Military Occupation of Japan

     Greetings, All -- A piece in Military History magazine about the days when General Douglas MacArthur was the American Proconsul in postwar Japan, brought back a flood of memories.  We were members of the Occupation Team stationed at Atsugi Air Base.  The opening photograph in the article showed the General's personal aircraft of the time.  In common with the series, it was named "Bataan," after the peninsula that become the last redoubt of General "Skinny" Wainwright who took command after the President had ordered General MacArthur to evacuate to Australia.

     It was those events that gave rise to his famous pledge, "I shall return!"  Return he did with a huge naval flotilla and armies of fighting GIs and Marines.  Japanese General Yamashita, in command of the notorious "Death March" in which many thousands of U.S. and Filipino troops were murdered, was also known as "The Tiger of Malaya" for his earlier conquest of the peninsula and the island fortress, Singapore.  At the ceremony aboard U.S.S. Missouri at anchor in Tokyo Bay, despite the ravages of malnutrition while a prisoner of war, General Wainright held himself erect and accepted Japan's unconditional surrender.  The disgraced Yamashita was hanged later following his conviction of war crimes by an Allied court.  The Japanese surrender delegation is shown in an official photograph.

     We served as the S-3 Sergeant in the 872nd Engineer Aviation Battalion ("Strip Work is our Speciality.)  We were in the Eighth U.S. Army assigned to the 5th Army Air Force.  Our job was to build, renovate and maintain air fields in the Tokyo-Yokohama area.  Japanese aircraft were far lighter than most, if not all, U.S. types.  The first step in avoiding permanent damage to runway and hardstand surfaces was to cover them with PSP, Pierced Steel Planking.  It was ingeniously designed to be assembled like a tile floor, but was connected one to the other by steel clips.  The clips were placed by hand and hammered into position.  A collateral "advantage" of installing PSP was heavily damaged fingers.

     Elsewhere on this page, we have placed a photograph of Billy himself, dressed in fatigues, Army work clothes of the day.  The snapshot was taken by Army 1st Lt. John A. Dacy, a real sailor man with whom we attended high school.  John has passed away.  He left school a little early and signed on as an Ordinary Seaman on a gasoline tanker running from the Gulf of Mexico to Dharan in the Persian Gulf, the reverse of much of today's shipping.

     John survived his dangerous voyage through submarine-infested waters and was commissioned in the Army's quite large smaller-craft logistics Navy.  His assignment at the time of the snapshot was in Yokohama Harbor as skipper of Miss Em, an Army Air Force crash boat converted to service of the Commanding General, Eighth Army.  The craft was named after the General's spouse.  John had a nifty boat and we had an equally nifty Jeep.  We devised many highly productive outings based on those makings.

     Perhaps there will be more at another time.  Best wishes, Billy