It’s estimated they saved a million American lives, all while being viewed as the enemy.
October 15, 1946: Fort Snelling as a military installation and garrison closed its post headquarters.
The U.S. Army needed Americans who could read, speak, and think in Japanese, and it found them in the community it had learned to distrust.
During WWII, the Military Intelligence Service Language School trained thousands of mostly Nisei soldiers to translate captured documents, question prisoners, and interpret for the war in the Pacific. It did that work while the government was locking up Japanese Americans in camps across the West.
Before the war, two Army officers saw what their service lacked. Captain Kai E. Rasmussen had spent four years in Tokyo and watched the Japanese army fight in China. Lieutenant Colonel John Weckerling had studied Japanese in the 1920s and returned as an assistant military attaché. Together they drew up a plan for a language school. The War Department was slow to agree, and when it finally paid, it paid $2,000.
A School Inside an Old Airplane Hangar
The Fourth Army Intelligence School opened on November 1, 1941, in an old airplane hangar in San Francisco. A month later, Pearl Harbor made its mission urgent and its recruiting harder.
Rasmussen found his director of training in John F. Aiso, a Harvard-educated lawyer who was then working as a mechanic in a truck repair unit in Los Angeles. Three more instructors joined him: Shigeya Kihara, Akira Oshida, and Tetsuo Imagawa. The first class had 60 students, and only two were Caucasian.
They studied reading, writing, interrogation, and translation, along with captured documents, map reading, Japanese military organization, and radio monitoring.
Chased Out of California
In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, and the Army began removing 112,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast. The school’s students reacted with fear and anger. Aiso also worried about what would happen when soldiers in uniform walked public streets in California, where many people were openly hostile to anyone of Japanese ancestry. The staff decided the school had to leave.
Rasmussen searched the country for a community that would accept Nisei soldiers for what they were worth. Several Midwestern states refused. Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen said yes. In June 1942, the school relocated to Camp Savage, outside Minneapolis, with 18 instructors and 200 students. Rasmussen chose the site for its closeness to Fort Snelling and to two large cities where he expected the Nisei to face relatively little discrimination.
Graduates went to Army units across the Pacific and quickly proved their value as code breakers and negotiators. The War Department took the school under its own authority, expanded it, and renamed it the Military Intelligence Service Language School.
MISLS at Fort Snelling
By August 1944, class sizes had outgrown Camp Savage, and the school moved to Fort Snelling. Days were long. Classes ran from 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM, with more from 7:00 to 9:00 PM, Wednesday afternoons went to military drills, and Saturdays to exams. Free time was Saturday afternoon and Sunday, spent at the Mun Hing Cafeteria on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis, fishing, skiing, or playing volleyball. Students also wrote for the Fort Snelling Bulletin and put out a newsletter for alumni in the field.
By then, the school had produced 1,600 graduates, 142 officer candidates, and 53 officers. It kept growing with the war. In 1944, it added a Chinese language program, and as the Army prepared for the invasion and occupation of Japan, its training focused on that mission. By July 31, 1945, it had graduated 2,078 Nisei, with another 1,863 still in training. Women of the Women’s Army Corps also trained there as interpreters and translators, and many were sent to Tokyo to work in the federal civil service during the occupation.
A Million Lives
The government did not extend its trust evenly. It viewed Issei and Kibei, Japanese Americans who had studied in Japan for three or more years, with suspicion, fearing they might stay loyal to Japan. It placed its hopes on the American-born Nisei.
Those hopes paid off. Major General Charles Willoughby, General Douglas MacArthur’s intelligence chief, said the Nisei shortened the Pacific War by two years and “saved possibly a million American lives.” He added that they also saved billions of dollars. By 1946, more than 6,000 students had graduated from the school.
In June 1946, the school moved to Monterey, California, and became the U.S. Army Language School. Four months later, on October 15, Fort Snelling closed its post headquarters. In 1963, the school was renamed the Defense Language Institute, which many consider one of the world’s premier language schools.