In the months between the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the United States stood on the precipice of world war. During this time, the Americans on the frontlines did not fly aircraft or lead troops against a heavily defended position. Instead, they were in the presence of potential enemies, serving as naval and military attachés at embassies from Berlin to Tokyo. A revealing portrait of life in Tokyo emerges in the letters of Lieutenant (junior grade) Stephen Jurika, who served as an assistant naval attaché in the Japanese capital from 1939 to 1941.
Jurika’s unique background prepared him for the assignment despite his relatively junior rank. Though born in California, he was raised in the Far East, where his Czechoslovakian-born father was a businessman. Jurika attended school in the Philippines, China, and Japan. His classmates in the U.S. Naval Academy class of 1933 recognized the traits that would prove ideal for his career. “He is gifted with an easy flow of speech and tact, makes friends easily and retains them indefinitely,” read an entry in the Lucky Bag, the Academy’s yearbook. “With a keen and appreciative sense of humor, impulsive sound judgment, and a willingness to question anything, Bob [a Naval Academy nickname] is eminently qualified to handle one of Uncle Sam’s battle canoes.”
Yet Jurika’s future lay not on the battle line but as a naval aviator, and he earned his wings in 1936. Three years later and now married to Lillian Ursula Marie Smith, the daughter of Marine Colonel Harry Locke Smith, the young couple set out across the Pacific for an assignment in Japan.
Jurika’s Naval Academy classmates had noted that his chief occupation in study hour was letter writing, and his arrival in Japan prompted the beginning of voluminous correspondence. While a junior naval officer’s salary was not the highest (although it would have been steady for the years of the Depression), it allowed his family to live like royalty overseas. “We have a cook, maid, baby amah [for their daughter, also named Lillian Ursula Jurika] and a chauffer [sic] all for a total of about 50 dollars a month. I don’t know what I shall do with Lil after we come back to the States, for she will be accustomed to the luxury out here.” But they missed some of the simple comforts of home. One day, when Jurika and his wife visited the liner President Coolidge, which carried Asiatic Fleet Commander Admiral Thomas Hart, he wrote his mother-in-law of enjoying a rare Coca-Cola on board.
The couple attended many parties, including one held in honor of the admiral and another at the Spanish legation that included dancing on the terrace; the “champagne and wine flowed freely.” On 26 July 1939, Jurika noted that while he met diplomats from Spain, France, and England at the latter, he did not speak to those from Italy and Germany.
His letters reveal that the power of his position was becoming more apparent. “It really is surprising what a young jg can do out here,” he wrote. “It is not the rank, but the position which does things. I am ten years younger than the next junior Air Attaché of any other country, yet they all act as though I were the ultimate authority. It’s a game, with the closest mouthed and open eyed individual winning out. It is a case of all of us joining up against the Japanese.”
At this time, Japan was engaged in a protracted war in China. Jurika noticed its effects in rising prices and the scarcity of commodities such as gasoline and building materials. He observed that the Japanese people had “hitched in their belts a notch or so, but where most Americans make the mistake, is in underestimating the ability of the people to take a couple more hitches.” Jurika did not perceive significant anti-American sentiment in Tokyo; it appeared this was reserved for the British.
With the invasion of Poland by Germany on 1 September 1939, Jurika immediately felt the changing tides in the international situation. News of the invasion and subsequent declarations of war from Britain and France came while he was visiting Manila, the capital of the Philippines. “Instead of flying for the fun of it, the Admiral had me out patrolling Philippine coasts to maintain neutrality,” he wrote his mother-in-law. “From four thirty in the morning until late in the afternoon or night, we’d go out in formation, then break up and begin searching the inlets and bays of all islands.”
He wrote of observing mines and steel booms, and soldiers and sailors in Hong Kong when he stopped there on the way back to Japan. There his work took on a different urgency, which he described to his in-laws, noting that what he wrote was not “for publication.”
Work at the Embassy? In these times the candles burn brightly. There are things humming all the time, secret stuff to be decoded and unscrambled coming over the wires and a mess of reports to be sent on to O.N.I. [Office of Naval Intelligence] in Washington. In addition, I go to the launching of new ships (not invited) with a pair of binoculars from a private and select viewpoint which enables me to do as well as being actually present; watch their aircraft and stations scattered all over the damned country; meet ships and carry officer messenger mail; go on courier trips. . . and a thousand other little items that go to make life here rather exciting and interesting.
Jurika’s efforts sometimes did not even require subterfuge. As John Prados recounted in an exhaustive study of America’s intelligence gathering in Japan before and during World War II, Combined Fleet Decoded, Jurika openly attended a Japanese army show at Haneda, where he happened upon a static display of the acclaimed A6M Zero fighter. He was able to observe the details of its construction and note its specifications, which appeared on a plaque—in English. He sent this information to the United States via official channels.
Jurika even pursued the possibility of visiting Japanese territories in the Pacific, which included Japan’s future wartime naval base at Truk Atoll, and planned to catch a ride on board a Japanese flying boat. “The Navy Dept has tried for many years to get one of our officers down there,” he wrote optimistically in November 1939, but the Japanese successfully obstructed his effort.
China proved fertile ground for intelligence gathering. “The British intelligence took care of me in Hongkong, where we . . . discussed the Japanese in China and the turn in the European War,” he wrote on 27 May 1940. “They are very much depressed over the situation in France, and I don’t wonder. Explored the defenses of the island—and the Japs could never take it until they starved the British out. It would cost them several hundred thousand men to storm the island.” (His assessment would prove wrong with the swift December 1941 capture of Hong Kong in just 17 days.) In Shanghai, Jurika often met with a fellow assistant naval attaché, Marine Major Gregon Williams. Because Japanese troops had occupied the city since 1937, the lieutenant could also observe them here firsthand.
Jurika made numerous trips to the Philippines during his time as a naval attaché, which gave him opportunities for professional advancement and allowed him to visit his well-connected family. In December 1939, he recounted a meeting with Admiral Hart in which he told him “the latest from Japan and . . . what I thought would happen . . . . Luckily, and I really mean it, everything I said that day has come true.” At midnight mass at the Cathedral of Manila, Jurika saw his godfather, the archbishop, and many a pleasant afternoon was spent at his mother’s country house at Taygaytay, where he wrote some articles for a newspaper syndicate in Manila.
Back in Tokyo, Jurika and his fellow attachés sensed a change by the spring of 1940. “Japan is slowly but surely becoming a place that war has marked,” he wrote in April. “It hasn’t rained for several months; the water supply is running dangerously low, electric power is a rare quantity. There are no leather shoes for sale.” Other letters spoke of the high number of “white boxes” containing the ashes of Japanese soldiers killed in action in China arriving in the Home Islands.
The signing of the Tripartite Pact by Japan, Germany, and Italy in September 1940 and the U.S. embargo on the shipment of iron and steel scrap to countries outside the Western Hemisphere and Great Britain that took effect the following month cast an ominous tone on the lives of Americans in Japan. U.S.-Japanese relations were deteriorating, prompting Jurika to write: “We know that they are aware that a war with us would be suicide for them. At the same time, they are more or less desperate, and in such case would not hesitate to go down with colors flying against a combination of powers. So we are now going to live from day to day, in suspense and sitting on top of a volcano.”
On 27 October 1940, Jurika wrote a letter only to his father-in-law (most previous letters included his mother-in-law in the salutation). First, he informed him of a State Department directive that all wives of Americans in Japan leave the country, and detailed how Lillian would get home safely. He wrote of attending reviews conducted by both the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army, noting that his presence at the former was without permission. Of the latter he wrote of 50,000 troops on one huge parade ground with the latest mechanized equipment, humorously describing how some of the new weapons broke down right in front of Emperor Hirohito.
With the letter traveling by way of diplomatic pouch, he provided more details than ever before of his intelligence gathering. “For the past four months I’ve been drawing up bombing maps of Japan by main manufacturing districts, a job which has never been done in this office. Also plans for bombing Tokyo, its powder factories, munitions factories, government buildings; collecting and evaluating information on Jap bases in South China, Indo China, the South Seas, and getting down to business on every phase of the possible war.”
Jurika’s final letter from Tokyo, dated 15 April 1941, informed his in-laws of receiving orders home and the continuation of his intelligence gathering during visits to naval bases. He noted that it was becoming more difficult to see anything their Japanese guides wanted kept secret. A formal call on Admiral Osami Nagano, chief of the General Staff, prompted a comment on the leadership of the Imperial Japanese Navy: “From my views of the top Admirals and Captains, the Japs appear to be very well led. Their plans are surely well conceived—but we prefer to believe in initiative—and, believe me, we have them there.” Little did he know that one such plan that would seize the initiative in war with the United States was already underway.
When war came on 7 December 1941, Jurika was serving on board the carrier Hornet (CV-8), ready for action but mindful of the effects on distant family. “We are off to war, leaving the day after Christmas for a long voyage,” he wrote his in-laws on 23 December. “I have not heard yet how Mother and my sisters and brother have made out in the many bombings of the Philippines. I pray that they are safe, but haven’t the faintest idea, nor do I know how to get the news.”
While serving as the air intelligence officer in the Hornet, Jurika’s painstaking intelligence gathering proved its true value when U.S. Army Air Forces crews under the command of Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle came aboard with their B-25 Mitchell medium bombers. Jurika briefed them frequently on the locations of Japanese industries, the positions of antiaircraft batteries, and ideal aiming points for their bombing runs. He also educated them about how to identify themselves to Chinese peasants, Japanese and Chinese history and culture, and the psychological and physiological differences between the two peoples.
When the Doolittle Raiders dropped their bombs over Tokyo on 18 April 1942, attached to one of them was a commemorative medal awarded to Jurika by Emperor Hirihoto in 1940. Jurika had mentioned to Doolittle that it was in his possession and the lieutenant colonel thought that it would be a humorous gesture to photograph the medal before it was “returned with pleasure” to Tokyo. Official Navy photographers captured the “ceremony.”
Jurika remained on board the Hornet for the Battle of Midway, watching from the carrier’s island as the TBD Devastators of Torpedo Squadron 8 launched on their fateful mission against the Japanese Home Islands. Staff duty in the South Pacific was followed by assignment as navigator on board the ill-fated carrier Franklin (CV-13), where he received the Navy Cross for his actions following an enemy air attack that devastated the ship while she operated off Japan on 19 March 1945.
As the months unfolded, two of Jurika’s relatives performed heroic acts. His brother-in-law, Naval Reserve Lieutenant Commander Charles “Chick” Parsons, received two awards of the Navy Cross and the Distinguished Service Cross for leading guerrilla operations against the Japanese in the Philippines. His brother Tom also engaged in activities behind enemy lines before being transported out of the Philippines to Australia.
Unfortunately, Jurika’s family would also suffer a great tragedy. He learned after the war that his mother had been executed in Manila in 1944. “She was beheaded along with a group of 29 other ‘patriots,’ one of whom had given her and the others away to the Japanese . . . . All of them were dumped into a bulldozed grave and buried over,” Jurika revealed in his U.S. Naval Institute oral history. After the war, Parsons and Jurika’s sister tracked down the perpetrators, who were tried for war crimes.
Jurika continued to serve in the Navy after World War II, and his final assignment as commanding officer of the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps unit at Stanford University set the stage for his academic career there. He earned doctoral degrees in political science and geography, and joined the Hoover Institution, Stanford’s campus think tank. While there, he edited the memoirs of Admiral Arthur W. Radford, the first naval officer to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The headline for The New York Times obituary announcing his death on 15 July 1993, “Officer and A Scholar,” captured the essence of his service in and out of uniform.A young naval officer’s correspondence provided an up-close and detailed view of the soon-to-be enemy—Japan—on the eve of World War II.
Captain Stephen Jurika Papers, National Naval Aviation Museum.
Carroll V. Glines, Doolittle’s Tokyo Raiders (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1964).
John Prados, Combined Fleet Decoded: The Secret History of American Intelligence and the Japanese Navy in World War II (New York: Random House, 1995).
The Reminiscences of Captain Stephen Jurika, Jr. (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 1976).
Jurika’s Reflections on the Raid
While serving on board the USS Hornet, commanded by Captain Marc A. Mitscher, Stephen Jurika put his knowledge of Japan to good use. In this excerpt from his U.S. Naval Institute oral history, then-retired Captain Jurika recalls briefing Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle and his Army Air Forces aviators prior to their raid on Tokyo.
Captain Mitscher and Lieutenant Colonel Doolittle spoke quite a number of times together, but to my knowledge Doolittle did not address his group during these morning brief sessions . . . except on rare occasions, such as the day before they expected to be launched, when he got them together for sort of a pep and a brief session.
They told me that they would like to cover Japan—not just Tokyo, but Osaka, Nagoya, and Kobe, as well. That meant that with . . . only 400- or 500-pound bombs in each one of these aircraft they were not going to make a big splash, they were not going to attempt to destroy a major [manufacturer] like Fuji Steel or Japan Iron and Steel or one of the major petro-chemical plants, but, rather, were going in for [psychological] effect.
. . . [Mitscher, Doolittle, and I agreed] on priorities of targets, and then I spent the rest of the time telling them about the locations or anti-aircraft defenses and how these would be built up on towers and high buildings, machine guns and pom-poms, and things like that, small guns, that the Japanese had used in China and up at Nomonhan [Mongolia] against the Russians.
Then, knowing where all the major buildings in Tokyo were—and there were not too many pre-war—we would draw a line from that to a target that they wanted. The Diet Building, for example, on one of the highest hills of Tokyo, was something that you could fly over, go a very short distance, and be in Kawasaki, perhaps three or four minutes, no more than that, on a bombing run, and the first major point under you would be in the Tamagawa River, and just beyond that would be a major petro-chemical works. You didn’t have to estimate, you didn’t have to use a stopwatch. You had these major physical points to look at.
We took our maps of the various cities and would point out these targets, including major buildings that would stick up. If you were down low, they would loom above the horizon. Fly over these and go on an absolute [dead reckoning] course, you then pass over a river and the next big complex that you see, with chimneys belching yellow smoke, to lay your eggs.