<Begin Segment 31>

TI: And pretty much you, you went to China, Chunking, to, again, interrogate or question...

GH: Right, uh-huh.

TI: ...POWs and things like that. While you were in China and doing interrogation, there was one interview in particular that I read about that was interesting, and that was there was someone who talked about the Japanese working on an atomic bomb. Can you, can you tell me about that?

GH: Yes. He was, I think, either a first or second lieutenant, I can't recall, but he was with the army air corps, the Japanese army air corps, and he was captured, and one of the, the fact that I was in the U.S. army air corps, I was in charge of the Japanese POW connected with the air corps. He was brought in one day for interrogation, and during the course of the interrogation, he pushed a Chinese matchbox in front of me, and he said, "We're working on a bomb this size that could destroy a city." I says, "Come on. Don't pull my leg." But then he recomposed himself and he says, "No, that is true." He said, "It has been researched at Tokyo Imperial University, sponsored by the army, at Kyoto Imperial University, sponsored by the navy, and also at Osaka University." And then he went on to mention that he had worked with Dr. (Yoshio) Nishina, who was at Tokyo University. And then he went into the technical side, which is beyond my comprehension. The...

TI: He tried to explain to you how it was going to be...

GH: Right, he talked about the Uranium-(235), the Cyclotone, I mean, you know, it was beyond my comprehension. So I excused myself on a couple of occasions just to see if the terms were valid, and I couldn't find it in the dictionary. Well, anyway, our regimen was, I was spending one week at Nanonchen, at the hot springs, I was billeted there and walked to the POW camp. And after five days of interrogation, I would come back and then spend the next week writing up the report. But when I returned and there were two officers who had just graduated from the OCS, and I was introduced to them, and so I asked them, "I have just interrogated a POW who claims that, that they're working on a bomb called the atom bomb, or atomic bomb." And I said, "It's the size of a matchbox that could destroy a city." Well, they both looked at each other and they rolled their eyes as though to say that I've been overseas too long. And so I excused myself and the following week, I started writing up the report. But I felt that without some technical aspect, the, the report was not complete. So in order to get assistance, I made an appointment with a doctor, I mean, with Colonel John (Burden)... it slips my mind. It'll come to me. And I made an appointment, but when I entered, he was reading the document, and when I did mention about the atomic bomb, he did look at me, and he gave me a strange look. But after I made my report, he didn't respond. So I just saluted him and went back to my desk, and I said, "I'm not getting any help," so I just wrote the report and threw it in the wastepaper basket.

TI: Did you have, through the interrogation, did you have a sense of how far along the Japanese were with their research?

GH: I had no idea, but according to what I read, they say they were as advanced as the Germans, but the Japanese had trouble. They didn't have the Uranium-(235), and as a matter of fact, they were being shipped on a, by submarine from Germany to Japan. But we intercepted it, the message, and we sank the submarine.

TI: So it really was a race for the atomic bomb between the...

GH: Well, I'm sure they had still a long ways to go. As a matter of fact, when we dropped the bomb, Dr. Nishina was asked by the military whether it was possible to complete the bomb within six months. But of course, when the bombs fell on Nagasaki, there wasn't, we don't know the answer.

TI: That's amazing. Yeah, I didn't know about that.

<End Segment 31> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.