Military Intelligence Service (United States)
The Military Intelligence Service was a World War II U.S. military unit consisting of two branches, the Japanese American unit and the German-Austrian unit based at Camp Ritchie, best known as the "Ritchie Boys". The unit described here was primarily composed of Nisei who were trained as linguists. Graduates of the MIS language school were attached to other military units to provide translation, interpretation, and interrogation services.
"President Harry Truman called the Japanese Americans in the Military Intelligence Service the 'human secret weapon for the U.S. Armed Forces' against the Japanese in the Pacific. Major General Charles Willoughby said, 'The Nisei shortened the Pacific War by two years and saved possibly a million American lives.'"
They served with the United States Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, as well as with British, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, Chinese, and Indian combat units fighting the Japanese.
General Hayes Adlai Kroner was Chief of MIS at the War Department for most of the War.
History
The U.S. Army long recognized the need for foreign language comprehension going back to the establishment of West Point in 1802, requiring its cadets to understand French, which was considered the language of diplomacy, as well as the source of the majority of the military engineering texts at the time. Spanish was added to the curriculum following the Mexican-American War and German after World War I. George Strong and Joseph Stilwell, both West Point graduates of the class of 1904, served as military attaches to Japan and China respectively. They took the opportunity to study the local language there, and understood the need to provide language training for enlisted troops. They were among the first US commanders to establish language programs offering classes for both officers and interested enlisted soldiers, teaching rudimentary spoken Chinese and Japanese.As relations worsened with Japan in the buildup to the war, a group of officers with previous tours of duty in Japan including Rufus S. Bratton and Sidney Mashbir recognized the need for an intelligence unit able to comprehend not only the spoken Japanese language but the intricacies of military terminology. US Army G-2 intelligence staff first surveyed colleges for Japanese language students and came to the realization that in all of America, only 60 military aged Caucasian males had any interest in Japan, mostly for purely academic reasons. The possibility of using Japanese Americans, or Nisei, with language skills was suggested as the number of Caucasian personnel qualified in Japanese was almost non-existent, and there was little time to train additional Caucasian personnel. The Army directed the Fourth Army, responsible for the defense of the West Coast, to start a school, assigning Lt. Col. John Weckerling and Capt. Kai E. Rasmussen, graduates of the Japanese language program in Tokyo, to stand up the school. Nisei soldiers John F. Aiso and Arthur Kaneko were found to be qualified linguists and recruited along with two civilian instructors, Akira Oshida and Shigeya Kihara, and became the Military Intelligence Service Language School 's first instructors.
The Military Intelligence Service Language School
The MISLS began operation with an initial budget of $2,000 and scrounged together textbooks and supplies in November 1941, about a month before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The first class of 60 students begin their training at the Presidio in San Francisco, graduating 45 students in May 1942.Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, some 5,000 Nisei were serving in the US military in various capacities, often assigned to menial tasks and labor units despite their qualifications. John Aiso had been drafted in 1940 and assigned to a motor pool even though at the time, he was already a well respected Harvard Law School educated attorney working with a white-shoe firm in international law.
Following Pearl Harbor, most of the Nisei were summarily discharged or placed under constant surveillance. For the officers in charge of the school and their Nisei students, the outbreak of war prompted their studies to intensify to prove their loyalty. Military Security officers questioned the loyalty of the Nisei students, removing some due to suspicion, and prompting Weckerling and Rasmussen to recognize that frontline commanders would have difficulty entrusting the Nisei soldiers with sensitive documents, and sought to find Caucasian officers with Japanese proficiency to serve as team leaders. Eighteen National Guard and Reserve officers drifted through the class, most failing due to limited comprehension ability and the complexity of the Japanese written language. Two men, however, graduated with the first group, Captain David Swift and Captain John Burden, both born in Japan as the sons of missionaries, and even spoke the Tokyo dialect better than some of the Nisei students.
Anti-Japanese sentiment pushed President Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 9066, forcing the removal of anyone with as little as 1/16th Japanese ancestry from West Coast of the United States. By March 1942, the Military Intelligence Division was being reorganized as the Military Intelligence Service. It was tasked with collecting, analyzing, and disseminating intelligence, and absorbed the Fourth Army Intelligence School. Originally comprising just 26 people, 16 of them officers, the MID was quickly expanded to include 342 officers and 1,000 enlisted men and civilians. Minnesota's Governor Harold Stassen offered up Camp Savage, a former Works Progress Administration facility to host the MIS Language School. The school moved to Minnesota in June 1942, offering larger facilities without the complications of training Japanese-American students in the coastal areas they were prohibited from, and faced less anti-Japanese prejudice. In 1944 the school outgrew Camp Savage and was moved to Fort Snelling. There it continued to grow, occupying 120 classrooms staffed by 60 odd instructors. Over 6,000 would graduate from the WWII language program.
In Hawaii, the pre-war Corps of Intelligence Police detachment grew from a 4 man staff to 12 officers and 18 special agents as the was reorganized as the Army Counter Intelligence Corps within the reorganized MIS.
In March 1941, CIC agent Major Jack Gilbert recruited two former students from his previous position as military advisor at McKinley High School in Honolulu, Richard Sakakida and Arthur Komori, as Japanese sailors who jumped ship in the Philippines to avoid the draft. Living amongst the Japanese community in Manila, they spied on Japanese interests and reported to the local CIP detachment of any hostile intentions discovered.
Sakakida would eventually be captured and tortured by the Japanese following the fall of Corregidor, and help lead an escape of 500 Philippine guerrillas held at Mantinlupa Prison.
As the first MISLS class completed its training in May 1942, its students were immediately sent to the frontlines, participating in Guadalcanal to interrogate the first captured Japanese pilot. At first, commanders were skeptical of the Nisei linguists. The first unit of MIS deployed under the command of Capt John Burden with the 37th Infantry Division to the Solomon Islands campaign. Upon arrival, Burden and his Nisei predictably found themselves assigned to menial tasks translating non-sensitive personal letters far from the front due to the lack of trust. After a chance meeting with Admiral Halsey, Halsey confessed to Burden that his own Caucasian interpreters only had a rudimentary understanding of Japanese and could only decipher the names of the prisoners. Burden convinced Halsey to give him a chance. Burden demonstrated the wealth of information that could be provided by a fully fluent linguist and vouched for the Nisei soldiers in his command to meet the demand. His presence proved to be instrumental in opening the eyes of the American field commanders to the value of the Nisei linguists.
MIS servicemen would then be present at every major battle against Japanese forces following Midway, and those who served in combat faced extremely dangerous and difficult conditions, facing prejudice from soldiers who believed they couldn't be trusted, sometimes coming under friendly fire from U.S. soldiers unable to distinguish them from the Japanese, and even dealing with the psychological conflict of encountering former friends and family on the battlefield.
"The most important action resulting from a Japanese translation was at Bougainville in 1942. An M.I.S. translator translated an un-coded Japanese radio transmission that Admiral Yamamoto was scheduled to go on an inspection tour of the bases around the Solomon Islands. U.S. Navy P-38s had fifteen minutes of fuel time available to intercept Yamamoto's aircraft near Bougainville. His plane was successfully intercepted and shot down. This was a blow to the morale of the Japanese, and was a morale booster for the Allies in the Pacific. Admiral Yamamoto had directed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 after which the United States entered World War II in both the Pacific and Atlantic Theaters of Operation."
The ambush of Isoroku Yamamoto in the Solomons campaign in 1943 was a major MIS contribution to the war effort. MIS soldier Harold Fudenna intercepted a radio message indicating the whereabouts of Admiral Yamamoto, which led to P-38 Lightning fighter planes shooting down his plane over the Solomon Islands. Although this message was first met with disbelief that the Japanese would be so careless, other MIS linguists in Alaska and Hawaii had also intercepted the same message, confirming its accuracy. The success of these first few Nisei linguists convinced the War Department to establish more Japanese-American combat units such as the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team deployed to the European Theater.