Back from the Jap

Mr. Grew was the first off the boat. Dressed in a grey flannel suit, he stepped gingerly down the gangplank, looked about him at the cluttered, smoky, indubitably American landscape of Jersey City. Then he clambered into a black Buick sedan, which took him across the dock where the reporters and newsreel men were waiting. As he grinned, deep lines showed in his face. But he was happy. Nervously fingering his glasses, he stepped up to the newsreel microphone.

Said Joseph Clark Grew, U.S. Ambassador to Tokyo since 1932, home after seven months' internment, two months at sea: "A red-letter day it is for all of us who have looked forward to this moment with absolutely inexpressibly keen anticipation."

For "all of us" it was an understatement. Behind him, on the anchored Gripsholm, painted in the blue & yellow of neutral Sweden, were some 1,450 passengers, two-thirds of them Americans--diplomats, correspondents, missionaries, doctors, businessmen, the wives and children of some, including several babies born in internment and one born at sea.

They said little of the miseries of their internment. Husbands kissed wives as cameras clicked. Next day newspapers had an unusual pictorial record of marital feelings. Notable was U. Alexis Johnson, U.S. Vice Consul at Mukden. He rushed off the boat, calling to reporters: "I don't want to talk to newspapermen. I want to talk to my wife. I haven't seen her in three years." He spied her in the crowd, walked up to her slowly, gravely.

"Hello," he said.

"Hello."

"How are you?"

"Fine. How are you?"

They didn't kiss; didn't even shake hands. They just looked at each other for a long while, then walked off and got in a cab.

It took three days for Government officials to question all the passengers, to inspect the 1,600 pieces of luggage. (It had taken six to empty the Drottningholm from Lisbon in July.) Some of the passengers came off in stretchers. J. B. Powell, fiery publisher of the China Weekly Review, had been terribly mutilated by the Jap. Some came off, only to be taken to Ellis Island for further questioning.

After a night in Manhattan, Ambassador Grew, at 62 the ablest, most polished U.S. career diplomat in the field, went to Washington to report to his boss, Franklin Roosevelt, then closeted himself in a hideaway in the State Department and prepared a radio address to the U.S. people. Said he:

"Even during our imprisonment in Tokyo many [Japanese] friends used to contrive to send us gifts. . . .

"But there is the other side to the picture, the ugly side of cruelty, brutality and utter bestiality, the ruthlessness and rapaciousness of the Japanese military machine which brought on this war. That Japanese military machine and military caste and military system must be utterly crushed. . . .

"Let us put it in a nutshell: there is not sufficient room in the area of the Pacific Ocean for a peaceful America, for any and all of the peace-loving United Nations, and a swashbuckling Japan. . . .

"While we are fighting against the forces of evil, lawlessness and disorder in the world, we are primarily fighting to prevent the enslavement which actually threatens to be imposed upon us if we fail.

"I am convinced that this is not an overstatement. Surely ours is a cause worth sacrificing for and living for and dying for if necessary. 'Though love repine and reason chafe, there came a voice without reply: 'tis man's perdition to be safe, when for the truth he ought to die.' "

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