GyGsMailbag: Atrocities USMC, Okinawa 1945...

(Via Milinet)

June 1, 2000

3 Dead Marines and a Secret of Wartime Okinawa

By CALVIN SIMS

------------------------------------------------------------------------
NAGO, Japan -- Shortly before the end of World War II, just
after the United
States won the brutal battle for Okinawa, three American marines
stationed in
this sun-drenched archipelago disappeared.

At first, the Marine Corps listed the three, all 19 years old
and black, as
possible deserters in the summer of 1945. A year later, when
there was still
no trace of them, they were declared missing in action.

For five decades, the case was forgotten. Then in 1998, the
local police,
acting on a tip, discovered what proved to be the bones of the
three marines
in a cave just north of this resort town.

After long examinations, the remains were sent to relatives in
the United
States for burial early this year.

But the discovery did little to solve the mystery of the
marines'
disappearance and, far from putting the case to rest, dredged up
powerful
local resentment about how Americans treated Okinawans after the
fighting
stopped.

Some elderly Okinawans, who grew up near where the remains were
found, are
now willing to tell a long-held secret: a group of villagers
ambushed and
killed the three men, thinking they were the three black marines
who the
villagers believed had repeatedly come to the village to rape
the village
women.

While much of what the Okinawans said about those painful days
after the war
ended is corroborated, it has not been proved that these three
marines
committed any rape. Nor has it been confirmed that the villagers
in fact
killed the soldiers, although there is strong evidence that they
did.

Still, the villagers' tale of a dark, long-kept secret has
refocused
attention on what historians say is one of the most widely
ignored crimes of
the war, the widespread rape of Okinawan women by American
servicemen.

Much has been written and debated about atrocities that
Okinawans suffered at
the hands of both the Americans and Japanese in one of the
deadliest battles
of the war. More than 200,000 soldiers and civilians, including
one-third of
the population of Okinawa, were killed.

There has been scant mention of rape afterward. But by one
academic's
estimate, as many as 10,000 Okinawan women may have been raped
and rape was
so prevalent that most Okinawans over age 65 either know or have
heard of a
woman who was raped in the aftermath of the war.

"I have read many accounts of such rapes in Okinawan newspapers
and books,
but few people know about them or are willing to talk about
them," said Steve
Rabson, a professor of East Asian Studies at Brown University,
who is an
expert on Okinawa.
Marine Corps officials in Okinawa and Washington said that they
knew of no
rapes by American servicemen in Okinawa at the end of the war,
and their
records do not list war crimes committed by marines in Okinawa.

Gen. John G. Castellaw, deputy commander of the Marine force in
Okinawa, said
that during the past 30 years, in which he completed numerous
assignments on
the island, he had never heard of any accusations of widespread
rape by
American servicemen in Okinawa.

The New York Times tried to contact surviving members of the
segregated 37th
Marine Depot Unit, to which the three dead marines were
attached. But the
Montford Point Marine Association, a veterans group representing
the marines
who were trained at Montford Point, N.C., said it could not
locate any
veterans willing to be interviewed.

Samuel Saxton, a retired captain who is the association's
immediate past
president, said in a telephone interview that it was important
to learn the
truth about the marines' deaths and whether Americans committed
rapes in
Okinawa. But he said he feared that black marines who served
there, and made
up only a part of the Americans stationed on Okinawa, would be
wrongly
painted with a broad brush.

"It would be unfair for the public to get the impression that we
were all a
bunch of rapists after we worked so hard to serve our country,"
he said.

Books, diaries, articles and other documents refer to rapes by
American
soldiers of various races and backgrounds.

Masaie Ishihara, a sociology professor at the Okinawa
International
University, said "there is a lot of historical amnesia out
there" about those
traumatic postwar years. He said that "many people don't want to
acknowledge
what really happened."

One possible explanation for why the United States military says
it has no
record of any rapes is that few if any Okinawan women reported
being attacked
out of fear and embarrassment, and that those who did were
ignored by the
United States military police, the historians said. Moreover,
there has never
been a large-scale effort to determine the real extent of such
crimes.

Even today, efforts to speak to women who had been raped were
rejected
because friends, local historians and university professors who
had spoken
with the women said they preferred not to discuss it publicly.

"Victimized women feel too ashamed to make it public, and
criminals who
killed the three marines are afraid," said a police spokesman in
the nearby
city of Nago.

In his book "Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic
Bomb," (Ticknor &
Fields, 1992) George Feifer said that there were fewer than 10
reported cases
of rape by 1946 in Okinawa, "partly because of shame and
disgrace, partly
because Americans were victors and occupiers." Mr. Feifer said
that "in all
there were probably thousands of incidents, but the victims'
silence kept
rape another dirty secret of the campaign."

In interviews, historians and Okinawans said that some Okinawan
women who
were raped gave birth to biracial children, many of whom were
killed at
birth. More often, however, rape victims obtained abortions from
village
midwives.

The first published account in English of the discovery of the
remains of the
three marines appeared in The Pacific Stars and Stripes in 1998
shortly after
the remains were retrieved. In the article, an Okinawan man who
would not
give his name said that as a child growing up after the war in
Katsuyama, the
remote mountain village where the remains were found, he heard
village elders
talk of an incident involving the American marines.

In separate interviews with The New York Times, elderly
Okinawans who also
grew up in the village, said that after the United States won
the battle,
three armed marines would come to Katsuyama every weekend and
force the
village men to take them to their women, who were then carried
off to the
hills and raped.

The marines were so confident, the villagers said, that they
would sometimes
come to Katsuyama without weapons. One day, the villagers, with
the help of
two armed Japanese soldiers who were hiding in the jungle,
ambushed three
marines in a dark narrow mountain pass near a river, they said.
The Japanese
soldiers shot at the marines from the bushes and several dozen
villagers beat
them to death with sticks and stones.

"I didn't see the actual killing because I was hiding in the
mountains above,
but I heard five or six gunshots and then a lot of footsteps and
commotion,"
said Shinsei Higa, a 71-year-old retired teacher, who was 16 at
the time. "By
late afternoon, we came down from the mountains and then
everyone knew what
had happened."

Fearing that other Americans would come looking for the marines,
the
villagers dumped the bodies in a hillside cave, which has a
50-foot drop just
inside the mouth, and they vowed never to speak of the incident
to outsiders,
the Okinawans said.

Kijun Kishimoto, an 84-year-old retired school principal who
grew up in
Katsuyama, said that he was away from the village when the
killings took
place but that he learned of the incident from his brother and
niece.

"People were very afraid that if the Americans found out what
happened there
would be retaliation, so they decided to keep it a secret to
protect those
involved," Mr. Kishimoto said.

Okinawans who lived in Katsuyama said the three marines who
harassed their
village were "black Americans" and that one was "as large as a
sumo
wrestler." The cave, which is on a steep slope above a valley
along a narrow
river is known to local residents in Japanese as "kurombo gama,"
which means
Cave of the Negroes.

United States military officials said that based on dental
records, the
remains recovered in the cave were positively identified as
those of the
three missing marines, all of whom were black. They were Pfc.
James D.
Robinson of Savannah, Ga., Pfc. John M. Smith of Cincinnati, and
Pvt. Isaac
Stokes of Chicago.

The Stars and Stripes article said that a guilty conscience led
the Okinawan
man to contact Setsuko Inafuku, a tour guide for Kadena United
States Air
Base in Okinawa, who had been involved in retrieving the remains
of Okinawan
and Japanese soldiers.
Ms. Inafuku said in an interview that she and the Okinawan man
began
searching for the cave in June 1997 but had no luck finding it
until a
typhoon struck the island in August and knocked over a tree that
hid the
entrance to the cave. In September the police were notified but
they agreed
not to remove the remains for several months so that the person
who had led
to the discovery could remain anonymous.

Marine Corps officials said that the United States military did
not plan to
conduct a criminal investigation since the remains were
discovered outside a
military installation and were under the jurisdiction of the
Okinawa
Prefectural Police. The prefectural police has said that it has
no plans to
investigate because the statute of limitations on such a case
expired after
15 years.

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company