Nisei Linguists: Japanese Americans in the Military Intelligence Service during World War II

This book tells the story of an unusual group of American soldiers in World War II , second-generation Japanese Americans (Nisei) who served as interpreters and translators in the Military Intelligence Service. It describes how the War Department recruited soldiers from an ethnic minority and trained them in a secret school to use the Japanese language. Months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Fourth Army Intelligence School was established on the Presidio of San Francisco with sixty students. After the attack the Western Defense Command removed all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. The War Department transferred the school with its Nisei instructors and students to the Midwest. For the rest of the war the renamed Military Intelligence Service Language School operated in Minnesota at Camp Savage from 1942 to 1944 and then at Fort Snelling from 1944 to 1946. By the spring of 1946 the school had graduated nearly 6,000 military linguists in the Japanese language. The book also describes how these Nisei served with every major unit and headquarters in the Pacific war. Their courage, skill, and loyalty helped win the war sooner and at lower cost to the United States than would otherwise have been possible. During the American occupation of Japan they helped turn bitter enemies into friends, thus securing the victory and serving as a bridge between the two cultures.