WWII vet to return flag taken from enemy
PORTLAND, Ore. — Marvin Strombo was behind Japanese enemy lines on a Pacific island during World War II when he realized the other five men in his squadron had moved on without him.
The U.S. Marine, part of an elite scout-sniper platoon fighting a 1944 battle on Saipan, nervously scanned the terrain. He spotted a body on the ground, a dead Japanese soldier lying on his left side. The young man looked peaceful, as if asleep, and something white poked out from his jacket.
Strombo knelt and pulled out a silk flag, all the space around the bright red emperor’s sun filled with elegant calligraphy. He hesitated, then took the flag and scrambled to reunite with his squadron as they entered the Japanese-held town of Garapan.
More than 70 years later, Strombo is returning the Japanese flag to his fallen enemy’s family. The 93year-old arrived Friday in Tokyo, the first stop in a 10,000-mile journey into the remote mountainside to bring the keepsake back to the man’s home village — back to a brother and two sisters who could never say goodbye.
“I realized there were no bullets or shrapnel wounds, so I knew he was killed by the blast of a mortar,” Strombo recalled this week in Portland, Ore., before boarding a flight to Japan.
Then, quietly: “I think that soldier wanted me to find him for some reason.”
The flags were a goodluck charm that linked Japanese soldiers to their loved ones and their call for duty. Some were signed by hundreds of classmates, neighbors and relatives.
Allied troops frequently took them from the bodies of their enemies as souvenirs. They have a deep significance because most Japanese families never learned how their loved ones died and never received remains.
For Strombo, the flag hung in a glass-fronted gun cabinet in his home in Montana for years, a topic of conversation for visitors and a curiosity for his four children. He never spoke about the battles of Saipan, Tarawa and Tinian.
He wrote letters to find out more about the flag but eventually put it aside. He knew no Japanese and, in an era before the internet, making any headway was difficult.
Then, in 2012, the son of his former commanding officer contacted him about a book he was writing.
Through him, Strombo reached out to the Obon Society, a nonprofit in Oregon that helps U.S. veterans and their descendants return Japanese flags to the families of fallen soldiers.
Within a week, researchers found it belonged to Yasue Sadao by reading the script on the flag. They traced the corporal to a tea-growing village in the mountains roughly 200 miles west of Tokyo.
The calligraphy turned out to be the signatures of 180 friends and neighbors who saw Yasue off to war, including 42 of his relatives. Seven of the original signatories are still alive, including Yasue’s 89-year-old brother and two sisters.
When researchers contacted Yasue’s brother, he asked if the person who had his brother’s flag was the same one who found it so many years ago, said Rex Ziak, who co-founded the Obon Society with his Japanese wife, Keiko.
“There was just silence on the line and then he asked, ‘Do you imagine he knows how my brother died and where he died?’ ” Ziak recounted. “And that’s when we realized that this person is very much alive in that family and this mystery of what happened to him is very much alive.”
Strombo is the only person who can provide those answers. He can roughly show where he found Yasue’s body on the outskirts of Garapan and can tell the siblings that their brother likely died of a concussion from a mortar round.
“It got so I kind of wanted to meet the family, you know,” he said, his voice growing raspy. “I know it means so much to them.”