Elliott Thorpe

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Elliott Raymond Thorpe (* 26. December 1897 in Westerly , Rhode Iceland ; † 27. June 1989 in Sarasota , Florida ) was an American officer last Brigadier General , and head of counterintelligence General Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific War .

Life

Thorpe attended Rhode Island State College for a year as an engineering student before enlisting as a private member of the Rhode Island National Guard in the summer of 1916 . He was later assigned to the Coast Artillery Corps . Promoted to First Lieutenant of the Infantry during World War I , he was part of the Guard of Honor when the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919.

In 1941 Thorpe served with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel as a military attaché in Bandung , Dutch East Indies , where he was briefed by General Hein ter Poorten of intercepted Japanese messages heralding the start of the Pacific War, including the attack on Pearl Harbor . Although he dutifully informed his superior in Washington, General Sherman Miles , the warnings were ignored. During the war, he served as chief of counterintelligence to General Douglas MacArthur as G-2, USASOS. He competed with Charles Willoughby , who was MacArthur's chief of intelligence (G-2, GHQ , SWPA ). He was responsible for the operations of the 441st Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment , which in 1944 consisted of 39 individual detachments scattered across the Pacific. In March 1945 Thorpe was promoted to Brigadier General. He attended the signing ceremony of the surrender of Japan on the USS Missouri on September 2 .

In occupied Japan , Thorpe was appointed by MacArthur to head the Civil Intelligence Section of the GHQ in addition to his other duties as chief of counterintelligence at AFPAC . In his dual role, he was responsible, among other things, for censoring the press and the media, counter-espionage, tracking down and arresting suspected war criminals and cleaning up political parties.

From July 1946 to the fall of 1947 Thorpe headed the Military Intelligence Service Language School in Monterey , California, which later became the Army Language School . From March 1948 until his retirement from active service a year later, he was a military attaché in Thailand .

In 1952 Thorpe was nominated by the Republican Party for the House of Representatives elections. He withdrew his candidacy after an investigation by the Counter Intelligence Corps opened, but was reinstated. In 1960 Thorpe retired in Sarasota, Florida. In 1969, he published the autobiographical work East Wind, Rain: The Intimate Account of an Intelligence Officer in the Pacific 1939-49 . Shortly before his death in 1989 at the age of 91, he was interviewed for the BBC production Sacrifice at Pearl Harbor . He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ John Patrick Finnegan: Military Intelligence , Center of Military History, United States Army, Washington DC 1998, p. 96.
  2. ↑ Eiji Takemae: The Allied Occupation of Japan , Continuum, New York 2003, p 163rd
  3. ↑ Cameron Binkley: From World War to Cold War: Creating the Army's “Multilanguage School at Monterey” ( PDF ; 1.9 MB), p. 8 ff.
  4. ^ University of Rhode Island Library Special Collections and Archives: Guide to the General Elliot Thorpe Collection 1928–1999 (PDF on Brown University website), accessed April 25, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Thorpe, Elliott
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Thorpe, Elliott Raymond (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American general
DATE OF BIRTH December 26, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Westerly , Rhode Island
DATE OF DEATH June 27, 1989
Place of death Sarasota , Florida