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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . c h a p t e r t h i r t y - t h r e e ........................................................... tokyo rose One incident that occurred during my year in India and China was a chapter of the war that Lee and I never forgot. In June 1944, we flew our first mission out of China against the Japanese home islands. We bombed the steel mill in Yawata, on the island of Kyushu. It was a tough mission, and we lost several airplanes and crews. It was the first time that Japan itself had been hit since the Doolittle Raid, and we tried to make the most of it. The Japanese had a propaganda broadcast that they put on the air every night pointed at the American troops. Most of us listened to it for a couple of reasons. It was usually good for a laugh, and it played good music. The announcer on the program was a young Japanese woman called ‘‘Tokyo Rose.’’ She spoke excellent English, and was, in fact, a young lady who had lived in California for a number of years and had graduated from UCLA. After the Yawata mission, Tokyo Rose announced that several B-29s had been shot down and listed six crew members, by name, who had been identified and buried. My name was among those she listed. It was sort of a joke to us, but of course, the broadcast was picked up in the United States, and this came as a shock to my little Lee. She got in touch with my folks, who were also shocked. My father got off a wire to the War Department asking for confirmation. In China, we were on the end of a long pipeline that extended three-quarters of the way around the world. In those days, there were no satellite relays, and it took an ungodly long time to pass the word back and forth between Washington and China. I wrote Lee a letter right after the mission, and when she received it about two weeks later, it was the first word she had that I was still alive. To show how thoughtful some people can be, Lee’s postman was aware of Lee’s being on her own while her husband was in China, and he went out of his way whenever he had a letter to deliver from me—and he knew that I had been reported missing. He was sorting mail in the post office one morning when he came across my letter written after the mission, and he stopped sorting and made a special trip to bring Lee the letter. This was a harrowing experience for Lee, as the Japanese propaganda mongers intended it to be, but the truth finally came out, and Lee had the strength and courage to see it through. If the Japanese lie did anything, it brought us closer together. Report from the West Los Angeles Tribune, June 23, 1944 Japs Report Death of Col. Edmundson War Department Casts Doubt Upon Nipponese Claims; Washington Authorities Suspect Tokyo Angling for Information Lt. Col. James V. Edmundson, Santa Monica’s most famous flying ace, was listed in a Tokyo radio report broadcast at midnight last night. The report picked up by the United Press in San Francisco, named him as a member of a crew of one of the B-29 Superfortress which made a raid on the Yawata Steel Works in Japan on June 16, but James A. Edmundson, the pilot’s father, today reported that members of the family have not received any word from the War Department to confirm the Tokyo announcement. Wire dispatches from Washington indicated that the War Department doubted the truth of the Tokyo broadcast, describing it as ‘‘Axis propaganda designed to feel us out.’’ Puzzling Factors Cited: ‘‘We don’t know any more than you,’’ the Colonel’s father told a reporter. ‘‘We know he was in that area, and the probabilities are that he was on the flights,’’ the father added, however. Puzzling to Santa Monicans who heard the broadcast or read the report of the enemy message was the fact that six Lieutenant Colonels and one Major were named as having been aboard one plane. Except under extraordinary conditions, it was considered unlikely that so many officers of such high rank would be on one ship. The radio message, as heard by Glenn Knox, head of a Santa Monica escrow firm at midnight last night...

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