Glenn Beck - Miracles and Massacres - True and Untold Stories of the Making of America

With every new accusation, DeWolfe’s tone became sharper, giving the impression of increasingly greater disgust and outrage. He never raised his voice; that was not his style. But he wanted—he needed —the jury to hate this woman. They had to see her as a California-born Benedict Arnold who verbally tortured and tormented America’s brave sons and husbands who were off fighting for their freedom. He needed them to see that words could be just as savage and destructive as guns and bombs.

Only then would they convict Iva Toguri.

Only then would they convict a woman who Thomas DeWolfe knew was innocent.

New York Times , February 14, 1943

The men often tune in on Radio Tokyo to hear the cultured, accentless English of a woman announcer they have nicknamed Tokyo Rose. Tokyo Rose pours it on so thick that the little company of Americans in a submarine far from shore who hear her usually get a lot of humor out of her broadcasts.

Tokyo, Japan

August 25, 1943

The English-born major was tall and, despite the hunger that had left him ill and emaciated, still remarkably handsome. He had been the Edward R. Murrow of Australian radio before the war began, but he’d been captured in Singapore after volunteering to leave the broadcast booth in favor of combat.

After a Japanese officer inferred that he could choose between being executed or working for Radio Tokyo, Major Charles Cousens agreed to write the script for an evening show called Zero Hour .

That didn’t mean, however, that he would write it the way they wanted. Even with his life on the line, Cousens was not about to be a pawn for the enemy. He tried his best to keep the program free of propaganda while undermining the Japanese war effort by using the English-language show to entertain Allied troops.

So far, it was working. The two POW hosts of Cousens’s Zero Hour —an American named Wallace “Ted” Ince and a Filipino named Norman Reyes—read the “news” they were given by the Japanese so fast that it couldn’t be understood. They repeated inside jokes that the Japanese didn’t understand and that brought laughter rather than fear to Allied listeners. They filled most of the program with lively music—peppy marches and fun, popular songs—while telling their Japanese overseers that the music would demoralize Allied soldiers by making them homesick. Inexperienced in American media, unable to understand the subtleties of the English language, and willing to defer to Cousens’s talent for attracting an audience, the Japanese staff at Radio Tokyo did not interfere much with Zero Hour ’s programming.

As Cousens sat in the POW’s small common room at Radio Tokyo putting the finishing touches on that evening’s script, he heard a friendly, upbeat voice from the doorway.

“Hey, boys,” the stranger said. “How ya doin’?”

The smiling woman at the door appeared to be Japanese, although her accent was definitely American. She was short and wore glasses and looked almost as malnourished as the POWs, yet her voice exhibited an energy that was missing among the Americans. She was looking at them like they were the first friendly faces she’d seen in years.

“My name’s Iva,” she said, shaking Cousens’s hand, and then the hands of the two show hosts.

Cousens introduced himself but was careful not to say too much in the presence of a Japanese stranger. His caution, however, did nothing to slow the conversation, because the newcomer was more than happy to do all the talking.

“I was born in Los Angeles and I only ended up here by accident. See, my mother asked me to go to Tokyo to visit my aunt Shizuko, who was sick. But I hated it here right away. I tried to find a way home to L.A., but the government kept asking me for more and more paperwork and then they took forever to approve it. Once Pearl Harbor happened it was too late—and so here I am.”

Cousens and his two hosts stared at her blankly. It was as though she’d kept all of this information bottled up inside her and it was now all spilling out. They offered little encouragement, no nonverbal feedback like smiles or nods of the head, but Iva kept talking anyway. She told them about the life she missed in America, the postgraduate classes she’d taken at the University of California, Los Angeles, and how she passed the time watching college football and horse racing at Santa Anita. But now, she explained, her life in Japan was completely different.

“One time the secret police knocked on my door at three in the morning. Scared me half to death! They told me how I would be so much safer if I dropped my American citizenship. See, my parents were born in Japan, and so I’m entitled to be a citizen here as well. But, honestly, I’d rather be interned as an enemy here than be a subject of the emperor. That’s exactly what I told them.”

Iva explained that she’d moved into a boardinghouse so that her aunt would not be subjected to the suspicions and harassment that came with sheltering an American citizen. Since she refused to renounce her American citizenship, the Japanese had also taken away her ration card, forcing her to share the meager provisions of other boarders. Needing a job to survive on her own, she’d found work two days ago as an English-language typist at Radio Tokyo.

Then, as quickly as she’d arrived to spill out her life story, she was walking back out the door.

“You look hungry,” she said to Cousens. Then she smiled and whispered, “Tomorrow I will bring you some apples.”

Tokyo

Three months later: October 25, 1943

“This week it’s apples, eggs, some flour, and a bushel of vegetables!”

Every weekend, Iva walked more than ten miles to buy and barter for food and medicine at farms in the countryside. She was particularly proud of the haul she’d just acquired.

“Any medicine?” asked Cousens. Iva’s pro-American attitude and willingness to smuggle things into Radio Tokyo had eventually won Cousens’s trust. He regularly took some of the provisions back to Camp Bunka, where he lived with twenty-six other POWs, many of them sick and starving.

“Some quinine and aspirin,” she said. “And a few vitamin pills.”

“You’re a lifesaver, Iva. And I don’t just mean that as an expression.”

Cousens had spent the last few months admiring Iva’s willingness to risk her own safety to smuggle food and supplies for others. Over time he had grown to trust her enough to explain to her their ongoing scheme to sabotage the Japanese propaganda.

“Why not share the plan with her?” he’d said to his skeptical cohosts at the time. “She’s one of us.”

Tokyo

November 12, 1943

“You have to bring in another announcer for a new ‘homesicky’ segment,” George Mitsushio told Charles Cousens.

Mitsushio was a fat thirty-six-year-old who’d been born in San Francisco but had chafed at the discrimination he’d encountered. In the 1930s he had immigrated to Japan and, after Pearl Harbor, chose his adopted country over the United States. He had officially become a Japanese national seven months earlier.

Given the circumstances, Mitsushio was, at least according to American law, a traitor for having served the Japanese government in various attempts at propaganda for seventeen months before renouncing his American citizenship. He was also, at least nominally, Charles Cousens’s boss, although he generally let the Aussie do anything he wanted when it came to Zero Hour .

“This is an Imperial Order,” Mitsushio persisted. “It has got to be done.” Slicing his hand across his throat, he added, “If not, it is my neck as well as yours.”

“All right,” said Cousens, who was already formulating a plan. “We’ll see what we can do.”