<Begin Segment 24>

TI: Besides asking about the atomic bomb, do you remember any other questions from that survey?

HH: Oh, it was just the general questions about, "When did you think that the war was going to be over?" Well, in the Hiroshima area, there is a naval base, a place called Kure, K-U-R-E, a little navy base, and I saw the navy base there, and destroyers and some of the ships, because it's on the Inland Sea. And they didn't want those ships -- of course, they were already back in the base also, kind of, not in the water itself, they were kind of beached in a way, because in case it got bombed, it won't sink farther. So they were already in the base, because they didn't have any more fuel and whatever.

TI: So in some ways, already at that time period, the navy was almost ineffective, because they couldn't really do anything.

HH: Yes, because the Japanese fighters were not able to even challenge the U.S. airplanes, B-29s that were flying over Tokyo and dropping those incendiary bombs.

TI: So was the survey then -- I guess we're getting to the findings of the survey -- so people were pretty much saying that the war was almost over? That they couldn't fight back?

HH: Yes. I don't know whether some of the letters that they're sending to their family members or whatever about the conditions and everything, I think probably they might have said something about it, but since we did not get a chance to get into the Java area, we weren't able to, in the OSS time when we were in India and such, we were not able to finish up our mission to pick up intelligence like that.

TI: But in terms of the public perception, I guess if you read some of the newspapers from that era, the U.S. newspapers, they talk about how the Japanese public was willing to fight to the death, that they were having bamboo sort of stakes ready to fight off the American soldiers if they came to the shores of Japan and things like that. I mean, was this survey sort of to capture the true sentiment of the people and what they thought about the war?

HH: I think so. That's part of the survey, bombing survey, which they expanded from the European area.

TI: And so when the survey was done, then what happened next?

HH: Well, by that time, we were only assigned for six months' duty, so by May we were, myself anyway, I was going to be coming back on a ship.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.