Return and Remembrance : Ex-Paratroopers Revisit Japanese Base, Mark Prelude to End of World War II

The first U.S. military men to land on the Japanese mainland at the end of World War II were 5,000 lightly armed paratroopers of the 11th Airborne Division, wracked with worries about a possible ambush by die-hard Japanese soldiers and civilians.

“Everybody was scared to death,” said Len Wallach of West Hills, then an 18-year-old buck private and now a retired Army colonel.

Tuesday will mark 50 years since the wary paratroopers landed at Atsugi Airbase in a prelude to the formal surrender that rang down the final curtain on World War II, and Wallach will be back at Atsugi to commemorate the occasion.

He left for Tokyo Saturday to speak at an anniversary ceremony with former comrades, marking the operation that climaxed later in the day with the arrival of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commanding general of the Allied Pacific campaign.

Japan, stunned and demoralized in early August, 1945, by atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had sent word abroad of its intent to surrender, and V-J Day was proclaimed by Allied nations on Aug. 15.

But Japan was still functioning under its own government. The military forces in its home islands were still armed, organized and unconquered, under leaders who had vowed repeatedly to defend their country to the death. The first troops to arrive would be outnumbered by thousands to one.

So when the first C-54 transport planes flew in sight of snow-capped Mt. Fuji in the early hours of Aug. 30, 1945 (Aug. 29 in the United States), most of the young paratroopers fretted over the reception they would meet.

“Mt. Fuji was gorgeous--just as beautiful as we had seen in postcards,” recalled George Doherty, 70, of Anaheim, who also headed for Tokyo after helping to organize the 50th-anniversary reunion.

“When we landed, we were told to be alert and ready for any unforeseen hostile action by Japanese die-hards and fanatics,” said Doherty, recalling that Atsugi had been a base for the kamikaze pilots who intentionally crashed their planes into Allied ships during the war.

“Most of the Japanese officers who greeted each of the 250 planeloads of troopers from Okinawa had side arms and their samurai swords swinging from their belts,” Doherty said.

“The Japanese were terrified,” Doherty recalled. “They had been told these were American paratroopers who had conquered Japan’s elite forces at Leyte, Manila and Corregidor and that they were ‘ferocious fighters.’ ”

Wallach, now a trim 68, born into a military family and himself a Green Beret officer in Vietnam, agreed that “the paratroopers were a bunch of deadly guys, all right.”

At the same time, said Wallach, that lone U.S. airborne division fighting in the Pacific was only 60% of its normal strength and lightly armed.

“But the occupation forces found to their surprise that the Japanese were very docile,” he said.

Another veteran of the 11th Airborne Division, William Letwin, observed in a reminiscence of the same landing in the current issue of National Review magazine: “The Tokyo area was not only safe but weirdly placid.”

Traveling in a dilapidated open truck supplied by the Japanese, Letwin was in a U.S. convoy that went from the airport to temporary quarters at Yokohama during the evening rush hour.

Citizens on railroad platforms “looked straight ahead, faces expressionless, like soldiers standing at attention,” wrote Letwin, noting that the Japanese were faithfully following the emperor’s unprecedented radio instructions broadcast earlier that month.

Wallach, interviewed in his West Hills home shortly before his departure, said he wasn’t as worried as his comrades as he flew into Japan; he said that he was even asleep when his transport plane landed at Atsugi.

“I was born in Hawaii and grew up with Japanese friends, and lived in Tokyo while my father was stationed at the U.S. Embassy around 1932,” Wallach said. (He later made his home, with his wife and children, only two miles from Atsugi for 12 years while he fought in Vietnam.)

After Wallach’s plane landed, he immediately left on an assignment 15 miles away, ferrying VIPs between temporary U.S. Army quarters and ships in the Yokohama harbor. It was there on Sept. 3 that the unconditional surrender pact was signed by Japanese leaders on the battleship Missouri.

Wallach said most of the 11th Airborne Division was soon assigned to three northern towns on Honshu and in Sapporo on the northernmost island of Hokkaido.

“The [Army] wanted to get us out of the Tokyo area--the paratroopers were not exactly socially skilled,” Wallach said with a smile.

“But once we got up north, it wasn’t long before we all had girlfriends.”

In ceremonies Tuesday at Atsugi, now a U.S. Navy base, a life-size statue of MacArthur will be unveiled in recognition of the general’s role as architect of Japan’s postwar constitution, Doherty said.

The bronze work was commissioned by Japanese businessman Kenkichi Takahashi of Ayaso City and sculpted by a Japanese artist, Doherty said.

Wallach, who has been asked to speak on behalf of the ex-paratroopers during the ceremony, said he will try to walk a line between diplomacy and frankness.

“I haven’t written it yet, but I know I’m not going to pull any punches,” Wallach said.

“I got this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to say something on behalf of the men who died because of the aggression of a heartless nation,” he said. “I have no animosity toward the Japanese soldiers, but it just grates me and thousands of others that the Japanese government has not apologized to Korea and the Philippines.”

The plain-spoken ex-soldier also said that, against the wishes of his wife and a number of colleagues, he intends to perform an act of defiance in the tradition of warriors before him.

After the ceremony, Wallach said he will walk out of sight of the crowd--but with a photographer in tow--and urinate on the airfield.

“It is a way of taking a stand against the [Japanese government’s] lack of contrition and our [U.S. government’s] lack of concern for the feelings of the soldiers that went before us.”

The tradition, according to Wallach, can be traced back to Athenian and Roman days and was most famously repeated in World War II by U.S. Gen. George Patton, when his armored division crossed the Rhine River in Nazi Germany.