STILL REFERRED TO in popular culture today, the spectre of the non-existent Tokyo Rose continues to conjure up notions of a honey-voiced Japanese seductress who, throughout the Second World War, made daily radio broadcasts to taunt the American troops fighting the Japanese Army and Navy in the Pacific. These American troops claimed to have endured her cajoling taunts of their impending defeat and deaths while their loved ones betrayed them in the marriage beds at home, so it will come as a surprise to many that the mysterious Tokyo Rose never existed. That said, someone had to be framed as Tokyo Rose to save the postwar American administration from the political suicide of publicly branding their returning heroes a bunch of deluded hysterics. The patsy forced into President Truman’s frame was the diminutive Iva Toguri, arrested and imprisoned for having been the woman who never was.
Born on 4 July 1916 to Japanese parents in Los Angeles, all-American Iva was a devout baseball fan and graduated from the University of California with a degree in zoology. In July 1941 she travelled to Japan to nurse a sick and dying aunt only to be caught left-footed by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into the Second World War. While her parents were being interned as hostile aliens back home, Iva was enduring similar treatment in Japan for her refusal to renounce her American citizenship. She was eventually released from detention and found work as a typist at Tokyo Radio, where she met and married Filipe D’Aquino. The station put out propaganda programmes, in particular a daily show called The Zero Hour, which was hosted by an Australian POW called Major Charles Cousens who had been a radio personality in Sydney before the war. He had been removed from his prison camp by Major Shigetsugu Tsuneishi of the Psychological Warfare Division and told that if he did not comply he and ten other prisoners, selected at random, would be shot.
Deciding to do all he could to sabotage the venture, Cousens was teamed up with US Army Captain Wallace Ince and Lieutenant Norman Reyes. Once at Tokyo Radio, Cousens realized that Iva was a kindred spirit and ‘recruited’ her into the programme by convincing his Japanese handlers that her familiarity with colloquial American would prove an invaluable asset. Iva’s input consisted of nothing more than doing a few links and introducing records from the musical selection, which she did under the name of Orphan Annie. Using a combination of voice tone, subtle innuendo and slang, the four did everything they could to ensure American listeners would be falling about laughing. Iva frequently addressed her audience as ‘my fellow orphans’ and even took the risky option of reminding the audience that they were listening to propaganda whenever the monitor stepped out of the studio. She also spent much of her meagre wages on basic medicines, which she passed under the table to Cousens to take back to camp. Had she been caught out in any such tricks she would, in all likelihood, have been shot.
After the capitulation of Japan in 1945, General MacArthur landed at Atsugi Airfield, some 20 miles from Yokohama, bringing with him a pack of rapacious journalists, each determined to interview General Tojo and track down the ghost that was Tokyo Rose. Two of the leading lights of this entourage were Clark Lee of the International News Service and Harry Brundidge of Cosmopolitan magazine, the latter putting out word that he would pay $250 to anyone who could point him in the right direction and a further $2,000 to the lady herself for an exclusive interview. In the commercial wreck that was Japan in 1945, this kind of money meant the difference between survival and oblivion – to put those offers into perspective, Iva’s pay at Tokyo Radio was the equivalent of $7 a month. Perhaps inevitably, one of Iva’s colleagues at the station, Leslie Nakashima, sold her name to Brundidge.
Never having heard of Tokyo Rose and labouring under the delusion that her self-satire of her limited input to The Zero Hour had made her some sort of heroine to the American forces, Iva, also delirious at the prospect of being paid today’s equivalent of $50,000 for a single interview, eagerly agreed with Brundidge that she was indeed Tokyo Rose and ready to talk. But to Brundidge’s increasing alarm, Iva sat rocking with laughter at any suggestion of her having been some sort of honey-voiced femme fatale and reacted quite violently to any suggestion that she had ever broadcast anything to the detriment of the United States or its forces. All she wanted to talk about were the ploys she and Cousens had used to let listeners know that all had been tongue-in-cheek.
Next, hurled into a panic by his editors’ refusal to be bound by the contract he had so obviously signed with a nobody, which left him liable for the $2,000, Brundidge took all his tapes and notes to General Elliott Thorpe, commander of the US Intelligence Corps in Japan, and urged him to arrest Iva as the traitor Tokyo Rose. And, just in case Thorpe failed to act, Brundridge also arranged for the gullible Iva to give a mass interview to over 300 reporters to place her in breach of the exclusivity clause of their contract and so render it void. The unwitting Iva gave her interview at the Yokohama Bund Hotel on 5 September 1945 with all present puzzled at her obviously revelling in what she misperceived as her newfound celebrity. The woman before them obviously had no idea who or what Tokyo Rose was believed to be.
Back in America, the right-wing media personality Walter Winchell, a mean-spirited but popular figure who seemingly took delight in using his media muscle to crush careers, latched onto the story, making demands on television and radio for Washington to have Iva arrested for treason and brought back to the States in chains. In Tokyo, the carrot-and-stick tactics of bribes and threats were brought to bear on Kenkichi Oki and George Mitsushio, two US-born employees at Tokyo Radio who had been in management positions above Iva. They were relentlessly groomed during the weeks preceding Iva’s trial to get them ‘word perfect’ in their spoon-fed perjury. These two would testify at her trial – which began on 5 July 1949 – that she routinely made treasonable statements over the air and frequently mentioned specific American units and their location. When later admitting their testimony to have been a pack of lies, the two said in their defence that as they, unlike Iva, had renounced their American citizenship, they were condemned to remain in Japan under American occupational control, and that it had been made blisteringly clear to them just how unpleasant life could be made for them and their families if they did not do as ordered.
AXIS SALLY
Born in Portland, Maine, Mildred Gillars was the real American traitor-at-the-mic who broadcast from Berlin throughout the Second World War as Axis Sally, frequently signing off with a sneer at President Roosevelt and all his ‘Jewish boyfriends’.
It was Gillars who goaded American servicemen about their impending defeat. She also made routine visits to POW camps to record demoralizing ‘interviews’ which, conducted under the muzzle of a gun, she would use in her show, Home Sweet Home.
Hunted through the ruins of post-war Germany, Gillars was finally returned to the United States where, on 10 March 1949, she was given a ten to thirty year prison sentence and a $10,000 fine. She first became eligible for parole in 1959 but, reluctant to face the public, she refused to apply and, in 1961, the Alderson Reformatory in West Virginia had to virtually throw her out onto the street to be rid of her.
Having ‘found God’, Gillars went to live at the Our Lady of Bethlehem Convent in Columbus, Ohio, where she taught German until she died in 1988.
Even the judge, carefully selected after a quiet word from Washington, would also later confess to have been operating under a politically dictated agendum resulting in Iva’s trial being an utter disgrace. US District Judge Michael Roche acknowledged that he had consistently ruled out any evidence ‘likely to confuse the jury as to her guilt’ and to have then browbeaten that same jury into returning a guilty verdict on the last remaining charge after they had driven him to distraction by returning not-guilty verdicts on the other seven vaguely worded charges. Among the evidence disallowed by Roche was that of Cousens who, cleared of any wrongdoing on his return to Australia, where all had a good laugh at what he and Iva got away with on air, had travelled to the States at his own expense to testify that all she had ever done was a few links and interject sarcastic comments. Also disallowed were the repeated attempts by the defence to introduce into evidence that as early as August 1945 the US Office of War Information had published in the New York Times a report stating: ‘There is no Tokyo Rose; the name is strictly a GI invention. Government monitors listening in twenty-four hours a day have never heard the words “Tokyo Rose” over any Japanese-controlled Far Eastern Radio.’
It would also doubtless have confused the jury to hear that General Theron L. Caudle, Assistant Attorney General of the US Army, had reported to the Attorney General’s Office:
Considerable investigations have been conducted into this case and it appears that the identification of Toguri as ‘Tokyo Rose’ is erroneous as her activity consisted of nothing more than the announcement of music selections. A few cylinders of her broadcasts and a large number of her scripts have been located and they, as well as the transcripts of the broadcasts of her program which were monitored by the Federal Communications Commission, do not disclose that she did anything more than introduce musical records. It is my opinion that Toguri’s activities, particularly in view of the innocent nature of her broadcasts, are not sufficient to warrant her prosecution for treason.
Even six months before her arrest, the Eighth Army Legal Services was reporting: ‘There is no evidence that she ever broadcast greetings to units by name or location or predicted military movements or attacks indicating that she had access to secret military information and plans as the Tokyo Rose of rumour and legend is reported to have done.’
But none of this could save Iva from the determination of the Truman administration to give the people what they wanted; the few who did speak out in her defence lived to regret it as she was thrown to the wolves with a sentence of ten years and a $10,000 fine. Paradoxically, while American bile was focused on the wholly innocent but supposedly ‘foreign’ Iva, the real American traitor-broadcaster Mildred Gillars was quietly being locked away. Broadcasting from Berlin as Axis Sally, it was this middle-class white woman from Maine who had taunted American troops with tales of defeat and spousal infidelities, and all done in a sultry and seductive voice trained in minor acting roles in pre-war America.
After doing her time, Iva was released to settle in Chicago, receiving in 1977 a belated but nevertheless welcome full pardon from President Ford. Shortly before her death in 2006 she was also presented with the Edward J. Herlihy Citizenship Award by the American World War II Veterans Committee, which praised her for her stoical silence throughout her unjustly imposed ordeal, during which she never uttered a single cross word against her country.