The Mystery of the False Surrender

Sean Doyle is going through his father, Alvin J. Doyle’s, papers in his study/attic; the latter’s funeral had been over the weekend and now it is his job to sort out what to keep and what to toss. His wife Diane of eighteen years is helping him. Downstairs, their sixteen-year-old son Seamus is playing video games in the living room. Diane sees her husband absorbed once again in thought so she excuses herself to ostensibly go to the kitchen to see about dinner.

           Sean reads aloud from the page, “Did anyone ever find out who did it?” This from a type-written letter paperclipped to a World-War-Two-era Daily Mirror newspaper article copy stamped CENSORED BY WAR DEPT. and CENSORED BY US NAVY in bold black across the top above the title, “Iwo Jima Marine Makes False Report of Allied Victory in Europe.” His father had hand-written a note on the letter See Iwo Jima: Legacy of Valor by Bill D. Ross pages 327-8.

           The letter was from a John H. Makin who identified himself as a Private First Class Marine, stationed on Iwo Jima in March 1945 and discharged with honorable service in November of the same year. The location gave Lolita, Texas as the hometown.

           Sean reads the newspaper copy. It seemed that late one night on Iwo Jima, on guard duty, two bored Leathernecks had walkie-talkies. This in March of 1945 was after most of the heavy fighting for the island had taken place and most of the military personnel on the island were either getting ready to leave or were fortifying the runways for Superfortress B-29 bombers that were returning from Japan either shot up, low on fuel or both. One Marine had keyed his mike and adlibbed, “News Flash! An official statement from Radio Berlin has reported that the German High Command has agreed to unconditional surrender! The war in Europe is over!”

           A communications officer aboard one of the Navy ships anchored off Iwo had heard this announcement and taken it at face value. He relayed it to all the other ships and broadcast it over the ship’s loudspeakers. Pandemonium ensued; everyone was so happy that Nazi Germany had been defeated and now all available military might would be used against Japan. Flares and starbursts went off along with guns, rifles and sirens in jubilation. His father had written, “It felt great while it lasted, but it was a dirty trick.”

           But who had been the trickster? Sean located the book mentioned in his father’s library and flipped to the indicated pages. He read through the copy to the concluding paragraph: “The identity of the Marine culprit who caused it all remains one of Iwo’s lost secrets.”

           Author Bill D. Ross listed Somerset, New Jersey as his hometown in his foreword to the book. Some research on the internet revealed his obituary from ten years ago, in 1994. He had died of cancer at 73; survived by his wife Dorothy.

           Sean debates the wisdom of calling his widow of ten years over something so trivial as this; on the other hand, this former Marine had cared enough to write to his father about it. And his father had written a newspaper article about the incident for the now-defunct Daily Mirror of New York City that had been censored by the Navy and the War Department.

           He decides instead to call the letter-writer, or attempt to anyway. The letter is undated but has no ZIP code or two-letter abbreviation for Texas, so Sean pegs it for mid-1960s or earlier. He uses his father’s desktop computer to look on whitepages.com for a current telephone number. He finds a John H. Makin Jr. listed in Lolita, TX; he dials the number on his cell phone.

           “Hello?” a mature male voice answers after picking up.

           “Hello, is this John Makin?” Sean asks into his phone.

           “Depends,” the other voice parries. “Who is this?”

           “I’m Sean Doyle; my father was Alvin Doyle who had been a wartime correspondent during the Second World War,” Sean explains. “He recently died and I’m going through his papers and it seems a John H. Makin wrote him a letter about an event on Iwo Jima where he says he was a Marine in March of Nineteen Forty-five.”

           “Hi Sean,” the other voice replies in ease and familiarity. “John Makin who was a Marine in World War Two was my father; he died about twenty-five years ago. I’m John Makin Junior. Sorry about all the secrecy.”

           “No problem John,” Sean returns the cordiality in his New York accent, compared to the other’s Texas drawl. “Yeah he wrote a letter to my father about a crazy false surrender report that got erroneously broadcast over a walkie-talkie one night by a guard and passed on as legit when it wasn’t. My father wrote a story about it for the now-defunct Daily Mirror that got killed by the military censors and your father wanted to know if the guard had ever been identified.”

           After Sean had briefly recounted the situation the other end of the line grew silent, as if John Junior was trying to make up his mind about something. Finally he says, “Sean, have you got some time? I’d like to tell you about my father.”

           “Sure,” Sean replies without hesitation or irony. “I have all day if I want; tell away.”

            “My father was always full of stories,” John Junior decides to preface his remarks with. “When I was growing up he used to tell me about the war and what happened on Iwo Jima. He said he was lucky he made it out alive; so many Marines didn’t.

           “Don’t know if you know the background, but the Japanese were dug into the island in caves, pillboxes and tunnels; the brass expected a walkover but the Japs were determined to fight to the last man. They saw the island as the gateway to their empire and the barbarian Americans were not going to take it easily, if they had anything to say about it. By far and away it was the worst casualty rate battle site in the war; historians have compared it to Gettysburg as far as killed or wounded.

           “Anyway, one night we were watching some old ‘What’s My Line’ reruns and one of them had Art Carney on as the celebrity mystery guest, where the panelists all had blindfolds on and had to guess who it was by yes-or-no questions, the sound of the voice and so on. Well, after Carney had been identified he adlibs some radio impersonations he used to do during the war; he would imitate FDR, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, and all those characters.

“Well, my father had been drinking and that set him off like I’ve never seen him; he started this rant that I had heard variations on when I was a kid. He would screw up his voice so he sounded like a radio announcer and blare stuff like, ‘News flash! President Kennedy has announced Soviet ICBMs in Cuba. Khrushchev denies everything. The UN Security Council will meet in emergency session.’

“Only this time it was what you just said: ‘Flash! An official announcement on Radio Berlin has confirmed that Nazi Germany has agreed to unconditional surrender! The war in Europe is over!’”

“You remember those were his exact words?” Sean inquires on his end.

“I hadn’t, until you said them,” John Junior recounts. “Now I remember, but it’s been forty years. You know how stuff starts leaking out of the old memory banks after that amount of time.”

“Yeah, unfortunately I do John,” Sean ruefully admits. “Memory leaks are happening on this side as well.”

Diane returns to the attic after he wraps up his phone call to Texas. “We’re all fixed for dinner,” she imparts when he doesn’t say anything right away. “We don’t have to do any shopping.”  

Sean drops the letter and the article copy to the keep pile; he glances one last time over the two words that he has scrawled across the bottom of the letter:

Mystery Solved.