Front-row seat to a surrender

ATLANTIC, Iowa — Clair Gill saved enough money working odd jobs during the Great Depression — some work paid as little as 15 cents an hour — to buy a cheap camera. He doubts that he paid more than $10.

Gill packed the camera along while South Pacific island-hopping in the Army Air Forces during World War II. The Iowa native photographed buddies, natives, the island sawmills he built and the warplanes he patched.

He also chronicled a little-known episode on a little island marking the beginning of the end of the war in the Pacific and WWII.

Four days after Japan announced that it would cease fighting, a delegation of 16 Japanese military and diplomatic envoys secretly landed at a U.S. airfield near Okinawa en route to Manila to set details of a formal surrender ceremony.

Pfc. Gill, an aircraft mechanic whose main job was to repair flak holes in warplanes, photographed the brief stopover at Ie Shima. He captured images of the first face-to-face meeting of U.S. and Japanese troops no longer actively at war. It happened 64 years ago today.

Gill's photographs depict a specially marked Japanese bomber parked on the tarmac, three Japanese troops walking past aircraft and a U.S. officer and interpreter talking with about half the enemy delegation.

“We got word they would be there, and we just quit working,'' said the 90-year-old Gill. “We didn't go to work that morning. We just went to the strip and waited for it. I'd spent three years over there in the jungles, and I was ready for home.''

Gill's front-row seat to history on Ie Shima started on an aircraft recovery wrecker known as a C2. A buddy was the driver of one of two wreckers parked at the runway as a precaution, in case of a crash landing by a Japanese bomber or a U.S. escort fighter. Gill perched atop the cab.

“The weather was good. Not too much wind. Sunshine,'' he said. “The Japanese made a regular circle approach to find out what the windsock said so they'd know which way to come in.''

The delegation's flight to Ie Shima was part of a series of specific instructions issued to Japanese leaders by Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur establishing how the surrender and peaceful occupation of Japan would happen. Signing surrender terms would not be among the tasks of the Japanese delegation.

On Aug. 19, Japanese Lt. Gen. Torashiro Kawabe, army vice chief staff, led a party aboard two disarmed navy aircraft. They were Mitsubishi G4M “Betty” bombers.

After landing at Ie Shima, the Japanese passengers were quickly transferred to a U.S. C-54 transport and arrived at Nichols Field south of Manila about 6 p.m. The first of two conferences between U.S. and Japanese officials that night started less than three hours later. MacArthur did not attend.

The Japanese envoys left Manila at 1 p.m. Aug. 20 and returned to Japan along the same route they traveled a day earlier through Ie Shima, secretly returning to Japan aboard the same Betty bombers.

Gill said security was extraordinarily tight around the Ie Shima airstrip. Infantry troops were flown in to line the entire perimeter of the nearly mile-long runway. Soldiers stood no more than 6 feet apart.

Gill's initial vantage point on the wrecker when the Japanese arrived Aug. 19 was about 75 feet from the action.

“After everything settled down and they made their greetings, I got up as close as I could,'' he said. “I didn't get any argument at all.''

Gill knew he was low on film. His camera used film rolls limited to about 16 photographs.

“I ran out of film that day,'' he said.

Gill and a California soldier processed their film and printed photos in their tent at night by candlelight. They didn't have an enlarger and were limited to making prints the same size as the negatives, about 1.5 inches square.

The war ended for Gill shortly after the Japanese stop at Ie Shima. Japan formally surrendered Sept. 2 in a Tokyo Harbor ceremony aboard the battleship USS Missouri, and Gill shipped back to the United States.

Gill served in the Army for nearly four years. He hadn't been home to Anita, Iowa, since leaving after Christmas 1941. His tour included Australia; Port Moresby in Papua, New Guinea; Noemfoor Island in the Dutch East Indies; Clark Air Base in the Philippines; and Ie Shima.

Gill was discharged at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., in October 1945, took a Rock Island train to Atlantic, Iowa, and telephoned his parents to tell them he was home.

He packed away the negatives and photographs and went on with his life, eventually managing the Anita municipal utilities and selling cemetery monuments. He married Jean Wood, and they had a daughter.

“All that stuff was pretty well forgotten and laid up in the attic,'' he said. “I just stored it away. It wasn't that important to me.''

Gill eventually discarded the camera.

His daughter, Linda Schilling of Hoffman Estates, Ill., decided to make a collage of the photos after her father visited war memorials last year in Washington, D.C.

The three Ie Shima runways in use when WWII ended still exist.

Contact the writer:

444-1127, david.hendee@owh.

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