Island Infernos: The US Army's Pacific War Odyssey, 1944

by John C. McManus

In an anonymous swamp near Sio, New Guinea, exhausted, half-starved Japanese soldiers of the Imperial Army’s 20th Division retreated west, fleeing from their Australian and American adversaries, who had maintained a steady advance in the wake of the successful Saidor invasion. The Japanese abandoned anything that might slow them down, including a heavy steel box they distractedly flung into a muddy pit, half-submerged in a layer of noxious water, an unappealing place they mistakenly believed no enemy would ever investigate. The box was packed with Imperial Japanese Army code books and accompanying material, all of which was too soggy from New Guinea’s monsoon rains to burn. The responsible signals officer had carelessly abandoned this precious intelligence raw material. Even worse, he had torn the covers off each code book and disingenuously forwarded them with inscribed certificates of destruction to his superiors, deliberately deceiving them about his failure to destroy the books. If Americans remember with infamy Benedict Arnold, who betrayed his country for ego, then this sloppy and deceptive Japanese signals officer is fortunate he remains anonymous to history, lest his memory endure in similar fashion among his countrymen. The damage he did to his nation’s cause far exceeded whatever strife Arnold’s betrayal may have created for the American revolutionaries.