The American battalion was trapped, under siege and under fire, and one man was their best, last hope.

Delivery Man: The Enemy-Alien Nisei Translator Who Saved His Battalion in World War II is the suspenseful, tragic and true story of a combat translator in a pioneering American special operations force, sent into the heart of a forgotten jungle war in which he fought soldiers of his own ancestry and put his life on the line to save hundreds of his brothers.

U.S. Army Sgt. Roy Matsumoto was born in Los Angeles and lived for seven years in Hiroshima. His family remained in Japan in 1929, when he returned to Southern California alone and took a job delivering groceries. Like all Japanese-Americans, Roy’s life was upended by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, followed by his internment by his own country – first at the Los Angeles horse-racing track on which Sea Biscuit had triumphed two years before, and then at another concentration camp in Arkansas.

In exchange for his freedom, Roy volunteered to join the U.S. Army, which trained him and sent him into northern Burma. That’s where the American commando force known as Merrill’s Marauders braved a malarial jungle to engage a tenacious enemy force on a winning streak. 

Though contact with his family in Japan would be impossible for the duration of the war, Roy took comfort that their home city of Hiroshima, sheltered by an inland sea, was considered relatively safe from attack.

 

Rory Laverty is an investigative journalist who has reported on the military and the justice system for the Washington Post, The Daily Beast, and Newsweek. He is the author of Aluminum Alley: The American Pilots Who Flew Over the Himalayas and Helped Win World War II (Stackpole, 2023).