Japanese children, seeing a Marine for the first time, eagerly reach for chocolates offered them by SSgt Henry A. Weaver, III. (National Archives)
By Morton Stith
I worked as a Bomb Disposal Marine, a part of World War II that seems to have been wiped from history. Our mission was to neutralize unexploded bombs and shells which had been fired or dropped. This included German, Japanese, and American ordnance. In Tokyo alone we estimated the existence of thousands of unexploded American bombs.
There were only a couple of hundred of us in Bomb Disposal. All volunteers. Everyone thought of us as dangerously eccentric, which we were. We got away with crimes large and small. When MPs attempted to eject me from the officer’s beach at Waikiki, I told them that I was a bomb disposal man, and they left me alone. On troop ships I was excused from the noxious chores grunts were required to perform. They figured that I was a lunatic.
I joined the Marines in 1941 as soon as I turned eighteen to escape my terrifying household. This was before Pearl Harbor. The Marine Corps quickly became my home, and my five years in it were some of the happiest of my life.
Bomb Disposal men operated in pairs and alternated roles. That is, one worked on the bomb while the other handled the telephone, and then on the succeeding day, we reversed roles. We rarely handled more than one bomb a day.
On Guam, I got paired with a British Sergeant from the Royal Marines who had just come north after several years in Burma. He was the most dangerous human being I’ve ever encountered. He carried a straight razor and had a violent temper. We got along beautifully.
He and I were among the first Allied troops to enter Japan after the war. I was in Okinawa watching an outdoor movie when someone announced that Japan had surrendered. The next announcement was for Sgt. Stith to report immediately to the commandant’s office. After five years of undetected crime, I thought they’d finally caught up with me. Instead, I was ordered to board a destroyer and within hours was headed for Japan. We arrived weeks before the first occupation troops.
My small team was ordered to search for a dispersion control device which the Japanese had adapted to large scale naval artillery. The search began in the arsenal at Hiroshima and lasted ten days. We didn’t find it and continued for ten days more in the Mitsubishi research facilities at Nagasaki. This was around twenty days after the bomb had been dropped. We never found the device. Nobody ever mentioned the word “radioactivity.”
I was the last person the military should have sent to Japan. Being a Marine and having seen a good quantity of the atrocities, I hated the Japanese with a vengeance. But a dramatic incident changed me. In fact, this event did more than change my life. It gave me a new life.
When I arrived in Tokyo, it was empty, or so it seemed, and I wandered the streets of what looked very much like a desert. Tokyo was completely flat, except for the imperial palace and the Dai-Ichi Seimei building, which would soon house General MacArthur. This was just after the surrender and before occupation troops arrived. The Japanese avoided me completely. I soon discovered that the source of their terror was the Marine Corps insignia that I wore. They thought that in order to be a rikusentai one had to murder his mother.
We were ordered not to buy food in the shops or to purchase it in restaurants for the simple reason that there was not enough food for the Japanese, and we had our own rations to eat. They issued us the D ration, a large bar of inedible dark chocolate, which could only be consumed by knocking a corner of it on a rock to knock off pieces. It was dreadful stuff.
I sat down on a curb in front of some shops and proceeded to hack away at my chocolate bar with a corner of the sharpened screwdriver I kept in my boot. I looked up to see that a ring of Japanese children had formed around me.
They had never tasted chocolate, nor had they tasted sugar either, but they knew what I was eating and couldn’t take their eyes off me. On impulse I chipped off a piece of D ration and handed it to a two-year-old, who knew exactly what to do with it. He popped it into his mouth, and his eyes rolled to heaven in ecstasy.
I then handed out other chips to other children and discovered that the mothers were horrified. They thought that I was poisoning their children. I passed out chips to the mothers and they also knew what to do with them. In the meantime, the clerks from the store were watching this drama with jaws agape.
When they saw that the situation was reconciled and everyone was happy, all eighteen clerks trooped out onto the sidewalk and gave me a deep bow. I got up and bowed back, breathing out heavily as I did. At that moment, all of my hatred and anger blew out from my mouth in a huge ugly cloud. Every last vestige. I turned and followed the clerks into a store, and we shared green tea. Over those delicate cups, I not only learned to like Japan but indeed fell madly in love with it. I picked up Japanese in a matter of weeks and although ungrammatical, I developed some fluency.
Those days are as alive to me at this moment as they were in 1945.
Morton Stith would spend one-year as a monk in Daituko-ji, a Zen buddhist monastery in northern Kyoto, before returning to the United States in 1947. He became a Professor of Art History at California State University and died in 2017.
