<Begin Segment 23>
TI: Well you must have done some extraordinary things back in New Guinea for him to feel so strongly about this.
SK: Well that's he said but I, I thought I was just doing my job of course. And I thought more of the, of the man that I interrogated who was a guard at a building. A manufacturing building.
TI: Well tell, tell us about this story.
SK: Because here comes a prisoner that I interrogated who is very detailed and very clear in his mind as to the nature of the location of the building itself that manufactured war products for Japan, where their railroad tracks came into the building and the highways and so forth, leading from it and he volunteered to draw me a diagram. So I encouraged it, and he drew me a diagram, which I attached to my report which I submitted. And so many days later, the 5th Air Force liaison officer came looking for me, shook my hand, congratulated me for the fantastic report that you gave, gave us, along with diagram of the building itself and here's a picture of the building as we took it and here's a picture of the building that used to be there. Nothing but rubble after they bombed it.
TI: So based on your interrogation of this prisoner you were able to get enough detail so that the Air Force...
SK: The Air Force took...
TI: Could come and...
SK: Right, right. And that's the building, that's the instance that my former boss in New Guinea who had been contacted by this 5th Air Force Liaison officer who wrote this report, we'd like, I'd like to show him something, refers to that incident. Years later in Tokyo when I came across him and he said, "Did you get that award that I, I wrote you for?" I said, "No." "I thought I put you in for a Bronze Star?" And then he made the mistake of asking me for permission. "Do, do you want me to look after, look into it for you," he says, and I said, "No thank you."
TI: Why did you say that? Getting a Bronze Star I would imagine would be very important.
SK: Well this is '40, what year. That would be '49, '50 something like that, years after the end of the war and I, I have no idea of, of making the service a career or anything like that you see. And for him to ask me for, whether I wanted him to look into it. I thought, if he thought that I deserved it, he doesn't have to ask me. He should go right ahead and look into it. That was my feeling and so I, I said, "It's too much water under the dam, forget it."
<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.