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gky: Something else the MIS did was translate documents. What kind of documents would you consider important that you translated?

SI: I would say operation orders were the most important, and then there are diaries. The Japanese soldier writes everything in his diary and, as I say, their security indoctrination was far different from ours. We were not allowed to keep anything about our unit or what training we had, things like that. But these diaries, the first day that they're conscripted, they would write everything down, where they take their training, where their commanding officer was, and then when they joined a unit, they would put the same thing, "I joined this unit and so and so is the commanding officer," so forth, so forth. So one of the most important documents would be an individual diary.

gky: Did you consider them, I don't want to say personal, but did they help you to know the Japanese better?

SI: Oh, yes.

gky: In what way?

SI: Well, they would write their most innermost thoughts, so if they were scared, for example, you know, when we went into Leyte, which is on the southern part of the Philippines, Japan set down about nine convoys of troops directly from Japan down to Leyte. And, of course, because of the fact that we had broken their code, we knew exactly when they were coming, so most of them were blasted out of the water, but one or two got through. But in the diary that we had from one of them, explains the suffering. Day after day they're bombed and they're -- it's a futile effort, and it's very sad to read some of these diaries.

gky: I've read some of these diaries, some of them that said, one of them said, so and so died of illness, so and so died of illness, and every day was someone new had died, died of malaria, died because he drank water too fast.

SI: Yeah.

gky: It's so sad.

SI: It is sad and I think, well, in a way, for us, it was very fortunate that they allowed the soldiers to keep these diaries, because this is one of the best source of information that we had, and also in the war crimes trials. They would write things about what they did. We got the diary of a sergeant, I think, warrant officer who had cut off the neck of a prisoner, and in explaining it, it had his name. So, Anderton, who has a photographic mind, remembered that name and remembered the fact that when the prisoner came in he knew who it was, so we got him on that war crimes. Well, that's one of the ways that we used their diaries.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.