Shut-Ins

In the Marianas, U.S. correspondents thought they might have found one small part of the explanation for wholesale enemy suicides in the face of defeat: the Japs seemed willing to swallow any yarn their Government told them, believed they would be tortured and killed if captured.

Civilian prisoners taken on Saipan believed that the Japanese had captured the Hawaiian Islands, that their Navy had gone through the Panama Canal without losing a ship, had taken Washington. Another yarn, which U.S. reporters read in the English-language newspaper Mainichi: the late Navy Secretary Frank Knox was losing his fleet at the rate of one or two ships a day instead of risking it all in one battle. Reason (according to Mainichi): Publisher Knox would get more stories for his newspaper that way.

Such gullibility was traced farther back by John Morris in Traveler from Tokyo (Sheridan House; $2.75), Morris, an Englishman once attached to the Japanese Foreign Office as an adviser, wrote that Jap newspapers calmly assert that the airplane is a Japanese invention, that Jesus Christ was born in the north of Japan.

Says Morris: "They know so little of what is happening in the world today, that only when the war is actually brought to their homeland will they realize that they are beaten."

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