Posted on 01/24/2003 9:38:04 AM PST by far sider
If I recall correctly, it was for Gen. McArthur. And I think Mauldin drew it. Although it may have been Herblock. Black & white, heavy shading, otherwise very simple.
She was probably the most listened-to disc jockey in history, yet hardly anyone remembers her as such today, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the lingering infamous legend surrounding her. Brought up by her immigrant Methodist parents to think of herself as an American, Iva Ikuko Toguri (1916 - ), a first generation Japanese-American ("Nisei") was forced to broadcast propaganda for Japan during World War II, after her native U.S. abandoned her there mere days before the Pearl Harbor attack, and despite her continual efforts throughout the war to return home.Chosen out of the NHK/Radio Tokyo typing pool to be a disc jockey by the very Allied POW's being beaten and starved into writing her shows, she became an adept at sabotage of her own broadcasts, trained to read and eventually write her segments of "The Zero Hour" the way the POW saboteurs intended, while helping to keep these soldiers alive at mortal personal risk with food, medicine, clothing and hope during her almost daily visits to their cells. Though employed to broadcast pro-japanese propaganda, her outspoken support of the Allies off-mike (while cleverly concealing it within her message and delivery on-air) resulted in numerous arguments and even fist fights at work, and continual harrasment at home and elsewhere. She literally cheered in the streets as U.S. Gen. Doolittle's Raiders flew over Tokyo, and cheered yet again when the first American B-29's appeared over Tokyo in the fall of '44 (the first one was a BR-29 reconnaissance craft named "Tokyo Rose").
When she decided that NHK and the Japanese Army were interfering too much with the show, she started not showing up for work, spending months incommunicado without permission, at one point taking a month's retreat at a Church college to receive religious instruction to convert to Roman Catholicism. She was the only Japanese of Allied national citizenship involved with broadcasting WWII Japanese propaganda to refuse to give up their citizenship, even in the face of the twice-weekly and sometimes daily 3 AM harrassments she endured at the hands of the Kempeitai Thought Police.
Yet in spite of, and ironically because of this, she was to be only person ever tried or sent to prison for these broadcasts, based wholly upon evidence that U.S. authorites had fabricated and threatened two NHK workers who had given up their American citizenship, George Mitsushio and Ken Oki, into perjuring themselves with. In a trial she was subjected to precisely because she had kept her precious citizenship intact, she was to see it revoked in the end as part of her punishment. Hers was the most expensive trial in American history up until that time, and probably the most garishly trumped-up of all its show trials, though these facts have been largely forgotten.
All this in order that she might have foisted upon her for popular and political purposes the title of "Tokyo Rose", even though neither she nor anyone else had ever broadcast for the Japanese under that name, and had in fact never even been in front of a radio microphone till fall of 1943, years after the myth of a single "Tokyo Rose" arose from the imaginations of Allied soldiers in the Pacific who tried to put a face on the many female voices coming from numerous Japanese controlled radio stations. Though long since pardoned by President Ford, himself a veteran of the Pacific War and survivor of many kamikaze attacks, controversy over her supposed guilt continues even to this day. Of her own broadcasts, during which she actually used the name "Orphan Ann", all that remains are a smattering of scripts, and a precious few recordings that can barely be accounted for on two hands.
My dad was THERE - Sidi bel Abes, Kasserine, Sicily, Anzio, the winter campaign north through Italy.
He says that Mauldin has it 100 percent right.
This happened to my dad once:
"Didn't we meet at Cassino?"
LOL. War is hell. Thank your Dad (if you can) for all of us.
It's actually a very funny story, if you can believe that.
My dad's unit was taking the small town of Biela in NW Italy from the remnants of the German XLV Army Group. Since he was in a combat engineer outfit, he had been issued the M-1 carbine as his primary weapon. That ghastly misdesigned abomination has the safety and the clip release side by side, which is important to this story.
Anyhow, dad trots round a corner and literally bumps helmets with a German soldier. He swung up his carbine, went to hit the safety, hit the clip release, and dropped all his bullets in the street. Fortunately Jerry was already making tracks for Berlin, so it didn't matter.
But dad threw his M-1 away, picked up a Garand from a dead GI, and carried it the rest of the war.
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