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gky: Did you get debriefed when you came back from the Dixie Mission?

SN: Beg pardon?

gky: Did you get debriefed?

SN: No. When I went back to Chungking, they were just ready to close up shop in Chungking and move the headquarters to Shanghai. And so I went back to Chungking in the latter part of September of '45, then was reassigned to another group called the U.S. Army Advisory Group that was supposed to go to Taiwan and observe and be an advisory group to the Nationalist army that was taking over the area, taking over Taiwan.

gky: So, it's like you're a professional observer.

SN: [Laughs] Yeah. But, for me, that tour, the service tour in Taiwan, was a fun deal. It was, you know -- we were assigned to southern Formosa and another group was assigned to Taipei and we were assigned to Tainan. And we just really didn't, we did hardly anything except to look around, and take the jeep and go for rides in the countryside of Taiwan. There was one thing that struck me funny when we -- the navy was supposed to bring Chinese Nationalist troops from Haiphong, which is the northern, which is now Vietnam. It was then French Indochina. And the navy was supposed to pick up the Chinese Nationalists division and take them over to southern Formosa, to southern Tainan. But they came down with a cholera epidemic, and so half of them were sick, so they say they'll have to postpone transporting the Chinese troops to Formosa. So George Nakamura and this guy -- among the Niseis, there's three of us Nisei, George Nakamura, who is the lieutenant; he became the language officer for the advisory group, then Tosh [Toshio Uesato] and I were the translation or interpreters.

[Interruption]

gky: This is the second tape with Sho Nomura, 14th of December, 2000 in Los Angeles. Okay, go ahead Sho.

SN: So, like I say, the Chinese occupation troops were southern Taiwan, came down with the cholera epidemic, so they said, "There's no use for you language people to stick around here," so we went back to Shanghai. And, in the meantime, the whole Chinese headquarters, our Chinese headquarters, had been transferred to Shanghai. And then, so we reported back to the Chinese translation and interrogation group, and they says, "Well, there's nothing for you to do here, so just take it easy until they say okay." So we just -- about three or four weeks before it was declared that the Chinese division was healthy enough to be transported to Tainan. And then after that three or four weeks, we went to Tainan, but we didn't do hardly anything.

gky: How did you know when the Dixie Mission was over? Was the only way you knew because they gave you orders that said...

SN: Yeah, that said it's all over, now you can go back to Chungking. Then in August, there was small corps of ten or fifteen people that were left, and I don't know when they left.

gky: How did you know -- the Dixie Mission was not considered a success.

SN: Not considered what?

gky: A success.

SN: That's right.

gky: So why did it fail?

SN: Because it didn't accomplish anything, really. That's the way I interpreted it, that it -- what did it accomplish? In reality, you can't say what it -- everything we reported was bolluxed up. About the only good thing about it in retrospect that turned out well for the Dixie Mission was our evacuation team. When the 14th Air Force would go out bombing Shanghai, or wherever the Japanese were, Beijing, Ceylon, their fighter pilots of these bombers, and on four occasions these fighter pilots were shot down and our evacuation team that was within the Dixie Mission, with the help of the Chinese communists, we were able to evacuate these downed pilots. That's about the only thing that I can say was really concrete and successful.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.