Written by Todd DePastino
Retired Navy Captain Bill Dempsey recently recalled to me a horrific fire on September 24, 1965 at a US Navy signals collection site in Kamiseya, Japan, that killed twelve Americans. I’d not heard of the tragedy, but Bill’s story and the 60th anniversary of it prompted me to learn more and try to find out if the deaths might have been prevented.
In the early morning of, a fire swept through Building 25 at the U.S. Navy’s cryptologic site at Kamiseya, west of Tokyo. When it was over, twelve Sailors and Marines were dead and fourteen more hospitalized for smoke inhalation.
The contemporaneous station newspaper, The Kamiseyan, reported that a pre-dawn electrical short “ignited heavy support timbers” between the first and second decks, with heat traveling along metal studs and embers carried through wall voids and air-conditioning ducts before the building erupted into an “uncontrollable conflagration.” Roughly one hundred men were on duty; twelve died, and fourteen were treated at Camp Zama.
The secure complex consisted of a two-story wooden Building 25 fronting the underground “tunnel,” where cryptologic watchstanders actually worked. The main operations building, in which the fire took place, was originally an Imperial Japanese torpedo manufacturing facility built to withstand Allied bombings in World War II. The walls and ceiling were made of reinforced concrete six to eight feet thick. There were no windows and few doors, making it especially susceptible to fire danger.
Bill Dempsey recalls scuttlebutt about Japanese firefighters being barred from the facility because of the sensitive nature of the documents within it. But The Kamiseyan emphasized that U.S. military and Japanese municipal fire departments fought the blaze together for nearly three hours.
The newsletter also described the dead as engaged in “rescue or salvage operations” or searching for the source of dense smoke when the flames flashed. It put the critical moment at about 2:35 a.m. Friday, September 24.
Subsequent official remembrance has filled in some context. The NSA’s memorial account notes that more than a hundred personnel were standing watch when the fire began and that an hour passed before the order to evacuate, by which time Building 25 was fully engulfed; the fire was brought under control around 5:50 a.m. Those details—late evacuation, wooden superstructure, confined underground spaces—frame much of the later debate.
Eyewitnesses and community histories have long questioned the electrical-short explanation. One widely shared recollection by cryptologic technician Fred Ames says an incinerator had been recently installed to destroy classified material after Sailors discovered sensitive documents in ordinary trash. Ames recalls the incinerator vented through an interior wall, “hot walls” when it was in use, and a “blowback” that injured a man days before the fire. That memory aligns with the long-standing “incinerator ignition” hypothesis, though it remains a veteran’s account rather than a formal finding.
Henry Van Gemmert, a sailor who was there, offers a blunt assessment: the line that the dead were engaged in “rescue or salvage” was, in his words, a cover for not evacuating while there was still time. He writes that the mission’s importance—Morse-code intercept of Soviet traffic—had drilled into watchstanders that they could not miss a “dit” or a “dah,” so they initially stayed on position with gas masks until it became too late to escape. He adds that the tragedy spurred a procedural shift: lives over manning positions when fire breaks out.
Other claims persist in secondary summaries: a locked exit that trapped men, and respirators that clogged quickly in particulate-heavy smoke. These points circulate widely in community retellings, and Wikipedia repeats them, but they are not well documented in publicly available primary sources.
So, were the deaths preventable? The balance of evidence suggests at least some were. NSA’s memorial narrative acknowledges a significant evacuation delay; in a fast-moving interior fire, an hour is decisive. The building’s configuration—a wooden structure linked to a windowless underground work area with ducts and voids—amplified heat and smoke spread before visible flames appeared. And if the incinerator recollections are accurate—improperly vented, with a prior blowback—then known ignition hazards went insufficiently mitigated. None of that proves a single smoking-gun cause, but taken together they outline a human-factors chain familiar in fire investigations: ambiguous early warnings, mission-first culture, structural vulnerabilities, and a late decision to clear the space.
The Kamiseya Twelve have since been honored on NSA’s Cryptologic Memorial. As the 60th anniversary approaches on September 24, 2025, veterans in the cryptologic community are asking commands to mark the date—read the names, lay a wreath, keep a minute’s silence, and tell the story plainly to younger Sailors who inherit the mission. Remembering what happened, and how people responded, is part of the safety record too.
Roll of the Twelve
Roger W. Alex, CTSA, 19
William Edward Briley, CTSA, 18
Wilfred Dewey Cordell, CTSN, 20
Dennis Eugene Etzweiler, CTSN, 18
Archie Russell Garofalo, CT3, age not listed in available sources
John Dewey House, CTSA, 18
Richard Eugene McKown, LCpl, USMC, age not listed in available sources
Ernest Don Moody, LTJG, 36
Paul Charles Rodrigues, Sgt, USMC, 24
Wayne Edgar Tower, CT3, 22
James Kenneth Whitman, CTSN, 18
Gregory Scott Williams, CT3, 19.
