[Pages S548-S553]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

TRIBUTE TO THE LATE LT. COL. RICHARD SAKAKIDA

Mr. AKAKA. Mr. President, I want to take the floor of the U.S. Senate
to tell my colleagues and the people of Hawaii and the country about a
Hawaii-born unsung hero of World War II. His extraordinary story has
never been fully told.
In a description of Colonel Sakakida's wartime activities, it is
written that today Richard Sakakida is alive and well and living in
California.
I was deeply saddened by the death last week of Lt. Col. Richard
Sakakida near his home in Fremont, CA, after a lengthy illness. Colonel
Sakakida, one of America's genuine war heroes, faced death with the
same stoicism and dignity as he displayed in facing the dangers of war
and the constant pain of his war injuries.
Colonel Sakakida will be mourned by the many who knew him personally
or by reputation, including the thousands of Japanese-Americans who
followed his footsteps to serve in their country during the Second
World War.
He is survived by his beloved wife of many years, Cherry, to whom I
offer my deepest condolences.
Colonel Sakakida was a true hero, one whose contributions,
tragically, have never fully been recognized by his own Government. His
was one of the most amazing stories to come out of World War II.
As a United States Army undercover agent and prisoner of war of the
Japanese in the Philippines 50 years ago, he endured isolation,
privation, disease, shrapnel wounds, the constant threat of discovery,
and unspeakable physical torture in carrying out daring intelligence
missions for his country. His sacrifices not only resulted in the
advancement of the Allied cause during the Second World War, they
reflected a great sense of duty and personal courage rarely seen even
in that great conflict.
As one of the very first Nisei recruited to the United States
military service, Colonel Sakakida also helped to pave the way for the
thousands of other Japanese-Americans who would make their own
contributions to the war effort as members of the famed 100th/442d
Regimental Combat Team and the lesser known Military Intelligence
Service. Later, though he modestly would have denied this, Colonel
Sakakida's achievements opened doors of opportunity in the military and
society at large for subsequent generations of Japanese-Americans and
other minorities.
In death, as they never were in life, Colonel Sakakida's
accomplishments deserve to be remembered and honored. To this end, I
hope that Members of Congress will actively support efforts to ensure
that his military valor is one day recognized by his Government.
For the benefit of those who do not know this remarkable solder's
story, I ask unanimous consent that a description of Colonel Sakakida's
wartime activities as excerpted from ``America's Secret Army: The
Untold Story of the Counter Intelligence Corps'' be printed in the
Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:

America's Secret Army: The Untold Story of the Counter Intelligence
Corps

(By Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting)

sakakida

Of all the unsung heroes of World War Two, Richard Sakakida
must rank as one of the most remarkable. For courage,
fortitude and loyalty to his adopted homeland there were few
to rival him. Yet outside a small circle of veteran CIC
agents Sakakida's name is almost unknown, and his
extraordinary story has never been fully told.
Richard Sakakida was a native of Hawaii, the son of
Japanese parents who had emigrated there from Hiroshima at
the beginning of the century. Most Americans would have
described him as a Japanese-American, but the Japanese had a
special word for such expatriates--Nisei, meaning the
firstborn away from the homeland. Educated at a American high
school in Honolulu and brought up as an American citizen in a
Japanese family, Sakakida was a man of two cultures and two
languages. The outbreak of war between America and Japan
might easily have led to a hopeless confusion of loyalties in
a person of his dual background, but it did not. Like the
great majority of Nisei, many of whom were later to
distinguish themselves in action against the Germans in
Europe, Sakakida firmly considered himself to be an American
first and last. In March 1941, nine months before the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, this resolute, soft-voiced,
earnest-mannered young man was invited to put his unusual
linguistic and cultural qualifications to practical use by
joining the specialist branch of the U.S. Army best able to
take advantage of them--the CIC. Along with another young
Nisei, Arthur Komori, he was sworn in as a CIC agent in
Hawaii with the rank of sergeant. These were the first
Japanese-Americans ever to be recruited into the CIC, and
they were to be among the handful of their detachment to
survive the war against Japan.

[[Page S549]]

After an intensive training course in the use of codes and
ciphers and the recognition of prime targets, Sakakida and
Komori were told to prepare to embark on a secret mission,
the nature of which would be revealed to them later. They
were told that their destination was Manila, the capital city
of the Philippines, an American possession on the point of
independence, where the United States still maintained a
substantial military presence. They were warned that their
assignment would certainly be a source of inconvenience
and probably of danger. They were to say nothing except to
their immediate family--in Sakakida's case his widowed
mother.
Less than a month later the two agents set sail for Manila
on board a U.S. Army transport, traveling as deck hands in
order to conceal their identity as members of the armed
forces. In Manila, a city of tropical languor and almost
colonial ease, they were met by the Commanding Officer of the
CIC Detachment in the Philippines and briefed for the first
time about the nature of their mission. The magnitude of
their task took their breath away. It involved nothing less
than the counter intelligence investigation of the entire
Japanese community in Manila, into which they were required
to infiltrate themselves as undercover miles in order to
target those individuals who had connections with the
Japanese military and posed a threat to the security of the
United States Army. As a cover story they were to claim that
they were crew members of a freighter and had jumped ship
after tiring of life at sea--a story Komori enhanced by
adding that he was also a draft dodger, a state of affairs
which he reported later ``was favourably received by the pro-
Emperor sons of Japan.''
Sakakida was instructed to register at a small hotel called
the Nishikawa, while Komori checked in at the Toyo Hotel.
From these two bases the tyro agents were to start looking
around for roles in keeping with their assumed identities.
Their case officers, Major Raymond and Agent Grenfell D.
Drisko, were the only members of the CIC Detachment who knew
that they were Nisei agents. In order to stay in contact they
were given keys to a mailbox at the Central Post Office in
Manila under the name of Sixto Borja and told to check the
box twice daily for instructions about rendezvous places.
Major Raymond or Agent Drisko would then pick them up at a
prearranged spot and drive them by a roundabout route to the
Military Intelligence section in Forth Santiago, where they
could submit their report in safety and receive new
briefings. For Major Raymond, a long-time Agent, Sakakida and
Komori developed tremendous admiration and affection. ``He
gradually instilled in us the techniques of subtle
investigations and subterfuges in the best traditions of the
CIC,'' Komori recalled later. To him they owed everything
they knew about working as undercover agents amongst the
impendingly hostile Japanese.
And so, in the months preceding the outbreak of war, the
two young and apprehensive Nisei began the delicate task of
burrowing into the warren of the main Japanese community in
the Philippines, numbering more than 2,000 in all.
Sakakida posed as a sales representative of Sears,
Roebuck, whose sales brochures he had learnt by heart, and
spent most of his evenings in the Japanese Club, where he
assiduously ingratiated himself with the Japanese
businessmen who frequented this hotbed of Nippon
orthodoxy. Meanwhile Komori obtained a post as a teacher
of English at the Japanese Cultural Hall in Manila and
made use of this respectable position to win the
confidence and even the friendship of some of the leading
Japanese residents of the city--the Japanese Consul
General, the Chief of the Japanese News Agency, the Chief
of the Japanese Tourist Bureau, the Chief of the Japanese
Cultural Hall and many others. With few exceptions he
found the Japanese ``arrogant and expansionist-minded,''
openly sympathetic to the militaristic ambitions of the
Japanese Army generals and increasingly dismissive of the
more peaceable and compromising civil government in Tokyo.
War fever had developed to such an extent, Komori
reported, that one of his students in his English class, a
journalist who wrote for a newspaper in Osaka, even
reported the likely route of advance of the Japanese
forces once they had launched their attack against the
British in Singapore.
Komori had to go along with all this, of course, in order
to keep up his cover. He even had to seem to join in the
jinjoistic euphoria when Japanese planes bombed the American
fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7 December and drink toasts to the
Emperor when America declared war on Japan the following day.
The outbreak of war now put him in grave danger, for it meant
that henceforth he would be spying on an enemy people, and
would have to face the consequences if he put a foot wrong.
The war was only a few hours old when the complexities of
Komori's new situation were brutally brought home to him. He
was in the Japanese News Agency in Manila, downing yet
another sake in yet another toast to the Emperor, when the
door burst open and he found himself ringed by a group of
Filipino Constabulary with bayonets fixed. To the Filipinos
he was just another Japanese. Along with officials of the
News Agency, Komori was herded down the stairs and into a
waiting bus. He was then driven to the stinking old Bilibid
Prison--``the hell hole'' as he recalled, ``of Manila''--and
here he languished, an American agent amidst a gaggle of
enemy subjects, completely confident that Major Raymond would
eventually learn his whereabouts and rescue him.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the rising tide of anti-Japanese
feeling in the Philippines that followed the outbreak of
hostilities, Sakakida too had been thrown into the Bilibid
Prison, though via a much more circuitous chain of events. In
the preceding months he had found employment as a clerk in
the Nishikawa Hotel in return for his room and board, a
job which had given him an ideal opportunity to inspect
the passports and other credentials of Japanese visitors
to Manila. With the coming of the war Sakakida's
information-gathering operation gained much greater
momentum. The United States now required all Japanese
nationals to file declarations of their bank accounts and
assets, and many of them came to Sakakida to seek his help
in filling out all the various forms. In this way he was
able to interview a considerable portion of the Japanese
community in the Philippine capital and obtain a large
volume of information which did not go on the forms,
particularly about the military background of the people
concerned, all of which he passed on to U.S. Military
Intelligence.
Sakakida did not, of course, reveal to anyone that he was
an American citizen. Since to all outward appearances he was
completely Japanese, he was treated as such by the hostile
Filipinos, and before long he found himself in such physical
danger that he was forced to look to his own survival. When
the Manila radio station announced that all aliens should
report to their local police station for internment, Sakakida
was happy to oblige. Along with three other Japanese he was
flung in the back of an open police truck and driven off
through the narrow streets of Manila, where crowds of angry,
anti-Japanese Filipinos aimed blows and missiles at them, so
that they were bruised, bloody and exhausted by the time they
reached the sanctuary of the Japanese Club, now an internment
centre for Japanese, German and Italian aliens. A few days
later he was sent into Manila city to obtain food for the
children in the centre, and while he was there he took the
opportunity to return to his hotel to pick up his belongings.
But he had barely begun to pack his bags when he was seized
by three Filipino Secret Service agents on suspicion of being
a spy and thrown into Bilibid Prison, where like his fellow
agent Komori he languished in hope of rescue by his CIC
commander, Major Raymond.
By now the situation on the war front had begun to
deteriorate catastrophically. In the first phase of their
plans for the military conquest of the Far East, the Japanese
had launched an almost simultaneous assault on Hong Kong,
Malaya and the Philippines. On the same day as the attack on
Pearl Harbor, over half the bomber of the American air force
in the Far Eastern Theatre and one-third of the fighters were
destroyed in Japanese air attacks on the American air base at
Clark Field in the Philippines, and the naval base in Manila
Bay was effectively devastated. Without naval support or
command in the air, the commander of the Filipino and
American forces in the Philippines, General Douglas
MacArthur (Commanding General of the U.S. Army Forces, Far
East), had no real prospect of holding Manila when the
Japanese began landing ground forces in strength on the
island of Luzon on 20 December, and he ordered a
withdrawal southward to the natural stronghold of the
Bataan Peninsula and the island fortress of Corregidor,
where he would hold out as best he could till relief
arrived from Hawaii, perhaps in six months' time.
Inevitably Sakakida and Komori were swept up in the turmoil
of the last few desperate days before the Japanese entry into
Manila. Events moved swiftly. First they were snatched from
prison by Agent Drisko; then on Christmas Eve, with bombs
falling on manila and the sky over the city a lurid red from
the fires of burning buildings and oil tanks, they were
bundled on to a tiny steamer bound for Bataan, along with the
entire staff of the CIC Detachment and Military Intelligence
section and all their documents. Sakakida and Komori were
seconded to Corregidor, the tiny overgrown island fortress
off the tip of Bataan, popularly known as The Rock, where
General MacArthur had established his headquarters after the
retreat from Manila. Here Sakakida was assigned as General
MacArthur's personal interpreter and translator. So desperate
was the general need for Japanese linguists, however, that
both Sakakida and Komori were sent to work near the front
lines in Bataan in alternating three-day shifts, so that
while one was on The Rock the other would be in Bataan until
they changed places. In Bataan they operated from makeshift
headquarters of bamboo sticks and banana leaves in a clearing
in the jungle, where amid the screeching birds and clacking
palms they plunged into a frenzy of activity. They went on
patrols and scouting expeditions through the lines,
interrogated prisoners-of-war, interned collaborators,
collected enemy documents and translated them, amassed
information of all kinds about Japanese movements and
intentions.
On occasion Sakakida traveled to the front to collect
personal papers from the bodies of the Japanese dead, for
Japanese soldiers kept highly detailed diaries which provided
not only useful tactical information but illuminating
insights into the morale and outlook of the Japanese
soldiery. Once he was

[[Page S550]]
summoned from army headquarters to broadcast a surrender appeal in
Japanese to diehard Japanese troops fighting a last-ditch
battle in the cliff caves at Longoskawayan Point, where the
Japanese Army had been trying to build up a pocket to
outflank the American defences at the Bataan front. The
Japanese responded to Sakakida's appeal with a fusillade of
fire and had to be wiped out to a man by pointblank
gunnery. Sakakida was not very popular with American and
Filipino front-line troops, because wherever he went he
drew a lot of fire from the enraged Japanese. Sitting in
his fox hole with his microphone and loudspeaker and an
escort of Filipino Scouts, he would broadcast his
surrender message across to the Japanese front line, and
the Japanese would listen in silence with exquisite
politeness until he had finished, and then blast the area
to bits with mortars and grenades and anything else they
could lay their hands on. At one time Sakakida tried
firing little messages at them with a home-made catapult.
The messages, which were rolled up in 2-inch lengths of
piping, read: ``It is cherry blossom time back in your
homeland, and the military have sent you here to the
jungles of Bataan. You ought to be at home with your
families and loved ones enjoying the cherry blossom. So
why continue this futile battle? Come and surrender with
this leaflet and your shipment back home will be
guaranteed.''
After this bombardment of the Japanese positions with this
touching homily, a voice with a strong Japanese accent called
out in English from the jungle: ``What the hell are you
firing now, Americans? Are you out of ammunition?''
By now many agents found themselves in the thick of
intensive and desperate fighting. When Special Agent Lorenzo
Alvarado's unit lost all its officers, Alvarado assumed
command during a fire fight with the enemy, and for his
courage and initiative was subsequently decorated with a
gallantry award. Early in March one of Sakakida's colleagues,
Special Agent Harry Glass, made history by becoming the first
CIC agent to be wounded in World War Two. He was struck in
the neck by a .25 calibre rifle bullet fired by a Japanese
sniper hidden in a tree along a jungle trail. By a miracle,
the bullet entered one side of his neck and exited the other
side without piercing the oesophagus or severing any blood
vessels, and Glass was back on duty in a couple of days, with
only two small plasters, one on each side of his neck, to
mark the historic spots.
Back on Corregidor they found The Rock was not a nice place
to be. It was now raked daily from dawn to dusk by Japanese
air and artillery bombardment, so that the garrison was
forced to seek permanent shelter in the tunnel system bored
deep inside the hills, where they eked out an acutely
uncomfortable troglodytic existence on half rations. Under
the hail of Japanese high explosives the two Nisei on
Corregidor worked 16 to 20 hours a day helping to decipher
Japanese signal codes and monitoring Japanese air force
communications, which were broadcast in clear, thus enabling
the Americans to warn target areas on the island that a raid
was coming. Later they were joined by another Hawaiian-born
Nisei, Clarence Yamagata, a civilian who had practised law in
Manila and acted as part-time legal advisor to the
Japanese Consulate until the American withdrawal from the
city.
As time passed the American position became more and more
hopeless and untenable, even on fortress Corregidor. By the
beginning of April it was clear that the end was near for the
hard-pressed soldiers on Bataan. After three months of bitter
and intensive combat, malnutrition and disease the men were
exhausted. By now the average daily food intake was down to
800 calories per man; and 90 per cent of the Filipino Army
had no shoes. Hope of relief had faded and most were resigned
to the prospect of imminent surrender to an overwhelming
enemy. Few could now escape the tragic fate that was about to
overtake them.
On 9 April Bataan fell in the greatest capitulation in
American history and some 76,000 shattered American and
Filipino survivors were led north into captivity on a
notorious death march that killed over half their number.
Many of Sakakida's CIC comrades took part in this march.
Others were transported to the prison camps in crowded,
insufferably hot freight cars, without water or food. Most
were to die at the hands of the Japanese, succumbing to the
privation and brutality of the camps, or drowning in
torpedoed prison ships, or simply disappearing without trace.
One agent did manage to escape after the surrender on Bataan.
This was Grenfell D. Drisko, who had been one of the first
CIC contacts that Sakakida and Komori had made on their
arrival in the Philippines. Fleeing to the hills, Drisko had
joined up with a guerrilla group, but unconfirmed reports
indicate that shortly before the Americans recaptured the
Philippines, Drisko's location had been betrayed to the
Japanese in return for a bounty and he was subsequently
captured and killed.
By the time of the Bataan surrender General MacArthur had
already removed himself and his headquarters to the security
of distant Australia, leaving his deputy, General Wainwright,
to hold the fort--in a completely literal sense--on doomed
Corregidor. Both generals expressed deep concern over Komori
and Sakakida. Since the Japanese refused to recognize the
right of anyone of Japanese blood to bear loyalty to another
country, they would doubtless treat the two Nisei with even
greater harshness in captivity than they would their
Caucasian comrades--especially if they discovered that the
Nisei in question had been undercover agents of American
military intelligence. General MacArthur therefore ordered
Komori and Sakakida to leave the Philippines on the makeshift
evacuation flotilla known as the ``bamboo feet.'' This
presented Sakakida with the most difficult and momentous
decision in his life and marked his transition from an agent
of ability to a man of heroic stature--and a master spy.
Sakakida contended that the evacuation plans as they stood
entailed leaving Yamagata behind to face his fate as a
prisoner of the Japanese. In his view this was unthinkable.
Yamagata had openly occupied a position of trust among the
Japanese and then voluntarily come over to the American side.
Clearly he would be marked out for special treatment by his
captors--a fate too dreadful to contemplate. Sakakida was
also aware that Yamagata's wife and children were then living
in Japan, a situation which made Yamagata even more
vulnerable to any pressure the Japanese chose to put on him.
Sakakida himself was not in such a vulnerable position. He
had never worked openly for the Japanese, he had no wife or
family. It was therefore only right and just, he felt, that
Yamagata should take his place on the ride to freedom. He put
this proposal to his commanding officer, who in turn put it
to General Wainwright, who put it to General MacArthur, who
agreed. Sakakida would have to survive the Japanese
occupation as best he could.
So, early on the morning of 13 April 1942, Sakakida bade
Yamagata and fellow agent Komori farewell as they set off on
their breakout bid from the beleaguered island of Corregidor.
They went not by sea but by air, taking off from the island's
tiny airstrip on what was considered a ``50-50 attempt'' to
get out in an army training plane that had been patched up
after a previous crash landing, with an American newsman and
an emissary from the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek, also on
board. The plane flew through the Japanese blockade without
incident and landed on the more southerly Philippine island
of Panay. Here they were rescued by a B-25 bomber flown, in
Komori's recollection, by a legendary pilot by the name of
Captain Paul I. (``Pappy'') Gunn, an expert in dare-devil
low-level flying, who flew them out, Komori later recalled,
``in a flight in broad daylight through enemy territory in a
hedge-hopping, canyon-shooting, wave-skipping trip, during
which the pilot kept telling us that enemy planes could not
see us as we were flying only a few feet above our own
shadow.'' The B-25 landed on Mindanao, the most southerly of
the main Philippine islands, where it took on a maximum fuel
load and then took off again on an historic flight of 17
hours to Australia, the longest flight ever made by an
aircraft of that type. Komori was later to state that in his
view this flight had been a ``test hop'' which proved that a
B-25 could be flown much farther than had hitherto been
believed, and that it set a precedent for the bombing raid on
Japan made a few days later by B-25's from the aircraft
carrier Hornet.
Komori's first task in Australia was to write what turned
out to be the definitive American guideline for the handling
and interrogation of Japanese POWs, based on the experience
that he and Sakakida had had in Bataan. The two CIC Nisei had
found that if a Japanese captive was given a drink of water,
an American cigarette and immediate medical care if needed,
his fear of summary execution evaporated and he was happy to
disclose everything he knew or was asked. This ``kindness and
understanding'' approach was to pay off in huge tactical and
strategical intelligence gains throughout the rest of the war
in the Pacific area.
Because of his language capability, Komori was next
assigned to the newly formed Allied Translation and
Interrogation Section under Colonel Sidney Mashbir. ATIS
performed an increasingly valuable task in translating
captured enemy documents and interrogating captured Japanese
soldiers. But Komori was a CIC agent and was in due course
assigned to the chief of counter intelligence in MacArthur's
South West Pacific command, General Elliott Thorpe. When the
tilt of war clearly swung against the Japanese, Komori
rejoined the CIC in the field as the agent, first in the
Philippines during the American re-conquest, then in Japan,
where he was one of the first CIC agents to set foot after
the surrender. Komori was to make a career in the CIC after
the war, retiring as a colonel to practise law in his native
Hawaii.
Sakakida's experience was to prove very different. There
was little for him to do except wait. He jointed up with the
other members of the CIC detachment on Corregidor preparing
for the inevitable surrender and helped them destroy
intelligence files and other records. He was then instructed
to revert to his former role as an undercover agent and
officially listed as a civilian by the American command. It
was understood that if the opportunity ever arose he would
try to enter the Japanese forces with the object of
channelling intelligence material to the guerrilla formations
that were already gathering in the hills.
On 6 May the ravaged defenders of Corregidor were
overwhelmed by the greatly superior Japanese forces that had
fought their way ashore. After sustaining heavy U.S. losses,
General Wainright and several of his aides, carrying a while
flag, went out of the tunnels in the direction of the enemy
lines in order to arrange a surrender. Some four

[[Page S551]]
hours later Wainright had not returned--and the Japanese had not ceased
their onslaught. Fearing the worst for Wainright's fate, his
deputy, General Beebe, decided to take a small leaking
harbour craft and try and reach Bataan to contact some higher
ranking Japanese. Sakakida went with Beebe to
interpret; Special Agent James Rubard and several others
of the headquarters staff volunteered to man the boat for
the voyage across.
As the boat came in to Cabcaben Port on the south-east tip
of Bataan, a squad of Japanese soldiers appeared, forced the
Americans to stand at attention and then proceeded to remove
their dogtags, watches and other valuables. The Japanese NCO
in charge then spoke to Sakakida in Japanese, and when
Sakakida replied the NCO struck him a number of times,
breaking his glasses, cutting his face and knocking him to
the ground. ``Hold your temper, Kelly,'' General Beebe
admonished Sakakida, deliberately addressing him by a false
name in order to conceal his Nisei identity. Rubard feared
they were going to kill Sakakida on the spot, but instead
they refused to allow him to accompany General Beebe as an
interpreter and returned all but General Beebe and his aides
by Japanese landing craft to the area of Corregidor where
American forces were being held captive.
For CIC men like Rubard and Sakakida this was a highly
volatile and dangerous time, especially when the Japanese
began calling members of Wainright's headquarters staff to
Malinta Tunnel for interrogation. Along with other members of
G-2 staff, Agent Rubard had been engaged in despatching
Filipino natives in small boats to Bataan and to the mainland
to observe and report on Japanese military dispositions and
movements. Being aware of the identity of these Filipinos, he
feared that under intense physical abuse and torture he might
be compelled to reveal their names. For that reason he
intended concealing his identity from his captors, at least
until the interrogations had ceased and prisoners had been
transferred to other locations.
But Rubard's plan was foiled, and his life and that of his
CIC colleague Sakakida put in jeopardy, by the activities of
a certain John David Provoo, a former G-2 clerk from army
headquarters in Manila, who as a Japanese linguist had at one
time been considered as a potential recruit for the CIC
Philippines Detachment. Provoo had never been accepted into
CIC because his background investigation revealed that he was
a suspected homosexual and Japanese sympathizer who had spent
several years in Japan learning the Japanese language and
studying to be a Buddhist monk. Immediately after the
surrender of Corregidor, Provoo began acting as an
interpreter for the Japanese occupiers. He went with Japanese
troops to the hospital wing of Malinta Tunnel and relayed
their orders that all sick and wounded Americans should be
moved out at once so that Japanese wounded could be
hospitalized there. When he heard this order Captain Thompson
of the Medical Service Corps told Provoo: ``Tell them to go
to hell, the men are too sick to be moved.'' When
Provoo interpreted this response to the enemy, they
immediately dragged Thompson out of the tunnel and
executed him on the spot.
This same John David Provoo now brought a squad of Japanese
soldiers down to the prisoner enclosure and pointed out
Rubard and several other headquarters staff members. Three
grueling, intensive days of ceaseless interrogation then
befell the helpless Rubard as his captors demanded
information on codes, Filipino agents and much else besides.
At each interrogation the Japanese became increasingly angry
and abusive. But they were not very skilled in the art of
interrogation and were further hampered by their very limited
knowledge of English. By the third day of questioning
Rubard's interrogators were slapping him about and swinging
their swords to demonstrate how they would behead him if he
did not co-operate. But he was able to maintain a consistent
story throughout his interrogation. He claimed that his only
duty had been to keep the G-2 situation map up to date, that
codes were kept by the Signal Crops (which was true), and
that Filipino agents had been handled by two G-2 officers who
had been evacuated to Australia by submarine shortly before
the fall of the island. At the end of the third day Rubard
was returned to the prisoner compound with his head still
intact. The next day he joined the main body of American
prisoners leaving Corregidor for a prison camp in Central
Luzon. He was never interrogated again. (After his
liberation, Rubard learned that Provoo had worked for
Japanese propaganda radio in Tokyo during the war. He was
never charged as a traitor, however, and his trial in a U.S.
court on charges of complicity in the murder of Captain
Thompson was dismissed on the grounds that he had been denied
a right to a fair and speedy trial. So Provoo went unpunished
for his actions against his fellow countrymen, though some
years later he was reportedly imprisoned for different
criminal offenses.)
Like the surrendered troops on Bataan, the American
defenders of Corregidor were herded into captivity on a death
march which left many dead or dying, and some of those who
survived this grim ordeal then had to endure an even grimmer
one in the hands of the Japanese military police--the dreaded
Kempei Tai.
Sakakida was one of those in whom the Kempei Tai took a
special interest. He did not take part in the death march but
was kept on Corregidor for six months--the only American left
on this tragic rock. He had originally come to the attention
of the Japanese military on the very first day of the
surrender, when he had accompanied General Wainwright to
Bataan to act as interpreter at the surrender conference.
From that day his life had followed a steep decline into
hell. He told the Japanese that he had been taken by the
Americans from internment camp and made to work for them
under duress, but the Japanese did not believe this cover
story and produced several liberated Japanese prisoners-
of-war who testified that Sakakida had worked for the
United States Army as an interrogator on a completely
voluntary basis. He was kept in one of the side tunnels in
Corregidor's honeycomb of tunnel installations and
interrogated over a period of several months. As Sakakida
was not very cooperative the method of interrogation grew
daily more severe. Sakakida was tortured, often severely.
Sometimes he was burned all over his body with lighted
cigarettes, sometimes he was beaten. He was slung with his
back over a wooden beam, his feet dangling free of the
floor, and he had water pumped into his stomach and was
then jumped on by his Japanese guards.
It was never entirely clear whether the torture was meted
out as a punishment for being a Nisei, as a means of
extracting information, or both. The Kempi Tai not
unreasonably believed that any Japanese who had suddenly
appeared in their midst at the side of the American C-in-C in
the Philippines, as Sakakida had done, ought to have
something interesting to divulge to them, though they were
not sure what. So every so often they beat him and burned him
some more, but he still would not talk. He was taken to the
former School of Artillery at Fort Stotsenberg and tortured,
and sometimes he was hauled off to the Judge Advocate
General's section at Fourteenth Army Headquarters in Manila,
where the view and the faces were different but the general
ambience much the same as before. Throughout all this
unpleasantness Sakakida held out and stuck to his original
story. He claimed that he was a victim of circumstances and
that the Americans had taken him to Corregidor and Bataan as
an interpreter and nothing more. He maintained that he was an
American citizen (which was true) and a civilian (which was
not). Never once, burnt and bloody though he was, did he so
much as breathe a hint that he was an agent of enemy
intelligence.
In December 1942 Sakakida was removed to Bilibid Prison.
Here he shared the same cell block as Japanese soldiers
serving life sentences for surrendering to the Americans
during the battle for Bataan. Some of these soldiers had been
interrogated by Sakakida after their surrender and they now
relished the opportunity of getting their own back. Sakakida
was not informed that he was to stand trial for treason,
since anyone of Japanese ancestry was of necessity a Japanese
citizen, and it was therefore as a Japanese citizen that he
had given his services to his country's enemies, the
Americans. If this charge was continued with, Sakakida faced
the death sentence. But towards the end of the year
Fourteenth Army Headquarters received word from the Japanese
Foreign Ministry in Tokyo that, although Sakakida had
indeed been registered with the Japanese Consul in Hawaii
at birth, his Japanese citizenship had been officially
made void in August 1941 by his mother. She had the
foresight to take this action after her son had left for
the Philippines--an action which even the Japanese
recognized made the charge of treason illegal. The charge
against Sakakida was therefore reduced to one of
disturbing the peace and order of the Japanese Imperial
Forces in Japan, and the interrogation continued, and the
torture too, though on an appropriately reduced scale.
Then this luckless Nisei was put in solitary confinement
and left to rot.
Altogether Sakakida spent nearly a year in the hands of the
Kempei Tai. Finally, in February 1943, he was taken from
Bilibid Prison to the office of Colonel Nishiharu, Chief
Judge Advocate of Fourteenth Army Headquarters, who had
evidently reviewed the case and come to the conclusion the
story which Sakakida had continued to tell without a single
variation was in all probability genuine. The Colonel told
Sakakida that he would now be released from custody and taken
into his, the Colonel's, employ. He was to work in the office
as an English translator, run a mimeograph machine, make tea
and help out generally, and in his off-duty time he would
serve as a houseboy at the Colonel's home. Sakakida was soon
to discover that security was not the Japanese military's
strongest virtue. Ofter he found himself alone in the office
with countless sensitive documents lying untended in unlocked
filing cases. Some of these documents he proceeded to
memorize or purloin, though as yet he had no means of
communicating their contents to the Allied cause.
Sakadida's rehabilitation was only probationary, however.
At various times and in devious ways the Japanese tried to
trap him into an admission that he was a serving member of
the United States Army. One day someone threw him a .45
pistol to clean, just to see how he handled it. Sakakida
realized that to disassemble the weapon properly would
demonstrate an embarrassing military expertise on his part,
so he merely wiped it with an oily rag and handed it back. On
another occasion a Japanese officer, a graduate of Harvard
with a disarmingly sympathetic manner, quietly asked him how
much the

[[Page S552]]
U.S. Army paid him as an interpreter. Sakakida saw through this ruse at
once, of course--it was a common method of finding out a
prisoner's rank--and replied that he had received no pay at
all, only food and accomodation. Once he was alarmed to hear
the counterespionage chief at Fourteenth Army suddenly accuse
him out of the blue of being a sergeant in the American Army,
a charge he denied with sufficient vehemence for the officer
to turn to other things. All these ruses he survived, only to
be caught dipping into Colonel Nishiharu's precious stock
of American cigarettes, an outrage which earned him the
sack as houseboy at the Colonel's house (though he was
kept on in his job at the Colonel's office).
As it turned out, this was the best thing that could have
happened to him. He was now sent to live in the civilian
barracks in the former English Club in Manila city. Even
under its new managers, the English Club could hardly be
described as a penitentiary. Though the Japanese warrant
officer in charge kept strict discipline--roll call at six in
the morning and 11:30 at night, bed check at midnight--he
overlooked the hours between midnight and the morning roll
call. Sakakida thus found that he had several hours of the
night at his disposal to resume his role as a CIC agent deep
behind enemy lines. During those hours of darkness he had the
opportunity to pass on valuable intelligence information
gained at Fourteenth Army Headquarters during the day. He
knew that by this time the Filipino resistance had built up a
well-organized guerrilla movement in the mountains and
possibly had established radio contact with General
MacArthur's headquarters in Australia. If Sakakida could find
a suitable go-between he might be in a position to make an
important contribution to the intelligence war against Japan.
The risks he ran were appalling, but at no time did he see
himself as heroic--it was simply something he felt he had to
do, and was glad to do.
Sakakida's lucky break came not long afterwards, when the
wife of an imprisoned guerrilla leader, Ernest Tupas, who was
serving a 15-year sentence for anti-Japanese activities,
walked into the Judge Advocate General's office to apply for
a pass to visit her husband in Muntinglupa prison. Sakakida
was required to translate her request into Japanese and
during this initial contact he not only revealed his identity
as a U.S. Army Nisei to her, but was able to fill out a
number of bogus passes for her and other guerrillas' wives,
and also hand over several intelligence documents concerning
Japanese military plans. In return, Mrs. Tupas was able to
arrange meetings between Sakakida and many of her husband's
guerrilla comrades who were still at large in the Filipino
resistance. In his free hours Sakakida was able to pass on
tactical information to them and to hatch a daring plan to
spring Tupas and as many as 500 of his fellow guerrillas from
prison.
Sakakida's plan was simple in concept. All that was
required was for Sakakida himself and a small group of
guerrillas disguised as Japanese officers to overcome the
prison guards and release the inmates. In practice, of
course, it was a rather more complex business. There were
three essential components to Sakakida's plan. The first was
that Tupas himself should somehow wangle himself a job in
the prison's electrical department, so that at an
appropriate moment he would be in a position to short-
circuit the prison electrical facilities. The second was
that the guerrillas should keep a meticulous watch on the
prison in order to determine the precise movements and
time-keeping of the prison guards. The third was that
somehow they should get hold of five or six Japanese
officers' uniforms, preferably without knife-holes in the
back of the tunics.
All this was done and by October 1943 everything was
arranged. Immediately after the midnight bed check in the
barracks at the English Club, Sakakida stole out into the
darkened, deserted streets of Manila and made his way to his
rendezvous with the guerrilla raiding party. Along with four
of the guerrillas he changed into Japanese officer's uniform,
complete with medal ribbons and a clanking sword at his side,
and spent a few moments rehearsing army salutes and formal
Japanese bows. Then, with military precision and a haughty
imperial swagger to their stride, the group strutted off down
the road to the Muntinglupa prison, backs straight, chests
puffed out, faces grim and set, polished boots echoing click
clack on the paving stones. Sakakida, as the only ethnic
Japanese and linguist in the group, marched at their head as
they approached the main gate of the prison. It was he who
addressed the soldiers of the guard at the prison entrance,
barking at them in harsh, guttural commands which compelled
their confidence and respect. Thinking that the guerrillas
were officers from the Japanese garrison making their nightly
security inspection of the prison--which the guerrillas had
already established took place regularly between midnight and
2 a.m.--the guards bowed low in respect for their superiors,
in accordance with Japanese custom. And as they bowed, eyes
firmly fixed on the ground at their feet, Sakakida and his
partisan comrades tapped each one on the back of the head
with the weighted butt of a .45 revolver.
With precision timing the lights in the prison were
suddenly extinguished--Tupas had done his job well. Sakakida
was now joined by a second, much larger guerrilla group of
some 25 men, and under cover of the darkness and confusion
the reinforced guerrilla force broke into the prison, rapidly
overpowered the guards inside and began opening the cell
doors. Altogether nearly 500 Filipino prisoners escaped from
Japanese captivity that night in one of the biggest gaol-
breaks of the war. Most of them got clean away, scampering as
fast as their legs would carry them out to the city outskirts
and the friendlier countryside before dawn could reveal their
whereabouts to the enemy. By then Sakakida was safely back in
the English Club in time for morning roll call, and later in
the morning he had the gratification of witnessing the
hysterical Prison Superintendent report to the barely less
hysterical Judge Advocate General the inexplicable loss of
his entire contingent of prisoners--only to be dismissed
on the spot for his pains.
Among those who get away was the biggest prize of them all,
the guerrilla leader Tupas. With the other escapees, Tupas
made for the mountains of Rizal, where he set up new partisan
headquarters and--most crucially--established radio
communications with the Australian headquarters of General
MacArthur, who was now C-in-C of United States land and air
forces in the Pacific Theatre. At last Sakakida had a means
of relaying to the Americans the vast amount of information
he had acquired while he was working in Colonel Nishiharu's
office at Fourteenth Army Headquarters. In effect, Sakakida
had become one of that exotic band of makeshift intelligence
agents known as the ``coast watchers of the islands'', a
fifth column of traders, telegraphists, anthropologists,
civil servants and others who were left behind when the
islands were overrrun by the Japanese but managed to evade
captivity and to communicate information about Japanese
movements and forces by radio to MacArthur's headquarters
throughout the course of the war.
Sakakida's position was almost unique, however, for it was
a rare event in the history of World War Two for the Army
headquarters of one belligerent nation to have one of their
serving soldiers and intelligence agents reporting back from
the very heart of the Army headquarters of an enemy
belligerent nation. But this was the case with CIC Agent
Richard Sakakida. Moreover, much of the information he now
transmitted was priceless. Much of it concerned Japanese
troop movements and shipping activities, all of which was of
vital significance in the day-to-day conduct of the campaigns
in the Pacific Theatre. But probably his single most
devastating contribution to the American military cause was a
portion of the invasion plans of a Japanese Expeditionary
Force of the Thirty-Fifth Army which was to be sent to
Australia. Just how important these plans were Sakakida was
able to glean a few months later from a Japanese officer in
the Judge Advocate General's office who had taken part in the
ill-fated mission. The officer in question had been on board
one of the navy ships that had left the Philippines,
ostensibly with plans to land invasion forces at Port Darwin
in Northern Australia. The officer returned to the
Philippines on the only ship that got back. American
submarines had taken care of the rest.\1\
\1\ Since there is no record of any Japanese invasion of
Australia, it must be assumed that what Sakakida had in mind
here was the engagement known as the Battle of the Bismarck
Sea.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
With the tide of war now beginning to run against the
Japanese, and the dream of imperial conquest cracking and
crumbling away, Sakakida's position at Fourteenth Army
Headquarters grew steadily more precarious. It was not
that he was under any direct suspicion, only that as a
Nisei he was viewed with increasing opprobrium by any
member of the Japanese military who came into contact with
him. Once Japanese headquarters came under direct American
attack the mutterings against him deteriorated into
outright hostility. In December 1944, because of heavy air
raids on Manila, the Japanese commander in the
Philippines, General Yamashita, the legendary conqueror of
Singapore, was forced to move his headquarters to Baguio
in the mountainous north of Luzon, and then even farther
into the mountains, to Bontoc, a few months later. The
time had come, Sakakida reckoned, to make a break for it
and hide out through the final phase of the war in the
security of the hills.
It was not the first time he had considered escape. More
than a year previously General MacArthur's headquarters had
ordered Anderson's Guerrillas--a guerrilla unit led by an
American officer who had escaped from Battaan--to try and
extricate Sakakida from the Philippines, but Sakakida had
feared a trap, Anderson's messages to headquarters had got
garbled, and the whole operation had broken up in confusion.
This time he would make no mistake. Early in June 1945 he
escaped into the mountains and a week later joined up with a
small band of guerrillas in the vicinity of Farmschol. Ten
days later they came under heavy Japanese shelling during
which Sakakida was so badly wounded that he had to be left
behind when the guerrillas made good their escape. He was now
on his own and would remain so to the finish, wandering
between the lines for weeks and months on end.
In the remotest reaches of the jungle Sakakida lived more
like an animal than a man. Though the jungle was luxuriant it
offered little enough to eat beyond grass and wild fruits.
With a razor blade he removed shrapnel fragments embedded in
his abdomen, but his wounds festered and he was

[[Page S553]]
drenched by tropical cloudbursts, for it was into the rainy season, and
bitten to within an inch of his life by the hordes of
tropical insects. For months he endured semistarvation and
the ravages of malaria, dysentery and beriberi. His hair and
beard grew long and wild, his skin was covered in sores and
scratches, his voice grew cracked and feeble, his eyes burned
fever-bright his clothes hung in tatters. He had no means of
knowing what was happening in the outside world, no knowledge
of the course of the war, of the liberation of the
Philippines, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
American landings in Japan, the Japanese surrender to General
MacArthur on board the battleship Missouri. But he did notice
that no more American P-38 fighter-bomber planes were
coming over dropping napalm, and that there seemed to be a
lot of trigger-happy Filipinos about, whom he was careful
to avoid.
World War Two had been over for weeks when Sakakida decided
his condition was so desperate that he ought to attempt to
reach help. Finding himself close to the Asing River, he
resolved to follow it downstream, hoping to reach the sea,
but he was so ill he could only make painfully slow progress,
and sometimes he blacked out. Then one day he spotted some
movement among the trees ahead, a group of soldiers coming up
the hill, and he drew as close to them as he dared. The
soldiers carried equipment and wore helmets and uniforms
which were strange to him. They were clearly not Japanese,
nor obviously American, and his first thought was: ``God! Now
they've got Germans out here!'' Not until he was within
earshot of the men and could hear snatches of their
conversation did he suddenly, ecstatically, realize that they
were Americans after all. At first he was afraid to come out
of hiding for fear they would take one look at his wild
Japanese appearance and shoot first and ask questions later.
But eventually euphoria overcame his caution, and madly
waving his arms and yelling as loudly as he could, he stepped
out of the jungle for the first time in months.
``Don't shoot!'' he yelled. ``I'm an American! Can't you
see? An American!''
The soldiers were extremely skeptical. Sakakida hardly
looked human, and certainly not American. They took him to
their battalion headquarters, an outfit which turned out to
be a medical evacuation unit posted in the forward areas to
collect stragglers. To the CO of this unit Sakakida
identified himself as an intelligence agent captured by the
Japanese at the outbreak of the war, and he gave his serial
number (10100022) and other pertinent data to back up his
claim. The officer was also extremely doubtful about all this
but agreed to put through a telephone call to the CIC Field
Office, and two hours later two CIC lieutenants drove up in a
jeep, leapt out and identified the weary agent as one of the
men they had been ordered by General McArthur's headquarters
to look for. Then they bundled Richard Sakakida into the jeep
and drove him to the Bagadec Field Office of the First CIC
Region of the 441st CIC Detachment. He had come home at last.
An uproarious welcome engulfed this lone survivor and a
festive banquet was laid out in his honour, with fried
chicken and beer and white bread and fresh butter and other
good things. Having lived for months on nothing but herbs and
grasses, such sumptuous fare proved too rich for him and it
took him a week to recover from the effects of the most
memorable binge in his life.
Sakakida was hospitalized for a week, then sent to Manila
for de-briefing. His story was so extraordinary that he found
people needed a lot of convincing he had not been a
collaborator with the Japanese. At Christmas 1945 he was at
last sent home to Hawaii for two weeks' leave, one of which
he spent in hospital with malaria and a high white corpuscle
blood count. Then it was back to Manila, where he was
assigned to the War Crime Investigation team, locating and
identifying guilty parties, aided by the Japanese
predilection for keeping records and diaries. He testified in
the trial of General Yamashita and later in the trial of the
American traitor of Corregidor, Sergeant John David Provoo.
Commissioned in 1947, he sought a transfer to the air force
and was subsequently posted to Japan, finally retiring in
1975 as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force. Today
Richard Sakakida is alive and well and living in California--
and happy to avoid the ballyhoo that attends most national
heroes.
Richard Sakakida and Arthur Komori were among the only
members of the CIC Detachment in the Philippines--the ``Lost
Detachment''.--to survive the war. Others known to have
survived included Special Agents Lorenzo Alvardo, John Lynch,
Ralph Montgomery, James Rubard and Clyde Teske. Most of the
rest died in Japanese hands. Both these brave Nisei were
awarded Bronze Stars for their work which, in the words of
their commendation, ``they performed with complete disregard
to the danger in which they found themselves.'' These two
Nisei, the citation continued, ``are a credit to their people
and to the United States Army.'' Of Sakakida's exploits over
and above the call of duty, his friend Komori had this to
say: ``His successful duping of the Japs is the finest story
of counter intelligence within enemy lines. His recovery was
considered even more important than the capture of General
Yamashita, the conqueror of Singapore.''

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