JAC WWII Seminar JAC Highlights Value of Capturing History

  • Published
  • By Peter G. Park
  • JIOCEUR Analytic Center
ROYAL AIR FORCE MOLESWORTH, England --  Dr. James C. McNaughton, Command Historian, U.S. European Command spoke about the contributions of Japanese Americans to Military Intelligence.

He was able to do so because of historical materials collected during the war and preserved.  More than sixty years later those records were available in 2006 when he wrote his book: "Nisei Linguists - Japanese Americans in the Military Intelligence Service during World War II" published by the U. S. Army Center of Military History. 

As Dr. McNaughton noted in an earlier paper: "As every practicing historian will tell you, history advances based upon the questions you ask and the materials you work from. I would argue that there are still new questions to be answered and new materials to be worked." In the Tribase area today historical information is being collected that may one day be the key information that a future writer needs to understand today's events. 

As the JIOCEUR Analytic Center at RAF Molesworth supports the U. S. European Command in understanding and where appropriate responding to today's events, history is being made and needs to be captured for future exploitation. At the JAC, that is the role of the Commander's Action Group assisted by directorate historical officers. At the 501st Combat Support Wing, Command Historian Mr. Jerry A. White has already catalogued the history of the Groups and squadrons in the Wing and has the responsibility for collecting the data today that will make history tomorrow. 

In researching his book, Dr. McNaughton drew on the contemporaneous records of this unusual group of American soldiers, the several thousand Nisei, or second generation Japanese-Americans, who served as translator-interpreters in the Military Intelligence Service during and immediately after the war. He also interviewed many of the veterans. It was a fascinating trail that he pursued resulting in publication of his book in 2007. 

As Dr. McNaughton noted: "In the summer of 1941, as America's relations with Imperial Japan approached a diplomatic impasse, the War Department Intelligence Division launched a secret effort to recruit and train West Coast Nisei to be Japanese-language interpreters and translators. By the outbreak of war, sixty students were in training at the Presidio of San Francisco. Within six months, the school had shipped its first 35 graduates to the field, just in time for Guadalcanal and the Buna-Gona campaign. In 1942 the War Department moved the school, then named the Military Intelligence Service Language School, to Minnesota, and by the invasion of Saipan two years later, the school had graduated over 1,200 linguists. 

"By the time US forces landed on Iwo Jima and Okinawa in 1945 the school had graduated over 2,000 who fought in every battle and campaign. Three earned the Distinguished Service Cross, and a number the Silver Star, some of them posthumously. Until the early 1970s much of what they did was kept secret. 

"Their story is inextricably linked to a painful and tragic episode in the history of American race relations, the deep-rooted prejudice against Asian-Americans that culminated after Pearl Harbor in the internment camps. They suffered the humiliation of seeing their families herded into internment camps and heard their commanding officer, Fourth Army Commanding General John L. DeWitt, explain away the evacuation to West Coast newspapers by declaring "a Jap is a Jap." In reaction, many mainland Nisei volunteered to serve their country straight out of the internment camps. In the Hawaiian Islands, Japanese-Americans, while not interned, were treated with great suspicion. Like other ethnic groups, these young Americans saw military service as a way to prove their patriotism." 

A copy of Dr. McNaughton's book "Nisei Linguists - Japanese Americans in the Military Intelligence Service during World War II" has been placed in the RAF Alconbury Library.