First Yank into Tokyo Reviews

Maj. Ross (Tom Neal) is a super-patriotic WW II American pilot raised in Japan who agrees to return to the East to obtain weaponry information from captive scientist Jardine (Marc Cramer). The suicide mission doesn't frighten Ross; his sweetheart Abby Drake (Barbara Hale) has died, and he now only wishes to perish serving his country. After plastic surgeons remodel his features, Ross parachutes into Japan and heads for the camp where Jardine is confined. There, Ross discovers that Abby is a very much alive nurse who has also been taken prisoner and is now in love with another prisoner, American Capt. Andrew Kent (Michael St. Angel). Ross nevertheless follows his orders and obtains the vital information, in the process encountering and outwitting several unsavory Japanese, including the insidious Maj. Nogira (Leonard Strong). His true adversary, however, is Col. Okanura (Richard Loo), a wily intelligence agent with whom Ross actually went to college and who remembers every quirk of his school chum. Luckily for the producers, this film was finished just as the A-bomb was dropped on Japan. They therefore went back to the cameras and changed Ross' assignment from obtaining plans for a secret gun to obtaining vital A-bomb information. In a new and unlikely ending, a narrator explains how Ross gave up his life so that the bomb could be perfected. Pathe newsreel footage was then tacked on, showing nuclear explosions, thus making this the first Hollywood feature to deal with the atomic attack on Japan.