16 January 2007

Yokosuka



The execution of Saddam Hussein's half-brother, Barzan al-Tikriti, and Awad Hamad al-Bandar came off without a hitch. Well. Almost without a hitch. There was no ridicule, anyway, even if Barzan's death was not according to the plan, which is true of many enterprises, both large and small.

He was inadvertently decapitated by the abrupt shock at the end of the rope. Officials in Baghdad carefully monitored the situation to see if there would be a public outcry, but there did not appear to be one.

Perhaps the locals were distracted by the dozen or so Shia civilians who were found hanging from the streetlights when the sun rose that morning.

The continuing sectarian violence highlights the stark difference between this war- mission accomplished on May Day 2003, according to the speeches of the time- and “Mission Accomplished” in Japan so long ago.

We marvel at how fast things move today, but we should note that the Greatest Generation did not let the grass grow under their feet.

I know a man who was present onboard the battleship Missouri (BB-63) to witness the formal surrender of the Japanese Imperial Government, the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters, and all Japanese and Japanese-controlled armed forces, wherever located.

It was September 2nd, 1945, and the ceremony was scheduled for nine-o'clock, sharp. Mighty Mo was anchored in the Sagami Wan, the reach of Tokyo Bay that curls around what was the Imperial Navy Base of Yokosuka, and three days earlier had become the advanced operating base of the US SEVENTH Fleet.

The battleship was flying a flag of antique origin. It was the thirty-one star version that flew over Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry's side-wheel steamer USS Mississippi when he steamed into the Sagami Wan on July 8th, 1853. He was in the van of four black warships.

There is a monument to the occasion in a park not far form the Main Gate to the base, erected in 1901. The residents of Kanagawa Prefecture were quite astonished by the firepower on the ships. A  poem inscribed on a plinth at the Black Ship Park describes without irony the impact of such a relatively small number of foreigners, which ultimately ended nearly three hundred years of isolation by the Tokugawa Shogunate.

Commodore Perry was quite stern with the representatives of the Shogun, and his presence, and return the following year, led to the signing of the 12-article Treaty of Peace and Amity.

Perry was not the first English-speaking visitor to the reclusive kingdom. William Adams was washed ashore here at the dawn of the 17th century, and there is a plinth to him, too, in the Tsukayama Park up on one of the queer steep little hills near the base.

He became useful to the Shogun for his understanding of the European traders who were beginning to appear in the Pacific, and usefully, he was not a Dutchman.

He outlived his Shogun, and died in retirement on his estate in Nagasaki in 1620, three hundred and twenty-five years before Major Sweeney and his crew appeared in a gap in the clouds above the city.

The Meiji Restoration brought great interest in the ways of the west. A large delegation of the Emperor spent nearly a year traveling in America, taking careful notes. The Yokosuka Iron Foundry was established in the city in 1865, and the French engineer Leonce Verny spent the next ten years supervising the development of modern dockyards and building ways.

Many of his works remained when I first washed up in Yokoskua, halfway in time between the surrender on the Missouri and the muddle of this morning.

The Base then would still have been instantly recognizable to any Pacific Sailor from the Big One. After the occupation and the great drawdown from the Vietnam War, the base was declining in utilization. There was discussion about transferring the facility back to Japanese ownership.

The loss of such a magnificent facility, with a top-quality work-force, appalled the Navy Leadership. Something needed to be done, and the decision was made to permanently base an aircraft carrier in the harbor.

Some questioned the wisdom or ability of the base to support the Midway (CV-41) at Yokosuka, and locals laughed. Back in the day, the base had supported five aircraft carriers with ease, under the flag of the Rising sun.

We were normally afoot on the base, since we lived on the ship. It was a mile, perhaps, to the main gate and the train to Yokohama and Tokyo. The road hugged the steep hills, and passed trough tunnels in their flanks. It would have been a challenge to take this place by force, and there were reminders of that everywhere.

In the war years that ended with the arrival of the Missouri, more than 260 caves in more than twenty distinct 20 networks were built throughout the base. There are at least fifteen miles of known tunnels in and under the hills inside the perimeter. There are many more scattered throughout Yokosuka and the surrounding areas.
We knew for sure that there was an underground five hundred-bed 500 bed hospital, a large electrical power generating facility, and a midget submarine factory. There was a whispered story that a tunnel ran from the base all the way to Atsugi airfield, filled with small arms ammunition and booby-trapped to a fare-thee-well.

All the caves except for three were sealed up for safety reasons, but the gaping mouths were still there, high up on the green hills, or filled with concrete at street level.

What's more, every base was like that, from the Kanto Plain to Misawa in the north. It was a pervasive reminder that we had come very close to something truly and utterly horrible, that could have been much worse than what we all had, Japanese and American alike.

There is a fun fact flyiung around the net these days, and I had to track it down as I thought about those days in Japan. They say the last Purple heart Medal was minted as part of a run of a half-million in 1945, in preparation for award to the hundreds of thousands who were going to die in the assault on the Home Islands.

It is quite true. They have never had to commission another production run, even accounting for the Gulf Wars and Vietnam and Korea. It is not an urban legend. You can check the Wikipedia or the article in the History News Network, of December of 2003.

When I walked the streets of Yokosuka Base, past the Club Alliance and the Officer's Club and the Submarine Base to the ship, I was always a little in awe of what had happened, and why it had not all been drenched in blood.

The day the Marines landed here, on the 28th of August, the battleship Nagato was at anchor in the inner harbor. She looms over the shoulder of the men coming off the landing craft. Within a day, they were destroying the small arms that they found, and the day after that, they were playing with parasols and bicycles.

MacArthur arrived at Atsugi as the great gray ships arrived in the harbor. Imperial Japanese Army troops lined the roads from the airbase to Tokyo with their backs turned towards the cars, so that they might not look upon the face of the new Shogun.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Photo credit: 
LT Wayne Miller, USNR, Official U.S. Navy Photograph

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