Loudspeaker Units.
Figure 69: Improved Surrender Leaflet. The new leaflet which did bring the Japanese in was better phrased. It did not mention the nasty word, surrender, but said, "I Cease Resistance." It also showed the Japanese how to carry the leaflet so as to persuade the triggery Americans that he was not holding a hand grenade behind it. The back of the leaflet, instead of being left blank, showed happy Japanese prisoners enjoying American captivity, their faces left identifiable as Japanese but blanked out enough to head off individual identification. Compare this with [figure 4], the Passierschein we used on the Germans.
Ultimate success came with the development of loudspeakers on tank mounts. These developed a range of two miles with the result that they had real value in combat operations. In April, 1945, a loudspeaker tank with the XIX Corps made an average of twenty broadcasts a day during action. Short talks were given to the enemy troops just before attack. Attacks were then withheld long enough to permit prisoners to come in. The attacks were then launched, lifted after a pause to permit more prisoners to come in, and finally pushed through. This tactic worked particularly well at road blocks where enemy troops were flanked. In the Teutoburger Wald a whole platoon was persuaded to surrender. At Hildesheim two hundred and fifty prisoners came over together. Elsewhere in the drive into Germany, the Germans came over in even greater numbers, but the situation was then so obviously at its best for us that they probably would have responded similarly to command banners, black words on white background, such as the ancient Chinese imperial forces used to carry around for tactical communication with bandits and rebels.
On Okinawa tank-mounted loudspeakers were ingeniously hooked up. The American tank officers and crews obviously could not speak good colloquial Japanese. The Japanese troops were dug in like rodents, and in a condition of desperation that made them fight cruelly and suicidally. Even if the Americans shelled the openings of their cave mouths or ran armored bulldozers over the holes, burying Japanese alive, there was the chance that the Japanese would run through long underground passages and pop up later, possibly at night, to cause more damage before they were killed. With Americans and Japanese unable to talk to one another, this condition might have led to a severe loss of American life in mopping up hundreds upon hundreds of such minute Japanese strongholds. The American tanks had loudspeakers mounted on many of them; they had radio telephone communication, that could be used between the different tanks on a tank team, or—it was an alternative, and could not be used simultaneously—could be employed for the commanding tank to communicate back to headquarters.
At headquarters, American Japanese, whose American accents had been trained out of their voices in special public-speaking classes, sat ready and waiting.
The tank team would come into the valley, and the American commander would look the situation over. He would cut his radio telephone into communication with headquarters, and would then say:
"Hillside ahead of me. No characterizing features. Five or six holes, but I can't tell which ones have Japanese in them. I can get up the hill. There are two trees at the crest of the hill, and a bunch of these native graves over on the left."
The American-Japanese at headquarters would say: "Regular announcement, sir? Do you want them to assemble by the graves or at the trees?"