THE ASSIGNMENT

1 October 1941 was a hot, muggy day in Thailand. A young Japanese major stepped from a Douglas Dakota and was momentarily blinded by the rays of the Bangkok sun. He was tense and, in his nervousness, felt certain the eyes of the airport employees were fixed on him—curious about the nature of his mission. His shirt had wilted in the humidity, and he thought briefly of the autumn air of Tokyo. As he sank into the back seat of the Embassy car which drove him to the Thailand Hotel he worried about his lack of experience in international intelligence. Although the hotel was Japanese managed, the major, travelling under the civilian alias Yamashita Hiro-kazu, was unable to relax—it would be better, he thought, to avoid questions from inquisitive Japanese. At the same time he was lonely and thought of the lieutenant assigned to him who was forced to remain in Taiwan with an attack of acute appendicitis.

In the solitude of his room Yamashita—in reality Major Fujiwara Iwaichi—was awed by the importance of his mission and his own lack of experience for it. Of course, a young major in the 8th Section, Second Bureau, Imperial General Headquarters had no choice. This was his duty and he would do his best. The Imperial Japanese Army assigned important missions to middle-ranking officers and gave them plenty of leeway to use their own initiative in executing their tasks. In this respect the Japanese Army differed from the British or American armies and the army of the Third Reich. And because of this difference Fujiwara was now involved in ideological warfare in Bangkok, unable to speak any Malay or Hindi and with only a smattering of English remembered from high school.

Fujiwara was not a complete stranger to Bangkok. He had been sent down on a brief secret mission about eight months ago in late March. He was, after all, in propaganda broadcasting affairs in the 8th Section at Headquarters. Even earlier, in December 1940, Fujiwara had been responsible for three Indian escapees from a British prison in Hong Kong who were given safe passage on a Japanese ship bound for Bangkok. Once there, the exiles contacted leaders of the Indian independence movement in Southeast Asia and the Japanese military attaché.