The telephone interrupted the serenity of a Hawaiian evening—as well as my pleasure at doing absolutely nothing at the moment—after an active day at Headquarters, Fleet Marine Force, Pacific (FMFPAC). An evening call at the chief of staff’s quarters usually meant bad news. Not so this time, in the summer of 1984. The caller was retired Marine Major Bob Hoskins. We had shared an office 26 years earlier when he was the S-3 (operations and training officer) of the 1st Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment and I, then a first lieutenant, was his assistant S-3.
Hoskins was a 4th Marine Division veteran; he had served in all its World War II campaigns—Roi-Namur, Saipan, Tinian, and Iwo Jima. He had gone ashore at Iwo Jima as a company gunnery sergeant, and to his amazement survived the entire operation without being hit. That was a first for him. After Iwo had been secured, he was flown to Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, where he underwent officer training in preparation for the assault on mainland Japan.
After an exchange of pleasantries, Hoskins came to the reason for his call. He was on his way to Japan to meet a Reverend Wachi and some other Japanese. “We’re planning a ceremony of the 40th anniversary of the Iwo Jima landing,” he said. The event was to be a joint Japanese-American affair, he continued, and the planning would involve delicate negotiations; the Japanese government harbored several concerns.
“Who is this Reverend Wachi?” I asked. My ignorance clearly bordered on dereliction of duty, judging from Hoskins’ reaction. He proceeded to tell me about “the Reverend”—as he referred to the mystery man: How he had commanded the Japanese garrison on Iwo Jima for several months, then been removed from command and sent home prior to the U.S. assault, and how, after the war, he had devoted his life to making amends for leaving his men and not dying there with them. If Hoskins related to me at the time how the 4th Marine Division Association had come in contact with Wachi, I have forgotten. The salient point to Hoskins was that the group considered Wachi an honorary chaplain. Although he was a Buddhist priest, members referred to him simply as “the Reverend.” He had actually attended some of their reunions at Camp Pendleton, California.
I wished Hoskins well and soon forgot the call. Until later that year, that is, when Lieutenant General C. G. Cooper, commanding general, FMFPAC, told me I would represent him at a 40th anniversary ceremony-planning conference on Iwo Jima in December.
A Man of Contrasts
Tsunezo Wachi, the Reverend of the 4th Marine Division Association, was instrumental in arranging the resulting commemoration, which occurred on Iwo Jima in February 1985. It was the first such joint American-Japanese World War II memorial ceremony.
I met Wachi on Iwo at the planning meeting. Even stooped by age, he was taller than most Japanese of his era. Rail-thin and stern of countenance, he nonetheless often displayed a keen sense of humor. Cryptic at times, animated at others, he clearly was highly intelligent and doubtless could have become a prominent public figure in post–World War II Japan had his life not been dedicated to the Japanese servicemen lost on Iwo Jima. Wachi was a man of contrasts who led a life of contrasts. He was a Navy line officer who, during the 1930s, served with a cavalry regiment long enough to become a competent horseman; an intelligence officer; a spymaster; the garrison commander at Iwo Jima for most of 1944; and a commander of Home Island “suicide boats” near the war’s end. Reared as a Roman Catholic—a rarity in Japan at the time—he converted to Buddhism right after the war and became a priest, spending the rest of his life promoting friendship between former foes.
Wachi graduated from Eta Jima—the Japanese naval academy—in 1923 and initially specialized in gunnery and torpedoes. Unexpectedly ordered to communications and language schools, he then became an intelligence officer, fluent in both English and Spanish. In 1944 he was transferred to Iwo Jima, where he was designated commanding officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) garrison. There he commanded the defenses against American air attacks while his forces prepared to counter the amphibious assault that Tokyo considered inevitable.
Then, in the fall of 1944, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) assumed responsibility for the defense of Iwo Jima. Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi took command; Wachi was ordered back to mainland Japan. From early 1945 until the end of the war, he commanded several thousand (he once told me 10,000) suicide boats. Some years later his daughter indicated that those boats were actually manned torpedoes. (The discrepancy in terms may have been a memory lapse compounded by the fact that near the war’s end, Japan developed both manned torpedoes and explosives-laden one-man motorboats.)
“What was your mission, Wachi-san?” I asked him in 1984.
“Troop transports when the Americans invaded Japan, Colonel. Only the troop transports.”
Wachi dedicated his postwar life to atoning for the fact he had not perished on Iwo Jima. He returned to the island countless times to search for the remains of the Japanese servicemen unceremoniously left buried in caves, tunnels, and defensive positions. In the nearly 40 years before his death, he accounted for the remains of more than 8,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors. Most were mummified by the underground heat of the volcanic island, often identifiable through papers and letters in pockets.
When possible, families were located and informed. In all cases, Buddhist religious ceremonies were conducted and the remains cremated. The man of contrasts also prayed for the souls of the U.S. Marine dead and erected a small monument honoring them. In 1953 he established the Association of Iwo Jima in Japan and in time became the Reverend to U.S. Marine veterans of that most horrendous of battles on that ugliest of islands.
Seeds of Friendship Sown
I was with Wachi for just two days in 1984 when the plans for the 1985 ceremony were finalized. On our first day, FMFPAC public affairs officer Lieutenant Colonel Jim Pendergast and I met Major Hoskins and Wachi at Yokota Air Base, then flew to Iwo. After a planning session, Wachi showed us around the island, taking us to places he knew would be of interest.
Before the day was over, he was treating us like his sons and his sense of humor surfaced. At one stop, he showed us a Japanese gun position. The gun had taken a direct hit on the barrel, which hung like a tongue out of the embrasure. Next to the position, an aging sheet of plywood covered something.
“What is that wood covering, Wachi-san?” I asked.
“Ah,” he replied. Smiling slyly and stepping forward, he slid the plywood to one side. “Dud American 16-inch round, Colonel.”
“Wachi, that’s not funny. You have been around Marines too long.”
Our second day was spent at the monastery in the hills near Kyoto where he had converted to Buddhism. Too soon, my mission was over and we parted ways. But a long-distance friendship ensued. Using Wachi’s ground rules, we exchanged letters for several years thereafter. Believing that an active-duty colonel had no time to write social letters, he would write to my wife. “My Dear Mrs. Pauline, Please tell your husband that . . .” When his health began to fail, I communicated through his daughter, Rosa Ogawa.
Wachi passed away in 1990. He left two unpublished papers—one written in 1977 for his 77th birthday, the second for his 88th birthday, though it is dated January 1989. The papers were translated by his daughter, Rosa. Together they total more than 70 single-spaced typed pages. While my brief time with him had provided a feel for the man and his commitment to his cause of friendship between two nations, his papers primarily address the war.
That was not the Wachi I knew. Unless asked, he seldom talked about the war. But it drove all that followed in his life, and perhaps that is why he wanted to leave his record of events. Regardless, one gets the impression that even in those papers Wachi did not reveal all. Perhaps he had forgotten things. Maybe, politely, he wished not to offend.
The 1977 paper is titled “Two Remorse Episodes Behind the Bar at Sugamo, Tokyo.” A more accurate translation would be “Two Sad Incidents Behind Bars at Sugamo Prison, Tokyo” (the place high-level Japanese war-crimes suspects were held for trial after the war). The 1989 paper is titled “The August Virtue of His Imperial Majesty,” an acknowledgment that throughout Japan’s history the hereditary emperor was always at the top, even when samurai or shoguns had come to power.
Spying on the U.S. Navy
One of the few times Wachi spoke to me about the war—albeit almost in passing—occurred on the second day of our 1984 meeting as we rode to the monastery in his son’s sedan.
“Wachi-san?” I said from the rear. Wachi, riding in the right front seat and smoking an evil-smelling cigarette of unknown origin, stared straight ahead.
“Yes, Colonel?”
“7 December 1941. Where were you?”
He turned. “Mexico City. Naval attaché in the Japanese Embassy. I was a spy. I had a room full of radios listening to the American Atlantic Fleet.” He smiled. “Americans are not the only ones who can break codes, you know.”
I didn’t realize at the time just how long Wachi actually had read U.S. Navy codes before the war. In his unpublished papers he describes interception and translation of encoded traffic between a U.S. Navy attaché and the Nationalist Chinese government about the confrontation between Japanese and Chinese military forces at Marco Polo Bridge in 1937. Wachi’s phrasing does not indicate that the capability was something new for the Japanese.
Those same papers also provide a glimpse into his brief career as a spy-handler. The story began in the summer of 1941, when a Colonel Nishi, the IJA attaché in Mexico City, was approached by a former U.S. Army major who had been cashiered for reasons that Wachi either didn’t know or never revealed. “Mr. S,” as Wachi called him, wanted revenge; he offered to spy on the United States. The Japanese attachés decided to test Mr. S by having him report U.S. Navy movements through the Panama Canal. They decided that Nishi would be the sole point of contact; Wachi never met Mr. S.
The test was simple. Wachi was reading U.S. Fleet transmissions and knew which ships were transiting the canal. Mr. S’s reports from Panama began shortly thereafter. All proved accurate. He could be trusted. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Nishi recalled Mr. S from Panama and asked if he was willing to go Washington, D.C., to “collect information.” The informant enthusiastically agreed.
Shortly after Christmas 1941, Nishi excitedly told Wachi that Mr. S had returned to Mexico with a damage report from Pearl Harbor, plus a gold mine of strategic information. Equally impressive was the ease with which the intelligence had been collected: Mr. S said he had gotten all of his information simply by visiting officers’ clubs in the Washington area and chatting with former colleagues.
When writing his 1977 paper, Wachi could not remember the precise information regarding Pearl Harbor that Mr. S had supplied, but recalled being overjoyed, for the damage inflicted on the U.S. Pacific Fleet was greater than the Japanese had thought. Mr. S’s strategic information was of greater interest, however. He reported on the U.S. Army’s mobilization operations, President Roosevelt’s decision to give priority to Germany’s defeat, plans for landings in North Africa to assist the British there, the resolve to maintain the lifeline to Australia, the goal of eventually recapturing the Philippines, and the construction of a submarine fleet to cut sea lines of communication between Japan and southern islands.
Mr. S had not forgotten aviation. He reported the planned air route that would take U.S. bombers south to Brazil, then across the Atlantic toward destinations in North Africa or India. Ominously, from Japan’s point of view, he also reported an accelerated pace of production for B-29 heavy bombers and plans to build operating bases in China. With the assistance of a German spy and an Argentine army attaché, Wachi oversaw the transmission of Mr. S’s report to Japan’s embassy in Berlin and to IJN headquarters in Tokyo.
Postwar Detention and Interrogation
Wachi returned to Tokyo in August 1942, shortly after U.S. Marines had landed on Guadalcanal. Reporting to navy headquarters, he searched for and found the report based on Mr. S’s treason. It didn’t mention Mr. S, but did identify Wachi as the report’s originator. Either that copy or another filed elsewhere survived the war, ultimately leading to Wachi’s incarceration.
In May 1946, Wachi was arrested by order of Major General Charles Willoughby, General Douglas MacArthur’s intelligence chief. The order noted, “Not as a war suspect.” Nevertheless, Wachi was held in solitary in Sugamo Prison with “Type A” war-crimes suspects (former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo among them). It was more than a month before Wachi learned why he had been arrested.
In June he was taken to a prison interview room, where he met “an American gentleman waiting for me with a smile.” The interview got off to a rocky start: An angry Wachi demanded to know, among other things, why he had been held in solitary confinement for a month without being told why. The American remained calm, explaining that he was an FBI agent (unnamed in Wachi’s writings) tasked with investigating Wachi’s “secret communication activities in Mexico at the outbreak of the war.” The agent said the United States had determined that at the war’s outbreak Wachi possessed what was then top-secret information. He added that Washington suspected the information had come from a high-ranking American official and wanted his identity.
Determined to protect Mr. S, Wachi attempted to learn more. Laughing, the agent reminded Wachi just who was asking the questions and who was expected to answer. Wachi agreed to cooperate and told the agent about the Mr. S system. How much he may have said he left unwritten, but he denied ever seeing Mr. S and said he could not recall his real name.
Wachi sensed that the agent was disappointed he had not uncovered a high-level traitor. Telling Wachi that further investigation would be necessary, the agent advised him to be patient and “put up with imprisonment” until he returned. Wachi then was moved from solitary confinement to what he termed a “general cell.” There Wachi provided Buddhist religious counsel to prisoners, including Tojo.
Late in July the FBI agent returned. Mr. S, he said, was one Mr. Sutten—that is Wachi’s spelling; it may have been the more common Sutton—who was still in Mexico. Wachi agreed that the name sounded “sort of familiar” and expressed concern for the man’s safety. Responding to Wachi’s questions, the agent said that the man was considered too low-level an operative to be of further interest.
The agent then shifted to a different subject. He had been directed to return to get Wachi’s opinion of how the Mr. S information had actually affected Japanese operational plans. Wachi wrote that he told the agent, “When we sent that information to Japan it was at the very beginning of the war, when Japan was ecstatic with its consecutive victories battle after battle so those who were on the top of the operation [sic] didn’t consider our information of much importance.” It was Wachi’s version of what the Japanese called “the victory disease.”
His writings stress the fact that the major strategic surprise to Japan was the American drive across the Central Pacific. He correctly noted that the decision to do so must have been made after Mr. S’s conversations with his loose-lipped friends in Washington. Wachi and the agent parted on friendly terms; Wachi soon was released.
Taking (and Leaving) Command at Iwo Jima
“They [IJN superiors] said to me, ‘Wachi, you are going to Iwo Jima where you will be the commanding officer and prepare defenses for an American invasion.’ I said: ‘Why me? I am an intelligence officer and know nothing of such matters.’ They said: ‘But Wachi, you are a captain. We don’t have many left.’” That’s what he told me in 1984—his sense of humor showing. That’s not what he wrote in 1989.
Wachi’s naval attaché service ended when Mexico declared war on the Axis. The Japanese Embassy was closed, and its personnel, along with those from other countries at war with the Allies, were temporarily held at West Virginia’s Greenbrier Resort. In June 1942, diplomats and attachés were taken to New York and put aboard the Swedish ship Gripsholm. Leaving the Gripsholm on Africa’s east coast, they boarded the Japanese liner Asama, bound for Singapore. In early August 1942, Wachi, Captain Ichiro Yokoyama (the former naval attaché to Washington), and Commander Terai (the captain’s assistant) were flown to Japan.
On arrival, their knowledge of the U.S. Navy was put to use in a war game against the IJN staff. Wachi laconically noted that the hypothetical war “ended in October with the U.S. on its winning side.” He was then assigned to “the special communications squad” of the naval staff. Its function was signals intelligence.
Wachi wrote that in 1943 “the U.S. began their counterattack. Starting with our losing Admiral Yamamoto, we were defeated in notable consecutive battles one after another.” By year’s end, signals-intelligence efforts were valueless. Citing the weakness of the IJN, Wachi wrote, “Our information was simply received as news.” He requested transfer to an active front.
Early in 1944, he was told that the IJN would establish a garrison on Iwo Jima. Defense of the island would be a navy responsibility, although the army would provide some troops. The army had agreed that Commander Wachi—which was his actual rank at the time, not captain, as he had joked to me—would be garrison commander. Wachi does not say when he arrived on Iwo Jima; however, it appears he arrived in March 1944 and that construction of defensive positions was well under way. He wrote that “every ship that arrived was loaded with not only soldiers and sailors but also 25-mm antiaircraft machine guns and shallow-water mines.”
By the end of April the garrison comprised 5,000 soldiers and sailors. The number is misleading, however; most of them had been swept up in what Wachi termed “the nationwide mobilization.” In his words: “They had had no [military] experience. They were just civilians.”
On 27 May 1944, Wachi ordered test-firing of all antiaircraft weapons. He wrote that “All went well . . . and we were satisfied that we were ready to defend the enemy attack [sic].” That was an excessively optimistic assessment. By that time the island had two completed runways, but it still was defended only by the 5,000 or so untrained soldiers and sailors, and its anti-invasion defenses had been constructed under IJN doctrine—which called for stopping invaders on the beach.
The Japanese outlook on Iwo Jima changed dramatically with the June 1944 American assault on Saipan. The driving force of change was the B-29. Wachi’s writings indicate that early in the war, the Japanese had acquired information on B-29 production and operating characteristics. He does not identify the source—perhaps it was Mr. S? In any case, he wrote, “We gathered that by October . . . Japan would directly be bombed by those long-distance high altitude bombers.” He added that “if the U.S. seized [Iwo Jima] and made use of it, the mainland would be an easy prey to B-29s. Therefore it was imperative for us to defend [Iwo] by all means.”
The assault on Saipan brought U.S. carrier strikes on Iwo Jima. It also brought “300 planes of Hachijojima Unit composed of fighters and bombers led by Admiral [Sadaichi] Matsunaga” to the island. The U.S. air campaign intensified; eventually it included B-29 sorties from Saipan and Tinian.
Meantime, the IJA assumed responsibility for defense of the island. General Kuribayashi was designated the island’s commander, and properly trained reinforcements began arriving from Manchuria and Japan. By October 1944, roughly 15,000 IJA soldiers and 6,000 IJN sailors had been added. Significantly, Kuribayashi changed the defensive strategy. In Wachi’s words, the new strategy was to “Destroy them after they are lured to get ashore [sic].” He mentioned that the change resulted in a “great dispute between the army and navy,” but did not elaborate.
Preparing for the Invasion of Japan
On 15 October 1944, Commander Wachi was promoted to captain and ordered home from Iwo Jima. Exhausted, he was not immediately reassigned. A month or so later, he learned that because he spoke English and Spanish he soon would be sent to the Philippines as a naval attaché. Formal orders never materialized, however, because as he told me in 1984, “the war was reaching an unfortunate conclusion.”
In February 1945, Captain Wachi was transferred to Kagoshima, on the island of Kyushu, as commander of the Kawatana Garrison—eventually code-named “Storm” and equipped with what Wachi’s written account calls “seaside crash boats.” In 1984, when describing the command to me, he referred to them as suicide boats. In a 1993 letter, his daughter describes the weapons as “suicide crash boats, which were nothing but torpedoes with men on to blast into the targets.” Wachi’s command was responsible for defending Kyushu’s northern coast; a similar command covered the southern coast.
Wachi’s suicide crews were volunteers, “paid double and well-fed while all the nation was starving.” Most, if not all of them, were 16- or 17-year-olds “ready to be wild and desperate at any moment.” He added that he “had to discipline them to die for our country. All the actions had to be based on the significance of a brave death. To achieve this aim we went thru training after training until we could handle the seaside crash boats as our own limbs.”
Wachi’s writings lack information regarding the type of boat or torpedo or the number available. But an idea can be gleaned from his statement that there were “about 20 bases along the bay and each of them had about 200 or 300 crew according to their sizes.” That would translate into the potential for 4,000 to 6,000 vessels, far fewer than the 10,000 he mentioned in 1984, but enough to do considerable damage even if only a small percentage was successful.
During our 1984 ride to the monastery near Kyoto, I asked Wachi if he had known about the Pearl Harbor attack beforehand. He shook his head, then said, “No.” He went on to explain that in the Mexico City embassy’s radio room, he had several radios tuned to frequencies of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet. Just one was tuned to a Pacific frequency. “The first I knew of the attack was when a voice began calmly speaking on the Pacific frequency. He repeated, ‘Air raid Pearl Harbor, this is no drill.’ I heard aircraft engines and explosions in the background. I knew that only one nation could have done this and said to myself, ‘Japan, you have made a big mistake.’”
Thus began a tumultuous era—not just for Wachi personally, but for all of humanity. Throughout that time, from working as an intelligence officer to commanding suicide boats, he gave it his all. Reading his memoirs, I was struck by the relationships that developed between the old warrior and his former adversaries—to both his credit and theirs. Here was a man who for a time was our dedicated enemy. He then became our equally dedicated friend and ally.
The Reverend Captain Wachi truly was a good man.
Unless otherwise noted, information in the sections subtitled “Spying on the U.S. Navy” and “Postwar Detention and Interrogation” comes from Captain Tsunezo Wachi’s paper Two Remorse Episodes.
Unless otherwise noted, information in the sections subtitled “Taking (and Leaving) Command of Iwo Jima” and “Preparing for the Invasion of Japan” comes from his paper The August Virtue.
Copies of Captain Wachi’s papers and photos were given to former Marine Captain John Butler by Wachi’s daughter, Rosa Ogawa. Captain Butler’s association with Iwo Jima, and thus with Wachi’s family, stems from the fact that on 19 February 1945, his father, Marine Lieutenant Colonel John A. Butler, led the 1st Battalion, 27th Marines, 5th Marine Division, up Iwo Jima’s beaches and into the cauldron. Two weeks later, on 5 March, he was killed in action.