Spools of War : Retired Army Officer Sees 1945 Film of Occupied Japan as a Learning Tool

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ralph Herold will never forget the rubble that was left of the Japanese cities of Kobe and Osaka at the end of World War II.

Nor will he forget the faces of an apprehensive Japanese people, unsure of what to expect from the incoming U.S. Army in November of 1945.

Leaflets distributed by the Japanese government warned them that the Americans were “rapists and terrible people,” Herold said.

“The people of Japan were in a state of shock,” Herold said. “Here were these incoming white-faced soldiers they had never seen before. But once we started providing them with food, which many of them had been struggling to get, they realized we weren’t as barbaric as they had been told.”

Herold’s record of his war years does not rely on his memory alone. A young filmmaker in that still early era of movies, Herold has footage of his experiences etched into 2,000 feet of 16-millimeter Kodachrome film.

Herold, a Los Angeles native who now lives in Leisure World, was a member of a small clan of soldiers in the Army Signal Corps called pictorial officers. They were enlisted for their expertise with cameras.

“I started shooting movies when I was 14 at the 1934 Tournament of Roses Parade,” said Herold, now 73.

He later became the corps’ chief pictorial officer in the South Pacific.

“When I joined the National Guard in 1940 they were looking for somebody to organize the training film libraries. By the time we got to the South Pacific in November of 1944, we were shooting movies, stills and doing the film distribution, the whole kit and caboodle.”

By late summer of 1945, then Capt. Herold and his film crews had joined Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s 8th Army in the Philippines preparing to launch an invasion of Japan. But “we got lucky in August when the Japanese said they had had enough and we became an army of occupation instead,” he said.

Herold has made a 25-minute documentary videotape he entitled “Objective Kobe” that includes some of his most dramatic footage shot during the occupation of Japan. Herold, armed with an old Bell and Howell camera on a turret, recorded what was left of the bombed-out industrial city.

Although Kobe was spared the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the city was nearly completely destroyed by the more conventional bombing during the last few months of the war, he said.

“Kobe was, and still is, the home of Mitsubishi, but by the time I got there 85% of the city was destroyed,” Herold said. “It looked like a desert.”

Herold says he shot his full-color film during his spare time. In those days, the military was not interested in color film that could not be processed cheaply or used in newsreels.

“They wanted black and white film that could be processed quickly and either shipped to the newsreel companies or saved for review by staff officers,” Herold said. “But I had in mind to shoot anything and everything I saw.”

But Herold always wanted to tell a story later, which he hopes to do with his video. He said he is negotiating with several organizations with hopes that the film will wind up in the hands of schools and libraries, the Public Broadcasting System or the Smithsonian Institution.

“Whoever gets the video will take my pictures and do what they want with the narration and the music,” he said.