A2C Hidemaro Ishida, USAF

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Korean War · One of the Ashley Five · Confirmed alive after the Armistice · Never returned

He was contacted by radio in April 1953 and positively identified. Four months later, after the Armistice, American officials recorded him as still alive in North Korean hands.

Photograph of A2C Hidemaro Ishida of the Ashley crew
A2C Hidemaro Ishida. He was alive and in North Korean hands after the Armistice.

The man

Hidemaro Ishida was the son of the Rev. and Mrs. Nitten Ishida of Pine Street in San Francisco, according to a casualty list in Scene: The International East-West Magazine. A Buddhist priest named Nitten Ishida was taken by the FBI from his family’s church home in San Francisco shortly after Pearl Harbor, according to Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement (Unconfirmed by PIP as the same family). Ishida flew as the B-29’s right gunner. Decades later the poet Brian Komei Dempster published a poem “for Hidemaro Ishida, MIA, Korean War, 1953,” addressed to “Uncle Hide.” (Beloit Poetry Journal.)

What is known

A2C Hidemaro Saito Ishida, who joined the Air Force from California, was the right gunner aboard B-29 42-65357A of the 28th Bombardment Squadron, 19th Bombardment Group, lost near Hungsu-ri, North Korea, on Jan. 29, 1953. DPAA believes he was one of the survivors known as the Ashley Five and carries him as unaccounted for. The story of the crew — the capture, the radio contact and the message sent after the Armistice — is told on the main case page, Capt. Gilbert Ashley and the Ashley Five.

Ishida was the only Japanese-American on the crew. A North Korean woman from the village where the men were held told U.S. intelligence she saw four of them: “three Caucasians and a Japanese-American.”

The men on the mountain

In 1953 five men from the same B-29 were held together in a mountain village in North Korea, where guerrillas who claimed to be friendly were secretly working for the North. The U.S. tried to rescue them by air and was ambushed. Three more men from the crew are also unaccounted for.

Evidence and sources

  • Military records of the 22 April 1953 guerrilla report and the radio contact producing “positive identification” of all five men.
  • The 28 July 1953 message to Ashley and the captors’ early-August response.
  • The assessment by US officials with “intimate knowledge” of the operation that the five were alive as of August 1953.
  • Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency records of the loss of B-29 42-65357A and of the men aboard.
  • Primary account: PIP research files.

Request for information

Please contact us if you can help with any of the following.

  1. Accounts from anyone who saw or knew of the Ashley crew after August 1953, including North Korean or Chinese guards, drivers or interrogators, or residents of the Paek-san region.
  2. Reports of any of the crew moved to China or the Soviet Union, including the source of the account given to John Shaddick’s mother in China in 1955.
  3. Any photograph or film of the crew in captivity, with its provenance.

U.S. officials recorded the five alive in North Korean hands in August 1953, after the Armistice. When the United States demanded them back, the captors threatened to kill them. In 1955 a man in China told Shaddick’s mother her son was alive and that his return would have to be negotiated. Did North Korea kill the five once the United States named them? Did it keep them, or hand them to China or the Soviet Union? If they were bargaining chips, who held them, and for how long?

Write to contact@powinvestigativeproject.org. We treat every approach in confidence.

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