Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Harvey Watanabe Interview
Narrator: Harvey Watanabe
Interviewer: Stacy Sakamoto
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: November 4, 1996
Densho ID: denshovh-wharvey-01-0019

<Begin Segment 19>

HW: I had another assignment which was to screen all documents that were shipped to MacArthur's headquarters, Japanese documents. My job was to open up the crates and screen them, and decide which ones to translate totally, which ones partially, which ones, maybe not urgent, but of near, of practical value for the... for Hawaii, which covered the Pacific Ocean area. And then there were some documents that are for very long-range strategic value that we sent to, sent to Maryland. And there was also lots of it that I burned, in an incinerator there, and the interesting thing is by then, we weren't being tailed around by CIC operatives so much. If we left camp, there was always somebody watching us.

SS: CIC?

HW: Yeah, but by then, I could destroy anything I wanted to, without anybody lookin' to see what I was destroying -- [laughs] -- burning in the incinerator.

SS: So you mean at some point, you were still perceived as being not trustworthy.

HW: Well, yeah, we'd been on furlough and they would be following us around. We'd be walking down the street and we'd say, "Hey, somebody's tailing us," in one instance in Sydney, Australia. So the three of us, I said, "Well, let's duck into the next restaurant." So we did. We went inside the door, and just around the corner and waited, and sure enough, this guy shows up. So, we said, "Boo." [Laughs] He disappeared.

SS: How did you feel about that? Did you ever feel that your government had betrayed you or that the military --

HW: No, no. Because if I were the government I would do the same thing to anybody that I had in my employ, in my jurisdiction, that was doin' the same thing we were doing. Wanna make sure we're not talking to the wrong people. You hear about it in the paper all the time, people who work for foreign office or somethin' like that, spilling information for money to other... it happens today.

SS: The task that you were doing; you were handling really top secret things.

HW: Yes.

SS: Tell me a little bit about what that was like.

HW: Huh?

SS: Tell me a little bit about what that was like, you know, the kinds of things that would come across your desk.

HW: Well, one particular document we spent almost a week translating, and we did it very carefully because it was a report from a Japanese fighter pilot about what the B-29 airplane did, bomber did, when it tried to attack the bomber. And the significant thing is that the, is that the... to the fighter pilot, was that the bomber did a stupid thing, but when he went to attack the bomber, instead of the bomber trying to evade the fighter pilot -- it turned broadside to it, and turned all its guns onto the fighter plane. The fighter pilot was lucky he didn't get shot down. He didn't go after the bomber anymore. He went back and reported what he had come across. What the Japanese did not know is that in the B-29s we had managed to synchronize all the guns through one gunner. Any gunner could operate all the guns in the airplane. So one gunner could fire on one airplane with all the guns on the airplane, and they didn't know that. But that was one that we really worked hard to get it out.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 1996 Densho. All Rights Reserved.