Lt. Col. Sugiyama Retires (1 SEP 1966)
Sugiyama, known as “Jim,” was born in California in December 1927. In 1942, the teenager moved with his family to a War Relocation Center for interned Japanese Americans. At just 16 years of age, Sugiyama left the Topaz Center in Utah and traveled to Michigan, where he completed high school and then attended the University of Michigan. However, his studies were cut short after just one year when he was drafted in April 1946.
Making the most of his situation, Sugiyama attended the Army Officer Candidate School and Basic Infantry Officers Course and was commissioned a second lieutenant in April 1947. Sugiyama requested assignment to the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) Language School but was instead sent directly for occupation duty in Japan. Upon reporting to the MIS’s Allied Translator and Interpreter Section (ATIS) at Camp Zama, he found he was ineligible to work as a translator. ATIS instead assigned him to the Maizuru Repatriation Bureau as an interrogator, where his limited personal knowledge of the language was put to the test interviewing Japanese prisoners of war returning from the Soviet Union.
One month before the North Korean Army (NKA) invaded South Korea on Sunday, June 25, 1950, Sugiyama was reassigned as the order of battle officer for the 7th Infantry Division G-2 in Japan. On the Friday before the incursion, Sugiyama became concerned about the movement of NKA units towards the 38th Parallel and requested maps to better track the order of battle estimates provided in the GHQ Daily Intelligence Summaries. Informed the division had no available maps of North Korea, Sugiyama was told to wait until Monday. By then, it was too late. He subsequently became heavily involved in providing order of battle estimates as the division prepared for the landing at Inchon and for operations up and down the peninsula throughout late 1950. Sugiyama later served as the division assistant G-2 operations officer after the United Nations (UN) resumed offensive operations in 1951.
In July 1951, then Capt. Sugiyama was reassigned as the NKA order of battle officer for Far East Command (FEC). He and Chinese Communist Forces (CCF) order of battle officer Capt. Henry Ajima became “responsible for providing what amounted to the final word on the CCF and NKA order of battle in Korea.” Relying entirely on interrogation reports and captured documents from across the Korean peninsula, Sugiyama created the first complete NKA order of battle for FEC in 1952.
He returned to the U.S. in mid-1952 and served in various intelligence roles until recalled overseas in March 1956, first with the UN Command Military Armistice Commission Support Group in Korea, then with the U.S. Army Command Reconnaissance Activity, Pacific in Tokyo. The early 1960s found Sugiyama in Germany, where he served first as Combat Command S-2 and then as assistant chief of staff, G-2, for the 4th Armored Division. He then served at the U.S. Army Special Warfare School as chief of the Propaganda Division. In 1965, he deployed for his final concurrent assignments as the first commander of the 55th MI Detachment and as deputy G-2,
I Field Force, Vietnam.
On Sept. 1, 1966, Colonel Sugiyama retired his commission, having received three Bronze Star Medals, an Army Commendation Medal, and an Air Medal. Sugiyama finally returned to his studies that had been interrupted twenty years earlier. He earned an undergraduate degree in political science and a master’s degree in public administration. He put both to good use continuing to serve his country during the 1970s as national president of the Japanese American Citizens League and then as project coordinator for President Jimmy Carter’s Presidential Reorganization Project, helping develop the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. Finally, Sugiyama served in the U.S. Office of the Special Counsel, which he had helped create in 1979, until his civilian retirement in 1988. He passed away in January 2019 at the age of 91.
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Article by Erin E. Thompson, USAICoE Staff Historian. New issues of This Week in MI History are published each week. To report story errors, ask questions, request previous articles, or be added to our distribution list, please contact: TR-ICoE-Command-Historian@army.mil.
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