What Marines Did With the First Japanese Soldier on Guadalcanal Who Walked In and Gave Up

Soneto Sakata was the first Japanese prisoner on Guadalcanal whose word the United States Marine Corps acted on and acting on it cost the first Marine Division 22 men in one night. He was a warrant officer in the Imperial Navy. He had been in American hands for a matter of hours when at 6:00 in the evening on the 12th of August, 1942, he was put into a landing craft at the boat pool near Kukum Village with 25 armed Americans and taken west along the coast in the dark.

The Navy lieutenant who ran that boat pool remembered the mood afterwards. Everybody was laughing and talking while the party waited for its craft. They went off looking confident and the men who stayed behind turned in. Three of the Americans came back down the beach the next morning. The other 22 were never found.

That patrol has been told for 80 years as a lesson in how not to run a reconnaissance and it is one. Is also the front end of something else and the something else is the part almost nobody tells. The information the prisoner gave was not a trick. The Marine Corps understood that within weeks and what the division built out of that understanding worked against the Japanese Army for the rest of the Pacific War without the enemy ever finding an answer to it.

Start with what the Americans had when they landed because it is worse than most people assume. United States Navy had been teaching officers Japanese in Tokyo since the 1920s. It was a 3-year course. It was thorough and by 1940 it had turned out 65 men. Of those 65, in December of 1940, 12 were rated as fully able in both the spoken and the written language.

That same Navy had been war gaming a Pacific campaign against Tokyo for two decades. In February of the following year, a naval officer named Albert Hindmarsh was told to find out how many Americans could handle the language anywhere in the country, in uniform or out of it. He came back with a figure of about 600 people carrying some knowledge of Japanese or Chinese.

Out of that 600, he judged 56 worth inviting to start a school. Classes opened that autumn at two universities. The three-year course was compressed to roughly 14 months. And when the West Coast internment orders broke up the California program, the whole thing moved inland to Colorado. By the autumn of 1942, 47 Japanese-American teachers had arrived in Boulder, gathered out of seven internment camps, to teach American officers how to speak with the enemy.

None of that helped the 1st Marine Division in August. The men in Colorado were still in class. When the division sailed for the Solomons, it carried four officers who could speak Japanese and two who could handle the written language with any confidence. One of the two was Ralph Corey. Corey had spent 10 years in the American Consular Service in Korea, China, and Japan.

And by 1938, he was a vice consul at Nagasaki watching a war machine work from inside one of its port cities. Then Washington brought him home and put him into the naval organization that was breaking Japanese diplomatic traffic, where the difficulty was never turning the language into English. The difficulty was knowing what a particular phrase meant to the man who chose it.

Late in 1941, a clerk handed him a message, and what he made of it was that Tokyo had told its diplomats to stand by and burn their code papers. His translation went to the president. It arrived at a quarter to 10:00 on the morning of the 7th of December, too late to be of use to anybody. He was 44, married, and finished with desks.

He told a colleague he was sick of pencil-pushing and was going to join the Marines, and they gave him a commission that May, 6 weeks before the division sailed. He got ashore on Guadalcanal on the 7th of August in the second wave and started working at once. The war correspondent, Richard Tregaskis, who shared a tent with him, watched him translate a sign torn off a hut.

Shortly after midday, the first three Japanese prisoners taken on the island came to him for questioning. They said they belonged to a navy labor battalion and that their camp lay a short distance ahead along the trail. When the Marines reached the camp, they found a fourth man too sick with malaria to have moved.

Those four are the honest answer to the question this story starts from. The first Japanese who gave themselves up on Guadalcanal were not soldiers at all. They were construction workers, the men who had been cutting the airfield the Americans had just taken, and they came in over the following days in ones and twos, hungry, ill, and willing to talk.

It surprised the Americans. Nothing in the training of the men walking in had prepared them for it, either. It mattered more than it should have because everything else the division tried had failed. Air photographs showed tree canopy. Observation posts on the ridges showed more ridges. The perimeter held a strip of coast around one airfield.

The island beyond it was a blank, and the one method that returned anything at all was walking out into it and looking. A man who would answer questions was worth more than any camera in the South Pacific. Sakada was a different proposition. A patrol from the 5th Marines picked him up near Kukum behind American lines on the 12th of August.

He was a warrant officer rather than a laborer, and he gave nothing away. Corey sat down beside him with armed guards standing over both of them and got very little. Then he offered him brandy. And after a long stretch of questioning, Sakamoto allowed that there was a body of Japanese naval landing troops a few miles to the west.

That they had lost their officers. That they were in poor condition. And that under the right circumstances, some of them might give up. The Marine Corps history of the campaign, written 4 years after the war by an officer who interviewed the survivors, is careful about this. It notes that the prisoner never volunteered any of it and agreed to the possibility of surrender only after considerable questioning.

And it states in plain terms that there was no reason to doubt his sincerity. A second prisoner said something similar. On the same day, a Marine patrol reported a white flag hanging in the trees to the west in the same square of jungle. That flag was in all likelihood an ordinary Japanese battle flag, seen from far enough away that the red disc in the middle of it did not carry.

Lieutenant Colonel Frank Gedge was the division intelligence officer, and the reconnaissance already sketched out for that area was a sound one. Land by boat in daylight. Work up the bank of the Matanikau River. Camp inland overnight. Walk home across country the next day and take enough riflemen to fight if it came to that.

When Gedge had heard about the prisoner, he took personal charge and rebuilt the plan around bringing surrendering men home alive. Which meant filling the boat with the regimental surgeon, with Corey, and with most of the intelligence section of the 5th Marines. That section was corpsmen and scouts rather than infantry.

The party came to 25 people, a large share of them specialists whose value had nothing to do with a firefight. The changes cost about 12 hours. Instead of going ashore in daylight, the patrol left the perimeter at 6:00 in the evening and landed around 10:00 at night. Before it left, Colonel William Whaling of the 5th Marines told Geregau which stretch of beach to stay away from.

A patrol 3 days earlier had run into strong, well-cited Japanese positions between the mouth of the Matanikau and Point Cruz and had been stopped at the river. Whaling said to land west of the point. In the dark, on a coast none of them knew, the boat put them onto the beach Whaling had named. Machine gun and rifle fire caught them as they moved off the sand.

The colonel went down almost at once. A bullet took Corey in the stomach and the only doctor on the patrol was hurt too badly to help anybody. Three men were sent out at intervals to swim and wade back down the coast with word of what had happened. And they reached the perimeter at half past 5:00, at 25 past 7:00, and at 8:00 in the morning on the 13th.

Relief companies went out by boat and found nothing. After the 21st of August, another patrol turned up a dispatch case holding the surgeon’s equipment and a piece of torn clothing with Geregau’s name on it. That is the entire physical trace of the Geregau patrol ever recovered. Putting the one man in the division who could handle written Japanese into a night landing on a hostile beach was indefensible and there was a second reason nobody at the time could say out loud.

Corey knew how the Americans were breaking Japanese diplomatic traffic and he came very near to ending that night alive in enemy hands. A service that had known for 20 years who it was going to fight had trained 65 men to speak to them and on the 12th of August it spent one of those 65 on a beach in the dark.

There is something the official account does not settle. The monograph never mentions the prisoner leaving the perimeter at all. Officers who served through the campaign and wrote about it afterwards state plainly that Sekoto went out in the boat and died on that beach with the rest, and the researchers who have worked through the casualty files agree with them.

So, the strongest sourcing puts him in that landing craft, and the official history declines to follow him out of the stockade. The reconnaissance did give up its answer in the worst possible way. What happened to the patrol, and what the relief company saw while combing that ground for it, settled the question of whether the Japanese held the country west of the river in strength.

They did. On the 19th of August, three companies of the fifth Marines went back over the same ground in a planned attack and killed more than 65 men there for the loss of four of their own. Now, the part that changes the shape of the story. The information was accurate. There were Japanese naval landing troops west of the Matanikau, in poor order, sick and hungry.

Sekoto had not sent the Marines into a trap. He answered the question he was asked and told the truth, and the men who acted on his answer went ashore in the wrong place at the wrong hour with the wrong people aboard. Nearly every other prisoner taken on that island did the same thing. The Marine Corps monograph carries a footnote most people never see, which says that the reliability of information from prisoners was a source of amazement to Marines throughout the campaign, and that no paperwork anywhere in the

division files shows a single attempted deception. In the final weeks, when the Japanese were pulling their surviving troops off the island in secret, prisoners taken in sectors miles apart told American questioners the same story about a withdrawal to the northwest with no way of arranging it between them and no sign that any of them had tried.

Most people who know this story know the first half of it, The prisoner and the beach and the patrol have vanished. The second half sits in a footnote in a 1949 monograph and in a memo that survived because other men kept passing it around. A like and a subscription are what make it worth going after the second halves.

The reason for all of it sits in a document issued in Tokyo on the 7th of January 1941 over the name of the war minister, Hideki Tojo. It was a field service code printed small enough to carry and it told every Japanese soldier that he was not to suffer the disgrace of being taken alive. Historians have argued for decades about how binding that instruction was in practice.

What is not arguable is what the code left out. There was no instruction on how to behave in captivity because captivity was not supposed to be possible. Japanese soldiers and sailors got no briefing on the Geneva Convention which Tokyo had declined to ratify. Nobody told them that a prisoner owes his captors a name, a rank, and a number and nothing further because no such rule had ever been written for them.

A man who found himself alive in American hands had walked past the end of everything he had been taught and there was no script waiting for him on the other side of it. He also believed most of the time that he was already dead. His relatives would be told he had died. His name would come off the rolls. Going home was not something he expected which removed the ordinary reason a prisoner keeps his mouth shut, the expectation of one day standing in front of his own people again.

Set that against an American who spoke his language, gave him a cigarette, fed him, and had a doctor look at his injuries and the arithmetic broke the way the Americans needed it to break. Ulrich Straus who spent years in the interrogation files of the National Archives, found the same pattern repeating across the whole war.

The questioning worked through kindness rather than pressure. The small courtesies caught men off guard, and so did the size of the American machine they traveled through on the way to the rear. The 1st Marine Division learned this the expensive way and then built around it. Colonel Edmund Buckley took over the intelligence section after Get Gooder was killed.

A stockade went up and by the later part of the campaign, the routine at division headquarters east of the mouth of the Matanikau had settled into a fixed shape. Somebody fed a captured man. A corpsman or a doctor treated his injuries. Then somebody who spoke Japanese sat down with him and started a conversation rather than an interrogation.

The difference between those two things is the whole point of what follows. One of those men was Sherwood Moran, a Marine captain in his 50s, who had spent most of his adult life as a missionary in Japan and spoke the language the way a man speaks a language he has lived inside. A photograph kept by his relatives shows him on Guadalcanal in 1942 sitting with a downed Japanese pilot whose hand had been hurt talking to him.

Buckley stands behind them watching. The results came in without noise and they were not small. On the 25th of January 1943, a Japanese engineer sergeant was captured, fed, and questioned in the usual way. At the end of the usual list of questions, with nobody prompting him, he mentioned that within a day or two there would be a daylight air attack of some weight on the American perimeter.

There had been very little of that since early December which is why the Americans took the warning seriously instead of dismissing it. The attack came in as he had said. Seven bombers arrived with something like 40 fighters alongside them, and American aircraft were already up and waiting. Almost nothing was damaged.

The account of it comes from a letter a Marine officer wrote to the core historians in 1945. In July of 1943, Moran sat down and wrote out what he had learned on Guadalcanal in a short field memo for other language officers. He argued that the interrogator’s first job was to establish himself as one human being talking to another.

That reminding a prisoner he was a prisoner was worse than useless, and that the man across from him deserved the plain decency owed to any exhausted and frightened person. It circulated through the Pacific without fanfare. It is still handed around in the American military today, 80 years on, and it was written by a middle-aged missionary in a tent on an island where the alternative approach had already killed 22 Marines in a single night.

A comment naming the detail here that landed hardest does more than it looks like it does. Those comments are what push a video like this one in front of people who have never heard of Ralph Corey. The monograph carries one attempt at deception by a prisoner in the entire Guadalcanal campaign, and it is worth the telling.

Late in January, a wounded Japanese non-commissioned officer came into division headquarters. He answered every question put to him and gave his unit and everything else that was asked. A doctor treated his injuries in front of the language officer, who saw to it that he had food and a comfortable place before leaving.

The officer was on his way out of the tent when the prisoner called him back. He had a confession to make. The food and the medical treatment had got to him, and he could not let it stand. He had given a false name at the start, which he now corrected. And then he added, “But that is the only lie that I told.”

What Marines Did With the First Japanese Soldier on Guadalcanal Who Walked In and Gave Up

Soneto Sakata was the first Japanese prisoner on Guadalcanal whose word the United States Marine Corps acted on and acting on it cost the first Marine Division 22 men in one night. He was a warrant officer in the Imperial Navy. He had been in American hands for a matter of hours when at 6:00 in the evening on the 12th of August, 1942, he was put into a landing craft at the boat pool near Kukum Village with 25 armed Americans and taken west along the coast in the dark.

The Navy lieutenant who ran that boat pool remembered the mood afterwards. Everybody was laughing and talking while the party waited for its craft. They went off looking confident and the men who stayed behind turned in. Three of the Americans came back down the beach the next morning. The other 22 were never found.

That patrol has been told for 80 years as a lesson in how not to run a reconnaissance and it is one. Is also the front end of something else and the something else is the part almost nobody tells. The information the prisoner gave was not a trick. The Marine Corps understood that within weeks and what the division built out of that understanding worked against the Japanese Army for the rest of the Pacific War without the enemy ever finding an answer to it.

Start with what the Americans had when they landed because it is worse than most people assume. United States Navy had been teaching officers Japanese in Tokyo since the 1920s. It was a 3-year course. It was thorough and by 1940 it had turned out 65 men. Of those 65, in December of 1940, 12 were rated as fully able in both the spoken and the written language.

That same Navy had been war gaming a Pacific campaign against Tokyo for two decades. In February of the following year, a naval officer named Albert Hindmarsh was told to find out how many Americans could handle the language anywhere in the country, in uniform or out of it. He came back with a figure of about 600 people carrying some knowledge of Japanese or Chinese.

Out of that 600, he judged 56 worth inviting to start a school. Classes opened that autumn at two universities. The three-year course was compressed to roughly 14 months. And when the West Coast internment orders broke up the California program, the whole thing moved inland to Colorado. By the autumn of 1942, 47 Japanese-American teachers had arrived in Boulder, gathered out of seven internment camps, to teach American officers how to speak with the enemy.

None of that helped the 1st Marine Division in August. The men in Colorado were still in class. When the division sailed for the Solomons, it carried four officers who could speak Japanese and two who could handle the written language with any confidence. One of the two was Ralph Corey. Corey had spent 10 years in the American Consular Service in Korea, China, and Japan.

And by 1938, he was a vice consul at Nagasaki watching a war machine work from inside one of its port cities. Then Washington brought him home and put him into the naval organization that was breaking Japanese diplomatic traffic, where the difficulty was never turning the language into English. The difficulty was knowing what a particular phrase meant to the man who chose it.

Late in 1941, a clerk handed him a message, and what he made of it was that Tokyo had told its diplomats to stand by and burn their code papers. His translation went to the president. It arrived at a quarter to 10:00 on the morning of the 7th of December, too late to be of use to anybody. He was 44, married, and finished with desks.

He told a colleague he was sick of pencil-pushing and was going to join the Marines, and they gave him a commission that May, 6 weeks before the division sailed. He got ashore on Guadalcanal on the 7th of August in the second wave and started working at once. The war correspondent, Richard Tregaskis, who shared a tent with him, watched him translate a sign torn off a hut.

Shortly after midday, the first three Japanese prisoners taken on the island came to him for questioning. They said they belonged to a navy labor battalion and that their camp lay a short distance ahead along the trail. When the Marines reached the camp, they found a fourth man too sick with malaria to have moved.

Those four are the honest answer to the question this story starts from. The first Japanese who gave themselves up on Guadalcanal were not soldiers at all. They were construction workers, the men who had been cutting the airfield the Americans had just taken, and they came in over the following days in ones and twos, hungry, ill, and willing to talk.

It surprised the Americans. Nothing in the training of the men walking in had prepared them for it, either. It mattered more than it should have because everything else the division tried had failed. Air photographs showed tree canopy. Observation posts on the ridges showed more ridges. The perimeter held a strip of coast around one airfield.

The island beyond it was a blank, and the one method that returned anything at all was walking out into it and looking. A man who would answer questions was worth more than any camera in the South Pacific. Sakada was a different proposition. A patrol from the 5th Marines picked him up near Kukum behind American lines on the 12th of August.

He was a warrant officer rather than a laborer, and he gave nothing away. Corey sat down beside him with armed guards standing over both of them and got very little. Then he offered him brandy. And after a long stretch of questioning, Sakamoto allowed that there was a body of Japanese naval landing troops a few miles to the west.

That they had lost their officers. That they were in poor condition. And that under the right circumstances, some of them might give up. The Marine Corps history of the campaign, written 4 years after the war by an officer who interviewed the survivors, is careful about this. It notes that the prisoner never volunteered any of it and agreed to the possibility of surrender only after considerable questioning.

And it states in plain terms that there was no reason to doubt his sincerity. A second prisoner said something similar. On the same day, a Marine patrol reported a white flag hanging in the trees to the west in the same square of jungle. That flag was in all likelihood an ordinary Japanese battle flag, seen from far enough away that the red disc in the middle of it did not carry.

Lieutenant Colonel Frank Gedge was the division intelligence officer, and the reconnaissance already sketched out for that area was a sound one. Land by boat in daylight. Work up the bank of the Matanikau River. Camp inland overnight. Walk home across country the next day and take enough riflemen to fight if it came to that.

When Gedge had heard about the prisoner, he took personal charge and rebuilt the plan around bringing surrendering men home alive. Which meant filling the boat with the regimental surgeon, with Corey, and with most of the intelligence section of the 5th Marines. That section was corpsmen and scouts rather than infantry.

The party came to 25 people, a large share of them specialists whose value had nothing to do with a firefight. The changes cost about 12 hours. Instead of going ashore in daylight, the patrol left the perimeter at 6:00 in the evening and landed around 10:00 at night. Before it left, Colonel William Whaling of the 5th Marines told Geregau which stretch of beach to stay away from.

A patrol 3 days earlier had run into strong, well-cited Japanese positions between the mouth of the Matanikau and Point Cruz and had been stopped at the river. Whaling said to land west of the point. In the dark, on a coast none of them knew, the boat put them onto the beach Whaling had named. Machine gun and rifle fire caught them as they moved off the sand.

The colonel went down almost at once. A bullet took Corey in the stomach and the only doctor on the patrol was hurt too badly to help anybody. Three men were sent out at intervals to swim and wade back down the coast with word of what had happened. And they reached the perimeter at half past 5:00, at 25 past 7:00, and at 8:00 in the morning on the 13th.

Relief companies went out by boat and found nothing. After the 21st of August, another patrol turned up a dispatch case holding the surgeon’s equipment and a piece of torn clothing with Geregau’s name on it. That is the entire physical trace of the Geregau patrol ever recovered. Putting the one man in the division who could handle written Japanese into a night landing on a hostile beach was indefensible and there was a second reason nobody at the time could say out loud.

Corey knew how the Americans were breaking Japanese diplomatic traffic and he came very near to ending that night alive in enemy hands. A service that had known for 20 years who it was going to fight had trained 65 men to speak to them and on the 12th of August it spent one of those 65 on a beach in the dark.

There is something the official account does not settle. The monograph never mentions the prisoner leaving the perimeter at all. Officers who served through the campaign and wrote about it afterwards state plainly that Sekoto went out in the boat and died on that beach with the rest, and the researchers who have worked through the casualty files agree with them.

So, the strongest sourcing puts him in that landing craft, and the official history declines to follow him out of the stockade. The reconnaissance did give up its answer in the worst possible way. What happened to the patrol, and what the relief company saw while combing that ground for it, settled the question of whether the Japanese held the country west of the river in strength.

They did. On the 19th of August, three companies of the fifth Marines went back over the same ground in a planned attack and killed more than 65 men there for the loss of four of their own. Now, the part that changes the shape of the story. The information was accurate. There were Japanese naval landing troops west of the Matanikau, in poor order, sick and hungry.

Sekoto had not sent the Marines into a trap. He answered the question he was asked and told the truth, and the men who acted on his answer went ashore in the wrong place at the wrong hour with the wrong people aboard. Nearly every other prisoner taken on that island did the same thing. The Marine Corps monograph carries a footnote most people never see, which says that the reliability of information from prisoners was a source of amazement to Marines throughout the campaign, and that no paperwork anywhere in the

division files shows a single attempted deception. In the final weeks, when the Japanese were pulling their surviving troops off the island in secret, prisoners taken in sectors miles apart told American questioners the same story about a withdrawal to the northwest with no way of arranging it between them and no sign that any of them had tried.

Most people who know this story know the first half of it, The prisoner and the beach and the patrol have vanished. The second half sits in a footnote in a 1949 monograph and in a memo that survived because other men kept passing it around. A like and a subscription are what make it worth going after the second halves.

The reason for all of it sits in a document issued in Tokyo on the 7th of January 1941 over the name of the war minister, Hideki Tojo. It was a field service code printed small enough to carry and it told every Japanese soldier that he was not to suffer the disgrace of being taken alive. Historians have argued for decades about how binding that instruction was in practice.

What is not arguable is what the code left out. There was no instruction on how to behave in captivity because captivity was not supposed to be possible. Japanese soldiers and sailors got no briefing on the Geneva Convention which Tokyo had declined to ratify. Nobody told them that a prisoner owes his captors a name, a rank, and a number and nothing further because no such rule had ever been written for them.

A man who found himself alive in American hands had walked past the end of everything he had been taught and there was no script waiting for him on the other side of it. He also believed most of the time that he was already dead. His relatives would be told he had died. His name would come off the rolls. Going home was not something he expected which removed the ordinary reason a prisoner keeps his mouth shut, the expectation of one day standing in front of his own people again.

Set that against an American who spoke his language, gave him a cigarette, fed him, and had a doctor look at his injuries and the arithmetic broke the way the Americans needed it to break. Ulrich Straus who spent years in the interrogation files of the National Archives, found the same pattern repeating across the whole war.

The questioning worked through kindness rather than pressure. The small courtesies caught men off guard, and so did the size of the American machine they traveled through on the way to the rear. The 1st Marine Division learned this the expensive way and then built around it. Colonel Edmund Buckley took over the intelligence section after Get Gooder was killed.

A stockade went up and by the later part of the campaign, the routine at division headquarters east of the mouth of the Matanikau had settled into a fixed shape. Somebody fed a captured man. A corpsman or a doctor treated his injuries. Then somebody who spoke Japanese sat down with him and started a conversation rather than an interrogation.

The difference between those two things is the whole point of what follows. One of those men was Sherwood Moran, a Marine captain in his 50s, who had spent most of his adult life as a missionary in Japan and spoke the language the way a man speaks a language he has lived inside. A photograph kept by his relatives shows him on Guadalcanal in 1942 sitting with a downed Japanese pilot whose hand had been hurt talking to him.

Buckley stands behind them watching. The results came in without noise and they were not small. On the 25th of January 1943, a Japanese engineer sergeant was captured, fed, and questioned in the usual way. At the end of the usual list of questions, with nobody prompting him, he mentioned that within a day or two there would be a daylight air attack of some weight on the American perimeter.

There had been very little of that since early December which is why the Americans took the warning seriously instead of dismissing it. The attack came in as he had said. Seven bombers arrived with something like 40 fighters alongside them, and American aircraft were already up and waiting. Almost nothing was damaged.

The account of it comes from a letter a Marine officer wrote to the core historians in 1945. In July of 1943, Moran sat down and wrote out what he had learned on Guadalcanal in a short field memo for other language officers. He argued that the interrogator’s first job was to establish himself as one human being talking to another.

That reminding a prisoner he was a prisoner was worse than useless, and that the man across from him deserved the plain decency owed to any exhausted and frightened person. It circulated through the Pacific without fanfare. It is still handed around in the American military today, 80 years on, and it was written by a middle-aged missionary in a tent on an island where the alternative approach had already killed 22 Marines in a single night.

A comment naming the detail here that landed hardest does more than it looks like it does. Those comments are what push a video like this one in front of people who have never heard of Ralph Corey. The monograph carries one attempt at deception by a prisoner in the entire Guadalcanal campaign, and it is worth the telling.

Late in January, a wounded Japanese non-commissioned officer came into division headquarters. He answered every question put to him and gave his unit and everything else that was asked. A doctor treated his injuries in front of the language officer, who saw to it that he had food and a comfortable place before leaving.

The officer was on his way out of the tent when the prisoner called him back. He had a confession to make. The food and the medical treatment had got to him, and he could not let it stand. He had given a false name at the start, which he now corrected. And then he added, “But that is the only lie that I told.”