Densho Digital Archive - Herbert Y. Miyasaki Interview (denshovh-mherbert-01-0003)

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LD: You had an officer named Laffin, didn't you?

HM: Yes, Captain Laffin.

LD: How did you feel about your officers?

HM: Personally, the only thing he was good at was speaking. Because he was connected with a United States company in Japan for maybe close to twenty years, I don't know the exact number of years. He could speak the language fluently, he couldn't read or write. When we went to Snelling from Savage, language specialists, I was handling language specialists then, he was one of them, he couldn't read or write. That's because they commissioned him. At that time, the injustice given, done by United States Army, our instructors, they all excel in the language, but because of our skin, none of us were commissioned, no. And then instead, person comes in, Caucasian comes in, and he goes to, maybe he spends four years in Tokyo as a military aide, all right? So he comes into school, and he goes to a specialist school. He can't read or write. He can speak, converse, yet he's commissioned to lead us into combat without knowing anything about military regulations and rules and regulations, no. Because they never had basic training. So they led us in, well, I hate to say it, but Laffin lost his life. People who were there, we know, we saw him, we buried him. That kind of injustice. If we had been given a leader with the unit, who qualified as a language, linguist, military tactician or strategist, we would have done lots more up there. Because none of those officers that accompanied us were qualified. They were officers commissioned by the United States Army.

Like when we were in Savage, going back to Savage, we graduated, we handled, like military terminology. That's something we don't hear in the United States, Japanese military terminology. Here comes a bunch of less than twenty years old and twenty-five years old boys, they stayed in the school maybe two months and all got commissions, second lieutenant, they're all Caucasian. Oh, there are a bunch of Jews, the "Chairborne Infantry" we used to call them. You go to combat, you don't last. They don't endure. Why, I don't know. First of all, they're not qualified language-wise. You've got to fight them with language. Because I don't care, what we do is psychological warfare. We're only fourteen in numbers, we can't outfight the Japanese. I turned them around mentally, it's very hard. That's what Kenny Yasui did, [inaudible]. He went over there, but they didn't know he was there, American men, GI. We used to go on the radio, loudspeaker, in the jungle, all that. I think Hank Gosho may have done some, I don't know for sure. Calling to the Japanese troops to surrender, "You're all battled out, you're surrounded," this and that. And, "You don't have food, you don't have ammunition. How are you gonna fight?" We even can hear the GIs weeping back there, not American GIs. And then during the daytime, our bombers go up, drop bombs all over like toothpicks and matchsticks, you can see that. And then the whole ground would shake, and that's about three, four miles away. That continued for I don't know how long. All this time leaflets were being dropped, that's part of psychological warfare. And they were being prepared back there, we've got some people who were Delhi, I think, or maybe Calcutta.

LD: What kinds of things would you say to Japanese soldiers you think would appeal to him? What kinds of things do you say, what did you say in your appeal to surrender or appeal to give in? What would you say?

HM: Well, we always used the same line: "to die is so simple, to live is the hard part, to live. If you don't have any people, relatives, living back there in Japan, go ahead and die. Leave your remains over here in Burma. But if you care for them, your own children, if you love them, by all means, live and go back there, if that country needs some changing, change it." That's the kind of... well, along that lines, we used to appeal to prisoners.