Fifty five years have passed and we are still finding and bringing home remains of our boys who fought and died in the 82 days of war in Okinawa, but there are three aviators who will never make it home. The three american soldiers who were captured, tortured and executed on Ishigaki Island on April 15, 1945.
Lt. Vernon L. Tebo * Robert Tuggle Jr. * Warren H. Lyod
Narrative:
Two weeks after L- Day, three American airmen parachuted onto an Ishigaki Beach after their Grumman Avengers were shot down or ran into trouble. They found themselves swimming to a coral reef where the Japanese Imperial Navy awaited. They were immediately captured and interrogated. The commander of the island's naval garrison, which had suffered casualties in an American air raid the previous day, ordered holes dug near his headquarters. Two prisoners were delivered there by truck the same evening of April 15. Twenty-eight-year old Lieutenant Tebo, a high school teacher from Chicago before the war, and twenty-year-old aviation Ordinance, First Class Robert Tuggle from Ranger, Texas had been so badly beaten then they were unable to walk. Dragged toward the holes, they were bound, blindfolded and gagged. Captain Makuta, proud of his beheading skill acquired in China, swung his sword the moment Tebo was pushed to his knees. His body tumbled into the hole. The second swordsman won the privilege of being executioner after losing three of his men in the previous day's air raid, then spent hours proudly informing his men he'd been chosen. He managed to cut through only half of Robert Tuggle's neck, but sailors kicked the body into the hole. Then a second truck arrived with Warren Loyd, 24, of Long Island, NY,. Because of his strict adherence to an unwritten CODE of CONDUCT, his death came in a more gruesome manner. He was announce to the town's people of Ishigaki to have been the "evil" enemy that has been bombing and killing their families. He was blindfolded and paraded through the streets of the Island, beaten and then tied to a stake. About thirty men of a howitzer platoon watched, because their officer had ordered all to be there. Two sergeants used sticks to beat the bound captive in the stomach. About a dozen more men followed suit, until the order was given to switch to bayonets. Some 50 men practiced on Lyod for half an hour under the supervision of officers who demonstrated the proper technique. To hide what happened, in September 1945 after Japan surrendered, the bodies of the three aviators were dug up and cremated and their ashes placed in fuel cans then sunk to the bottom of the sea near Iriomote, an island west of Ishigaki. But some of the sailors forced to watch the executions reported it to American authorities after the war. Of the sailors and soldiers who participated, 41 were sentenced to death as war criminals. Later some were pardoned and their sentences reduced. Seven Japanese officers were tried for war crimes and were hung. (These accounts have come from actual witnesses of the incident and from the book TENNOZAN (page 389) by George Feifer)
Talking Sweet Potato
Email: ctaira@sunny-net.ne.jp
Copyright © 1995 Formerly [Okinawa by Land Okinawa by Sea]. All rights reserved.
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