Encoded for the Experiencing War web site for the Veterans History Project.
The recording of the interview with Milton Zaslow was digitized.
This transcription was encoded with minimal changes to the original text in an effort to preserve original content and idiosyncrasies of the person interviewed. Period language and terminology are also retained. Encoding is literal with regard to the transcriptionist's capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. Spelling errors are indicated with [sic]; however, recurring errors in spelling within a single document have been marked the first time and not subsequently.
Today is November the 17th, 2004. I'm Bob Nakamura, will be the interviewer. And operating the video equipment is Greg Hirabayashi. The purpose of the Veterans History Project is to collect audio and videotaped oral histories of American war veterans and of those who served in support of them, as well as selected, related documentary materials, such as photographs and manuscripts that may be deposited in the permanent collection of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The deposit documentary material will serve as record of veterans' wartime experience and may be used for scholar and educational purposes. JAVA is the acronym for Japanese American Veterans Association. We are an association of veterans, our spouses, and friends with the shared interest of those who participated in the Armed Forces of the United States. JAVA is a partner of the Veteran History Project at the Library of Congress. JAVA members have been encouraged to record their own oral histories within the guidelines from the Library of Congress. However, today the subject of our interview is not a JAVA, Japanese-American Nisei veteran, but is Mr. Milton Zaslow of Silver Spring, Maryland, which is located in the metropolitan Washington DC. Mr. Zaslow is a veteran of World War II and was an officer in the military intelligence service. Mr. Zaslow asked to be interviewed to narrate his experiences with the Japanese-American Nisei soldiers during World War II. We'll briefly cover Mr. Zaslow's background and then have him tell us stories, experiences with the Japanese soldiers when the United States was at war with Japan. So good afternoon, Mr. Zaslow. How are you doing?
Good afternoon. Fine. Thank you.
I'd like to start with the background, just your background, to set the scene as to where you were born, where your parents might have come from, brothers and sisters in general. And -- and what were you doing just before the start of World War II?
Thank you. I was born a long time -- a long time ago in New York City. And for the purposes of what we're talking about today, it's important that you understand we're talking about World War II. The war broke out, and I was just graduating from CCNY, College of the City of New York, with the prospect of ending up in the Army because the war was on. A very funny thing happened, and I got a call from someone who I did not know, who knew a friend of mine, and said, "Mr. Zaslow, you don't know me, but we want to start a Japanese language course because there's a war on and that's a useful commodity, and we need a couple of people to join. Will you join us?" Well, because I'm -- I knew the name and I was just graduating from college, I said yes. And so within a couple of weeks we had organized a course at New York University in New York City of six credits in a matter of a few months. It was a very intensive course. And if we had six students, the university would give it, and we were six students.
Were you a student there at that time?
No. No, I was not. I had graduated from City College, but NYU was prepared to sponsor such a course if they had a minimum number of students who would pay a fairly high fee for very intensive courses several hours a day.
Can I ask you why they asked you to do this?
I'm sorry?
Can I ask why they asked you to --
I think they were just looking for a friend of somebody he knew who had enough money to pay for a very intensive course because it was -- it was a high-intensity course. And within a couple months you were -- you were given a tremendous exposure to the Japanese language. So I signed up. And it was a very intensive course. I'll never forget. We walked into the room, and there were six of us. Several of us had never seen each other before. And this little Korean man walked in. He was the instructor, Mr. Kang (ph). And he said, "Hajimete yamenikarimasu (ph)." And I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. And we were off and running at that point. And so we took the course. It land a couple -- it lasted a couple of months, and we had an elementary understanding of Japanese.
Can I ask you, what -- what year this was now?
'42.
'42?
Yeah, '42.
And -- oh, this is after the war is started?
Oh, yes.
Okay. Can we just drop back a second --
Sure.
-- and ask you -- let me ask you, when -- what were you doing in December 7th, 1941?
I was a college student at City College. And --
Do you remember your feelings then?
Well, no one -- I had not experienced a war before. I didn't know what it meant. Didn't know what the relocations were. All I knew was that I would be involved in one way or another, and it occurred to me that this was a productive way to be involved.
What was your first thought of the Japanese? Did you have any Japanese friends at that time?
Zero. My exposure to Japanese-Americans was actually zero. Had no understanding of what they were, what they were like, what their situation was at all. So I walked into it cold. And so we graduated in the course, and we -- we were contacted by the Army. The Army inter -- sent an officer around to interview us. There was a pretty good system. He was a lieutenant colonel in the Army, and he had been a lieutenant military attache in the U.S. embassy in Tokyo when the war broke out. And so he returned, and he left Japan as a lieutenant. He arrived in the United States as a lieutenant colonel because everybody was getting past promotions. He knew some Japanese. He interviewed me and others, and I was picked. Told me that "When you're ready, here's where you go and sign up." And I did. So I enlisted in the Army and was told on the first of January 1943 to report to the University of Michigan. And at Michigan they had a --
This was -- this was before even basic training?
No basic training.
You had no basic training?
No basic training.
You had your uniform to wear, or not?
Absolutely not. So we all arrived in our civilian clothes at the University of Michigan. And Michigan had a -- a Japanese professor -- man named Yamagiwa, a very famous name -- who ran the program. And our class had about 150 people in it, and we were subjected to the most intensive course I've ever had of any kind. And for that period and then later when we moved to Minnesota, we were spending 24 hours a day in Japanese. We ate with our Japanese sensei. We spent time in the evening with him. We would have homework and classes after supper up directly until bedtime. And it was the most intensive course I ever had, and it paid off. It turned out at the end of six months, they picked what they thought were the 35 most promising students -- and, fortunately, I was one of those -- and moved us to Minneapolis, to a camp called Camp Savage. Camp Savage, Minnesota, outside of Minneapolis. And it was here that I first met the Nisei, because Camp Savage was a former WPA camp. It was a very austere bunch of Quonset huts out in the countryside.
What time of the year was it? Do you remember?
We arrived on the 1st of July, and the temperature was in the high 90s; and, of course, when the winter came, the temperature was 20 below zero for weeks.
And this was July of 1943?
'43, yeah. And so there were about a thousand, I think, or several hundred, at least, Japanese-American Nisei there at varying levels of understanding. Some had -- were Kibei and had just come back from Japan. Their Japanese was their best language; their English was very weak. Some were just Nisei who spoke Japanese at home. And so it was spotty in many ways. Some were -- many were just young kids in their early 20s; some, 18, 19 years old. Some were middle-aged people who had been picked up or volunteered. And so they segregated us into various levels of understanding, and they were very generous toward us who were -- we were -- it became an officer's candidate school. If you graduated from that cohort successfully, you were -- you would be commissioned and you would be commissioned and you be the team leader of a team of ten Nisei enlisted men, sergeants.
Can I drop back to the --
Yeah.
-- feelings again? Like, when all of a sudden you saw all these young Japanese men, and you hadn't had experience with Japanese men --
Zero.
-- before. What -- what did you think?
They were a new kind of person. I'll never forget. When we were there and the -- and snow began. The snow begins pretty early in Minneapolis, and it gets kind of deep. About half of them were from Hawaii, and here we are living in these old, dirty huts where the temperature's 20, 25 below zero one end; and then it starts snowing, and it's a foot or two feet of snow. There are only two iron stoves in this long barracks where 50 or 60 people are sleeping. And the Hawaii kids went crazy. They had never seen snow in their life. And, of course, being from Hawaii, they didn't sleep in any clothing or underwear; so they're stark naked. And they run outside into the snow, roll around it, and they just had a great time. It was meeting different people from what I'd ever met before. But they were there. They knew what their job was. They had to learn the language. Some cases learned English more than Japanese. And they set up the teams.
Let me ask one more question.
Yeah.
Some of these men were from the relocation -- the internment camps --
Oh, yes.
-- that were set up in the Western United States.
Absolutely. Sure.
And what did you think of that at that time?
Well, that was when I was first introduced to that problem. It was a -- I considered that to be the most heartbreaking aspects of my whole career with the Japanese-Americans. They had a commitment. They decided that America was their country, and they wanted to fight for it and improve their reduced position by virtue of their service. And I think they were successful.
As a young man, did you understand that at that time? Did you --
No. Of course not, no. We got to be much closer to the problem than a smartass kid from New York. And, you know --
What was their reaction? What was their reaction toward you? Toward you and your group from --
They were -- they were a little surprised and smiled when they looked at these young hakujin, who were supposed to be their officer, was learning Japanese when they knew they would never really fully understand Japanese the way should. But they were very generous. I mean that sincerely. They understood that that was the game.
Did you have a commission by then?
Not yet. When you graduated and before you went overseas, then you were commissioned.
Oh.
So the team was set up, and I had ten men headed by a sergeant, a staff sergeant and -- mostly sergeants. One or two corporals. Some of them were 18, 19 years old. Some of them were middle-aged guys. Not middle-aged. In those days, for me, middle-aged, was in their 30s, you know. And off we went. We went to San Francisco to the Point of Embarkation to go to Hawaii. And we arrived at San Francisco and we were at Fort Mason. And it was a day or two -- one night, actually, before we were getting on the ship to go to Hawaii.
Excuse me, but did you look like a military unit by then? Did you have uniforms and --
Oh, yeah. By then, we had -- we had uniforms.
Had some basic training, like how to march and line up --
A little. Not very much. They didn't pay much attention to our soldierly skills. You know, we had target practice and all that kind of stuff, but I think it was the minimum necessary. They looked upon us as people who would be the linguists and the translators and the interpreters. And so we had one night free before -- we were at Fort Mason -- before we get on the ship to go to Hawaii, on the ship. And this becomes important because as I worked with the Nisei, I came to recognize that every now and then there would be what I would call a "special problem." And the first special problem arose in San Francisco. The war was on. There was a local law which prohibited Japanese-Americans from being on the streets of San Francisco. And here were Japanese-Americans in uniform. Some of them had come from Hawaii -- from California. Some were from Hawaii; some, from California. This was their home. They wanted to go out, see what was going on, and the regulations did not permit that. So as a second lieutenant, I invoked all of my soldierly responsibilities and called them together and said, "Tonight, you're not Japanese-Americans. You're Chinese. And you're going to be free to go out on the streets of San Francisco. Just don't you get into trouble. And enjoy yourself." And they did. And they did not get into trouble. And there was no incident; and, of course, it was something I felt I should do. They appreciated that, and the bond between me and my team became stronger. We then arrived in Honolulu.
So how did you travel to Honolulu?
To Honolulu?
Yeah.
It was -- I'm ashamed to even talk about it. We were on a -- an Army transport. It was a Liberty ship, which was about as small as you can get. And it was such a unimportant ship, that the captain of the ship was an Army captain. So we arrived in Honolulu, and now a second problem begins. And the second problem is that we were assigned to the Navy command SaPac headed by Admiral Nimitz. And so we were Army people-- now, with the naval command, that causes all sorts of questions always being asked. Now, the Navy headquarters there was Pearl Harbor, but if you were Oriental, you were not permitted to enter Pearl Harbor where all of the military activities were. And so the Navy set us up in downtown Honolulu in a furniture store, where the three officers -- we were three teams -- the three officers lived, slept -- during the day we worked on captured material that had been brought in from operations.
Did you have a unit designation, do you remember?
No. Just a team.
Just a team.
Working for -- it was called JICPOA, Joint Intelligence Center Pacific Ocean Area. It was a JICPOA team.
You guys did the same thing?
Attache simpac (ph), yes. Exactly. And so the advantage there is that they had to find a place for the Japanese-American enlisted men to stay other than inside Pearl Harbor. And they were very nice about that, and they set the three officers up in the home furniture company, and we lived there. Worked there during the day -- we had desks and everything -- working on captured diaries and things like that. But at night they were on their own. And this was seventh heaven. The war was on. Most of the eligible Japanese were either too old for dating or in the 442nd in Europe. And they were Japanese soldiers -- Japanese-American soldiers in Hawaii with all of those Japanese-American girls wanting to do everything they knew how to do for them. It was wonderful.
Nice story.
Yeah. They deserved it.
How many -- how many -- what was the strength of these three teams?
Ten. Ten each.
Ten each.
And each officer's went to different places. There was -- my team would go to one area; second team, another area. Some went to Iwojima. Some went to other places.
When you were in Hawaii and you had to review the captured material --
Yes.
-- can you tell us a little bit about what kind of material it was?
Mostly diaries.
Diaries?
You always pick up a lot of documents.
And where do they come from?
Captured from operations. Guadalcanal and places like that. Oh, yeah. And it was good training.
Remember any interesting documents that came up?
Nothing special. The Japanese wrote a lot of personal information about themselves and their families and their feelings, but that's not what we were looking at documents for. So our first assignment was to go to the Marianas. Now, after having lived through being an Army organization in a Navy command, which is a special relationship, we were attached to the Marines in the Marianas, Second and Fourth Marine divisions. And our objective -- we were landing on Tinian, which was one site. There's Saipan, Tinian, and Guam for the -- We landed on Tinian with the Marines and we had, about 15 minutes to get to know the teams you were fighting -- the Marines you were fighting with. Hope for the best. And we just were in a totally new situation. It was no -- it was no different from any other military situation except being American in a Marine command was about something very special. You had to learn -- they had to learn -- you had to learn; and, two, having Japanese-Americans walking around in the combat areas was a very special problem because they'd be the first to be shot. And, as you know, in those -- well, you may not know -- in those days, we always had passwords. You know, "Who goes there?" And they would pick words, like, "Wendell Willkie," who was a Republican nominee for president. And Japanese-Americans don't saw "Wendell Willkie". They say "Wenderu Wilrukey." And -- bang, bang -- you're dead. So we had to be very careful how we lived with the Marines and worked with them. It worked very well. They got along fine. The Marines respected what our guys did; and the important thing was, the reason we were tied to the Marines is the Marines would not take Japanese-Americans in uniform. And so they were dependent on a relatively small number of Navy officers who were Japanese linguists, some quite good.
Can you step back a little bit and tell us about what -- what the island looked like? Obviously, it was still combat zone?
Well, I -- I can tell you what you're not prepared to hear. And Tinian was an agricultural place. It was a place where you had Japanese in charge and Koreans doing the labor work. And you had about, maybe, 8,000 Japanese families and maybe 15,000 Korea families and doing mostly agricultural work. After the combat phase was over -- and I'll talk about that in a minute -- then this was the first and largest enemy population that we had overrun in the war. And the preparations were as if there were civil affairs officers coming out of the Army. They were people with supposed skills and experience. Most of them came from a Williamsburg School, which was a kind of a finishing school for public affairs officers to help the natives do their thing. It turns out that they were totally unable to do anything because none of them spoke Japanese, and it didn't occur to them that you couldn't really work with the natives unless you could speak to them. And so they just disappeared, and it ended up with our kind of guys -- we had -- we had a couple of Navy language officers and ten Nisei. And we helped set up a people program, an education program. We set up kindergarten through eighth grade, with no materials whatsoever. We would clear the sand on the floor and the sand and the finger would be the blackboard. Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts.
And your team would support the civil affairs people?
And -- no. The civil affairs people just gave it up.
Oh.
We did it ourselves with the Japanese language -- the Navy language officers. And we were quite successful in doing that. And it was a new experience for all of us, considering the fact that we had done -- during the combat operations, the Marines -- I don't know. I should tell you that I have very strong respect for Marines. They believe they're different people, and it turns out they are. And I'll never forget. I was a brand-new second lieutenant there because of my Japanese language ability, whatever it was, and I'd wake up in the morning, roll over, and say, "Hey, Lieutenant. Let's go out. We're going to go out, flushing caves." Now, "flushing caves" means that -- the Japanese would not surrender. They'd throw themselves off the cliff before they surrendered. They would kill themselves, and they'd end up in pockets and caves, 20 here, 50 here. That sort of thing. And we wanted to get some as prisoners. And so it was my job to go up to the entrance of the cave and shout at them, explain to them that I was an American soldier and that I wanted them to surrender and we would take care of them. They would not be shot. Well, their answer was always quick and the same. A live grenade came out of the caves. So we weren't too successful. The Japanese --
Did they understand your Japanese? Was it good?
Oh, yeah.
Very good?
It was good enough. They understood it. They just wouldn't do it. They wouldn't give up, but ___, and that's the kind of intense combat atmosphere. And two kind of other things which, for example. It turns out that on Tinian, the -- no, it was on Okinawa. I'll give you an example. The Japanese introduced a new kind of landmine. Usually, you'd have iron landmines, you'd have mine detectors, and you'd find the iron. Well, the Japanese started developing ceramic mines which would not respond to metal probing. And so, "Hey, Lieutenant. Come over here. We're going to go look at this landmines. They found this landmine. We don't know anything about it." Turn it over and read the defuse instructions and make sure it doesn't go off. So that was kind of fun. So it was that kind of --
You personally did some of these too?
Yeah. Well, that's -- yeah. That's what I signed up for. And now in Okinawa we had a never different --
Before you leave there --
Yeah.
-- you told us about the civil affairs type work that you did --
Yeah.
-- and flushing caves. Did you still have the mission to keep looking at tons of material that was coming in or not?
No.
You didn't do that?
Operation -- the operation was over. I was with Marines. Marines are combat people. That's all they cared about.
Right.
But it was a lot of fun, going through that stuff during the operation. They'd -- you know, you'd get an old building with old stuff there, and you'd -- I'd spend most of the day, for example, going through old documents that had been rain soaked or weather-beaten with scorpions all over the thing. Scorpions running, walking all over my hands and things like that. That was part of the -- part of the job.
Now, did you have to work on Japanese bodies to find equipment? I mean, find --
We did not.
You didn't.
No. We did not. Others did and would bring the stuff to us. In Oklahoma it was different. In Okinawa we were attached here again. We started up with a Navy command, attached then to the Marines, and in Okinawa we were attached to the Army 24th Corps. And --
What was the -- what the time frame here, though?
Well, that was '45, I guess. Early '45, late '44.
Okay.
And --
I know the 24th Corps. I was a member of the 24th Corps in Vietnam.
Oh, really? No. This is -- this was the 24th Corps. And so we didn't get -- we -- you know, we never got too many Japanese prisoners. But at the Corps level, you would spend most time translating and interrogating prisoners and that sort of thing. But the thing that I would like -- and so things wound down. The war was over. And we all end up in different locations. They were sent back to replacement depots, and I ended up in Japan.
Well, can we stay with the war just a little bit?
Yeah.
In Okinawa --
Yeah.
Were you there in Okinawa, and were you there on August 6th, 1945?
You bet your sweet life, I was. As a matter of fact, I had the pleasure of swimming ashore, because the -- the way we landed was we ___ in large ships over the side into small LSTs, which would then be run by a boatswain. And a boatswain is a Navy enlisted man with a ring in his ear. And he would run you up to the beach, drop the front deck, and off you go. Well, turns out there was too much shooting for the boatswain -- for our boatswain. And so he dropped us off where he --
This is a different date?
-- and we swam ashore.
Okay. That was in '44, I guess?
Yeah. Swam ashore. And, matter of fact, the only thing that kept me from sinking was that I had packed my bag so well, it kept me afloat. Oh, yeah.
Did you have a weapon then?
Damn right.
What'd you carry? Do you remember?
I carried a carbine and a .45. And 20 tons of dictionaries.
Japanese dictionaries?
Damn right.
That was your --
That's all. That's how I did business.
Right. So, now, the question I had asked before was on August 6, 1945, when the atomic bomb was dropped.
I was in Okinawa.
You were in Okinawa. Do you remember hearing about it?
Yeah. No one knew what it was. We thought it was great. No one knew what the atomic bomb was. And they said it's a really special bomb, which is fine with me.
You remember the feelings --
And, you see, that was the most dangerous night of all, because anybody who had a gun was firing in all directions that night.
You remember the feelings of the Nisei soldiers?
Oh, they were delighted. Of course. Absolutely. But out of all of this, the one thing I wanted to spend a little bit of time on is my experience as the commanding officer of these people. Army regulations provide that if you're an enlisted man under combat circumstances, you can receive mail. But if you want to send mail to anyone it has to be censored by your commanding officer for obvious reasons. And so I was in the business of reading the mail of every single one of these young men, mostly young men. And mostly they would write to their families and mostly they were in the relocation camps. And the heart-wrenching thing to me was that here -- here are these guys not living too well, in danger of being killed at any time, writing letters to their families in the relocation camps and trying to keep their families' spirits up. Whereas normally you would expect the families' letters would be quite the other way. And I felt that -- that just was -- I was overwhelmed by that. And it was quite common with almost every one of them. They all had older parents or grandparents or uncles. They were very attentive. Would talk to them, make sure they mention their names and what they were doing. But in every case they were writing it to try to raise the spirits of the people back in the camps. And that's such an inversion of what you normally would expect coming from people in combat for their country, that it overwhelmed me.
Do you remember some of the people from that period that you remember? Remember names or --
You bet your life.
Oh, yeah? You still ___ those people and what they --
Yes. First of all, we -- understand, we had two kinds of Nisei. I don't know how well you know about it. People called Yogore and people called Kotonk. And that's between the Hawaii -- Hawaiian-Japanese and the California-Japanese.
Can you explain which is which?
Yo -- the Kotonk are the Japanese -- are the Hawaiian-Japanese. And they, you know -- they stick together. Don Oka was my sergeant. He was -- he was the most mature man. He deserved the job of being a sergeant, which means he really ran the team. And I had been keeping in touch with him after the war. He was a cartoonist for Walt Disney and a very good one. And I believe -- I hope he's still live in Los Angeles. I remember several names, but I want to give you one story which will explain how important these people were to me. Through my friends here in Washington who keep in touch with JAVA, I was invited to a JAVA meeting which was held in the ambassador's residence, which is a brand-new building. It's a gorgeous building downtown in Washington. And I wanted to see that. Now, the chances of my seeing anybody that I knew 50 years ago was just insane. But what the hell? They were -- and so I went to this thing, and there were hundreds of hundreds of Japanese-Americans all over the place, all ages, although there were quite a few 50s- and 60s-year-old types. And I'd look at one fellow who looked like he's about 55 years old, and there was a young guy who used to work in my team, about 18, 19 years old. I'll never forget. Setsuo Isokane. And he had that lovely look in his eye that you see when somebody who is smart is talking to you, you know? He just radiates. I'll never forget that look. And I'm looked at this 60-year-old man, and I walk up to him and say, "Is your name Isokane?" And he says, yes. It was Setsuo Isokane. The same man. He was a professional. He was a businessman. A successful guy. And it was just the most rewarding experience I can ever recall. So I will never forget them and the service they performed. It made me a better person.
Do you stay connected with the community? Have you had Japanese-Americans in your work? I mean --
Oh, we know a couple who are -- sure. Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
Can you tell -- can you, just for the recorder here, tell us about your -- briefly, your career --
Okay.
-- after World War II.
After World War II, I was picked up by the Army Security Agency, because I was a -- I was a fairly accomplished linguist. I was one of the better ones. And I, as a matter of fact, I was able to work in social problems which is not the easiest thing to do. And so I was hired for a totally different job, having nothing to do with Japanese. And so I was a captain in the Army Security Agency in 1946. I'll never forget. February 1946 arrived at ASA, and have worked in there in a variety of management jobs, from being branch chief, division chief, officer, group chief -- And I've been -- I've worked overseas. I've been assigned in Japan for two years. Again, not working on Japanese stuff. I was assigned to London for three years, which is a wonderful job. And I ended up as a deputy director of various kinds of things. And it was a great experience, one which I will treasure all my life. And -- and I retired some time ago and I -- I'm now active in the Cryptologic Museum which exists right next to NSA. And I do other things not for pay, volunteer work, because I think I've worked all my life for Uncle Sam, and I thought I should do something for people as opposed to governments. And so that's a much more tiring but necessary thing for me to do.
Well, I see. I can't think of some other things to ask you. Well, we covered -- well, it was very interesting, I think, your discussion. And would you like to finish off by any --
That's it.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
It was excellent. We really appreciate it. Thank you very much again.