Word: jap
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Return Visit. Bob Eichelberger will set up his headquarters in bomb-smashed Tokyo. He had visited the Jap capital before, and on one occasion had started a picturesque yarn...
After World War I, as a temporary major and intelligence officer for Major General William S. Graves's expeditionary force en route to Siberia, he was one of a group entertained at a dinner by Jap officers. Eichelberger had seen no combat service in Europe, was short of medals. To keep him from being out-spangled by his Jap hosts, a brother officer insisted on lending him some campaign bars. The Japs were properly impressed...
Then the Eighth went south to clean up what was left of the Philippines. In 44 days it made six major and 24 minor landings. Eichelberger was all over the place, sleeping among his soldiers on the ground - once, so close to a Jap airfield that the racket of enemy airplane engines kept them awake most of the night. MacArthur wrote this commendation: "a model of what a light but aggressive com mand can accomplish in rapid exploitation...
Ashore, U.S. photographers crouched side by side with Domei's lensmen, shooting the big shots. One Domei cameraman had carrier pigeons to fly his pictures back to his office. U.S. and Jap reporters elbowed each other at press conferences. Jap reporters obligingly gave out interviews, and in turn interviewed U.S. newsmen. (Didn't they agree that the bombing of Japanese cities was horrible?) The U.P. came up with an eyewitness description of atom-bombed Hiroshima from its onetime Tokyo office manager, Honolulu-born Leslie Nakashima, who went there to look up his mother. Wrote he: "I was dumfounded...
American reporters went into Tokyo ahead of the U.S. Army, simply taking a suburban train like thousands of other commuters. (Said an obliging fellow from the Jap Information Bureau: "When young gentlemen wish go Tokyo? Trains every half hour.") They dropped in at Domei, looked over the busy newsroom, were photographed chatting with the editors. A woman guide (born in California) was assigned to escort one group around. She said she wasn't Tokyo Rose: that was two other girls from Los Angeles. At the Imperial Palace one newsman got as far as the Emperor's foreign secretary...