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A Marine Spy in Micronesia, Page 2
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This development alarmed Ellis and forced him to make what must have been a very difficult decision. If he returned home, it would have been in disgrace and failure both in accomplishing the mission and in disappointing General Lejeune, who had confidence in him. Probably he would have faced early retirement. If he proceeded with the mission he would be defying orders, but he could gain some vindication if he were ultimately successful. Perhaps too, Ellis now realized that he would soon die from his illness and concluded that he had set out. Thus, he determined to go. On 4 October 1922, he wired his bank for money, and two days later left the hospital, removing himself at last from all military authority.
Ellis probably sailed from Kobe aboard the Kasuga Maru of the Nanyo Boeki Kaisha (NBK) Lines. He got off at Saipan where Spanish Jesuit missionary, Brother Gregorio, resident there at that time, remembered him. Ellis’ next stop was Yap sometime in November. There he visited briefly with a half-caste Marshallese-German businessman named Henry Fleming. Fleming, who has been educated in Germany and learned a little English there, remembered that Ellis arrived aboard the Matsuyama Maru, staying for only a short time because the ship was sailing on to Palau that evening, but displaying during his brief tour an impressive knowledge of the copra trade.[29] When the ship arrived at Koror Oilasong Tellei, chief of the native police, checked his papers at the dock and noticed Ellis was listed as going to Jaluit. Again, Ellis’ visit was brief, only a couple of days. He stayed at a Japanese hotel in Koror.[30]
No one at Truk or Pohnpei recalled Ellis, but at Kusaie he was remembered by an American resident, Victor J. Herman.[31] The ship proceeded to Jaluit, and enroute Ellis became very ill. On Sunday, 31 December 1922, Jesse Rebecca Hoppin, an American Protestant missionary was awakened at 2:00 am by police chief Tanaka Shoji. Together with the resident medical doctor, Ishoda Uichi, they went aboard the Matsuyama Maru to bring Ellis, “whose life was in danger” to the hospital.[32] After two weeks he was released and moved to the mission compound as the guest of Jesse Hoppin.
The Japanese authorities watched Ellis closely, but cautiously. They had identified “mother Hoppin”—as the Marshalese affectionately called her—as the best person to attend him. Undoubtedly Ellis told her of his mission, although in no way was she a collaborator. She provided separate lodgings for Ellis on the compound, and arranged that various school children should do chores for him. One of these, Benjamin Lajipun, became his houseboy and together they toured Jaluit on foot and by canoe, all the while tailed by the Japanese. Periodically, the small sailing ship, Caroline Maru, made fieldtrips through the Marshall to collect copra and deliver supplies, and Ellis joined the mission party on one of these to the Ratak Chain. He took copious notes. Next the Caroline Maru was scheduled for the Ralik Chain, but this time the Japanese attempted to prevent Ellis’ passage. He finally prevailed, but they sent Dr. Ishoda to watch him. Ellis slept on the deck and at each island charted the reefs and inventoried facilities, local products, and local populations.
Following this trip, Japanese surveillance was increased, and Ellis took even greater precautions. But he could not refrain from spirits, which he kept hidden in his quarters, and he occasionally became sick. Mother Hoppin scolded him and admonished the local shopkeepers not to sell Ellis whiskey. But he got liquor anyway and drank continuously.
Returning to Kusaie on his trip back through the mandates in mid-March 1923, Ellis stayed at the home of J.V. Millander, a naturalized American of Swedish birth who owned a trading company. The company foreman was Millander’s nephew, Arthur Hermann, whose brother, Victor, had met Ellis on his first brief stop there three months earlier.[33] Victor Hermann accompanied Ellis on the trip to Pohnpei, beginning the first leg of his journey back to America. They became friendly on the trip and, upon reaching Palau, enjoyed a few drinks together at the hotel before the ship left. When they parted, Ellis gave Herman an address and stamped envelope and asked him to mail it in San Francisco. He told Hermann “he would stay on Palau for a while and then go southward to Menado” in the Celebes.[34]
At Palau, Ellis decided not to stay in the Japanese hotel, but instead moved in with high clan Palauans who had befriended him. These Palauans also provided Ellis with a wife, Metauie, a beautiful woman some twenty-five years his junior.[35] Oikasong Tellei, chief of the native police force, was one of four assigned to watch Ellis closely. Ellis covered all of Koror, the harbor at Malakal and adjoining Arakabesang Island, but was not permitted to travel to Babelthuap, Peleliu, or Angaur. Tellei recalled that Ellis sought out the high places and “looked out over the sea.”[36] In the evenings Ellis would seattle down in his Palauan house and invariably begin drinking. The house, a small, thatched affair, was not far from the NBK store where beer and whiskey could be obtained. Ellis had his houseboys, Felix Rechuuld and Antonio Ngirakelau, get the liquor for him by special arrangement with the store manager.[37] As he became sicker and his delirium tremens increases, the Japanese sent Dr. Isake Isoroku to attend him. Ellis sent him away several times. In spite of urgings from Palauans and Japanese, he continued to consume large quantities of beer and sake.[38] Occasionally, he would rant and rave, and once he pranced around the house “like a soldier and punched his arm through the wall.”[39]
Metauie remembered clearly the day of his death. He had been violently ill for several days previous and was attended constantly by herself, William Gibbons, his wife Ngerdoko, and the houseboys. Ellis cried, she recalled, and talked incoherently sometimes about his home and family in America. At one point, he confided to them that he “was an American spy sent by higher authority from New York.”[40] Dr. Isake came one last time to persuade him to stop drinking and offered medication, which Ellis refused. By mid-afternoon on 12 May 1923, he was dead.
One can only speculates as to the sequence of events which immediately followed Ellis’ death. The Palauans, led by the high chief saw Ellis’ burial nearby. More than a week passed before the authorities notified the America Embassy in Tokyo,[41] His belongings, among his various maps, charts, notes and confidential codebook, were confiscated by the Japanese. The Japanese governor may have prepared a full report, but no record of this has ever been found.[42] They undoubtedly were relieved to get his notes and charts.
After the story broke in America, and over the years since, there have been suggestions and implications that Ellis was poisoned by the Japanese. There is absolutely no evidence for this. Every effort was made to offer him medical assistance. He always refused and was usually impolite about it. As far as is known, he was never medicated. That the Japanese would have placed poison in his whiskey is unlikely, since, for Ellis whiskey itself was poison enough. Clearly, his own stubbornness and self-destructive tendencies killed him in the end.
Back in Washington, the news of Ellis’ death was received with shock and suspicion. Since the mandates were strictly closed to outsiders, throughout the Asiatic Fleet, there was inclination to believe stories of Japanese duplicity rife in the Americas press. Lejeune was saddened. His letters to Ellis’ family were compassionate, and he saw to it that they were not burdened with debts.[43] With Ellis dead and the mission lost, he saw no need for the undated letter of resignation. Back in California ONI investigators interrogated Victor Hermann, but he knew nothing about Ellis’ death, and after a couple of weeks the matter faded from public view.[44]
In Tokyo, Captain Cotton attempted to arrange for an American ship to call at Palau to retrieve Ellis’ remains.[45] The Japanese refused this request but assented to an individual representative going to Koror as their guest to bring back the body. Cotton saw a chance to gather some intelligence but lacked trained agents. He finally settled on Lawrence Zembsch for the mission. Zembsch, a chief pharmacist, was a seventeen-year veteran and had attended Ellis at the Yokohama Naval Hospital. After a briefing on the seriousness of his mission and the possibility of danger, Zembesch departed for Palau by Japanese steamer on 5 July 1923.[46]
At Koror Zembsch stayed at the Japanese barracks. He was introduced to all those who knew Ellis and was escorted by Oikasong Tellei. At the burial site the remains were exhumed, photographed, and cremated. William Gibbons told Zembsch that Ellis was suspected by the Japanese of spying, and that they had watched him closely. The chief pharmacist offered to pay any debts Ellis had left, but the Japanese would not permit this.[47] Zembsch left Palau with Ellis’s ashes and a little more information thanhe had when he arrived.
But when Zembsch arrived at Yokohama on August 14, 1923, he had to be carried from his cabin and taken immediately to the hospital. The strain of the trip had apparently caused Zembsch to have a nervous breakdown. He was recovering nicely when, at approximately noon on 1 September 1923, the great Kanto earthquake completely destroyed the hospital burying him “beneath the falling debris beyond the possibility of rescue.”[48] The mission of Zembsch then, only served to spin a tighter web of mystery around the mission of Ellis. More questions were raised than answered. And the unanswered questions about Ellis remained. Nor had Zembsch provided any intelligence about Japanese activities in the mandates. In retrospect, history has little to show for Ellis’ mission. Nothing was discovered that was not already known. The notes, charts, and maps made on the trip were lost.
Ellis himself would have found no fortifications as early as 1923, only rumor and gossip. He was interested in making onsite inspections of the islands he had designated in his Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia as being critical to an island hopping campaign, in order that he could improve upon his plans. Had he survived, such information would have been very useful.
CRITIQUE OF THE MISSION
Shedding light on the details of Ellis’ Micronesian mission in no way detracts from his efforts in the cause on his work. As a spy he does not receive high marks. From a military standpoint only the most dismal appraisal could made of his mission’s execution: a seriously ill, neurotic, sometimes drunken Marine officer, AWOL, with a code book, openly discussing his mission with American nationals and, in full view of the Japanese, traipsing through the islands making notes and maps. American naval authorities would have been embarrassed had they known of Ellis’s whereabouts.[49]
The Japanese must have also been embarrassed. They had not yet fortified their islands,[50] and must have wondered what Ellis was looking for. Surely, they were alarmed at his advanced state of ill health because at every location they provided his access to medical assistance, all of which he refused or avoided as soon as he was able to remove himself from their hospitals. That the Americans would send such a person to spy must have seemed to them incredulous, even ludicrous. Considering their restrained behavior and tolerance, they were probably hoping they could get him out of the mandates before he died. A more sinister but less plausible interpretation is that they saw he was self-destructive and that it was only a matter of time before he drank himself to death.
But Ellis’s belief in, and commitment to, his cause is undeniable and borne-out, albeit tragically, by his experience. His inability to conquer his alcoholism was pathetic, but he doggedly moved ahead in the face of what he must have known to be impending personal doom.
CONCLUSION
Ellis’s war prophecies have outlived the mystery of his mission. Although he was no means alone in recognizing that the balance of power in the Pacific had shifted with Japan’s acquisition of Micronesia, his unique contribution was that he knew what the Marine Corps should do about the threat, and he acted on that belief.
The military genius of Earl Hancock Ellis is clear and his contributions are permanent.
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