just struggling in the water [interrupted with a greeting “I’m being interviewed”]. They picked up two prisoners and so they called on me to inquire of them right away. So they put me in a room with the two prisoners and one was a big young fellow, kind of mad that he had been picked up by the Americans and he didn’t want to talk about anything, he just—so that’s fine, I just didn’t talk to him. The other one was a little fellow who was older, who had been a high-ranking noncommissioned officer in the Japanese navy that is like a sergeant in the Army, not a commissioned officer but supervised a lot of younger enlisted men. He was a very interesting prisoner because he knew a lot and was very happy to talk about it. He loved the Navy, he knew everything—he tried to—he was very curious, he liked to find out all that he could find out about what was going on and he constantly went down to the wireless
room and read all the dispatches to see all the information were coming in from various sources as to what was going on.
[296]
So, he was able to tell me everything about what happened at the battle and everything about what happened to the ships after the battle: how many bombs they got hit with and where they went to get repaired—one of them was sent to Jakarta down in Indonesia, and others had been sent into China, and he could tell me which ones had been sunk, and how many bombs it took to sink them, he was a very bright fellow and he was always very interested in the Navy. One of the things he confirmed was that a battleship called the Musashi, which was one of Japan’s two biggest and most favored battleships; there was to Yamato, and the Musashi. And the Musashi was in that battle in Leyte Gulf. Nobody knew why it didn’t continue in and it turned around, it went back. I think that it was partly because of American carriers—American airplane carriers, which were really only merchant ships converted to carriers, they were unarmored; one shot would sink them. There were two or three of them there and they held on or something, maybe that the Japanese navy thought that there were more, that they were more powerful than they were, or something. I don’t know how much radar the Japanese had at that time, but American ships had radar and they could see what was going on. I’m not sure where the Japanese were in that respect, but that might have been part of it. But at any rate, they turned around—they came through over an island called Samar and the straits of Samar and the Musashi had, after knocking out some of those American carriers, turned around and went back, and went right back through the channels and headed for the other side of the Philippines. It had disappeared, or at least nobody knew where it was and it turned out that it had been sunk by American planes on the way back and he was able to confirm that. It was actually one of the first times they knew it had been sunk. But he could also tell me things like this: he could tell me what they were building in Japan, there was a new aircraft carrier being built in Japan and he told me this, which had not been published but turned out to have been a fact, that this carrier sailed out of Japan on its first trip, went between Formosa and China, that’s between Taiwan and China on this trip and at that point was sunk by an American submarine, in its first trip out of Japan; it was a big, big new carrier and of course that was crucial because of—at that point, by the Battle of Midway they lost most of their carriers and if they’d had one that worked—another one, it would have made a good deal of difference. At any rate, so I sent in the report to the captain of the ship, and then we went back—I went back to where I was in Tacloban.
[341]
We waited around of something—we spent an awful lot of time waiting around for something to happen, and I don’t know how much—how long after that I got—I was awarded a Bronze Star because—and they said, they said that all this informa—they sent me a copy of the information which they sent to, I guess Hawaii, or the Naval Command, and said that—at the bottom of it, said “All this information is confirmed by other sources”, which means, I think, that they knew it all from codes anyway, so, but they do need confirmation I suppose, anyway, then the rest of my time in the—by this time I had been there pretty much two years, about two years I think. The next thing was—at this point, the American Army was still fighting in Manila—they had half of Manila; they had sunk a lot of Japanese ships in the Manila Harbor, which is quite shallow, but half of Manila was, safe, from Americans.
[356]
So, a friend of mine who was not a Japanese interpreter but was an intelligence officer, proposed to the captain of Intelligence, in Leyte Gulf, that we go up to Manila and try to find out some things, even though the Navy wasn’t officially moved up there yet, but we’d go up there and they thought we could get PT boats to help us get to Manila and when—see if we could find out some information on what we could find out on some of the ships which were half—which were sunk, either half sunk or all sunk, but sunk in fairly shallow, I mean like, 60 foot deep water, and there were some important Japanese ships that were sunk there, one called the Ashikaga, which had been a command ship—it was a cruiser, and they would have a lot of information on, at least, what had happened before, if not what’s going to happen.
[370]
So we flew to Subic Bay which is a American base, north of Manila—small harbor north of Manila, and we flew up there, pretty much, this way [holds thumb up], I mean hitchhiking, like, we’d go out and say, “Give me a ride” because this wasn’t really an official trip. We got in Subic Bay and there was a PT boat, units there, and we persuaded them to take us into Manila Harbor, which they could do because they were shallow draft, and Manila Harbor was still mined—had not been cleared of mines, so it’d be dangerous for regular ships to go in but PT boats could go, pretty much on the surface, so they’d take us into Manila and we’d go on various ships that were half open or half sunk and see what we could find. We didn’t find much, but eventually we just—eventually, we decided to just stay there because we met some—they were really insurgents, against the Japanese, young Filipinos, they called them guerillas. They were fighting—had been fighting, the Japanese and they met us and we were from the American Navy, so we were heroes, and they gave us a little house along the, along the southern part of Manila Bay and said, “Here, you can just live here. We captured this from some, quisling or some traitor and you can use it.” They would take us out in dugout canoes, or else the PT boat people would take us and go on through the ships. We didn’t find a thing worth anything and then the next move was that [laughs] see; this is not a very heroic story.
GM: No, it’s good.
[392]
JW: [laughs] Well, when more of Manila was safe, this intelligence officer, he was a very bright kid; he decided that we should move, into Manila, into the safe part. So he went in and there was a big, big, like, now million dollar home, and he rented one of them this lady who was from the Netherlands and he didn’t pay her, he just promised her that when the Navy came, they would pay her for the rent. So we moved into this—it had a circular drive, and a portico [laughs]. And we lived there and several Filipino—young Filipino men who had been with the United States Navy, who had been cooks, came to us and said, “Oh, well we’re happy that you’re the
Navy; we want to get back in the American Navy.” So we said, “Okay, fine, just come in you can be our cooks.” [Laughs] And this thing (?fell out?)—we didn’t have any electricity or water, but he discovered that one of MacArthur’s chief generals were moving into another house just behind us and they were setting him up a electric generator so that he could have electricity and a water supply, so we persuaded them to, just do our house too. Anyway, we didn’t do very much; we did persu—with this fellow’s help, persuade the army units to—they had army, sort of tugs, or dredging ships, going through the harbor and we persuaded them—oh! diving ships, and we persuaded one of them to dive on this Japanese cruiser I mentioned, the Ashikaga, and it was always just “Will you help us do this and if you help us, we’ll let you, well, if you find a Japanese sword or souvenir, well, you can have it.” They dove on this Ashikaga and retrieved a whole lot of Japanese plans, that had been for the war and for the defense of Japan or whatever. I don’t know how useful it was, but we spent a lot of time trying to translate that and put it in—it was all soaked, first of all, and very—just rice paper, so very fragile. A lot of it became torn, and we had to piece it all together, and it got sent back, mainly through Australia.
[422]
About, not long after that, in June, I got—no, April, I was told that I would get rotated: I had been overseas 18 months, and I rotated back to Washington, D.C. for three months, then I’d be out again. But I had left on my bag—I was only on temporary duty so I left all my baggage and everything in Brisbane, so I said I had to go back to Brisbane and get it. And I wasn’t too unhappy about whatever extra time I took because the next thing that was going to happen would be attacking Japan, and I would have been heavily involved. It took a long time to get a flight back to Brisbane because there wasn’t much going on anymore. I flew on a Dutch plane—and Dutch Army plane to Brisbane and then I had to wait several weeks to get a ship to New York City. There was a tanker, an empty tanker, and it took like, a month to go across the Pacific; stopped in Panama for a week, then we got on a destroyer and went to New York City and eventually to Washington where I was—I worked under a translating (?place?) for about three months. That would be the summer of 1945 and while I was there, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, and the war ended. The Air Force formed a task force to go to Japan and investigate. It really was to investigate how effective the American Air Force was. In other words they tried to justify the use of the Air Force and whatever it accomplished. So they sent this team of economists and naval officers and all kinds of people and translators, like myself; I was assigned to that. I went to Japan; in September I joined them by going to Japan. I was sent over on the New Jersey, which is a battleship, just all the way across the ocean. And then was in Tokyo for a couple of months, just translating whatever they had for me to do; interpreting a few interviews with Japanese—former Japanese admirals. The Navy would sit them down and ask them a lot of questions about why they did this and why they did that. I interpreted for a lot of those meetings. I was always a little worried because most of those Japanese admirals spoke English very well, so I had to be sure I translated really well [chuckles]. But anyway, I amused myself on my
off hours going and listening to classical music ‘cause there was a lot of—Tokyo Symphony was functioning with a German conductor named Rosenstock and no—it wasn’t the Tokyo Symphony, it was the Radio Symphony, it was—belonged to the radio station it was a full orchestra and so I got to know some of those people and (?visited them in London?). I play the cello, so I did (?business a lot?) with a fellow who played first cello and is a very nice person.
[462]
It was called the Strategic Bombing Survey, and they formed various units to investigate different things: they had a unit investigating railroads, another investigated various kinds of manufacturing, and they formed a unit to investigate, they called it urban areas studies, to investigate what the bombing did, how it affected the life, economic life, etc. of the city. So I got in that, they said “Get in that ‘cause you’ll get out of Tokyo and you’ll see the countryside.”
We were to investigate Osaka, Kobe, which were both practically destroyed and Kyoto which wasn’t destroyed at all and the reason for it: it had been on the target list before the atom bomb, but some intelligence person said don’t touch that, that’s the old capital and has lots of famous old temples and lots of history and—just leave it alone—and no manufacturing of any kind, so best leave it alone. We located ourselves in Kyoto because the other cities practically were just in ruins anyway. We would travel to the other cities and I’d translate for people. Our little unit became sort of like—there was a mayor of Kyoto and our little unit, whatever it was, which had an economist or something, whatever—we were sort of like, their advisors or their dictators. So whatever we wanted, they wanted to do. They were very nice too, so they’d give us parties and everything; keep us happy. I don’t know how much it accomplished; I suppose it justified or explained how…what kind of bombing did what to Japan. Of course, it ruined it—a lot of it. In Tokyo, it was mostly—all downtown Tokyo was flat except for a few buildings—well, not all of it, no, but a lot of it. It burned the—a few office buildings in the center of Tokyo, where this outfit formed and we lived in what had been a building that belonged to the electric company…but a lot of Tokyo was destroyed and that was destroyed in the fires that they—that the American bombers set; I don’t know if it was Doolittle, or one of the bombers that ran that dangerous trip—before Americans could do much to the Japanese, they sent a fleet of planes…as far as they could and they flew them to Japan, and it was too far for them—they were to set fire to Tokyo, as much as possible and fly on to China, and land in China; that’s a whole story of them, but that was why the fire in Tokyo, which was terrible, almost like the bombing of Dresden and those places; destroyed the whole city and killed hundreds of thousands of people. But I never traveled other than—I would travel a little outside of Tokyo but I never was in Hiroshima or Nagasaki where the bombing had been with the atom bomb. I was there until, June of—almost June I guess, of 1946, and then I got orders that I was to be released from the Navy, so that was the end of that.
[504]
GM: So, during all this, since you were a cellist, did you get to play or did you just kind of have a break from that, all this time?
JW: I did, when I had the chance. I did in Australia for a while.
GM: Would it be just, any cello that you found, when you could?
JW: Yeah, borrowed one—I worked with a lady who was the first cellist in the Brisbane Symphony, and we became good friends, and I played for her—I don’t know if it was lessons but I played for her, I remember, and went to the concerts.
GM: Did you have any contact afterwards, with any of these people?
JW: Not after—not anybody—no, nobody, not one. Some of the people who I studied Japanese with, some of whom were in Australia with me but after I was out of Australia, I never saw any of them again. [music stand clangs] Well, when I came back to Washington, for the three months, which had to be about when the war ended—some of those people who were in school with me was in Washington, so I did know them. And I’ve seen them since. Actually, after I got out of the school—after I got out of the Navy, I went to Julliard, which I had hoped to do from Yale. Just to be very frank, I don’t think I would have got into Julliard if I’d gone directly from Yale because Julliard was, at that time—that would have been 1942, Julliard was still a very special, small school where you couldn’t pay to get in—you had to be paid—you had to get everything free or you couldn’t get in. In other words, everyone was on a scholarship, so it’s very exclusive. The level of people who got in was very high and I’m sure that I would have not gotten in because at Yale. I studied, but I wasn’t that kind of a totally serious student who would’ve ended up in—getting a scholarship to Julliard. I was able to get in Julliard after the war ‘cause after the war, the G.I. Bill came out and Julliard said look, why should we turn down all this money from the government that everybody would have, so they canceled their fellowship and just established regular fees—you had to audition to get in, and I spent about four months with a teacher named Maurice Eisenberg, who was a pupil of Casal’s and put myself in shape to take an audition to Julliard, but I entered Julliard in the fall of 1946, and using the G.I. Bill, so I didn’t—and the school was crowded. Before it was very small and exclusive so it was suddenly full of people; a lot of the ex-G.I.’s and everything. So I was there for three years as a cello student, and I also majored in string quartet, because I got to know some Israeli musicians who were very interested in playing quartet. We formed a string quartet while I was at Julliard named it—called it LaSalle Quartet, gave concerts, and got a job after—I was there three years—I hadn’t even gotten a master’s degree, I just took the ones I wanted.
[539]
But we got a job teaching at Colorado College as a string quartet. And then I was there for two years—I was teaching, with the string quartet in Colorado Springs…in Colorado College for two years—this is only pertinent because it has something to do with the Naval Language School—after I was there two years I got married, and the quartet kind of broke up and—they still went on, they found another cellist, but I went back to Julliard; decided I would study conducting, so I spent a lot of time, training myself, to take conducting, saying I got in Julliard and I was there two more years as a conducting student. After that, I was in New York for a couple of years but finally, I got a job in—this is the only point of all this—I got a job as conductor of the Springfield Ohio Orchestra. One of the reasons I think I got it, was because on the board of that orchestra, there was a man who I had known in the Japanese language school—he was a—actually they called it a “BIJ”, that would be “Born In Japan”; his father was a missionary, but he was in some other business in Springfield, but I think that couldn’t have hurt, my being considered for a position there so that may be what ties the end of the story.
[553]
GM: Well, while you in the service did you stay in touch with your family? What did you do for fun—did you pull any, like, pranks or anything?
JW: With my family?
GM: Yes
JW: Oh, yeah. I think the, spending so much time with Japanese that my English language became kind of warped. I began to sound like Japanese—in English, you say, “I’m going downtown now”; you say place before time, but in Japan, it’s time before place, and just all kinds of verbs are at the end and things like that.
[560]
GM: Well, and what was mostly, everyday life like? What—did you do anything while you were waiting? Anything in particular that you liked to do?
JW: You just make life as normal as you can, especially if you’re in a place like Brisbane. We lived in a hotel in Brisbane which the Navy took over, but it belonged to the Christian Temperance Association, which is a—the Christian Temperance Association promoted Prohibition, against liquor, like in the United States in the 30’s. So you couldn’t drink in liquor in the hotel, but we did and some of us got caught doing it and they said you have to move to another place, but the Navy had other locations. It was fairly normal, I mean as normal as you could be, without a family, with just limited time—hotel-like. Then in Tacloban, where I was for quite a few months, I was on a little Navy base that had a little town around and I’d—we got to know a few people. I remember meeting a family, because I heard somebody playing the—I was walking down one of those little streets in that that little tiny town, it’s mostly just a village, and passed a church where I heard somebody playing the Mendelssohn Concerto so I walked in and got to known them. It was a young girl, a very confident player; I don’t know what might have become of her after that. But you just tried to live as normal a life as you can.
[576]
GM: So, when you did all this traveling, what kind of, planes and—were they?
JW: When I graduated and got commission in June of 1943, first they sent me home for a week, just for vacation, then I flew—it took, this is funny, by today but it took three days to fly across the United States. We had to stop; we stopped in Columbus, Ohio and Decatur, Illinois, then we stopped in New Mexico. Actually, the plane stopped working so we had to stop in New Mexico, but we finally got to—and then we stopped to—it took more than three days, these were overnight stops; we stopped overnight also in San Diego, finally headed up to San Francisco, where they put us up in the best hotel, Mark Hopkins Hotel, it was then the best hotel, and the JW: Navy of course—best of everything. I waited there three weeks and nothing happened, so naturally, you get three weeks free in San Francisco, you have a pleasant time with all your friends. Then I finally got a plane and they flew me to Honolulu, where I spent another three weeks, on the beach in the Moana Hotel, which is the then old, best hotel, right on the beach for three weeks. Nothing to do except wait, go every morning and say “Is there a plane to go to [END OF SIDE ONE, BEGIN SIDE TWO]
[539]
There were about—a seaplane that flew us to Australia from Honolulu; we stopped at about three different islands on the way south, each time overnight. Nowadays, one straight flight from Brisbane probably from Chicago, but this plane was a big seaplane that stopped at Canton Island—I can’t even remember all of the islands. Then finally, near Australia, we stopped in New Caledonia, which is a set of [banging in background] French islands, then Brisbane. So flying then was a good deal different. You could add up how much a trip like I had would cost if you wanted to go on vacation—it’d be quite a lot [laughs].
GM: So did you enjoy all the traveling or was it a pain?
JW: I guess I did, just enjoy things going on.
[560]
GM: And when you were in the Philippines, and all these places that were so far away from America, what kind of life would that be? Would it be like, American—would you eat American food and such or would you mix it in?
JW: Pretty much, Navy headquarters, you all had to be fed, and feel like we—in Australia where we were in a hotel and ate in a hotel restaurant and place like that, it was maybe a little more normal. But other than that like in the Philippines and Hollandia, you just ate at the army mess, or the navy mess and get pretty normal food, maybe boring after a while.
[577]
GM: Did you keep any diaries or you have any friends that you stayed in touch with?
JW: No, I didn’t do any of that.
[579]
GM: Okay. And do you remember the day that you finally came home? What you did or anything?
JW: All I remember is that I landed in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and came from Panama on a destroyer, so we went to the Navy Yard, and then my family’s from New Jersey so it wasn’t long before I got to see them. But what struck me when I first came home was how fat everybody was. Because if you live down there and eat just Navy food, you end up being trim, and thin, in good condition. It just seemed to me like everybody was way overweight but it’s not anything like now.
[598]
GM: [laughs] Well, I think that’s about—well, do you think that like, your war experience effected how you think of it now? Are you against it [war]?
JW: My view of the war is well, jaundiced or maybe not jaundiced but it’s certainly not the normal view of war—not what I would have had if I was an enlisted person. If you were enlisted in the Navy or if you were a draftee or in the army, first off, you’d go through some type of—and to be in the Navy at all, or to be an officer, you had to have gone through basic training, which is six months of usually something like six weeks or six months of really tough, physical work. I had never had any of that—not a bit; I had never even had a gun until when I was in Hollandia once; we were—I took a gun and we had target practice but other than that I had ever held a gun. So it’s kind of anomalous—it’s not anything to do with normal war but I suppose that a lot of people in war, they spend so much money and they spend so much effort and they overdo everything. There’s an awful of it that’s very casual, or very wasteful. Then the part that really hurts is the people who have to do all the fighting and all that—that’s not fun. I did have friends who—later on I heard some of their conversations, their descriptions of their—some of my friends were in Washington the whole time, and some of them were in Honolulu, the whole time; almost a normal life, like and office life; go to the office, translate Japanese then go home at night. Some of them got married and just settled down doing that. A lot of them became, well maybe not ambassadors, but became—worked for the State Department of the government because they spoke Japanese and they maintained it, and used it. Some of the people who had studied Japanese were actually, initially scholars in that; there was a fellow from Harvard who was in my class, had been a Chinese language major, and so it was to his credit to have another language and his whole life afterwards became involved in that. He taught Japanese and Chinese at Columbia University after that.
[649]
But the normal person who is in the National Guard or sent to Iraq, there might be some times when somebody sits around and does nothing but an awful lot of them are—oh, what I was going to say was some of the people I know who were in the Pacific with me, like I know a fellow who was in the—he was so effected by the whole thing that afterwards he became a monk. He was assigned to the Marines, and he was—he landed in, among other things, in Iwo Jima, where it was murderous—he tells this story, he’d referred to his, sort of his diary kind of thing and he told how—one point they had a Japanese straggler that—the battle had moved on but he was just, fell over—was wounded but was—they needed to interrogate him, find out what they could, so he interrogated him, found out what he was usefully able to tell, and then—he was with a Marine, or a bunch of them and whatever he said, “well, what do we do this guy?” “Kill it. We can’t leave him behind us—it wouldn’t be safe,” and—I didn’t have any experiences of that kind; I think if I hadn’t been sent up from 1st Corps where I was waiting to go in, for three months, into battle, they eventu—it wasn’t long after that—as soon as the Leyte Gulf landing was set, 1st Corps was sent in to fight in the Philippines and I would have been right in the middle of it. And I would have had some—that kind of experience which could really damage you, mentally or spiritually. It damaged him enough so that he became a monk—couldn’t face life anymore.
[684]
GM: So you think you’re lucky that—
JW: I was very lucky; lucky all the way around. One time when we, I said we were living in this little cottage on the edge of Manila Bay, courtesy of the guerillas; we went out—I don’t know whether we went out that time in PT boats that came to get us or whether we went out in dugout canoes, but we went to a ship that hadn’t been entirely sunk but had been burned. It was a merchant ship, a Japanese merchant ship. We had a group of about five or six people and this chief intelligence officer; we had an Australian Navy officer, an older fellow, who was very alert and had a lot of war experiences. We had photographers, and we had [???] and me, translating and interpreting. We were on this ship and were wandering around on this burnt out ship and came through one place where somebody discovered that there were Japanese soldiers in one of the rooms, not really rooms—well it’s a room but they’re all steel, steel doors and steel walls. So they said open this door a little bit and tell these people that if they’ll give up we won’t harm them. And I did. And they,—boom! And they ignored what I said; I presume I said something intelligible but—I did that and they blew themselves up in there. And they—the Australian officer who was the one who was keeping us all safe, and keeping us from doing stupid things, said that, he peeked and he said don’t go in, you don’t want to look in there, ‘cause it was all people blown all over the walls. But that was about as close as I came to any kind of really—
GM: Still pretty bad
JW: —but not the same with most people. Of course a lot of people just—I don’t know if they were as many interpreters who were, I really don’t know what the facts are as far as whether people from my class, whether anybody ever counted them as to if any of them got killed. If don’t think there were very many…’cause I even don’t know very many who had really the serious kind of experiences that I described…
[729]
GM: So, after the war, did you join any veterans’ associations or do you go to any reunions?
JW: No, I forgot everything. I tried—
GM: Just went into music?
JW: —yeah, I went into music and I just forgot the Japanese part of it. When I did finally started to study conducting at Julliard, there was a Japanese fellow, who was from Japan, who was studying conducting too. He and his wife and his little son had come—I guess they were from a quite well-off family; I think his wife’s father had been (?premiere?) of Japan or something, so they were well connected. But anyway, he was studying at Julliard and it was fun to be with people who were Japanese, ‘cause I can speak Japanese. Other than that, I really just—we used to have to learn 500 words per week, 500 Japanese characters a week…so I decided I would forget 500 a week.
[747]
GM: So is it basically gone now?
JW: Basically, I don’t—about the only thing I can say is, I can say “Where’s the bathroom?” and that kind of thing. I imagine it would come back fast because I really spoke it for several years but—
GM: You just never use it again now?
JW:—the only thing I really remember offhand is a speech that they gave us; they said—when we studied at the Navy School, they had a series of Naval textbooks—Navy had textbooks in Japanese, that they had used to train Navy _____ and things like that, in Japan. Although there were no textbooks when I was at Yale, there was a dictionary in English-Japanese available, that we could buy but there were no Japanese language study book. But the Navy had a series of them and—
GM: It’s incredible you learned all that without a real textbook.
JW: —we used those and one of the things they did was to teach us—what the Navy had done was to teach the people who were teaching Japanese to—it taught them a speech so that if they got stuck someplace and had to say something, some occasion, you had to make some nice speech, so it was all about world peace is desirable and everybody thinks so on and on and on like that. We had to learn that so we could just spout it off and quite literary—not casual conversation but literary Japanese. [phone rings in background] That was one of the things me had to do, was learn that. And I never used it, never had any kind of occasion like that where I had to use it while I was in the Navy but I could still remember it today; make most of the speech.
[Talk about interviewer’s family]
GM: …that’s about it [talk about e-mail addresses] is there anything else, that you remember, that you’d like to add?
JW: No, that’s about it.
GM: Thank you so much
JW: You’re welcome
[793] [END]
