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gky: Can you explain how the school at University of Michigan and at the, the school at Fort Snelling, it was, it wasn't before Fort Snelling, was it, or was it when Camp Savage was going to Michigan?

JM: It was at Savage too. Yeah, let me take a shot at that. To get these Caucasian team leaders the army went out and began recruiting on college campuses to find, oftentimes what they did was they looked for Phi Beta Kappa's, and they recruited these men that they felt would have an aptitude to learn a foreign language and organized a special program at the University of Michigan. There they organized a one year course, which was a very intensive full time Japanese language course, to prepare them to go to Camp Savage. The first course started in January of '43. Several months into that first course the army was desperate for Caucasian team leaders for the first groups of Nisei that were going out, so they took about forty of the top students in that first class and graduated them at the six month mark and then sent them to Fort Snelling -- I mean, here I go, they graduated them at the six month mark, sent them to Camp Savage, so they arrived at Savage in the summer of '43. That's the first small group.

gky: Can you start over?

JM: Okay. [Laughs] I'm trying to get the dates straight. In the fall of '42 the War Department went out onto college campuses looking for Caucasian college students that they felt would have an aptitude to learn Japanese. They went through the lists of Phi Beta Kappa members looking for the best and the brightest of American college students who hadn't already enlisted, and recruited over a hundred of them and sent them to the University of Michigan, where they set up a special one year program, which was just an introductory course of intensive Japanese, to prepare them to take the six month course at Fort, at Camp Savage. So several months into that -- that began in January of '43 -- several months into that, the army became so desperate for Caucasian team leaders to go out with the Nisei that they skimmed off the best forty or so and graduated them at the six month mark in the summer of '43 and rushed them to Camp Savage. So the first Michigan graduates to complete the whole program came out in early '44, and most of them went out to the Pacific and joined Nisei teams that were already there. You know, "Hello, I'm your leader." Well, they'd already been through some campaigns on their own. That program continued to expand during the rest of the war, and those Caucasian graduates then went on to Camp Savage, and then after '44 to Fort Snelling, and there were hundreds in training at Fort Snelling at the end of the war.

gky: So they must've gone into the occupation?

JM: That's right. Yeah, many of them went into the occupation.

gky: Do you think that was a successful maneuver by the army, to recruit non Niseis to be the leaders of the Nisei?

JM: I don't think it was really successful if you look at the resources that they committed to do that. It would've been a lot simpler all around if they had just given the Nisei commissions. The army did that to other soldiers throughout the war if they had technical specialties like a foreign language so that they would, they could make them second lieutenants. But of course, because of their prejudice at the time, the army couldn't do that until the very end of the war. In the middle of the war the army allowed Nisei to go to Officer Candidate School, so a handful of them in the United States and in Australia were allowed to go to OCS and they got their commissions that way, but it wasn't until the very end of the war, in the summer of '45, as the army was planning for the invasion of Japan they knew that they would need thousands of linguists, they knew that each division that went into the invasion would need a team of Niseilinguists, that they finally said, you know, this is nonsense. We need officers and we can't get them by commissioning Caucasians, so let's commission the Nisei. So in fact, in July of 1945 the army commissioned, direct commissioned over fifty Nisei in Southwest Pacific and dozens more in the China Theatre, in anticipation of the invasion of Japan. And then, of course, the war ended a few weeks later, fortunately.

gky: There were also some Nisei who got battlefield commissions, like Phil Ishio at, over in ATIS.

JM: Right.

gky: So this policy of not commissioning any Nisei was relaxing towards the end of the war?

JM: Phil became a warrant officer. He was appointed a warrant officer in '43 and I think he went through the OCS program in Australia. I'd have to check on that.

gky: [Inaudible] told me he didn't ever go to Officers Candidate School.

JM: Okay, then he was probably one of the ones who got a direct commission in '45. That's when Harry got his commission, Harry Fukuhara, for example.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.