Executive Order 9066 didn’t just remove 120,000 civilians, it removed America’s human secret weapons.
June 1, 1942: The U.S. Military Intelligence Service Language School was moved from San Francisco to Camp Savage, Minnesota.
On June 1, 1942, the U.S. Army officially relocated its Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS) from the Presidio in San Francisco to Camp Savage, Minnesota.
The move was a direct consequence of Executive Order 9066. The government had ordered the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, forcing more than 120,000 civilians from their homes. The order also displaced many of the very men the Army was training to help defeat Japan.
The new location, Camp Savage, was chosen by Colonel Kai E. Rasmussen, a Danish-born American and Japanese language student. He believed Savage was “a community that would accept Japanese Americans for their true worth – American soldiers fighting with their brains for their native America.”
Conditions at Camp Savage were difficult in the early months of the war. The first students studied without desks, chairs, or even beds. Despite the hardship, each new class was larger than the last. For the final class, 100 instructors graduated 1,100 students.
The MISLS was composed primarily of Nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans whose language skills and cultural knowledge made them uniquely valuable to the U.S. military.
These individuals were trained to perform critical tasks such as translating intercepted communications, interrogating prisoners of war, and interpreting captured documents. Their linguistic skills and cultural knowledge provided the U.S. military with invaluable intelligence that significantly contributed to the Allied victory in the Pacific.
President Harry S. Truman later called these Japanese American linguists “our human secret weapon.” Working throughout the Pacific, MIS soldiers translated captured documents, interrogated prisoners, monitored communications, and provided intelligence that repeatedly gave Allied forces a critical advantage.
Military leaders, including Major General Charles Willoughby, acknowledged that the efforts of the MIS shortened the Pacific War by up to two years and potentially saved a million American lives.
By August 1944, the MIS program had outgrown its facilities and was relocated to nearby Fort Snelling.
The 1940 census shows that 51 people of Japanese heritage lived in Minnesota, most of them railroad workers. By 1950, that number had grown more than 20-fold to 1,049 — many drawn by the community formed around the MIS program.
Despite facing discrimination and the injustice of incarceration, these Japanese American soldiers demonstrated unwavering loyalty and patriotism. Their service not only played a pivotal role in the outcome of World War II but also laid the groundwork for the eventual redress and recognition of Japanese American contributions to the nation.
Executive Order 9066 was intended to remove people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. Instead, it scattered them across the country, including to a small Minnesota town that became one of the most important intelligence training centers of the war.
The men who arrived at Camp Savage were viewed with suspicion because of their ancestry. Within a few years, they would be credited with helping shorten the Pacific War, saving countless lives, and proving that America’s greatest wartime advantage was not a weapon or a machine, but people it had once chosen to distrust.