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Saipan - Japanese Medic's Journal
Diary paints portrait of a soldier as a young man

BY Carlos Santos, Richmond Times-Dispatch Staff Writer, Sunday, September 17, 2006

CHARLOTTESVILLE -- Art Beltrone was rooting through a junk box at a gun show in Richmond last month when he discovered a poignant, personal, six-page gem of World War II history.

A wad of tightly-folded onion skin pages turned out to hold a translation of a Japanese soldier's diary covering 29 days of the bloody battle for Saipan, a heavily fortified island at the southern end of the Marianas archipelago.


In the weeks before the American assault in mid-June, 1944, the island was bombarded from the air and by naval gunfire, according to American history.

So the diary of Tarao Kawachi, a Japanese medic, confirms in a very detailed way.

"Same as before, the enemy bombing was carried out in large pattern bombings and received terrific bombardment right after noon and toward the evening. The raid occurred while we NCOs were cooking and didn't have a chance to take cover in the air raid shelters," Kawachi wrote on June 11, 1944.

The diary was found by American troops on July 19, 1944, probably on Kawachi's dead body, Beltrone said. It was translated within two days and a few typewritten copies were distributed to American commanders to furnish "an interesting insight on the character of the [Japanese] soldier," according to the introduction typed on the first page by the "Headquarters 27th Infantry Division in the field."

"It's an amazing piece of work," said Beltrone, a Keswick resident and a military artifact historian and consultant. "It had the kind of content I look for. . . . He's saying what he's feeling and what was going on around him in detail. I think it was taken as a piece of intelligence material because of what he included such as the location of units and the descriptions of how they fought."

Beltrone is donating the diary to the U.S. Army and Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, Pa. whose mission is, in part, to preserve the history of the Army.

A copy of the diary will also be given to the Japanese embassy in Washington and to major Japanese newspapers, Beltrone said. "There's somebody in Japan, some relative who has no idea how this man spent his last days. That's why I want to share this with the Japanese," he said.

The diary lists a half dozen names of Japanese soldiers as well as their units. Kawachi was in the Hakahara unit, part of the Homare Unit, 43rd Division Hospital Unit.

The diary also tells, in at times poetic detail, the last days of many Japanese soldiers on Saipan, who were so close to battle at times they could hear the voices of American troops. Of the 30,000 Japanese on Saipan, only 2,000 survived the battle.