One Marine's War: A Combat Interpreter's Quest for Humanity in the Pacific.

• Author: McGibbon, Ian
• Position: Book review

ONE MARINE'S WAR

A Combat Interpreter's Quest for Humanity in the Pacific

Author: Gerald A. Meehl

Published by: Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 2012, 246pp, US$34.95.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The Pacific War, from 1941 to 1945, was notable for the savagery of its combat. Determined not to dishonour their military code, in which surrender had no place, Japanese soldiers usually fought to the death--often bringing it about in suicidal charges. American troops, unsettled by the fanaticism of their enemy and such tactics, showed little compunction in killing their adversaries.

For one small group within the vast US military, however, saving enemy lives was an imperative. Live prisoners of war offered the opportunity to secure valuable operational intelligence. Obtaining this intelligence required, of course, an ability to communicate with the enemy, and in recognition of this the US authorities had wasted no time after the outbreak of war in developing Japanese language programmes to produce Japanese-speaking officers. That developed by the US Navy was initially based at Berkeley, near San Francisco, but eventually shifted to Boulder, Colorado.

One of the men who went through the course at Colorado was Bob Sheeks, who had spent the first thirteen years of his life in Shanghai, where his father had a job in an international company, who was studying at Harvard University when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and who was recruited into the language programme largely on the basis that he was taking a Chinese class. Working fourteen hours a day, six days a week, Sheeks survived a course that aimed to have the pupils reading, speaking and writing Japanese in little over a year.

After graduating, and being commissioned in the US Marines, Sheeks left for the combat zone in early 1943. His initial destination was New Zealand, where the unit to which he was assigned, the 2nd Marine Division, was recovering from its Guadalcanal ordeal. Sheeks found New Zealand uninviting--it was cold and wet the whole time he was there--but enjoyed his stay, not least because of two women, one of whom (a young Women's Army Auxiliary Corps soldier based at Fort Dorset that he met at a 'Tea Dance') 'rescued him from propriety'. After a few months he proceeded to Noumea. His tasks included interrogating Japanese survivors of the submarine I-17, which (though not mentioned) was sunk by the New Zealand warship HMNZS Tui between New Caledonia and Espiritu Santo on 19 August...