During the New Georgia Campaign in summer 1943, the 43rd Infantry Division (National Guard men from New England states) suffered the highest psychiatric casualties of any U.S. division in a single WWII operation, with nearly 1,950 men (15% of strength) affected by combat fatigue and shell shock. Japanese officer Toshihiro Oura documented these American soldiers' endurance in his diary, recording artillery fire, supply ships, and the men's resilience despite constant pressure, darkness, and losses. Tokyo had forbidden any soldier from praising the enemy, yet Oura's diary survived and was translated by Nisei interpreters (Japanese-Americans whose parents were in internment camps), revealing that the official Japanese propaganda claiming Americans would break under pressure was fundamentally wrong.
A Japanese Officer Watched Americans for 25 Days — Then Japan Forbade Him to Write What He Saw追加:
New Georgia Island, Solomon Islands, summer 1943.
Two American soldiers are lying in a foxhole.
Night is coming down fast.
Around them, jungle so thick you can't see your hand in front of your face.
And somewhere out there in the dark, Japanese voices are calling out. Not soldiers advancing, just voices calling, taunting, keeping the men awake.
The night before, in the confusion and the darkness, men in their own unit had fired on each other.
So, these two soldiers make a decision.
A small one.
They reach over and grip each other's forearm, wrist to wrist, the old Roman way.
And they hold on.
The other hand stays on the rifle.
That way, if something comes out of the dark, the man next to you feels it before you do.
And then they close their eyes.
Across the channel to the northwest, a Japanese officer is watching them.
Not through binoculars at that moment, through a diary.
Every day, every week, from the morning the Americans first set foot on this island, Tokyo had given him an order that was simple and absolute.
Anyone, any soldier, any officer, any commander who praised the Americans was betraying his country.
Not a word of admiration was permitted.
Not in letters home, not in official reports, not anywhere.
But what this officer was seeing from his forward position every single day, artillery fire coming in steady across 8 mi of open water, supply ships arriving through the bomb runs, the pressure building hour by hour without a break.
He couldn't find the words in Japanese to describe it.
Not because the language didn't have words, because Tokyo had told him which words were allowed. And none of them fit what he was looking at.
Those soldiers in the foxhole had no idea anyone was recording their endurance.
Tonight, we're going to look at that summer from both sides at the same time.
If stories like this one matter to you, the kind that never made it into the history books, hit that like button right now.
It's the only way this channel stays alive, and it's the only way stories like this one find the people who need to hear them.
Because the only person who wrote down what those soldiers did was the enemy watching from a distance.
June 29th, 1943.
Munda Point, New Georgia.
A Japanese anti-aircraft officer named Toshihiro Oura opened a small notebook at his forward observation post and wrote in what would become his war diary.
I wonder if they will come today.
He commanded 27 men, a handful of 25-mm and 40-mm anti-aircraft guns.
His assignment, protect the airfield at Munda Point, the last functioning Japanese airbase in the Central Solomon Islands. Without that airfield, Japan's grip on the Central Pacific begins to slip.
He knew the Americans were coming.
He just didn't know when.
That same week, on a transport ship moving south from Guadalcanal, men from Connecticut and Vermont and Rhode Island and Maine were checking their equipment.
The 43rd Infantry Division.
Their nickname, Winged Victory.
They were National Guard called up from four of the smallest states in New England.
Not professional soldiers, machinists, farmers, postal workers, school teachers, men who had signed their names on a National Guard roster years earlier, maybe for the extra money on weekends, or because the uniform meant something in a small town or simply because a neighbor asked. None of them had ever been in combat.
This was going to be the first time.
General John Hester, their division commander, had been handed an assignment that was bigger than a single division had any right to handle alone. Seize the New Georgia Island group, capture the airfield at Munda Point, and open the road toward Rabaul. His staff officers had spent months planning it, but planning and jungle are two different things. June 30th, 1943.
Before dawn, the men of the 43rd Infantry Division came ashore on Rendova Island, 8 mi to the southeast of Munda, across the Blanche Channel. The official Marine Corps history of the landing described it as having all the appearance of a regatta rather than a coordinated landing.
A regatta.
Rain was coming down hard. The beach had no real control point. Supplies were piling up in the mud without anyone to sort them.
Vehicles sank to their axles within minutes of hitting the shore.
The engineers of the Navy's 24th Construction Battalion tried to build corduroy roads out of coconut logs. The logs sank, too.
One bulldozer disappeared almost completely into the mud, and still the unloading continued.
Because the 103rd Field Artillery Battalion, the Rhode Island men, had one job that could not wait for the mud to stop.
Get the howitzers to higher ground. Get them aimed northwest and start firing.
The 103rd Field Artillery had done the math before they ever stepped off the ship.
8 mi across the Blanche Channel is within range of a 105-mm howitzer.
If belonged to the Americans, and if the guns could be set up on the high ground before the Japanese figured out what was happening, Munda Airfield would be in range.
Every hour it took to get those guns into position was an hour Ura's men could use to reinforce.
So, the artillery men from Rhode Island dragged howitzers through the mud.
They calculated firing angles on an island they'd never set foot on before that morning.
They ran telephone wire through the jungle to forward observers they hadn't yet placed.
By the afternoon of June 30th, the same day they landed, the first rounds were already crossing the channel.
Toshihiro Ura, across the channel to the northwest, heard them land.
He opened his diary and wrote, "Everything is as the enemy wishes it."
Now, here is what the history books won't tell you about those men from New England.
The 43rd Infantry Division holds a record from that summer that no American division has matched before or since.
Not a record anyone wants. In the New Georgia Campaign, July through September of 1943, the 43rd suffered the highest number of neuropsychiatric casualties of any American division in a single operation in the entire Second World War.
Nearly 1,950 men, more than 15% of the division's strength, shell shock, combat fatigue, war neurosis.
Call it what you will.
The official terms kept changing as the doctors tried to understand what they were seeing.
The 43rd made up only 40% of the Allied force on New Georgia, but it accounted for 80% of the psychiatric casualties across the entire campaign.
These were not men who broke because they were weak. They broke because they were thrown unprepared for the first time in their lives into a jungle so dense you couldn't see 10 ft, in darkness so complete you couldn't tell the difference between a Japanese soldier and your own sergeant, after weeks of no sleep, constant rain, dysentery, malaria, and an enemy that used the night itself as a weapon.
Japanese soldiers would crawl close to the American lines after dark and simply call out, in English sometimes, "Marine, you die tonight."
"Blood for the emperor."
Not always attacking, just talking, keeping men awake, making them fire at shadows.
And in the confusion of one of those nights, men in the 43rd had turned and fired on each other.
That is why two soldiers in a foxhole decided to hold each other's wrist in the dark and keep their rifles in the other hand.
Not because they were brave in the storybook way, because they had thought it through.
And they held on.
The diary of Toshihiro Ura was found in the Munda area in August of 1943.
It was translated that same year in the field by Nisei interpreters attached to the 37th Infantry Division.
Japanese-American soldiers whose own families were sitting behind the wire of American camps while their sons read the notebooks of the enemy.
That translation is sitting in an archive right now.
And what it says about the men from Rhode Island and Vermont and Connecticut and Maine is something Tokyo spent the entire war making sure no Japanese citizen ever heard. Tokyo had a pamphlet. It was called The Psychology of the American Individual, and in 1942, it was distributed to Japanese soldiers across the Pacific.
It told them what they were going to be fighting.
Americans, the pamphlet said, thought about money.
They thought about comfort.
They did not carry the honor of their ancestors into battle.
They did not fight for something larger than themselves.
And when the pressure became too great, when the casualties mounted and the situation turned hopeless, they would break.
That was the foundation. Not a rumor.
Not a private opinion. An official document stamped with authority, handed to every man who might one day face an American rifle.
Praising the enemy. Questioning that document in any form was treated as an act of betrayal.
No newspaper in Japan was permitted to print a single favorable word about American fighting men, no matter what the soldiers on the ground were actually seeing.
Toshihiro Aura had read the pamphlet. He believed it. And then July started. July 3rd.
Aura wrote, "Everything is as the enemy wishes it. Today, again, no friendly planes appeared. Not even a boat came.
We are outnumbered 10 to 1, and our material and provisions are limited.
If we are going to fight, now is the time. Come and get us.
But the way things are going right now, we're just waiting to be struck by the enemy."
On Rendova, the men from New England were not thinking about the pamphlet.
They were digging, extending communication wire through the jungle, recalculating firing angles as the forward observers walked their rounds closer to the target, patching howitzers that the mud and the humidity were already working to destroy.
There is no photograph worth taking of men doing that kind of work.
There is no story worth telling about it, not in the usual way.
But every day they did it, the rounds landing on Munda Point arrived a little more precisely, a little closer to the revetments where Ura's anti-aircraft guns sat, a little harder to ignore.
July 4th, Japan sent 16 bombers to finish what the July 2nd raid had started. 16 planes.
The anti-aircraft batteries on Rendova, the men who had arrived in the chaos of a bad landing two days after losing 59 of their own, shot down 12 of them.
12 out of 16. Ura wrote it down the next day. No commentary, just the number.
He was a careful man with a diary. He wrote what he saw, and what he was seeing, day after day, did not match the pamphlet.
July 11th, General Oscar Griswold, commanding the 14th Corps, came ashore on New Georgia and looked at what the 43rd Division was dealing with.
He sent a message up the chain.
Things are going badly.
Three words, not a request for permission to stop, not a defense of what had happened, just the truth sent up the line so someone with more resources could act on it.
Two more divisions were brought in, the 25th and the 37th, and Griswold was put in command of the entire operation.
Not punished for telling the truth, given more to work with because he had.
Toshihiro Ura, watching from his observation post, saw the American force get larger.
He had been told the Americans would waver when things went badly.
He was watching them send for help and keep moving.
July 15th, Ura climbed to his forward observation post, the highest point in the Munda defensive line, what he called the eye of all the forces in Munda, and raised his binoculars toward Rendova.
He wrote, "I set up binoculars and observed the enemy positions."
What he saw from that post was a piece of ground that looked like a factory.
Guns, ammunition crates moving steadily from the beach to the firing positions, supply ships unloading in rotation, men going about their work in the rain, not preparing for something, working.
The way men work when they have already decided what the outcome is going to be, and they are simply doing the steps.
Oura was 16 days into his diary.
He had not yet written a word of praise for the Americans. He couldn't.
But the way he was writing around it, the counting, the listing, the careful notation of every plane that didn't appear, and every boat that didn't come, told a story that the pamphlet had not prepared him to write.
July 20th.
From his observation post, Oura watched a Japanese naval gun keep firing.
It had been under American artillery fire for days.
It should have been destroyed.
It was still firing.
He wrote, "It's a wonder they are still living. It is so hard to believe that they can endure so long.
They are showing us vividly the spirit of the Imperial Navy."
He was praising his own men.
But read that sentence again, slowly.
"It is so hard to believe that they can endure so long."
That is not what a confident man writes.
That is what a man writes when endurance has started to feel like a miracle, when he has been watching, day after day, what the other side is capable of, and he is beginning to understand that his own side is the one being ground down.
And the thing grinding down was across the channel.
Men who had landed in a rainstorm on a beach that looked like a disaster.
Men who had lost 59 of their own on July 2nd and gone back to the guns the same afternoon.
Men who in the darkness and confusion of a jungle night gripped each other's wrists and waited for morning.
Not everyone kept moving.
Some of them didn't make it back.
There is a list maintained to this day of the men from the 43rd Infantry Division who never came home from New Georgia.
Corporal Matthew Malone 103rd Field Artillery Battalion July 18th, 1943 Private Dale Dubois 172nd Infantry Regiment June 30th, 1943 the first day.
Staff Sergeant Walter Casey Division Artillery July 18th, 100 names on that list. Men from Connecticut and Rhode Island and Maine and Vermont.
Men who had grown up in towns most Americans couldn't find on a map, who had gone to work and come home to dinner and signed their names on a National Guard roster without any clear idea it would come to this.
Ura never learned those names. He saw the pressure from those guns and he recorded the pressure and he never knew who was on the other end of it.
July 22nd Ura wrote, "Just think, I haven't washed my body or my face, nor have I brushed my teeth for a month already.
One of my upper front teeth has been broken off. My body smells like that of a wild dog. Only by staying in the dugout can I say that I'm still alive."
This is the entry that most people skip over.
It is not a military report. It is a man sitting in a hole in the ground, exhausted, writing down what his own body feels like.
His tooth is broken. He hasn't bathed in a month.
He smells like an animal. He is alive because he has not left his dugout.
Then he wrote this.
What in the world could our forces at Rabual and the staff of the Imperial HQ be doing?
Where have our air forces and our battleships gone?
My most regretful thoughts are the grudge towards the forces in the rear and my increasing hatred towards the operational staff.
Toshihiro Uora did not hate the Americans.
He hated the men who had sent him here and then left him.
>> [clears throat] >> The generals far from the noise who kept issuing orders without sending what he needed to carry them out.
He still believed, he wrote, the Japanese naval forces would eventually come.
He still believed.
But you can hear in that sentence, you can feel it. That belief starting to cost him something.
Across the channel, the guns from Rhode Island were loading for another morning.
The Seabees were moving ammunition up from the beach. The forward observers were checking their coordinates. Nobody was waiting for reinforcements that weren't coming. They were just working.
July 23rd, 1943.
Toshihiro Uora wrote his last entry.
Where have our air forces and battleships gone? Are we to lose?
Why don't they start operations? We are positively fighting to win, but we have no weapons. We stand with rifles and bayonets to meet the enemy's aircraft, battleships, and medium artillery.
Then he wrote that he was coming down with malaria again.
And then the diary stops.
Six days later, the Japanese forces on New Georgia began to withdraw.
On the The of August 5th, 1943, soldiers and Marines overran the last Japanese defenders at Munda Point.
The airfield that Aura had spent 25 days trying to protect that fell.
General Griswold radioed Admiral Halsey, "Our ground forces today wrested Munda from the Japanese and presented to you as the sole owner."
Nine days later, the first Allied aircraft landed on the recaptured runway.
A Royal New Zealand Air Force P-40, followed by a Navy transport carrying Marine Brigadier General Francis Mulcahy to set up his new headquarters.
The Seabees had already been clearing the runway for days.
That is what they did next.
They moved to the next job.
Aura's diary was found in the Munda area in August of 1943.
We don't know exactly where.
We don't know who picked it up. We know it was translated that same year in the field by Nisei interpreters with the 37th Division.
And Toshiro Aura himself, his fate is unknown.
Given how few Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner on New Georgia, given what the final weeks of that campaign looked like, the most honest answer is that we will probably never know.
What he left behind is 25 days of careful handwriting in a small notebook.
25 days of watching the Americans, writing down what he saw, and not having the words, the permitted words, the approved words to say what it was.
Spring, 1944.
On the outskirts of Brisbane, Australia, there was a racetrack.
Before the war, it had been a place where people went on weekends to watch horses run.
By 1944, it had been converted into something the army called the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section, the largest military translation operation in the history of warfare.
Roughly 2,000 soldiers sat at field desks inside those converted grandstands, working through stacks of captured Japanese documents.
By the time the war ended, they would translate and process more than 20 million pages.
Most of it was what you'd expect. Order of battle data, unit rosters, maps, messages that told commanders where the enemy was and what he was planning.
That intelligence shortened the war, saved lives on both sides.
But a large portion of what those translators read every day was something different. Personal diaries, thousands of them, picked up from the ground on every island the Americans had taken.
Guadalcanal, Tarawa, New Georgia, Saipan, Peleliu.
Small notebooks pulled from the pockets and packs of Japanese soldiers who would never come home.
Most of the 2,000 translators were Nisei, second generation Japanese Americans born on American soil.
Their parents had come from Japan, farmers and fishermen and shopkeepers who had crossed the Pacific looking for the same thing most immigrants look for.
After Pearl Harbor, the government decided those parents were a security risk.
120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were removed from their homes and sent to internment camps in the desert and the mountains in Arizona, in Utah, in Colorado, in Wyoming.
Not charged with anything, not given a hearing, just moved.
Many of their sons volunteered for the army from inside the wire. Some of them were handed a rifle and sent to Europe with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated unit in American military history for its size and length of service.
Others were given a different assignment. They were sent to the racetrack in Brisbane to read the notebooks of the enemy in the language of their parents.
One of those men was Harry Fukuhara.
He was born in Seattle on New Year's Day, 1920.
His father had immigrated from Japan, worked hard, built something modest, and then died in 1933 when Harry was 13 years old.
After the funeral, his mother made a decision. She packed up the family and moved back to her hometown, Hiroshima.
Harry grew up there, went to school there, learned the language his father had left behind.
At 18, he looked at what Japan was becoming.
The military parades, the propaganda, the way people like him were treated for having an American face, and he bought a one-way ticket back to the United States.
His three brothers stayed in Japan with their mother.
December 7th, 1941, Harry Fukuhara was 21 years old living in California.
Two months later, under Executive Order 9066, he was sent to the Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona.
The government put him behind a fence because of his parents' ancestry, because of what his face looked like.
In November of 1942, the army came to the camp looking for men who spoke Japanese.
Harry Fukuhara signed up. He said later, "I realized the time had come for me to decide whether I wanted to be 100% American and fight for my country."
He trained at Camp Savage, Minnesota, graduated in May of 1943, was sent directly to Australia without a single day of standard military training.
No basic, no rifle range, nothing.
He was put on a plane to Brisbane, given a stack of documents, and told to get to work.
This is what Harry Fukuhara did in that racetrack in Brisbane.
He sat at a field desk and read the private thoughts of Japanese soldiers who were already dead.
He read about men missing their mothers, about men describing the smell of rice cooking that they hadn't eaten in weeks, about men writing down the name of a girl back home, a charm she had given them to wear around their neck as though writing it down would keep it real.
He read final pages, the kind of writing a man does when he knows he may not survive the next morning, and he translated it all into English, in the language his mother had spoken to him, for the government that was holding his mother behind a fence in Arizona.
As the translators worked through those thousands of notebooks from Guadalcanal, from Tarawa, from New Georgia, from Saipan, they began to notice a pattern.
It ran through diary after diary, island after island, year after year of the war.
In 1942, Japanese soldiers wrote about the Americans with contempt. Soft, dependent on machines, no fighting spirit. The pamphlet said so. The officers repeated it. The soldiers believed it.
In 1943, the contempt started to give way to something harder to name.
The writers were still following orders, still fighting, still dying in the caves and the jungles without surrendering.
But the language in the notebooks changed. Relentless, they don't stop.
We thought they would pull back.
They didn't pull back.
I don't understand it.
By 1944 and 1945, in the caves of Peleliu and the tunnels of Iwo Jima, some of the notebooks had stopped describing the Americans the way the pamphlet described them at all.
They described men who treated combat the way a craftsman treats a difficult job, not fanatics, not machines, men who had looked at what was in front of them and decided it was going to get done.
Harry Fukuhara and the other Nisei translators were the first Americans to read those words, the first to see the pattern forming across all those notebooks from all those islands, the enemy's honest assessment of what those New England men had done, translated into English by the sons of people the United States government had put behind a fence.
Harry Fukuhara himself never made it to New Georgia.
His war took him to New Guinea and the Philippines. But by the time he was working his way across the Pacific, two of his brothers back in Japan had been drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army.
They were training on Kyushu, preparing to defend the home islands against the invasion that the United States was planning, the invasion that Harry Fukuhara was preparing to be part of.
He told a historian years later that he lay awake thinking about it, that he had been hospitalized more than once with malaria and battle fatigue, that he was physically and emotionally exhausted, that he might one day be on a beach in Japan in an American uniform, and his brothers might be the men trying to kill him.
>> [clears throat] >> The atomic bomb ended that possibility.
On August 6th, 1945, the bomb fell on Hiroshima, on the city where his mother lived, where his brothers lived, where he had gone to school as a boy.
It was Harry Fukuhara's duty in the days that followed to go into the Japanese prisoner of war camps near Manila and read the announcement aloud.
In Japanese, he read it the way a man reads something he has to get through. A single bomb equivalent to thousands of tons of TNT, the entire city of Hiroshima.
The prisoners went quiet.
Fukuhara went quiet, too.
About a month later, he got authorization to travel to Hiroshima.
He found his mother alive.
She had survived in an underground shelter.
His older brother Victor was there, too, but Victor was dying.
Radiation sickness. Victor died shortly after.
Harry Fukuhara stayed in the army, retired as a full colonel in 1971, served his country for decades after the war that had nearly asked him to fight his own family.
He died in Honolulu in 2015 at the age of 95.
What Ura's diary said about those New England men and what the pattern of a thousand notebooks said about American soldiers across three years of Pacific fighting was that the pamphlet had been wrong.
Not wrong about the equipment, not wrong about the logistics, wrong about the men themselves.
Tokyo had said the Americans would break under pressure.
What Ura recorded day after day from his observation post above the Blanche Channel was the opposite of breaking.
He watched men land in a rainstorm. He watched them lose 59 of their own on the second day and go back to the guns.
He watched the artillery fire grow more accurate as the weeks passed.
He watched a general tell the truth about how badly things were going and watched two more divisions arrive because of it.
He watched the pressure build and he watched it never stop.
He didn't have the words for it. Tokyo hadn't given him the words because the words would have been praise.
And praise was treason. Aura's diary is in an archive. The records of the 43rd Infantry Division are in an archive.
The testimony of Harry Fukuhara is in an archive, recorded before he died, preserved in army records and in at least one book so it would not be lost with him.
These things survived. They are on opposite sides of the same story.
The notebook of the man who watched, the records of the men he was watching, and the translation sitting between them done by a man whose mother was in a shelter in Hiroshima while he was reading the enemy's honest account of what American soldiers were made of.
The men from Connecticut and Rhode Island and Maine and Vermont walked off that island in August of 1943.
Most of them went home after the war.
Some of them didn't.
The ones who did go home carried it with them, the jungle, the nights, the foxholes, the names. Some of them talked about it.
Most of them didn't.
If your father was there, if your grandfather was there, on New Georgia or Guadalcanal or Rendova or anywhere else in that part of the Pacific, he may have come home and sat down at a dinner table and never said a word about any of it.
Or he may have said one thing once and then gone quiet.
That one thing is worth more than anything in any archive because what Toshihiro Oura wrote in his notebook, what he saw and recorded and could not name, is the official record.
What your family carries is the human one.
And when the last person who remembers it is gone, it's gone.
If there's a story in your family from that war, from the Pacific, from those islands, from any of it, write it in the comments below.
Not because this channel needs it, because it deserves to exist somewhere outside of memory.
Because Ura wrote down what he saw, and the men he was watching deserve the same.
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