A Shanghai American: From an American Childhood in Shanghai to Marine Combat Interpreter on the Pacific Island Battlefields of Wwii

By Daniel S. Williams and Gerald A Meehl

A Shanghai American: From an American Childhood in Shanghai to Marine Combat Interpreter on the Pacific Island Battlefields of WWII

Dan Williams, son of Baptist missionary parents, grew up in Shanghai, China, in the 1920s and 1930s. His experiences there as a Shanghai American shaped the rest of his life. Dan returned to the States at age sixteen in 1936 after a memorable journey on the Trans-Siberian railway. With the start of WWII, Dan was recruited by the US Navy and sent to the University of Colorado for a one-year course at the Navy Japanese Language School. After graduation, he became a Marine officer with the Fourth Marine Division and participated in the harrowing island invasions of Kwajalein, Saipan, Tinian, and Iwo Jima. While under fire in intense combat, Dan’s job was to help his fellow Marines win battles by finding and translating Japanese documents and interrogating prisoners. This narrative memoir, told in Dan’s own words, vividly brings to life events that helped shape the history of the twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546255598

Daniel S. Williams

DANIEL S. WILLIAMS’ childhood experiences in Shanghai, where he grew up as the son of missionary parents, had a profound influence on the rest of his life. A number of his Shanghai American childhood friends joined him in learning Japanese at the US Navy Japanese Language School in Boulder, Colorado, during WWII. He went on to serve as a combat interpreter in the 4th Marine Division and participated in several island invasions during WWII. Gerald A. Meehl is the author of five books on WWII. He has written more than 200 articles on scientific and historical subjects, and has traveled extensively during the last four decades to visit sites of WWII Pacific island combat. He received his PhD from the University of Colorado, and he was on the science team of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

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© 2018 Daniel S. Williams And Gerald A. Meehl. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/28/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-5560-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-5794-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-5559-8 (e)

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Prologue (by Dan Williams)

Foreword (by Gerald Meehl)

Chapter 1 China, 1920-1936

Chapter 2 Back in the States and the start of WWII,

1936-1941

Chapter 3 Japanese Language School, Boulder, 1942-1943

Chapter 4 Marine Corps training, 1943

Chapter 5 First island landing: Invasion of Roi-Namur, 1944

Chapter 6 Hawaii, 1944

Chapter 7 Invasions of Saipan and Tinian, 1944

Chapter 8 Iwo Jima, 1945

Chapter 9 Hawaii after Iwo Jima, 1945

Chapter 10 Return to Shanghai, 1945

Chapter 11 Post-war

Williams photos

Acknowledgments

Prologue (by Dan Williams)

Parents, their work, and locations immediately make life decisions for every new family member they add to the world, and so it was in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.A. in November, 1920. James Toy Williams, by his preference always known as J.T. Williams, or perhaps Dr. J.T., was completing work for his doctorate degree in theology at the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville. His soon to be ThD degree, Doctor of Theology, had been preceded by a ThM degree, Master of Theology, some credits for which he had obtained at the Columbia University School of Divinity in New York.

His wife, Laurie Smith Williams, had graduated from Southern Baptist Training School for Women, with a Completion Certificate. Earlier she had graduated from the Georgia State Normal School for Women, located in Milledgeville, Georgia, not far from either Atlanta, or Warm Springs, Georgia.

Few, if any, named full colleges for women existed in early 1900s America. In later years, Laurie obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from the same Howard College in Alabama from which J.T. had been granted his BA so many years earlier. Laurie and J.T.’s son James, or Jim, was born in Hong Kong in 1914. Second son Daniel Smith Williams arrived on November 22, 1920, and was named for family members.

Family notes report pyloric stenosis, stomach obstruction, and surgery visits for Dan in Rome, Georgia on February 15, 1921 and May 19, 1921. Both were successful, evidently permitting visits to Alabama and Georgia to see various family members of J.T. and Laurie’s parents, before the family of four’s San Francisco sailing date for China. Travel details of that transcontinental train trip, though later fascinating for new generations, are lacking, but Laurie’s entrancing descriptions of the gorgeous American Rockies are remembered.

On October 12, 1921, the S.S. Hoosier State of the Pacific Mail Line departed San Francisco for Hong Kong, with intermediate stops at other ports, their first of which was Honolulu. Details of that visit to the Paradise of the Pacific are unfortunately missing, although postcard photos, sheet music of Aloha Oe, tapa bark cloth samples from Hawaii and other souvenirs saved by Laurie, as well as her related memories of Waikiki and the Hawaiians, provide some insight.

That voyage of the Hoosier State made the usual Japan stop at Yokohama, about which there were no recorded comments in the Baby Book made by family members there. The family debarked at Hong Kong, and boarded a side-wheeler Pearl River boat for the 90 mile trip to Canton and the newly assigned Tungshan neighborhood Williams’ home.

A young child, becoming aware of and remembering details of the world around as he slowly becomes aware of his surroundings as he matures, has an endless task. If that world is Canton, as it was for Dan, first random impressions included the many papaya trees, the exquisite taste of dragon tooth bananas, a nearby railroad track and its flattening capabilities for items purposely left on the rails, and mango ice cream. Notes on Dan kept by parents in a Baby Book, and recollections of parents and six year older brother Jim, provided some narrative. Dan’s own detailed and continuous observations began later, in due time.

For the Williams family, major changes of work and living locations as well as language used daily began. J.T. Williams was appointed Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer of the Southern Baptist Mission in China, with headquarters in Shanghai, China’s de facto financial capital. Necessitated first was a move to Beijing (then Peking) for almost one year of Chinese Mandarin dialect language study, added to the Chinese Cantonese learned and used by Dan’s parents during their more than seven year assignment to South China.

Spoken Cantonese and Mandarin differ. A speaker of one must learn the spoken language of the other to communicate. One, two, three in Mandarin sounds like ee, er, san, but in Cantonese is yut, ee, sam. With ee meaning one in Mandarin, but two in Cantonese; possibilities for confusion are infinite. And the tones are even more complicated. There are four tones in Mandarin, but eight tones are sometimes counted in Cantonese. An imagined example is to pronounce ping in each of the four Mandarin tones: High tone ping, low tone ping, rising tone ping, or falling tone ping. Meanings might be ice, sick, soldier, and cake. With up to eight tones in Cantonese, language schools in Hong Kong or Canton (now Guangzhou) would furnish solutions, as they had done for Dan’s parents, J.T. and Laurie.

Dad J.T. had been performing, while in Canton on his previous assignment to China, on-site financial duties for his employer, the Southern Baptist Mission in China, so becoming officially a part of Shanghai’s unique and sophisticated international business and financial community met many needs. Personal interest and experience in finance, plus masters and doctoral degrees earned in a major seminary, provided recognized capabilities in both the multitude of business affairs he managed and the church-related focus of his employer.

Daniel S. Williams

San Rafael, California

June, 2015

Foreword (by Gerald Meehl)

We need an interpreter right now!

With those words, a sailor burst into the office of the 4th Marine Division intelligence section (called D-2) aboard the USS Appalachian, command ship for the American invasion force slated to land the next day on the small Japanese-occupied islands of Roi and Namur in the Marshall Islands located in central Pacific. Although former money manager turned commanding officer of D-2, Gooderham Goodie McCormick, was in charge, all faces turned to a young Marine lieutenant, Dan Williams. He recently had completed intensive Japanese language training at a U.S. Navy language school located at the University of Colorado and was a freshly minted Japanese Language Officer. On this day he was destined to be the first person in the 4th Marine Division to speak to the enemy, an actual Japanese combatant.

The sailor, breathlessly standing in the doorway of D-2, related that one of the screening destroyers of their convoy had sunk a small enemy ship. A wounded survivor had been brought aboard and taken to the sick bay. Someone was needed as an interpreter to help in his emergency medical treatment and to interrogate the wounded prisoner. Dan leapt up and followed the sailor as he trotted towards sick bay. This would be what he had been trained for: an opportunity to put his newly-acquired Japanese language skill to good use.

The path that led Dan to this momentous day on the USS Appalachian, January 30, 1944, started in the Spring of 1942 when he was seated in an office in the Old Navy Office building in Washington D.C. He was holding in his hands a document that would change the course of his life and the lives of many more young men as World War II played out in the Pacific theater over the next few years. In front of him was a uniformed Naval officer, Commander Albert Hindmarsh, who handed Dan a single sheet of paper to read. Hindmarsh had a stocky build, closely cropped dark hair graying at the temples, and wire-rimmed glasses. He sat trimly behind his desk, every inch a no-nonsense officer with a reserved military bearing that didn’t betray his Harvard PhD and previous status as a professor of international law there. During a pre-war stint as an exchange professor at Tokyo Imperial University, he had learned Japanese and also had joined the Naval Reserve. Dan had received a letter from Hindmarsh inviting him to appear for an interview, and had taken a few days off from his master’s degree studies at the University of Alabama to make this trip to Washington.

Dan stared at the paper and focused on a single sentence. It said that Hindmarsh was authorized to plan, formulate, organize, maintain and perpetuate a Japanese language proficiency for the U.S. Navy. The signature of the Chief of Naval Operations was at the bottom of the page. Dan guessed then why he had been invited to the audience with Hindmarsh; he was being interviewed to see if he would volunteer to learn Japanese and serve as an interpreter.

Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, rising tensions with the Japanese had led the US Navy to start building up its Japanese language capability. Hindmarsh and others recognized that, if war broke out with the Japanese, the Navy would need trained Japanese language interpreters, a lot of them, certainly many hundreds more than the handful in service at the time. Knowing the difficulty of learning to speak and write Japanese, and also knowing the Navy’s Japanese language program typically took several years to complete, a speeded-up version of the course would have to be devised with the goal that interpreters could be trained in about a year.

But who would be best suited to learn Japanese in such a short time period? The American expatriate community in Japan consisted of missionaries, businessmen and academics. Their offspring, who had either been born in Japan or raised there, would have some knowledge of the language. The so-called born in Japan (BIJ) children, now of college age, would be Hindmarsh’s highest priority recruiting targets. Next on his list were American children who had been born or raised in China in similar expatriate enclaves in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. These were the born in China (BIC) kids who grew up there in the 1920s and 30s. Although the BICs would not likely know much, if any, Japanese, they might at least be familiar with some similar words and with the written kanji characters shared by Chinese and Japanese. They would presumably be able to pick up Japanese faster than students starting with zero knowledge of these two languages. In his search for BIJs and BICs, Hindmarsh scoured the enrollment records of Ivy League schools that had a large concentration of BIJs and BICs, as well as colleges with Japanese language departments. Within weeks of the Pearl Harbor attack, Hindmarsh was sending letters to BIJs and BICs at universities across the country inviting them to interviews in Washington. He also visited other college campuses with large numbers of BIJs of BICs.

Dan had grown up in Shanghai and had been educated at the Shanghai American School (SAS) with American classmates who were now students in American universities. Many of them were being interviewed by Hindmarsh in his effort to recruit them to learn Japanese at a Navy Language School just recently re-located from Berkeley to Boulder, Colorado. After the interview with Hindmarsh, Dan would soon be re-united with many of his Shanghai classmates from the SAS.

Due to rising tensions between Japan and China, at age 16 in 1936 Dan returned from China and completed his high school education in Texas. He then attended the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa for his undergraduate degree. Because his parents continued to live and work in Shanghai, the closest he had to a family in the U.S. was an uncle who lived in Tuscaloosa. HG, as the uncle was known, was a charismatic Baptist minister and professor of religion at the University of Alabama. Though Alabama did not have a Japanese language department and thus no outward connection that would have led the Navy to him, Dan assumed his name came to be known to Hindmarsh by word of mouth from his former Shanghai classmates who also were being interviewed. Years later he learned that childhood friend from Shanghai, Bob Sheeks, who was one of Hindmarsh’s first recruits to the Japanese Language School, had steered the Navy to contact Dan.

Dan’s unexpected invitation letter said that if he possibly would be interested in getting involved with a Naval intelligence activity, please come for an interview to Washington D.C. He was first surprised, then intrigued, so he wired back in the affirmative. In a couple of days, he boarded the streamline train, the Southerner, that started in New Orleans every day headed north to New York via Tuscaloosa. He caught it in the evening, and the next morning was approaching Washington after a night on the train. As the train passed through Virginia and reached the outskirts of the nation’s capital, Dan saw a huge hole in the ground surrounded by construction equipment. Someone sitting near him said that was where the new war department building was being constructed. It later became known as the Pentagon. After arriving at the train station and catching a taxi to the old Navy building, Dan was escorted by two uniformed Marines to Hindmarsh’s office. Shortly after the interview started, Hindmarsh handed Dan the document he was now holding in his hands.

Dan looked up from the page of paper and Hindmarsh asked, Do you know any Japanese? Dan replied, A few things, hello, goodbye and some numbers. What about Chinese? I know a few characters, and speak a little bit. Hindmarsh asked a few more questions, and then he asked if Dan knew any kanji characters, the complicated elements of both Japanese and Chinese written language. Dan said he did, and Hindmarsh asked him to write a couple of them. After Dan finished and Hindmarsh looked approvingly at them, Dan mentioned that in addition to informally picking up Chinese as a kid, from the fifth grade on he had taken Chinese and French classes two or three times a week. As he related this information, he thought back to his Chinese teacher, habitually dressed in a long robe and a traditional cap. He didn’t know a word of English but taught Dan rudimentary spoken Chinese along with some written kanji characters.

After a few more questions, Hindmarsh said simply, You’re in. We need you. You’ll be in the Navy. Would you be interested? And that was all there was to it. This all sounded great to Dan so, without thinking twice, he readily agreed. Hindmarsh said he was to report to the new home of the Japanese Language School in Boulder, Colorado, as soon as possible. It had been recently re-located from Berkeley. What turned out to be unfounded fears of spies and sabotage drove the government to issue the regrettable Executive Order 9066 that dictated all Japanese-Americans were to be moved out of California and other west coast states. Since a number of instructors were Japanese-Americans, the school had to be shifted inland, and Colorado was the chosen location.

During his childhood in Shanghai, Dan and all his friends greatly respected the US Marines of the 4th Regiment who were stationed there. As a consequence, from a very young age Dan had aspired to become a Marine someday. When Hindmarsh mentioned that he would be commissioned as a Naval officer if he successfully completed the course, Dan didn’t ask about going into the Marines. As it turned out, his dream later came true when he was presented with the option to be commissioned as an officer in the Marine Corps when he graduated from the language course. But these were only distant concepts at that point, and the main thing was to clarify the timing of when he was expected to report to the school in Boulder. After this was done, he thanked Hindmarsh and left the office. From that point onward, Dan’s life arced on a different trajectory along with all the other young men who sat for interviews with Hindmarsh.

Dan made his way to the University of Colorado in Boulder later that spring of 1942, and began learning Japanese in the one-year intensive training course in the Japanese Language School (JLS). It was a considerable intellectual challenge to become at least marginally proficient in Japanese in that short a period of time. The course was rigorous to say the least. It was total Japanese immersion 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for nearly thirteen months. At the end of the course, the graduates were required to read and speak Japanese.

Many of the JLS graduates accepted commissions as officers in the Navy and went on to work as document translators at intelligence centers in Hawaii, Australia and elsewhere. Others were assigned to Navy civil affairs units and would end up working with the large number of civilians captured on islands like Saipan and Tinian. But some graduates, like Dan, learned that since the Marines were part of the Navy, they could elect to become second lieutenants in the Marine Corps. After going through Marine basic training, these JLOs would be assigned to Marine combat divisions and serve in island campaigns across the vast sweep of the Pacific theater. They needed a proficient mastery of the language to be able to rapidly translate captured documents on the battlefield and provide intelligence to Marine combat units. They also would be tasked with quickly and efficiently interrogating any captured Japanese combatants to obtain critical information that could help save the lives of their fellow Marines as they fought in bitter and deadly combat with the Japanese.

After completing his Marine combat training in late 1943, Dan was the first Marine intelligence officer assigned to the USS Appalachian after it tied up at the pier across from the train station in San Diego. He had been greeted on arrival at the top of the gangplank by an enlisted man who had shown him to his own cabin, complete with a personal telephone and his name and phone number in the ship’s directory. Life on a Navy ship appeared to be quite civilized! It wasn’t too long before he was sharing his cabin with several other officers, but everyone on the Appalachian realized they were lucky to be on such a well-appointed new ship. It was brand new and the first of its kind, dubbed AGC-1. More of its type were on the way, but for the Marines on the Appalachian, it was a treat to be on such a modern vessel. It was the command ship, with facilities for the latest communication technology.

Soon the Appalachian shipped out with the rest of the invasion convoy. The commanding Marine general was on board, along with his boss, the head of the Third Corps. Everything about this ship was first class, with nicely appointed berths, a full medical staff and modern medical equipment, and cabins for the high ranking officers of the Division. The word vector was heard a lot on the ship because on board was the latest technology to track incoming enemy aircraft and vector U.S. planes to intercept them. When the Marines boarded the ship, they noticed that the paint still smelled fresh. Like a new car smell, the Appalachian had a new ship smell. The ship was gleaming and clean, something that the Marines would come to appreciate later when they sailed on older more worn-out ships.

After leaving San Diego, the 4th Marine Division was told they were sailing toward their first island landing, proceeding directly from California to Kwajalein atoll in the central tropical Pacific. D-2 had studied aerial reconnaissance photos and determined that the Japanese had built an airstrip and facilities for a base on Roi and Namur, two of the small islets that ringed the massive central lagoon of Kwajalein atoll. There were other facilities and fortifications on the main island at the south end of the lagoon, and when the Marines landed on Roi-Namur, the U.S. Army would land in southern Kwajalein.

Though the Marines had extensively planned and practiced for their first combat landing, there was a rising level of tension and anticipation on the Appalachian as the Marines contemplated the unknown and unknowable experience of combat that awaited them. As one of a handful of specially trained Marines who could communicate with the enemy, the primary job of JLOs like Dan was not combat, but he would land with the assault units and be in the line of fire just like all the rest of the Marines in the island invasion.

As Dan hustled through the passageways of the Appalachian, the sailor he was struggling to keep up with relayed a few more details over his shoulder. The warships accompanying the transports had come across a small Japanese ship. Not knowing what threat this enemy ship posed, they opened fire and sunk it. When they reached the patch of ocean where debris from the ship was scattered around on the surface, there were several survivors in the water. They were taken aboard, and one was transferred to the Appalachian for medical treatment and interrogation. It turned out that Lt. Dan Williams would be doing that interrogation.

They finally arrived at sick bay, and there in front of them, laid out on an operating table and wearing only a loincloth, was the injured Japanese sailor. A couple of Navy doctors and a corpsman were preparing to patch him up. One said that the injured man needed immediate medical care. The doctors were eager to ply their trade as a rehearsal for the anticipated combat casualties they would be dealing with in the very near future. The irony was that their first casualty, and the first patient in their shiny new sick bay, was an enemy POW. They were ready to treat the Japanese sailor, but there also was an urgent need to find out what he knew.

Dan was very well aware that this was a significant moment, his first interrogation of an enemy combatant. This was what he had trained for during his year in Boulder, and what he had imagined many times before. But now here it was, the real thing, like a final exam. He had studied for it, but he didn’t really know how he would perform when faced with the actual test. And this was the assignment: interrogate a Japanese POW in his own language, make enough sense of what the prisoner said to determine any intelligence value, and report the findings back to Colonel McCormick.

With the thrill of a new and challenging experience mixed with apprehension, Dan approached the young Japanese man. Before he could formulate a question, the sailor looked at him, and said simply, "Itai. Dan immediately recognized the Japanese expression for it hurts. Glancing down at the bloody open wound in the sailor’s leg, he quickly formulated a response, his first words spoken to a Japanese POW: Kono kizu wa taihen desu. Hijo ni itai desho. Shimpai shinaide. Koko ni totemo i i ishasan ga orimasu. This roughly translated to This injury is awful. It must be extremely painful. Do not worry. There are excellent doctors here."

Dan’s immediate objective before asking more relevant questions was to calm the POW down and reassure him that he was on a brand new ship with the best hospital facilities available and expert Navy doctors, and that he would be well taken care of. The doctors stood watching this scene in rapt silence. They couldn’t understand a word of what was being said, and they were fascinated to see an American Marine speak Japanese to the first enemy POW any of them had ever seen. Suddenly a flash bulb went off. A combat photographer, assigned to land with and photograph the Marines in action, had heard about the drama unfolding in sick bay and had appeared unnoticed to record the first interrogation of a Japanese POW by a 4th Marine Division language officer.

Dan continued in a conversational tone to relax the Japanese sailor who was agitated and in obvious pain. The POW mainly wanted to know what was going to happen to him. Dan reassured him again that he would be well-treated, and then the doctors set to work in cleaning and bandaging his wound. Dan now realized that the time spent in Boulder watching Japanese language films, which often seemed to involve hospital situations peppered with medical terminology, was serving him well in his first interrogation.

He asked a few questions about where the Japanese sailor had been and where his ship was going. The POW said he was part of the Japanese naval supply corps, and he was based on Roi-Namur. The ship he had been on was a fishing boat. As part of the provisioning of the island, he and some of his fellow supply troops were catching fish to supplement the food supplies shipped from Japan. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and ended up directly in the path of the onrushing American invasion convoy. Their small ship had no chance to avoid the deadly fire from one of the U.S. Navy destroyers.

Dan’s next questions were about the extent of damage to Japanese facilities on Roi and Namur from the pre-invasion bombing by American aircraft. The sailor was hesitant at first but finally confirmed aerial reconnaissance information analyzed by D-2 that numerous facilities on the island had been wrecked. Flight operations had been seriously disrupted with a number of aircraft either damaged or destroyed. The planes that were still flyable had been sent to Eniwetok, another Japanese-occupied island.

After a few more questions, Dan figured he had found out about all the Japanese sailor knew. He returned to the D-2 office and reported to his commanding officer what he had learned. The intelligence information more or less confirmed what they already knew, but Dan had a real sense of accomplishment. He had passed his first test in Japanese language. He had engaged an enemy sailor in conversation, he could understand what was being said, and he could formulate questions and provide information to the POW regarding his injuries and likely treatment. He also obtained information with intelligence value regarding their invasion target. This was the beginning of Dan Williams’ WWII experiences with the 4th Marine Division. He participated in many more interrogations of Japanese POWs in combat situations in each of the Division’s four island invasions. He also sorted through and translated numerous captured documents, came under fire during all four island campaigns, and survived