In the autumn of 1942, the War Department published two articles about prisoner interrogation just two weeks apart, and they described what appeared to be two entirely different jobs. The first, dated October 8, carried the notes of a British intelligence officer who had spent the winter campaign in the Western Desert taking Germans prisoner. His summary was blunt: most of them would at least admit their unit. That was the most that could be obtained from them—rank, name, number, and unit if pressed, and then nothing further.
The second article, published on October 22 of the same year, dealt with Japanese prisoners and told American intelligence officers something none of them had planned for. It stated that capturing a single man alive was worth more to them than 50 dead enemy soldiers. The imbalance in raw material was striking. By mid-1944, German prisoners were arriving in the United States at a rate of 50,000 per month.
After nearly three years of war, the total number of Japanese prisoners in American hands was just under 2,000. From that small group came the kind of detail the British officer had warned his readers not to expect. On August 20, 1943, six survivors of a sunken Japanese submarine were brought to a camp at Numfor. Within days, the Americans had obtained her range, her armament, the seaplane in her deck hangar, her refueling points across the Pacific, and the identities of eight other submarines of her class then operating in shipping lanes off California, Oregon, and Washington.
The author of the first article was not complaining about his prisoners. He believed the technique he had learned was excellent, and he regarded the German prisoners as behaving true to their known pattern. They responded to a man shouting in their faces, and they responded to a display of knowledge. He offered one example.
A German engineer soldier arrived without a pay book and without an identity disk, which was unusual, and refused to disclose his unit. The officer asked whether he really imagined the British did not know the engineer units in Libya. The man said yes, he imagined exactly that. When the officer recited the list, the man immediately named his unit.
That was the nature of the matter, and it had its limits. Most Germans remained tight-lipped about anything tactical, and identity was usually drawn from the body, not the mouth. The pay book was standard material and almost always contained what the British officer needed. In cases where pay books were left in company offices before operations, the men carried an identity certificate instead, showing rank, name, birth details, and date of arrival in Africa.
Above all, there was the field post number, which had been collected early in the campaign into a working army-level index. Maps were nearly useless. An ordinary German soldier never handled one, and if a prisoner was asked to locate a position on a map, he almost always misjudged the scale. The officer’s own advice was not to expect much from interrogation, and to be suspicious of anything exaggerated.
His real haul in North Africa had come from papers, not from people: a map showing the location of every German unit in the sector, an operations order, and most importantly, the complete signal office of a Panzer division. That same distinction played out on a stage in the hills of Maryland in a three-act play called “Scrap of Paper. ” It was written for a school that trained investigators to deal with both enemies at the same time. The American at the camp in New Mie was a Marine lieutenant named Robert Sheeks.
He was born in China to American parents in 1922 and raised in Shanghai, where he studied until he was thirteen, and the family returned home in 1935. He was studying at Harvard University on scholarship when the war began. Naval intelligence pulled him from university to study Japanese for a year, first at Berkeley and then at Boulder, and assigned him to the Marine Corps. The six men before him were not officers, and no one thought that made them useless, because Japanese submarine crews were volunteers chosen from the best men, trained as rigorously as their officers, and each man knew his boat intimately.
What none of them had been instructed in was how to behave once captured. Sheeks kept them in solitary cells so they could not agree on a common story. A Japanese-American sergeant served as his assistant and issued the commands any enlisted man in that navy had heard thousands of times: enter, approach the desk, stand at attention. The goal was to create an environment these men recognized, so that answering a senior officer felt natural.
It began with name, rank, age, place of birth, education, and unit, then expanded from there. It did not happen immediately. Most of the six tried to avoid the early questions, some by claiming ignorance and some by fabricating answers. What broke that resistance was repetition and arithmetic.
Each man was interrogated alone, and his answers were checked against notes from every other session until the men could be confronted with their false replies. After that, the details began to emerge. A range of up to 16,000 miles, a crew of 100 men, a deck gun, 17 torpedoes, an aircraft in a watertight hangar, and navigation routes and refueling points that had brought submarines of that class close enough to bombard the Oregon coast the previous year. A Navy report later credited the interception and sinking of one or two large Japanese submarines partly to what that crew disclosed.
The gap between the two reports was not a gap in courage, nor was it a gap in interrogation skill. It was an administrative gap. It could be dated to two weeks in 1929 and one morning in 1941, and neither occurred anywhere near a battlefield. Forty-seven governments signed the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war in 1929.
Germany ratified it. Japan signed it and took no further step, and the reason was written down clearly, not hidden. The imperial soldier was not expected to be captured, so the treaty would work in one direction only: Japan would feed and house prisoners while the other side had no one to feed. The result for the German soldier was that he entered the field knowing a legal status awaited him with stated minimums and maximums.
Surname, rank, military number, and no obligation after that. On January 8, 1941, the War Minister in Tokyo issued a pocket manual to the front line. In it, the soldier was ordered not to bring upon himself the shame of being captured alive. The manual contained not a single page about what a man should do afterward, because according to its own logic, there was no “afterward.
” The rest of the order was mere paperwork. The man missing in battle was recorded as dead. His name was struck from the records at home, and an urn of ashes was sent to his relatives as proof of his death. That last detail comes through a prisoner who spoke to Allied interrogators and was published in the October article, and there is nothing in the article to indicate anyone verified it.
So the German prisoner arrived with a script, while the Japanese prisoner arrived with nothing. The October article was blunt about what followed. His security was more a matter of external training than internal conviction, and in a new environment, that training faded. Nearly everything here came from placing two ordinary documents side by side.
No one had kept them together, and the signal that this connection was worth the effort is an acknowledgment. The school in Maryland is where the two problems met on one floor. The Military Intelligence Training Center opened at Camp Ritchie on June 19, 1942, and offered an eight-week course covering terrain, signals, staff duties, counterintelligence, enemy armies, and aerial photography, with a specialized unit for prisoner interrogation and captured document translation. There were 265 hours of general training, 82 hours of specialized training, followed by eight days in the field.
The school also had professional actors on its staff. One of their productions on handling prisoners reached about 150,000 American soldiers by the summer of 1944, touring maneuver areas, the staff college at Leavenworth, West Point, and Quantico. “Scrap of Paper” was another of their productions, set in Formosa, following a Japanese attack order from the office where a typist printed it to the stronghold that fell because the Americans had become able to understand it. Near the middle of the film, one American character tells another that the Japanese prisoner cannot be handled the same way as an Italian or a German.
That humane treatment must be visible, and that simple kindness is what makes him talk. That line was written to be performed before men who would soon take on this task in both theaters. Japanese document security rested on a premise their officers stated publicly: that Westerners could never learn the writing, certainly not in cursive forms. That was an acceptable bet in 1935.
By 1943, it was a losing bet, and no one in Tokyo seemed to have reconsidered it. This is not to say the Germans stayed silent, for they revealed a great deal of information. It simply had to be pulled from them rather than asked for. In three country houses—Trent Park north of London, Latimer House, and Wilton Park in Buckinghamshire—the conversations of more than 10,000 men in British hands were monitored.
Senior officers were given non-coercive interviews on arrival, then treated as guests, fed well, taken on supervised outings, and left alone together. Microphones were placed behind paneling, under wall edges, and in the garden. These were mostly German-speaking refugees. Their transcripts were recorded on lacquer discs, and the staff were told to stay on duty until the prisoners fell asleep, because some kept talking after lights out.
The core of that operation involved the rocket program. The monitored conversations revealed development work, the sites were attacked, and the weapon’s entry into service was delayed beyond what it would have been otherwise. By the summer of 1943, the American side began writing down what worked in the Pacific. A Marine major named Sherwood Moran presented his method in a memorandum titled “Proposals for Japanese Language Interpreters Based on Field Work.
” Moran had been a missionary in Japan for a quarter of a century, entered Marine Corps headquarters in Washington at age fifty-six after Pearl Harbor, and landed on Guadalcanal beach with the First Marine Division as senior language intelligence officer, the oldest man on the island. The core of his memo was that the interpreter must speak to the man before him as one human being to another, and that the work was more like the art of winning hearts than interrogating suspects. On Guadalcanal, that view was a minority one. One regimental commander there even ordered his men not to bother dealing with prisoners at all.
The Navy language school issued its students the six-volume “Naganuma” books, stamped as government property and required to be returned at the end of the course. Sheeks took several of them with him to the Pacific, and no one ever asked for them back. The clearest statement of what all this achieved came on February 5, 1945, when the Marine Corps intelligence section wrote a paper for officers to read aloud to the troops. The paper stated that despite the fanaticism the Japanese soldier had often shown, he was frequently ready to tell the truth once captured.
Then the paper presented the example it thought would have the desired effect. On Saipan, one prisoner pointed out a tank position, a dump of ammunition and food, a water source, headquarters of several units, and a large concentration of troops. All of it was neutralized from the battle. The paper’s summary was that this was accomplished without a single American casualty.
The paper never named the man, never said when during the campaign he was captured, and never named who interrogated him. The result stayed in the file while its source faded away. Sheeks had come to that battle from Tarawa, where in November 1943 he had stood a few feet from Japanese troops inside a bunker with no way to speak to them, and the answers there were a flamethrower or a bulldozer. On his return to Hawaii, he designed surrender leaflets, persuaded a motor sergeant to mount a loudspeaker on a jeep, and spent unit recreation funds on hand-held loudspeakers.
He was awarded the Bronze Star with combat “V” device in August 1944. There was a strict ceiling on all of this, and it was military rank. Japanese officers almost never surrendered, so almost every prisoner was an enlisted man with information equivalent to the size of a platoon rather than staff-level intelligence. The British in Burma, for the entire campaign, never captured any live prisoner above the rank of captain.
The October article addressed the same divide from another angle, noting that Japanese officers had received some security training and gave their superiors’ names reluctantly, while their soldiers did not realize that talking could reveal anyone. The Americans never reached the top of that army. What they got was broad and shallow, and they got it in large quantities because there was nothing higher to obtain. The Allied Translator and Interpreter Section outside Brisbane eventually grew to more than 2,500 people.
Over the course of the war, the section produced 779 interrogation reports derived from more than 10,000 prisoners, plus a few thousand bulletins published two or three times a week. Compared with the millions of German prisoners, that source material was tiny. The Army opened its first Japanese language school six weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack, in an abandoned airmail hangar at Crissy Field, with 60 students, eight teachers, and a budget of $2,000. Fifty-eight of the sixty were Japanese-Americans.
It was aimed at an army whose officers had assured each other that their writing could never be deciphered by foreigners. And it was operating out of a shed the post office had discarded. Sheeks survived the war. He later became information officer at the U.
S. State Department in Taiwan. He was photographed at age seventy-two, standing beside the Second Marine Division memorial on Saipan in June 1994. The asymmetry the two articles found was not between two types of soldier.
The October article gave the justification heard from the men themselves in eight words. Officially, I am dead. Legally, I am stateless. No one in the Allied ranks ever had to wonder what the German prisoner thought of his legal status.
The pay book in his pocket had already given them his name, unit, and number, and he knew that information was in it when he handed it over.