An evening with a scrapbook.

[villa66]

I got a big blue scrapbook several weeks ago. Someone in my wife’s extended family was cleaning out after a death, and was about to throw it away. Just before it reached the trash, though, someone decided I would appreciate it, and so they sent it to me:

[villa66]

The scrapbook measures 14” x 12” (35.5 x 30.5 cm) and is filled with mostly empty pages all brown and brittle, probably dates from the 1940s, and has the look of a project that was begun and then almost immediately put aside, unfinished.

Last weekend I finally opened the old scrapbook for a closer look:

[villa66]

Miscellaneous Japanese papers, which were a common GI souvenir brought home from the Pacific during WWII.

Their age and origin was strongly suggested by the following stamp that appeared on each of the Japanese documents: “EXAMINED IN THE FIELD [by] JOINT INTELLIGENCE:”

[villa66]

I cannot read Japanese—except for a little “coin collector Japanese”—so I moved on to the first American document in the scrapbook, and was surprised to find a wartime leaflet intended to help the Japanese surrender:

[villa66]

And then another leaflet, with plenty of explanatory text in Japanese written on the back, but with a front side that doesn’t need much explaining:

[villa66]

And then the leaflet I found most interesting, and disturbing:

[villa66]

Five minutes to midnight. The picture tells the story…we have taken these islands one by one and now we are taking the Philippines back, but understand us—next comes Japan itself.

Of course it is difficult to remember now, since we are so far removed from the moment, but by mid-1945, for very many Americans, this leaflet would have been as frightening as it would have been for the Japanese.

But I put that moment away and continued on in the scrapbook, seeing that there had been a sudden burst of interest in the project, probably in the late 1960s or early 1970s, with a few pages of color photos of a Pacific locale once at war but now long at peace:

[villa66]

There were no inscriptions or notes of when or where, exactly, all these things were. But there were several pages of photos like this (I’ve chosen one of the pages without the native girls!):

[villa66]

At the back of the scrapbook was one last series of pages, written in a mix of both English and Japanese, “LIST OF SHIP’S STORES” [SUPPLIES], noting that these, again, are documents examined for useful information during wartime:

[villa66]

This series of pages piqued my instincts as a coin collector, because you can see the items listed are valued in terms of Japanese yen and sen. (Old prices = actual coin uses!) So the first four items are (per pound) “Biscuits, 59 sen; Butter, 1.44 yen; Cheese, 1.50 yen; and Cocoa,3.34 yen.”

“The List” provided by the ship’s Purser’s Department was especially interesting, because it provided my first clue as to the name of the ship, but this section definitely caught my eye:

[villa66]

“Wine, Whiskey, Sake, Beer, Lemonade…Cigars, Cigarettes, Playing Cards.” (More entries for my coin-notebook! A 50-sen piece buys a beer, and a cigarette costs 2 sen.)

But it was “The List” submitted by the Engine Department that confirmed the ship and the date of all this activity:

[villa66]

The Japanese steamship Yamashiro Maru, as recorded 4 March 1930. Of course these days the Internet is only seconds away, so I quickly found:

http://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?177179 (The S.S. Yamashiro Maru, a Japanese passenger/cargo ship built in 1912 and torpedoed by the submarine U.S.S. Trout on 23 Sep 1943.

I hope you won’t mind if I preface this with bold-face, but this is where my evening really became something special, for this particular coin collector anyway…. I got to thinking about the U.S.S. Trout—there was something familiar about that ship. And just that suddenly I remembered a picture that had caught my eye in a summary of WWII published by an encyclopedia company a couple of years after the war:

[villa66]

The illustration of the submarine sparked my interest because it was wrong for the point the authors were trying to make. They were showing how American warship design had evolved during the war, and certainly the three surface ships illustrated were good examples of the evolution. But not the submarine. The pictured submarine was an old boat, built before the war, and it still had its large white hull number (202) prominently displayed on the sail—peacetime dress.

Sure enough, the incorrect illustration used by the encyclopedia was of the U.S.S. Trout (SS202).

But the connection—interesting as I found it—didn’t satisfy me.

Trout. Trout…I know that submarine somehow. And then, finally, it clicked:

[villa66]

Soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and its several Pacific invasions, the submarine U.S.S. Trout was dispatched to the Philippine Islands with a load of anti-aircraft ammunition. After delivering the load, the sub required ballast for the return trip. The usual sand bags and bags of concrete were unavailable—they were urgently needed elsewhere, obviously—so the Trout was loaded with 319 gold bars and 630 bags of Philippine 1-peso pieces (with 1,000 coins to the bag).

The Trout can be seen back in Pearl Harbor transferring its ballast of Philippine precious metal to the cruiser U.S.S. Detroit and the eventual safety of San Francisco:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Trout_(SS-202)

And that was where my evening with the old blue scrapbook ended, with the papers from a Japanese ship that had been torpedoed by the same submarine that had rescued so much Philippine treasure earlier in the war.

It was a story I had read about since I was a new coin collector—years ago—and it seemed very strange to have stumbled upon this exceedingly slim but still physical connection to those long-ago events.

Since then I’ve read the Wikipedia article more closely, and it gives a brief account of the last moments of the Yamashiro Maru, including:

“…As the transport was being abandoned Trout proceeded close aboard and passed 12 to 15 life boats. The enemy ship was ablaze and low in the water with her bow nearly awash. Sound heard a heavy explosion from Yamashiro Maru and, seven minutes later, Trout could see no trace of her. That night, the submarine set a course for Hawaii and arrived at Pearl Harbor on 4 October 1943.”

By then, Trout—as I mentioned before—was a relatively old boat and after she sank the Yamashiro Maru on her 10th war patrol, she sailed to the U.S. for modernization. She returned to Pearl in late January, 1944, and soon thereafter departed on her 11th war patrol.

Trout did sink one more Japanese ship, but it is thought that she herself was sunk 29 February 1944 (a leap year, apparently). The U.S.S. Trout was declared lost on 17 April 1944.

But someone else did come home from the Pacific about 1945, and started a scrapbook.

v.

[shanxi]

Interesting, especially the two leaflets.

Has anyone ever believed the story about the unavailable sandbags.

And where did the 20 tons of gold bars end. Was all the gold returned to the Philippine banks after war ?