Reading 3 of 7 free1776 Club · all 7 storiesMonday, August 10
From the desk
Start with 1944: Guam secure after three weeks of fighting, the Marines pinned on the beach by a reef hundreds of yards out, then grinding through Orote Peninsula and the interior until organized resistance broke on August 10, leaving 7,500 Japanese troops still scattered in the mountains. Worth a longer look: 1945, when Tokyo cabled acceptance of Potsdam's terms but insisted the Emperor's place stay untouched, handing Washington a question with no clean answer. Wilson's Creek fills out the day, Lyon dead on Bloody Hill, Missouri lost.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1944Featured · This day in history
Guam is declared secure; 7,500 Japanese troops are still loose in the hills
Guam had belonged to Japan since three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Japanese forces captured the island on 10 December 1941, and taking it back would give American bombers the airfields needed to reach the Japanese home islands. On 21 July 1944, the 3rd Marine Division landed at Asan and the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade landed near Agat, on opposite sides of the Orote Peninsula, with landing craft stopped short by a reef hundreds of yards from shore. Japanese defenders under Lieutenant General Takeshi Takashina fought from the peninsula and then withdrew into Guam's mountainous interior. On 10 August, organized resistance ended, though some 7,500 Japanese soldiers remained scattered across the island.
Guam had been American territory since 1898 and fell to Japan just three days after Pearl Harbor, making its recapture personal as well as strategic. Its airfields gave the Army Air Forces the runway length needed to fly B-29 Superfortresses against Japan itself, and became the launch point for the war's final campaign against the home islands.
Did you know
QWhat happened to the American sailors who evaded capture when Guam fell in 1941?
Six US Navy sailors slipped away into the jungle rather than surrender when Japan seized Guam on 10 December 1941. Five were eventually tracked down by Japanese search parties and executed. The sixth, George Tweed, stayed hidden for the entire occupation, sheltered by Chamorro islanders who risked their own lives to feed and hide him. Tweed remained at large for over two and a half years, surviving until American forces returned in July 1944. His survival stood in stark contrast to the fate of the Chamorro population, thousands of whom Japanese troops forcibly marched into internment camps like Manenggon as the invasion approached.
QWhy did a Japanese submarine attack accidentally strand an entire infantry regiment on Saipan instead of Guam?
On 29 February 1944, the American submarine USS Trout torpedoed and sank the Sakito Maru, a transport carrying 4,124 Japanese troops of the 29th Division toward the Marianas, including most of the 18th Infantry Regiment. Escorting destroyers depth-charged Trout in retaliation, sinking it with its entire crew, but they also diverted to pick up 1,620 survivors and dropped them at Saipan instead of continuing to Guam. The regiment's 1st Battalion never made it to its intended destination, permanently altering the troop distribution the Japanese had planned for Guam's defense.
QHow badly did prewar American maps of Guam actually fail the invading troops?
Despite Guam being a US possession since 1898, the Office of Naval Intelligence's 345-page study and the 1:20,000 maps issued to troops in 1944 were riddled with errors. Contour lines were broken, indicating the terrain had never been properly surveyed, and roads marked on the maps, especially in the north, frequently did not match reality. Areas labeled bare on paper turned out to be dense forest, and low hills went unmarked entirely. The Japanese defenders, by contrast, had better maps of the island than the Americans returning to reclaim their own territory. Planners tried to compensate with plaster relief maps built at double vertical exaggeration and submarine reconnaissance photos taken by USS Greenling in April.
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1945military
Tokyo says it will surrender, but only if the Emperor stays on his throne
Five days after an atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima and one day after a second fell on Nagasaki, Tokyo finally answered the Potsdam Declaration. On August 10, 1945, the Japanese government announced it had cabled the Allies accepting the surrender terms Truman, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek had issued two weeks earlier, but only on one condition: the message must not "comprise any demand that prejudices the prerogatives of the Emperor as sovereign ruler." Foreign Minister Shigenori Tōgō's offer left Washington to decide whether a conditional surrender was surrender at all.
The declaration was largely an American document, drafted to keep Washington's strategic options open in the Pacific and to head off Soviet influence in postwar East Asia. Truman's insistence on unconditional surrender, issued days after he learned the atomic bomb worked, set the terms America would use to justify Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and seven years of occupation reshaping Japan into a democracy under MacArthur.
Did you know
QWhose handwriting actually appears on Chiang Kai-shek's and Churchill's signatures on the Potsdam Declaration?
Both signatures belong to Harry Truman. Chiang Kai-shek never attended the Potsdam Conference since he wasn't invited to the Berlin suburb where it was held, so his agreement was sought by telegram, with Ambassador Hurley delivering the message in Chongqing on July 25 and Chiang's reply arriving at 11:05 a.m. the next day. Churchill had already flown home to Northolt on July 25 and authorized the British text before resigning as Prime Minister that same evening. Truman simply wrote out both men's names on the final document himself. The declaration's three signatures were really the work of one man's pen in one room in Germany.
QWhy did Stalin refuse to put his name on the Potsdam Declaration alongside Truman and Churchill?
The Soviet Union was still bound by a 1941 neutrality pact with Japan and technically not at war, so Stalin declined to endorse the ultimatum at Potsdam itself. He instead promised to subscribe to it once the Soviets entered the Pacific war, which he'd scheduled for early August. Moscow finally agreed to adhere to the declaration on August 8, and Stalin unilaterally abrogated the neutrality pact the next day, launching a three-front invasion of Manchuria the same day Nagasaki was bombed. The timing traced back to a secret commitment Stalin had made to the Allies at Yalta back in February. Japan's own ambassador in Moscow had been counting on Soviet mediation that never had a chance to materialize.
QWhat did Emperor Hirohito's surrender broadcast reveal about Japan that had nothing to do with the war's terms?
The August 15 radio address marked the first time many ordinary Japanese citizens had ever heard their Emperor's actual voice. Hirohito had been treated as a distant, almost sacred figure throughout the war, rarely if ever addressing the public directly through mass media. Foreign Ministry official Toshikazu Kase had earlier recorded that Hirohito, upon first reviewing the Potsdam terms, said 'without hesitation that he deemed it acceptable in principle,' well before the government's public posture caught up to that private view. The broadcast itself became as much a national event for its novelty as for its content, introducing millions of subjects to a voice they had only imagined.
1988civil-rights
Reagan signs law admitting the internment camps were wrong; $20,000 to every survivor
Forty-six years after Franklin Roosevelt ordered roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them U.S. citizens, into camps behind barbed wire, Congress admitted it had been wrong. On August 10, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, authorizing $20,000 payments to each surviving internee and a formal government apology. The law found the internment had rested on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership," not military necessity. Checks began going out in 1990, and a total of 82,219 people ultimately received redress payments.
Reagan, a Republican president who campaigned against federal spending, signed a bill that cost the Treasury hundreds of millions of dollars to admit the government had wronged its own citizens by race. A majority of Democrats voted for it, and a majority of House Republicans voted against it, though Senate Republicans passed it by a narrow majority, making it one of the few times Congress crossed party lines to formally repay a group of Americans for a specific constitutional injury.
Did you know
QWhat did property losses from internment actually total, and how much did the government first pay back in 1948?
Japanese Americans forced into camps lost an estimated $400 million in property, businesses, farms, and belongings sold off or abandoned under duress. Congress made a token attempt to address this decades before the 1988 act, passing legislation in 1948 that provided $38 million in compensation for property losses. That figure covered less than a tenth of the estimated losses, and claimants faced a lengthy, poorly documented process since many had lost the very records needed to prove what they once owned. The gap between $400 million lost and $38 million returned stayed open for another forty years, until the 1988 law addressed the moral debt as well as the financial one.
QHow exactly did Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt justify internment to Congress?
DeWitt, who headed the Western Defense Command and oversaw the removal orders, told Congress plainly that citizenship made no difference to him. His testimony read, "I don't want any of them here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty... It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese." He was also the source of the blunter phrase "A Jap's a Jap," a line historians have since cited when describing internment's racial logic. The 1988 act's finding that internment stemmed from "race prejudice" was, in effect, a direct rebuttal to DeWitt's own words decades earlier.
QDid the government consider targeting Japanese Americans before Pearl Harbor was ever attacked?
Yes, years earlier. In a private 1936 writing, President Franklin Roosevelt suggested that any Japanese citizen or non-citizen on Oahu who had contact with visiting Japanese naval officers or crew should be secretly identified and placed on "a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp." That was five years before Pearl Harbor and six years before Executive Order 9066. The note shows the idea of pre-listing Japanese residents for detention existed in Roosevelt's thinking well before the war made it policy, undercutting the later claim that internment was purely a wartime emergency response.
