It took 14 days
It took 14 days.
That works out to an average of a little under four knots.
Four knots is around 4 1/2 m an hour.
A man in good health walks faster than that.
For 14 days and 14 nights, one of the United States Navy’s heavy cruisers crossed the Western Pacific slower than a walking pace in wartime inside the reach of enemy aircraft with her stern down 5 ft and four of her compartments full of seawater.
Houston made a similar passage, 1250 nautical miles, 13 days, four knots.
The tow line changed hands as they went.
Witchita had Canra first.
The fleet tug Muny took her later and then a tug named Watchill.
Houston went from Boston to the Ponyie.
Handing a tow line between ships at sea is delicate work in calm water and dangerous work in anything else.
And they did it repeatedly at night in a formation nobody could disperse.
Overhead, the carrier’s cabbat and cowpens kept aircraft in the air over the two cripples for the length of the run.
Those were light carriers with small air groups, and they spent day after day flying protection over ships that could not run instead of flying strikes at an enemy that could.
Aboard the ships themselves, the work never stopped.
Pumps ran continuously.
Shoring went in against bulkheads that were holding back the ocean and had been damaged by the same explosion that put the ocean there.
Men patched and listened and patched again.
On Houston, 200 men did the work of,00 and six of their wounded lay where they were because moving them was more dangerous than leaving them.
Canbor’s toe reached the Mugai Channel entrance to Ulythy at 5 in the morning on the 27th of October.
She came to anchor at 18 minutes 1 that afternoon, 14 days.
Ulithy was an anchorage, not a shipyard.
The repair ship Hector went alongside Houston and did what a repair ship can do, which is a great deal above the water line and almost nothing below it.
Patches went on.
Watertight integrity got better.
Neither cruiser got any closer to being a warship because neither one had been out of the water yet.
Canbor sat at Ulithy for 2 weeks.
On the 10th of November, she was taken under tow again and pointed south.
7 days later, on the 17th, she came into Seedler Harbor at Manis.
And on the 1st of December 1944, Canbor was walked into Absdutu and the pumps started.
Here is what happens when a floating dry dock lifts a ship.
The dock has already been ballasted down, so its floor sits deep below the surface, and only the tops of the sidewalls are showing.
The ship is warped in over the submerged floor by lines and capstands, one careful foot at a time, and positioned over a line of wooden blocks laid out in advance to match the shape of her keel.
Then the pumps start pushing water out of the dock’s ballast tanks.
The dock begins to rise.
The blocks come up under the ship and take her weight, and then very slowly over a period of hours, the water line goes down the side of the hull, down past the boot topping, down past the armor belt, down past the shell plating, that the torpedo opened up between frame 95 and frame 104, and then below the keel.
For the first time since 6:35 in the evening on the 13th of October, number three furoom and number four furoom on the USS Canra were not underneath the Pacific Ocean.
The 13th of October 1944 was a Friday.
So was the 1st of December.
Seven Fridays.
On the 1st of December, a volunteer salvage party from her own crew went down into those compartments.
They found the men who had been on watch there 49 days.
On the 4th of December, they brought out Harold her from number three fire room.
The remains were carried topside for identification and turned over to the base medical officer at Manis.
There is no way to make that sound like anything other than what it was.
Those men had been sealed inside a flooded compartment in the bottom of a warship for 7 weeks while that warship crossed 1300 m of ocean at walking speed.
The only thing on Earth that could get them out was a dry dock and the nearest one that was not floating in Seedler Harbor was 3,500 m away with a waiting list.
The steel got fixed, too.
That was the official purpose of the operation and it is what the paperwork records.
But the first thing that Dryd do once the water was off her was let the crew of the Canra go down and bring their shipmates up.
Canra came out of the dock and left Manis on the 13th of January 1945.
She reached Boston on the 17th of February.
Her permanent repairs there ran until the 15th of October 1945.
Houston’s turn came a few weeks after Canboras.
She had gone from Ulythy to Manis on the 20th of December and then waited because the dock was busy.
The light cruiser Reno floated out of Absad 2 on the 7th of January 1945.
Houston went in on the 8th.
She was underway again in February and reached the New York Navy Yard on the 24th of March.
And those two were not the reason ABSD2 was there.
They were two entries in a ledger.
The battleship Mississippi had been in that same dock in October of 1944.
The destroyer Kllin came in on the 1st of November with kamicazi damage.
The destroyer Claxton came in on the 2nd of December with kamicazi damage.
The Oiler Trinity was in for a week in April of 1945.
And in 1945, the dock took the battleship Iowa, 45,000 tons of her, drawing 37 ft 2 in when she was loaded, which was more than the dock could clear.
So Iowa offloaded her ammunition and pumped off her fuel oil until she rode high enough to come in over the blocks.
There is a detail from the 27th of April 1945 that says as much about this operation as anything else.
A Japanese torpedo bomber came in over Seedler Harbor and put an aerial torpedo into one of the pontoon tanks in section G of the dry dock itself.
The dock was damaged.
The dock repaired itself.
The dock went back to work.
One more thing about the man who put that dock in commission.
>> [clears throat] >> Joseph Rofort spent the rest of the war ashore.
At the end of it, the Navy awarded him the Legion of Merit, and it was given over the objection of Admiral King, who had never cared for him.
The officers who had worked in that basement at Pearl Harbor knew exactly what had been done there and who had done it.
They spent the next four decades saying so to anybody in Washington who would listen.
Rofort died in 1976.
In 1986, the Navy awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal.
44 years after Midway and 10 years after his funeral, his family accepted it for him.
He never saw the dry dock work.
He signed for it at Mayor Island in August of 1943, and by the time it was lifting torpedoed cruisers out of the Pacific at Seedler Harbor, he had been off the assignment for months and was a long way from the Admiral T Islands.
His name is on the commissioning of it anyway.
That is how the record works.
It keeps things whether or not anybody looks at them for 40 years.
Now go back to Tokyo for a moment because there is a loose end there.
The claims from the Formosa strikes were never quietly withdrawn.
They had gone out over the air to the Japanese public, to the emperor, and to Berlin and Rome.
There was no mechanism for taking them back.
Admiral Shima had looked at those same pilot reports and concluded they were worthless and he had turned his fleet around rather than act on them.
Admiral Toyota had believed them.
And a week after the announcement at Lee Gulf, the Japanese Navy fought the largest naval battle of the war under the terms the Formosa fighting had actually set.
The air groups that had been thrown at Task Force 38 over those 5 days were gone.
Not 11 carriers worth of American ships gone, Japanese aircraft gone, and Japanese pilots gone in numbers that could not be made up in a week.
What was left could either attack the American fleet or provide air cover for the Japanese fleet.
It could not do both.
10 months later, the last American battleship to be hit in the Second World War took an aerial torpedo at Buckner Bay off Okinawa on the 12th of August, 1945, 3 days before the end.
She was the Pennsylvania.
The torpedo opened a hole in her about 30 ft across, and she began to settle by the stern.
20 men were killed, 10 were wounded, including Admiral Oldenorf, who came out of it with broken ribs.
Salvage vessels towed her into shallow water the next day and patched her enough to move.
She was taken to Opera Harbor, Guam, and arrived on the 6th of September, 1945, 4 days after the surrender was signed in Tokyo Bay.
On the 7th of September, she went into a floating dry dock.
A steel patch was welded over the hole.
She came out on the 2nd of October and sailed for Puget Sound two days later.
The war had been over for a month by the time that ship left the dock.
The dock was still there, still in the Western Pacific, still lifting ships out of the ocean thousands of miles from any shipyard because that was the job and nobody had told it to stop.
There is no decoration for pumping water out of a dry dock.
Nobody made a film about the men who ran the capston that walked a cruiser in over the blocks or the machinists in the shops built into the walls of that thing or the crews on the Muny and the watch hill and the pawnnee who spent the war at four knots with somebody else’s ship on the end of a line.
The list of what they lifted is still in the record.
Mississippi, Canbor, Kllin, Claxton, Reno, Houston, Trinity, Iowa.
Every one of those names is a ship that went back to the war instead of going home, and a crew that stayed together instead of being broken up and parcled out.
That was the whole idea.
It was authorized in the first months of 1942 by men who had just watched what happened at Pearl Harbor and worked out that in a war fought across an ocean, the side that can repair itself forward is going to be the side still standing at the end.
They were right.
It cost 58 steel sections, five contractors, six building sites, and a lot of ordinary people who never got asked about it afterward.
Somebody’s father ran those pumps.
Somebody’s grandfather spent his war on a fleet tug making four knots and came home and put it away and never had a story that anybody asked him to tell twice.
If that was your father or your grandfather or your uncle, the comment section below this video is a better archive than most of the books on my shelf.
Tell us his name.
Tell us his ship.
Tell us the one thing he said about it.
The thing that never made it into any history anywhere.
Some of us are reading.
Dawn W.
Manalo Beach on the eastern shore of Aahu.
December 8th, 1941.
The morning after.
A National Guard corporal named David Akoui is walking the surf line with a rifle.
Something rolls in with the waves.
He thinks it’s a sea turtle.
It’s a man.
He’s a Japanese naval officer.
The day before, while the bombs were still falling on Pearl Harbor, he tried to take a submarine into that harbor to help finish the job.
Now he’s face down in the sand, and he’s still breathing.
When he wakes up in an American hospital under an American guard, the first thing he asks for is a way to kill himself.
The Americans tell him no.
His own country gives him a different answer.
Japan strikes his name from the record.
It scrubs his face out of a photograph.
It leaves his mother in silence and later sends him letters telling him he should be dead.
Two countries, one man, the opposite response.
50 years later, that same man will stand in a quiet room in Texas and break down crying in front of a submarine.
The one that carried him to this beach.
how he got from the surf at Wim Manalo to that room in Texas and what it says about the men who wore the sim uniform your father wore.
That says what this is.
If it’s a story you’d rather didn’t disappear, the like button is the thing that keeps it from disappearing.
His own country tried to erase him once.
We don’t have to.
He was 23 years old.
Kazuo Sakamaki, an Nsign in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 68th class of the Naval Academy, graduated the year before, the second of eight brothers.
He used to say a long time afterward that the size of his family was part of why they chose him.
He was one of 10 men picked for something the Japanese Navy had never tried in battle.
Five small submarines, 78 feet of steel, two men to a crew, a single hatch barely wide enough for a man to drop through.
They would be carried most of the way to Hawaii on the backs of larger submarines, cut loose in the dark about 10 mi off the coast and sent in underneath the harbor while the airplanes came down from above.
Each little boat carried two torpedoes.
Each one was meant to find a battleship.
When it was finished, when the torpedoes were gone and the harbor was burning, the crews were supposed to slip back out the way they came and meet the larger submarines waiting for them miles offshore.
That was the plan on paper.
It was the part no one really believed in.
Not one of the 10 men would ever make that rendevous.
The man who led the air attack, Mitsuo Fuida, argued against sending the submarines at all.
He thought they would be spotted before the planes ever arrived and give the whole thing away the night before they launched.
The men did what men in their position did.
Sakamaki wrote a last letter to his father.
He cut a lock of his own hair and clipped his fingernails, and he left them behind.
the things a family keeps when there will be no body to bury.
Nobody on those crews expected to come home.
That was understood going in.
That was in a way the whole idea.
At 3:00 in the morning on December 7th, the mother submarine I24 let HA19 go.
The trouble started almost at once.
The gyro compass, the one instrument that told Sakamaki which way his boat was pointed in the black water, failed.
From that moment on, everything he did was a guess.
He had to raise the periscope again and again just to find the island, and every time he did, he risked being seen.
He was not the only one in trouble that morning.
Out at the mouth of the harbor, one of the other submarines was spotted by the destroyer USS Ward.
The ward opened fire and sank it at 6:37, more than an hour before the first bomb fell.
Her captain sent word up the chain that he had fired on a submarine in a defensive sea zone, and someone somewhere decided it was a mistake and set the report aside.
The warning America needed was sitting on a desk before the attack ever began.
Fua had been right.
Nobody acted on it.
Sakamaki, blind without his compass, ran his submarine onto a coral reef.
Then a second time, then a third.
Around a quarter 8, with the harbor already burning behind him, the destroyer USS Helm caught sight of the little boat stuck fast on the rocks and fired.
The shells missed, but the blast knocked Sakamaki out cold, and it shook the submarine loose off at the reef.
When he came to, the boat was free.
It was also finished.
The impact had crushed both torpedo tubes flat.
He had spent the whole of that empty crammed inside a steel tube the size of a closet, and now he had nothing to shoot.
What he had instead was poison.
Seawater had gotten down into the battery compartment, and seawater on those batteries gives off chlorine gas.
It filled the hull.
Both men passed out from it.
came around and passed out again as the crippled boat drifted east around the island.
American destroyers found them through the day and dropped depth charges.
The sea hammered the hull.
The gas kept coming and the two men inside kept waking up to the very same situation hour after hour with no way out and no way to fight.
By evening they were off Bellow’s field and the boat ran ground for the last time.
There was nothing left to do but destroy it and swim.
Sakamaki set the scuttling charges.
The explosives meant to send the submarine and everything inside it to the bottom so the Americans would never have it.
He and Inagaki went over the side into the surf.
The charges never went off.
The same seaater that had filled the boat with gas had soaked them too.
Koshi Inagaki did not make it through the waves.
He drowned in the surf just short of the shore he had been swimming for.
Sakamaki made it.
He washed up onto the sand on the eastern side of Oahu, and he did not get up.
Everything he had been sent to do had failed.
His torpedoes were crushed.
His submarine sat whole on a reef where the Americans would tow it in and read every chart inside it.
His crew mate was dead in the water behind him.
And he was alive for a man raised the way he had been raised.
That was the worst part of all.
That was where the morning would find him.
He did not wake up on that beach.
When the corporal found him at first light, Sakamaki was unconscious, finished off by the gas, the depth charges, and a night and a day of trying to reach a target he never reached.
David Akoui was 21 years old, a corporal in the 298th Infantry, Hawaii National Guard.
He was not a hero.
Nothing about that morning had prepared him for what the tide brought in.
He had a rifle in his hands.
He had an enemy at his feet who could not stand up.
There were a great many things a man could have done on an empty beach.
The morning after Pearl Harbor still smoking across the island and every reason in the world to hate the body lying in the surf.
What Aqui did was call for help.
A lieutenant named Paul Plebon came down to the beach with a few men.
They bound the prisoner’s hands.
They lifted him, carried him really because his legs were gone, and they laid him in the back of a jeep.
Then they drove him to a hospital.
That was the first decision, the smallest one anybody made in this whole story, and it was already a different decision than the man in the jeep would have made with the roles reversed.
Sakamaki came to under a roof in a bed with an armed American standing in the room.
His first clear feeling was not relief.
It was shame.
He had crossed an ocean expecting to die.
He had made his peace with it.
The letter to his father, the lock of hair left on the family altar.
He had been raised to believe that a captured officer was no longer a man at all.
And now here he was alive in another country’s hospital being looked after by the very people he had come to kill.
He had been told what capture meant.
He believed it.
He expected to be beaten, questioned under torture, and then put to death in some degrading way.
That was the story he had been handed, and he had no reason to doubt it.
What came instead was a clean bed and a guard whose job was to keep him in it.
So he asked them to let him die.
He asked more than once.
He wanted the one thing his training demanded of a captured officer.
He asked the Americans in plain terms for a way to end his own life.
They told him no.
They told him no.
And they kept telling him no.
And so he turned it on himself the only way that was left.
By his own account, before they took the photograph that would mark him as prisoner of war number one, he pressed a lit cigarette into his own face, burned both cheeks, a man punishing himself for the crime of still breathing.
They took the picture.
They wrote down a number.
Prisoner number one, the first Japanese serviceman captured alive by the United States in the entire war.
A war that was one day old.
They moved him to a small cell on Sand Island in Honolulu Harbor and he stayed there close to 3 months.
He was alone in a way that few men ever are.
10 men had gone out in those five submarines.
Nine of them were dead.
He was the only one left, the single survivor of an operation that had been built from the start on the certainty that none of them would come back.
Every other man had done what he was supposed to do.
He was the one who hadn’t because a compass failed and the sea would not let him drown.
In those first of cases weeks he thought about death almost without stopping.
How to manage it when whether the guard would look away long enough.
The guard did not look away.
That was the job week after week for the young Americans posted to that cell.
Their assignment that winter was not to break this man.
It was not even to make him talk.
It was to keep an enemy alive.
An enemy who had come to sink their ships, who wanted nothing now but to die, and who would have thanked them for the chance.
They fed him.
They watched him.
They made sure the man who could not stand his own survival lived to see the next morning.
And the morning after that, nobody handed them a medal for it.
Nobody wrote their names down.
And this is the part worth slowing down for.
The United States had just been attacked with no warning at all.
More than 2,000 Americans were dead.
The country had every reason, every excuse anyone could ask for to look at the one enemy it held in its hands and decide he was not worth the food it would take to keep him breathing.
It decided the other way, quietly, with no argument.
A corporal on a beach, a lieutenant with a jeep, a doctor, a guard at a cell door.
Not one of them an important man.
Every one of them without being ordered to reaching for the same answer.
They kept him.
Why a nation living through the worst mourning in its history would spend its men and its time keeping its enemy breathing.
Sakamaki would carry that question for the rest of his life.
Half a world away, his own country was already answering a very different question about him.
In the world Sakamaki came from, there was no such thing as an honorable prisoner.
The code drilled into every Japanese serviceman, the one he had recited, the one he believed without question, offered a man exactly two endings, victory or a clean death.
There was no third door.
Capture was not a misfortune that could happen to a brave man.
It was evidence that something inside him had given way.
Every one of those 10 submariners had gone out understanding that they had not expected to come back.
They had been taught to want the opposite, to choose when the moment came between winning and dying.
Well, nine of them got the ending they had been promised.
And the Navy knew exactly what to do with nine dead men.
It promoted all nine of them, two ranks each.
It turned their portraits into posters and their names into somethings school children would learn.
It held their deaths up to the whole country as the purest thing a man could offer.
Proof of the spirit that was going to carry Japan through the war.
It gave them a title that lifted them out of the ranks of ordinary men.
The nine war gods.
There is a photograph from that time.
You can still find it today.
Nine young men in their uniforms posed together, solemn and proud, fixed forever as the heroes of Pearl Harbor.
There had been 10.
The 10th was Kazuo Sakamaki.
And before that picture went out to the newspapers and the school rooms, the Navy took him out of it.
Mitsuo Fua, the officer who had led the air attack.
the one who had argued against sending the submarines in the first place, wrote afterward that the Navy scrubbed Sakamach’s face out of the photograph before they let the country see it.
10 men went out.
Nine came home as gods.
The one who lived was the one they erased.
A dead hero confirmed everything the country believed about itself.
A living prisoner threatened it.
If one man could be captured and go on breathing, then the choice was never really only victory or death.
There was a third door after all, and the whole machinery of the thing depended on no one being allowed to see it.
A single living prisoner was a more dangerous thing in its way than a lost battle.
A lost battle could be avenged.
A man who had surrendered and was still breathing was a hole in the story itself.
So they closed it.
They painted him out.
His family was told that his fate was unknown.
It was not unknown.
The Navy had good reason to believe he had been taken alive.
But the truth did not fit the story the country needed in the winter of 1941, and they told her to say nothing.
The families of the nine were visited and honored, held up in their towns as the people who had given the country its gods.
Sakamaki’s family got the opposite of a ceremony.
They got a silence they were ordered to keep.
Somewhere in Tokushima, a woman went on not knowing whether her boy was living or dead.
Because the truth was the one thing the empire could not afford to let her keep.
I think about that other man sometimes.
not Sakamaki.
The guard, the young American whose whole job that winter was to sit outside a cell and keep an enemy alive, who was begging to die, and who never once turned up in a photograph or a citation or a single line of any history book.
Nobody wrote his name down, but that was America, too.
standing in a hallway at 4 in the morning, refusing to let a man throw his life away just because somebody on the far side of the ocean had taught him that he had to.
To understand what happened to Sakamaki next, you have to know what the word prisoner meant in this particular war.
On the other side of it, it meant something close to a death sentence.
Of the roughly 27,000 American servicemen who fell into Japanese hands during the Second World War, more than 11,000 never came home.
They starved.
They were worked past the point a body can go.
They were beaten or left to die of things a little medicine would have cured.
More than four out of every 10.
That was what surrender meant.
if you wore an American uniform and the men who took you were Japanese.
If you want to know what that number looked like up close, it looked like the Baton Death March.
The spring of 1942, tens of thousands of American and Filipino prisoners driven on foot through the heat of the Philippines with no food and almost no water, beaten as they walked, bayoneted when they stumbled, shot and left in the ditch when they could not keep up.
That was the same army working from the same code that had sent Kazuo Sakamaki to Hawaii.
That was the world Sakamaki came from and the welcome he braced for.
He waited for it.
It never came.
They took him off Hawaii and brought him to the mainland.
A camp in Wisconsin first, then Camp Livingston down in Louisiana, then others.
He was the first Japanese prisoner the country had, and a useful one.
His submarine had been pulled off that reef nearly whole, with its charts and its papers still inside.
A clean look at exactly how Japan had planned.
The underwater half of the Pearl Harbor attack.
It was the kind of windfall an intelligence officer dreams about and almost never gets.
Handed over whole sitting on a reef.
The questioners had a great deal to ask him and they came back with their questions again and again.
So America got what it needed out of Kazuo Sakamaki.
the charts, the answers, everything he knew.
And here is where the whole story turns quietly on a thing most people would walk right past.
After they had it, after he had nothing left to give them, nothing changed.
They kept feeding him more food by his own account than he had seen in a long while.
They kept treating his ailments.
They kept him in conditions a man could actually live in.
The questioning ended, his usefulness ended, and the plain decency just went on day after day, asking for nothing back.
That was the thing he could not make sense of.
He had braced for cruelty and been given a cut.
He had offered them his life, and they had refused to take it.
He had handed over his intelligence, and they had not thrown him away the moment it was spent.
None of it fit anything he had been trained to expect.
The only explanation left, the one he fought off for a long time, and then could not fight off any longer, was that these people simply did not believe a beaten enemy was worth less than a man, and it was not aimed at him in particular.
There was nothing personal in it.
It was just the way these people were.
And that in the end was almost harder to take than cruelty would have been.
Cruelty he could have understood.
Cruelty he had been promised.
Somewhere in those long months in a camp in the middle of a country he had been raised to hate.
Sakamaki made a decision.
He decided to live.
He started with the language.
He taught himself English slowly at first, then well, and then he did something that ought to stop you cold, given where he began.
The man who had begged for a way to kill himself became the man who talked other men out of it.
As the war went on and more Japanese were captured and shipped into the camps, they came in carrying the same shame he had carried, reaching for the same exit.
Tens of thousands of them would pass into Allied hands before it was over.
And he was the first of all of them, prisoner number one.
He sat with those men and argued them back from the edge.
“Stay alive,” he told them.
“There is no honor waiting for you on the other side of that.
He spent himself on it”.
Years later, he counted it among the things he was proudest of in his entire life.
how many of them he had kept breathing.
The country that was supposed to break him had instead handed him a reason to keep going.
And he was passing it down the line.
While Sakamaki was learning English in Louisiana, his submarine was out on the road.
The Navy had hauled H19 back to the mainland and turned it into something nobody had quite seen before.
They cut viewing ports into the side of the hull so people could see in.
They posed mannequins in Japanese uniforms at the controls.
They set the whole thing on a flat car and sent it across the country to sell war bonds.
It traveled to something close to 2,000 cities and towns, 41 states.
For 3 years it crossed America, county fairs, train depots, courthouse squares, and ordinary people stood in line and paid for the chance to climb up and look inside the little steel boat that had come to kill them and failed.
The campaign brought in millions of dollars.
The president himself was photographed standing beside it.
In the spring of 1943, they hauled it into the middle of New York City for a war bond rally, and the crowds came for that, too.
There may be people watching this whose mother or father stood in front of that submarine as a child in a town square in Ohio in Texas in Nebraska holding a parents hand staring at the enemy’s own weapon hauled out into the daylight in the middle of Main Street with a line of Americans behind them waiting their turn.
and a thousand miles inland, the man who had ridden that boat across the Pacific was teaching himself the language of the people filing past it and quietly turning into one of the reasons the prisoners around him were still alive.
The war ended in the summer of 1945.
In January of 1946, they sent Kazua Sakamaki home.
He came back to a country that no longer looked like the one he had left.
The cities were ash.
The empire that had erased him was gone, occupied, broken open.
American soldiers were a common sight on the streets now in the train stations and outside the ministries.
The keepers of a country that had sworn it would never be kept by anyone.
And the people who had been told for 4 years that their sons al chose death over capture now had to look at a man who had done the opposite and lived.
They did not welcome him.
The letters came.
Strangers wrote to tell him that the souls of his dead comrades were weeping over what he had done, that he had shamed them by going on breathing, and that the decent thing, the only thing left to him, was to finish what he had failed to finish at Pearl Harbor and take his own life.
He had spent four years among the people he had been raised to think of as monsters.
He came home to find that the ones telling him to die were his own.
He did not take their advice.
He went to work instead.
He took a job with an automobile company.
You have heard of Toyota.
And the thing that made him useful to them was the thing he had picked up inside a prison camp in Louisiana.
English, the language he had taught himself behind American Wire, became the tool he used to sell Japanese cars to the rest of the world.
He was good at it.
By 1969, they had put him in charge of their operation in Brazil.
He spent years abroad, came home to Japan in 1983, and retired in 1987.
An executive, a husband, a father, an old man with a long and ordinary life behind him.
For anyone old enough to remember what made in Japan came to mean in the decades after the war, there is an irony here worth naming out loud.
The first Japanese prisoner the United States ever took, the man America refused to let die, grew up to help build the company that would one day go fender-to-fender with Detroit.
He and his wife raised children.
He gave his first son a name, Kioshi, the same name as the man who had drowned in the surf beside him off Bellow’s field.
The crewmate he had left in the water.
His son would wonder later whether he had been named for that man on purpose.
The boy grew up under the weight of his father’s story.
People called him the son of a coward.
And in time that son stood up in front of rooms full of people and spoke not about shame but about understanding, about forgiveness, about setting a thing down.
Whatever the Americans had put into his father in that camp, it had carried far enough to reach a child who had not been born yet when it happened.
For 45 years, Sakamaki would not speak about any of it in public.
He raised his family, did his work, grew old, and kept the whole thing folded away somewhere no one could reach it.
Then in 1991, he agreed to attend a conference in a small town in Texas, Fredericksburg, the hometown of Admiral Chester Nimttz, the man who had commanded the fleet that beat Japan.
They had built a museum there.
And inside that museum, kept and cleaned and labeled like the piece of history it was, sat a submarine, a 19.
The same boat, the one that had carried him onto that reef half a century before.
America had not scrapped it.
America had not sunk it or buried it.
America had kept it, every rivet of it, and set it under a roof where people could come and learn what it had been.
They brought the old man into the room and he saw it and something in him gave way.
45 years of silence and most of a lifetime since that beach and Kazuo Sakamaki stood in front of his own submarine in Texas and wept like the boy who had once climbed into it.
Here is the whole thing in one frame.
His own country scrubbed his face out of a single photograph so that no one would ever have to know that he had lived.
America kept the entire submarine.
And 50 years later, it brought him into the room and let him stand in front of it and cry.
And the corporal, David Akoule, the young guardsman who found him in the surf that first morning.
He went on to the war.
He served in the Pacific with Merrill’s marauders deep in the Burmese jungle in some of the worst fighting there was.
And he came through it and in all the years afterward when the chance came to meet the famous prisoner he had pulled out of the sea.
The one piece of history he could have stepped forward and claimed he turned it down every time.
He had done a thing on a beach one morning and then he had gone and done his job and he never asked for anything in return for either one.
You will not find him in most tellings of this story.
And that is really what this was about.
Not Sakamaki, the men around him, the corporal on the beach, the lieutenant with the jeep, the guard at the cell door who kept a stranger alive against the stranger’s own will.
The cook who fed a man who had come to sink his ships.
Not one of them famous, not one of them decorated for it.
Men who simply could not bring themselves to be cruel to an enemy who was already finished because of how they were raised and where and by whom.
They wore the same uniform your father wore.
So let me ask you the thing I always ask.
If your father was a in the Pacific, Navy, Marines, Army, the Army Air Forces, or your grandfather, or an uncle whose chair was already empty by the time you were old enough to ask, he most likely came home and said almost nothing.
Or he said one thing once at the dinner table and never said it again.
History didn’t write their names down either.
So write his down here, his name, where he served.
And one thing, one thing he said or did or could never quite bring himself to talk about, leave it in the comments where it won’t go quiet when the last of them does.
And subscribe if you’d like the next one.
There are far more of these men than there are videos.
We are not going to get to all of them in
