The Pittsburgh Press (February 23, 1945)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – There are still Japs on the three islands of the Marianas chain that we have occupied for more than six months now.
The estimate runs into several hundred. They hide in the hills and in caves, and come out at night to forage for food. Actually many of their caves were so well-stocked that they could go for months without getting too hungry.
Our men don’t do anything about the Japs anymore. Oh, troops in training for combat will go out on a Jap-hunt now and then just for practice, and bring in a few. But they are no menace to us, and by and large we just ignore them. A half dozen or so give up every day.
The Japs don’t try to practice any sabotage on our stuff. It would take another Jap to figure out why. The Japanese are thoroughly inconsistent in what they do, and very often illogical. They do the silliest things.
Here’s a few examples. One night, some of our Seabees left a bulldozer and an earth-mover sitting alongside the road up in the hills.
Cute fellows
During the night, the Japs came down. They couldn’t hurt anybody, but they could have put that machinery out of commission for a while. Even with only a rock they could have smashed the spark plugs and ruined the carburetor.
They didn’t do any of these things. They merely spent the night cutting palm fronds off nearby trees and laying them over the big machinery. Next morning when the Seabees arrived, they found their precious equipment completely “hidden.” Isn’t that cute?
On another island, there were many acts of sabotage the Japs could have committed. But all they ever did was to come down at night and move the wooden stakes the engineers had lined up for the next day’s construction of buildings!
Checked up first
There is another story of a Jap who didn’t take to the hills like the rest, but who stayed for weeks right in the most thickly American-populated section of the island right down by the seashore.
He hid in the bushes just a few feet from a path where hundreds of Americans walked daily. They found out later that he even used the officers’ outdoor shower bath after they got through, and raided their kitchens at night.
There was a Jap prison enclosure nearby, and for weeks, peering out of the bushes, he studied the treatment his fellow soldiers were getting, watched how they ate, watched to see if they were dwindling away from malnutrition.
And then one day he came out and gave himself up. He said he had convinced himself they were being treated all right, so he was ready to surrender.
And here’s another one. An American officer was idly sitting in an outbuilding one evening after work, philosophically studying the ground, as men will do.
Suddenly he was startled. Startled is a mild word for it. For in front of him stood a Jap with a rifle.
But before anything could happen, the Jap laid the rifle on the ground in front of him, and began salaaming up and down like a worshiper before an idol.
The Jap later said that he had been hunting for weeks for somebody without a rifle to give himself up to, and had finally figured out that the surest way to find an unarmed prospective captor was to catch one in a toilet!
But don’t let these little aftermath stories mislead you into thinking the Japs are easy after all. For they are a very nasty people while the shootin’s going on.