<Begin Segment 7>

gky: Talk a little bit about what it was like to interrogate someone. What kinds of things go through your mind?

SI: Well, in the early days, in '42, you see the situation was such that -- New Guinea is a big island, sort of like east to west, and so the north shore was where most the Japanese troops were lined up. And they were being supplied from a base called Rabaul and we, of course, plastered that base to the extent that all they could do was send submarines and barges at night to send in supplies, send in replacements. So, for a long period of time, the Japanese troops, which is the 18th Army under General Adachi, was not in the best of shape. People had no medical supplies, no food, they're starving, and they're desperately trying to get together, coordinate some way to combine someplace. Of course, that was one of the main jobs I had to try to find out what they're trying to do. But when we did get prisoners, some of them would say, "I was lying out there wounded for days and days, the bugs and insects crawling all over me," and they're emaciated, and had dysentery and malaria, so, what we do is we help them by saying that, "You're going to be treated well. You're in a military field hospital and we're giving you the best medical treatment we can. We'll give you food and cigarettes," and they were very, very cooperative. When you talk with them, some of them were sort of half conscious, but we knew their names and their organizations, so you speak his name in Japanese and open his eyes, you know, startled, that he's hearing his name in Japanese. These guys, once they understood that what we tried to do was help them, we're not trying to torture them in any way, and we got tremendous information from a lot of them.

gky: It seems like there was a terrible fear of being tortured or beaten.

SI: Yes, yes. But we allayed that fear pretty early, especially ones who would -- now, if you got an air force pilot who was healthy, you know, and full of spirit, they were a different category because they still felt that they had to -- now, I never interrogated one of those fellows because I was just with the army. But from the experiences that people like Hadate and Steve had -- as a matter of fact, Steve Yamamoto was with me most of the time up the New Guinea coast, and he was doing most of the interrogation. I was in charge of all the translation work. So he had a bunch of these Japanese prisoners, and every time we captured the food supplies, special navy food supplies, they'd have the prisoners cook their food for them. That was much better than the stuff that we were getting from the army.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.