One Marine''s War: A Combat Interpreter''s Quest for Mercy in the Pacific

Robert Sheeks was born and raised in Shanghai until his family fled the impending Japanese occupation in the 1930s. He was emotionally scarred by grisly atrocities he witnessed as the Japanese military terrorised the Chinese during the Shanghai Incident of 1932; however, his intense hatred for the Japanese was gradually transformed into tolerance and then compassion. He was recruited after the Pearl Harbor attack to be a Japanese language interpreter in the Marine Corps, and when he encountered kind and considerate Japanese-American Nisei instructors during the intensive course at the U.S. Navy Japanese Language School, he began to re-think his attitudes toward the Japanese. Ultimately he developed an empathy for the Japanese enemy he had formerly despised. This began during the invasion of Tarawa where he was frustrated by the near impossibility of capturing Japanese combatants because there was no way to communicate with them in their bunkers where they fought to the death. That led him to devise methods to use a combination of surrender leaflets and amplified voice appeals to convince them to surrender. As a consequence, he ended up saving the lives of hundreds of Japanese civilians and military by being able to talk them out of caves during combat on Saipan and Tinian in 1944. For his efforts he was awarded the Bronze Star with a unique commendation, certainly one of the few medals ever given to a Marine officer for saving the lives of the enemy. About the Author Gerald Meehl has travelled extensively in the South Pacific, and has visited and photographed every major Pacific island battlefield of World War II. He is a senior scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. See more