Got the cable

I went back to the archives this afternoon, to get the next box they’d pulled — the POW related cables.

Here is the cable, which says it is from the Hokadate camp, listing my grandfather. It also lists Captain Lundy Ziegler — referenced in my grandfather’s affafavit — as the senior officer in the group.

The next trip to the archives — later this week — will be to get the POW camp files.  I’ve already looked through some, from Tokyo, which contain a lot of photos, interviews, etc. I found the notes from SGT Frank Fujita of HQ Battery, 2/131, the only Japanese-American combat soldier captured during the war (one other Japanese American was captured, a military intelligence specialist). Fujita wrote Foo: A Japanese American Prisoner of the Rising Sun, and his notes at the national archives describe the Bunko camp in Tokyo — a former girls school which held a small grouping of POW’s who were pulled out to work on propaganda broadcast on shortwave radio.

Some links:

George Stoddard: Navy, one of the technicians who was sent up to Japan in November 43. There is a GD Stoddard listed on the same cable that reported my grandfather — another lead to follow up, since he may have known my grandfather in Japan.

http://home.pon.net/shawnf/stor/Stoddard.G/Stoddard.htm

Glenn McKasson; A Marine who spent some time at Ohashi toward the end of the war:
http://www.west-point.org/family/adbc/autobios_files/mck.htm