<Begin Segment 7>

gky: We were talking about the difference between the MIS, what the MIS did and what the 100th and 442nd did.

TT: I would say that those who fought, the 100th and the 442, that went to Italy and fought against the Germans, they were serving their country by fighting the enemy. But, in contrast, when you talk about the MIS, the Nisei MIS serving in the MIS, I did, I have seen an order that prohibits any Nisei from serving in the Pacific war with the exception of those serving in Military Intelligence. So without that exception, the Nisei would not have been able to participate in the Pacific war, and to "fight against your own kind," so to speak. So I would think that the ultimate test of loyalty would be are you willing to go fight your own kind. So in looking back over my service with the MIS, although I wanted to stay with the 442, that was my original outfit, the fact that I was transferred and then trained and served with the MIS, when I look back, I can see that I was one of those of roughly 6,000 who were willing to go fight our own kind, because there was a great deal of question and doubt. Would these guys be willing to go and fight the Japanese enemy, being of the same ancestry? And the fact that 6,000 were trained and were available and sent out without one act of disloyalty, it was just a clean, unblemished record of loyalty. That really should say something about the Niseis' unquestioned loyalty to the U.S. They're even willing to go fight an enemy of their own kind, and lot of the guys had relatives. I don't know if you remember, I had a brother who was stuck in Japan before the war, I mean when the war hit, and I had no idea where he was or whether he might turn up on the other side of my gun sight. But, that didn't deter me.

gky: What did happen with him?

[Interruption]

TT: My brother was a pioneer in aeronautical engineering before the war. And he graduated in 1939 from NYU with his degree. He could, being a Japanese American, he was still not acceptable by the leading aircraft companies, Boeing, Douglas, North American. They would not hire a Nisei. So he came back to Hawai'i. Hawaiian Airlines wouldn't hire him. So somebody told him -- this is 1939, 1940 -- they said, "Why don't you go to Japan and look around?" Of course, at that time, the prevailing wisdom was that there would not be any war with Japan. So you know, this was not an act of anything out of the ordinary. So he was in Japan in 1941 checking out Mitsubishi and some of these other aircraft companies in Japan, and that's when they dropped the bomb on Pearl Harbor and he got stuck over there. So all through the war we didn't hear from him. We didn't know what happened to him.

[Interruption]

gky: You were talking about your brother. You didn't know what was going to happen to him. You didn't know what happened to him during the war. Then how did you find out what happened to him?

TT: Well, when the war was over and he finally wrote back or contacted us. And during that time, he was drafted in the Japanese army and served on Taiwan. So he was never in combat. But also, because he was a Nisei, he reported that at least two times the Japanese secret police raided his room to check up to see if he wasn't an American spy or something. So the Japanese, during the war, did not trust the Nisei.

gky: You're the second of three boys and a girl?

TT: Yes.

gky: What kind of a training did you get for being the electronic eavesdropping?

TT: Well, this group, when we graduated in February or March of 1944 from Camp Savage, a pretty large contingent, forty or fifty of us were ordered to MacDill Field, Florida, to be trained by the Signal Corps into this special training for what I call electronic eavesdropping, or voice intercept, radio intercept. So we spent about three or four months down there training, and then shipped to the West Coast, and then assigned to various what they call radio squadrons mobile, assigned to the various air forces fighting the Pacific war. In our case, we were trained for voice and code intercept, in other words, to hone in on frequencies that the Japanese military were using, the Japanese air force. In our case, when we got to India and Burma, we were, we honed in on these radio transmissions from the Japanese airfields and the communication between the tower and the fighter aircrafts. So we led a very unglamorous life, a routine life, around the clock, eight hours on and so many off, three teams. And we'd hone in to at least about six stations. Every time there was activity, we'd flip on the switch and record, and then translate the voice, hand over the code into English. And it was the air force airfield tower radioing back and forth between the fighters and the tower. And we were just out getting the raw material and translate it, and then send it in. Beyond that, we don't know what happened to it or how it was used or analyzed. We never were privy to that kind of information.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2001 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.