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Article by Professor Laurie Barber

Willard Price: Uncle Sam’s Spy?

New Zealanders of mature years will know the name "Willard Price". His travel books and newspaper travelogues brought vicarious tourism to millions of housebound in the 1930s and 1940s. This article investigates the charge that Willard Price was more than a travel writer, that he was in fact a United States spy?

In September/October 1914 the Imperial Japanese Navy seized Germany’s Pacific Micronesian possessions.1 At the Great Wars conclusion Germany’s Colonial Empire was carved up by the victors, who covered their avarice under a cloak of League of Nations Mandates, holding to the fiction that the victors were guardians rather than the annexers of these possessions. Germany’s South Sea islands, together with Australia’s, New Guinea, New Zealand won Western Samoa, and Nauru Island, were "C" mandates, allowed to be administered under the laws of the mandatory as an integral part of the administering state. Very quickly Japan closed the doors on Western trade in its mandate, and visits by Westerners to "Nanyo", its new acquisition became limited, almost impossible. League and Western suspicion that Japan was fashioning a fortress in its Micronesian possessions abounded.2 This paper tells the tale of an American journalist, Willard Price, and his attempts to unlock the secrets of Japans islands of mystery.

Willard DeMille Price (1887-1963) was well known to mid twentieth century readers of travel tales and overseas adventure. Price was a graphic penman who conjured up pictures that enriched the dreams of many armchair travellers. This American travel writer well deserved the epithet "inveterate traveller" bestowed by readers of his 1951 autobiography, I Cannot Rest From Travel, with its backward glance at his years of adventure in seventy countries.3

Willard Price enriched the imagination of a generation with popular travel adventures in the Amazon, Africa, Japan and the Pacific. His titles (and these are but a few) invited a "good read" - Riptide in the South Seas, Journey by Junk, Pacific Adventure, and Japans Islands of Mystery.4

Historians of the toffee-nosed variety have little time for journalists. Disdainfully, they sneer "lightweight", "no analysis", and light condescension. The truth is that historians frequently discover that journalists are their best, and sometimes only source. Sometimes they awaken to the reality that the journalist come traveller is well trained to convey the social, political, cultural and economic realities of the writers landfalls.

Willard Price was such a journalist, perceptive and analytic, and much that the United States military knew about Japanese Micronesia in 1941 came from his astute observations. And Americas leaders certainly needed to know about "Nanyo" after Pearl Harbour, for peppered 2700 miles along the Equator and 1300 miles north of it existed an extension of Japan that pointed like a dagger at the Philippines, New Guinea, and above all to the isolated United States territory of Guam.5

Price penetrated the curtain around Japans South Seas empire for 4 months in 1935 and wrote extensively about his experiences particularly in Pacific Adventure (1936) and The Islands of Mystery (1944). He found winning entry into the Japanese mandate no easy task. Japanese firms monopolised travel to and from the islands and the Home Islands Government politely discouraged visitors. Price was warned that the sea voyage would be uncomfortable; there had been ship wrecks, no appropriate accommodation was available and flies and disease were a constant threat. Japan did not wish to impose any of these evils upon visitors.6 Willard Price did his homework and discovered more sinister threats: that the few Westerners who had landed on the "Nanyo" either disappeared or received short shrift. A United States marine officer "Colonel Earl Ellis, had reached Palau, but according to the Japanese had drunk himself to death. It seemed to Price unlikely that an American colonel who was a drunkard should have been sent to his death by his own country. Two American officers had slipped ashore at Ponape, and lost their lives "in an unfortunate accident". A British officer, a Major Bodley, spent three days on Yap after his Japanese cargo ship was wrecked on a reef. Confined and closely guarded he survived. Another mariner, his motor vessel disabled, limped into "Nanyo", received temporary repairs to his boat, and with infinite courtesy was refused permission for a days stay and was towed out to the open sea.7

How then, given Japans closure of the islands to Westerners (with the exception of a few German and Spanish missionaries) did Price manage a 4 months stay? It took Willard Price and his wife months to win government permission and obtain their boat tickets. Persistence won out. He gained an invitation from a German missionary, won help from Japanese friends and persistently argued that Japan had everything to gain by giving access to a neutral journalist. A flurry of questions at the League of Nations won the day. Two tickets emerged with a comment that Japan wished it to be known that she had nothing to hide.

Even before he boarded the Yokohama Maru, Price was the target for Japanese intelligence surveillance. A Kempeitai (Japanese Gestapo) officer conducted a long interrogation:

He smilingly asked our ages, our father’s names, mother’s names, grandfather’s names, grandmother’s names, names of all the places we had ever lived or visited. Finally he asked: "What do you wish to see in the islands?" I could hardly say "fortifications". So I shrugged it off with "fauna and flora". He wrote that down. Then he asked: "Are they friends of yours?"8

Once aboard ship Price discovered that his Tokyo letters of authorisation were of little weight. The ships captain had received other orders to keep the Prices aboard. By skilfully jumping ship and correctly reporting his presence, together with Tokyo documents to surprised but not unfriendly Japanese administrators, Price won access and managed a 4 months sojourn in the forbidden islands.

What did he see? Followed always by a Japanese policeman, there, who was told to assist and protect him, he saw Micronesia transformed in the image of Japan. Native villages had become Japanese towns. Tinian town, on the edge of Japanese created sugar plantations, consisted of buildings of Japanese structure:

... light and thin, looking as if they had been thrown up in the afternoon. They stood elbow to elbow down the street with no space between - Japanese stores, school, hairdressing parlour, cinema, photograph shop, hardware shop, fish mongers, and Buddhist temple.9

Large scale immigration, particularly from Okinawa, had reduced the indigenous population to a minority in Micronesia. Sugar plantations, a sugar mill, a fishing industry, intensive Japanese horticulture, and copra, brought increasing numbers of Japanese to these islands. Tada, superintendent of the Japanese South Seas Development Company, explained the appeal of the mandate to Price:

You see, this is really Japan too. We get all the radio programmes direct from Tokyo. And the latest Samurai movies. And the weather here is better. Instead of being too chilly in winter and too hot in summer, its just about right all the time. And the swimming is good.10

The indigenous Micronesian population, Price noted, either assimilated to Japanese ways or were an ignored irrelevance. Micronesian children, dressed in Japanese style, with Japanese backpacks, bowed before Shinto shrine. Cooperative chiefs became minor officials and Japanese education provided basic skills in teaching and devotion to the Emperor and Nippon. Japanese physicians attended to the Mandates health.

Everything was controlled, orderly, directed and purposeful. Japan had created a colony, displacing the rule of the indigenous, much as it had been displaced by the Australians, New Zealanders and British in their colonies of the 19th century. There is no doubt that the lifestyle of the indigenous had been improved – if western standard was the baseline. Price saw all this, but was this his main purpose in visiting the mandate?

By 1935 the League of Nations, who through its mandate commission, held international "authority" over "Nanyo" needed to reassure itself that United States newspaper accusations of fortification in the Japanese mandate were untrue. The Japanese Governments regular and thorough reports to the Commission assured the League that there were no fortifications, but accusations in the newspaper still continued.

In his 1936 book, Pacific Adventure, Price was at pains to acknowledge that he had found no evidence of Japanese fortification, despite a careful and extensive search. In his book he referred to visits to "Nanyo" by Professor H. Clyde (University of Kentucky) and Doctor W.C.T. Herre (Stanford University) in 1934 and 1933 respectively. Their findings agreed with Price’s findings: "As for my own findings, they were nil". However, in his 1936 account Price acknowledges intense Japanese secrecy, and suspicion of foreigners, and sensibly suggests that much of this Japanese behaviour was "tit for tat". After all, how welcome were the Japanese in the United States, and in British and Australasian possessions in the inter-war years? Price argued in 1936 that:

Restriction of foreigners need not imply the presence of fortification. There is perhaps a much better reason for the nervousness of officials. Japan, fearing later troubles, does not care to have foreigners learn to intimately the contours of coasts and mountains, the size of ship basins, the depth of channels, the locations and character of passages through the reefs.11

It is, indeed, this potentially useful coastal information that Willard Price was at pains to gather. In his 1944 work, Japans islands of Mystery, he details most precise descriptions of key anchorages in Micronesia, their possibility for defence and their strategic strengths and weaknesses. He also indicates that his discoveries had been of use to the United States military and perhaps gives the show away when referring to periodic secret Japanese readings of his notebooks during his visit to Palau:

No information of a geographic or a strategic nature went into the notebook. It was preserved in other ways. The pages were scored with birds, flowers and folkways. Now and then there would be a pleasant word about one or other of the officials who were honouring us with so much attention.12

The inference is clear that he had his own method for disguising his information. That he was a "spy", whether in the pay of the United States Military or as a patriotic American happy to be debriefed after his visit, is more than likely. That the Japanese saw him as such is sure. At Truk, a Polynesian escort, Fal, confided that his orders were to take him shark fishing and make sure that there was an accident that prevented his return. Price and pro-American Fal contrived an "accident" from which Price survived, by the skin of his teeth, to protect Fal from his masters’ wrath.

A careful perusal of Price’s assessments clarifies that his interest was military. His description of Truk makes this quite clear:

After perhaps heavy loss where [from shore bombardment] a landing could be made on the reefs. Perhaps nothing would please the defenders more, for the landed forces would then be the target of batteries on the island peaks. But supposed effort is made to bypass the reef and enter the lagoon through one or more of the channels. There are only few of these and they would certainly be well mined and covered by fire from the reef as well as from the hill batteries.13

While Price was clear that no defences had been erected by Japan at the time of his visit he was also clear as to what could be done should the relationship of Japan and United States worsen.

In early 1944 the allied thrust toward Japan reached the South Seas Mandate’s atolls and islands. Fire storm bombardments by now superior United States naval and airforce destroyed air strips and left Truk’s boasted naval fortress, constructed after the war’s beginning, in ruins. Amphibious landings, the employment of flame throwers, tanks, satchel charges, and overwhelming reinforcement, smashed depleted Japanese defences. It is difficult to estimate how much or how little of Price’s information on the Mandate’s coast, atoll chains, and anchorages, may have helped the American invaders at this time. It is likely some did!

But, even so, the question still remains. Was Willard deMille Price, travel story purveyor par excellence, a United States spy? We may never know whether he was formally a United States intelligence agent, or just a patriotic American willing to tell what he had seen. But we do know that Willard Price deliberately travelled to Japan’s South Seas Mandate to check-out whether Japan had contravened League of Nations mandate provisions by erecting fortifications, and incidentally to discover the extent of Japanese colonisation and control. It may be that he was just a patriotic journalist, offering his findings to the jigsaw assembled by United States military in preparation for a foreseeable war. Why not? After all it is proven fact the Japanese tourists in the 1930s deposited their holiday photographs, often taken against backgrounds of port facilities and likely land beaches, with Japan’s military intelligence in Tokyo. For Price and for the Japanese tourists it was the least patriots could do. But there is the lurking suspicion that Price may have been more in the intelligence world, considerably more than just a patriotic citizen!

Readers Advice

Professor Laurie Barber is currently involved in a joint research project comparing the Australian, British, Japanese and New Zealand Pacific League of Nation’s Mandates. Willard Price appeared in his research as one of the few visitors to Japanese Micronesia in the 1930s, and the last to provide a full account of life in the Mandate, before World War II. No Bibliography has been placed with this article. The editors have agreed that the Price material notations are sufficient.

ENDNOTES

1 For a new study of Japan’s expansion in the inter-war years and following Pearl Harbor see Laurie Barber and Ken Henshall, The Last War of Empires, Bateman, Auckland, 1999.

2 League of Nations Permanent Mandate Commission, 11 November 1932.

3 W. Price, I Cannot Rest From Travel: An Autobiography of Travel in Seventy Lands, John Day, New York, 1951.

4W. Price, Riptide of the South Seas, Heinemann, New York, 1936

- Journey by Junk, Heinemann, London, 1954.

- Pacific Adventure, Reynall, New York, 1936.

- Japan’s Islands of Mystery, Heinemann, London, 1944.

5Guam was acquired by the United States following the Spanish-American War of 1898. It was an American enclave in the midst of Micronesian Japan.

6W. Price, Pacific Adventure, p. 127.

7W. Price, Japan’s Islands of Mystery, p. 23.

8 Ibid, pp. 24-25.

9 Ibid, p. 43.

10 Ibid.

11 W. Price, Pacific Adventure, p. 191.

12 W. Price, Japan’s Islands of Mystery, p. 111.

13 Ibid, p. 158.

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