Collecting is a Ball Vol. III-Forensic Collecting

As I mentioned previously, one of the fun things about collecting and selling, is we get to view into people’s lives. I like seeing what people collect as it tells me a lot about them. Recently, I helped a GoAntiques dealer value the contents of a local professor who died a bachelor and was a WWII veteran. I did this for the dealer at no charge as she is a friend of mine and needed a hand. I was particularly interested in the professor’s books and WWII papers. As I do not buy from estates where I help value items, I gave the knowledge and values I knew and participated in the 2nd day of the estate sale, as a buyer. The professor had been a WWII G-2 Japanese intelligence officer and translator. He participated in the island campaigns, went to Tokyo at the end of the war and spent several years there before coming home. Prior to the war he had received his doctoral degree from Duke.

I was called by the executor after the sale. He had kept many of the older Japanese books, papers and war photos trying to have a university buy them. He had asked if I would like to bid against them, and others, for the documents. Given I hate to pass up paper, I said “what the heck”, and a week later I found out I was the new owner. I was pleasantly surprised as I like paper, but somewhat chagrined as a lot of the items were in the Japanese language “kanji” and, to make matters worse, older prewar kanji is somewhat dissimilar from modern kanji, from what I understand.

I decided to start on the easiest part, performing online investigations of the material. I first went through the documents and found out a lot of them had to do with Guam. In particular, 1945 and the surrender of the island of Rota. The Americans had been anxious to capture the Marianas island chain and had taken the islands of Saipan, and subsequently Guam, in 1944. They bypassed Rota, as the larger islands gave them the airfields they needed to set up bases for the large bombers to fly their missions over Japan. The Japanese holdouts on the smaller islands were left to be finished off in 1945, after the heavy lifting was completed in Japan.

Lt. Oliver, the deceased, and former owner of the contents, was in his own war in the Marianas. He was an obsessive linguist who had gone through training in Japanese at the University of Colorado and entered G-2 intelligence ending up in the Marianas supporting the Navy. Apparently he was left with the effort to try to get the remaining 400 +/- Japanese troops on Rota to surrender after the major initiatives on the island were completed. Lt. Oliver and his friend Lt. William Jones decided the best method to accomplish this would be to drive a sound truck on a predetermined and announced daily route, around the island. They gave prewritten scripts to be broadcasted over the island, with encouraging messages to the remaining troops to surrender.

Their goal in this was to get the elusive Major Sato, one of the ringleaders of the hold outs, to surrender. They utilized the extreme measure of having leaflets, with their route and intentions, dropped to Major Sato. It finally worked and on June 11, 1945 Major Sato, who had been negotiating his surrender with the Americans for several weeks, agreed to come in with an officer and 33 enlisted troops. He agreed to do this with certain protocol and all this was documented in the papers that I found in the former Lt.’s trove. They actually included photos of the surrender, the marching in of the Japanese troops from the jungle and a pamphlet dropped from the plane. Subsequent from the surrender of Sato, there were many more items including Tokyo war crime documents and surrender drafts for the Marianas and such. Doing my research on this project I was stunned to learn that the last Japanese hold outs surrendered on Guam in 1972, 27 years after the war ended.

All this began out of helping a friend out on appraising items in a moldy basement one winter morning. It gave a stunning adventure and picture into a young GA military officers experience in WWII. From the photos, he saw a lot of very ugly things and it also appeared his ingenuity in getting the Japanese to surrender saved a lot of lives on both sides. I did take the liberty of using some of the formerly classified information to improve the accuracy of Major Sato’s surrender on Wikipedia. Major Sato, ho at the time, wanted his name kept out of the surrender broadcasts from the tuck and threatened to commit an honorable suicide if his wishes were not kept. Finally, with the 34 other men that chose to surrender with him at his side, he finally announced to them; “on his, (Sato’s) order and by the numbers, all hands saluted the Colonel, (Stent), then removed their caps and bowed low from the waist. Sato addressed his men: “ I am turning you over to the authority of Colonel Stent. From now on you will obey all of his orders. You will be taken to the stockade where you will be treated well, given food, shelter and medical treatment. You are now prisoners of war, but that is nothing to be ashamed of, for that is an honorable status.”

A very stunning, but minor story from WWII. It is why collecting and antiques are so much fun.

Writer and Contributer Will Seippel is the Founder of Worthpoint.com, an avid collector and a good friend to USAntiqueShows