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gky: Can you give me an idea of what the Intelligence infrastructure looked like during World War II?

JM: Sure. People talk about the Pacific Theatre. That's really a misnomer. In fact the Joint Chiefs of Staff divided up what we call the Pacific Theatre now into several different commands. I'll start in the Central Pacific, Admiral Nimitz, was the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Ocean areas in the Central Pacific. You had the South Pacific under Admiral Halsey. You had the Southwest Pacific area under General MacArthur. And then going all the way around, you had, on the Burma-India frontier, the China-Burma-India theater, which the Allies referred as the, to the Southeast Asia Command. So each of those major theaters had its own Intelligence apparatus. In Admiral Nimitz's Pacific Ocean areas there was the Joint Intelligence Center of Pacific Ocean Areas, JICPOA, which was a multidimensional intelligence center which did everything from radio intercept work to geographic intelligence, photographic intelligence, and it had a section of Nisei in the JICPOA annex translating captured documents. In the South Pacific you had a small intelligence center in Noumea on New Caledonia for the first couple years. In Australia, MacArthur had the Allied Translator and Interpreter Service, ATIS, in Brisbane, which in '44 moved forward to Hollandia on New Guinea and then in '45 into the Philippines. In China-Burma-India, gets a little more complicated, but there was a Southeast Asia Translation and Interrogation Center, SEATIC, in Delhi, and then in China itself there was another translation and interpretation center in Chungking, so -- and this is an important point -- some of the MIS Nisei went out with the frontline units and did the, the quick translation of captured documents on the battlefield and the initial interrogation of those prisoners while they were still fresh. But then behind the lines you had these large organizations that were almost like intelligence factories that took in thousands of pages of captured documents and took in hundreds of prisoners a few days after they had been captured, maybe a few weeks afterwards, and then looked through this mountain of information looking for those little nuggets that would turn a battle. For example, one of the documents that was found in New Guinea in 1943 was a book that the Japanese army had published which was the army officer list, and that gave the complete name and rank and unit of assignment of every single officer in the Imperial Japanese Army. What the Nisei did in ATIS was they took that list apart and they put every name and every unit on two file cards. They filed one by name so they had an alphabetical list, and then they filed the other half of the cards by unit, so for every regiment and division in the Japanese army, voila, they had a complete list of their officers. And the Japanese didn't tend to reassign their officers from regiment to regiment, so if it was Lieutenant So-and-So in the 37th Regiment here, then a year later he was gonna be in the same regiment over here, if the regiment moved. So that's how the Nisei could do that magic during interrogation. If they get a prisoner and the prisoner says, they ask him, "What is your company commander?" and he says, "I don't know," well then they could whip this out and say, "Don't lie to me. We know that your commander was Captain So-and-So and your regimental commander was Colonel So-and-So." And the, and the prisoners would think, "My god, they know everything, so why should I hide anything? They already know it all."

gky: Did the Intelligence infrastructure work well together? I mean, did, like did SEATIC work well with ATIS? Did, 'cause there was some...

JM: No, they really didn't work well together. That's part of the problem. If you go to the archives today you can find mountains and mountains of reports that they all sent to each other, and on the back page of each report it listed the distribution, so they were sending each other copies of all these things. JICPOA and ATIS, for example, were exchanging documents all the time, but they never really got it right. The problem is the difference in perspective between the commanders who are fighting the war, like General MacArthur and General Eichelberger in the Southwest Pacific, versus the staff who are thinking strategically, like, what island should we invade next? To the regimental commander, he's not thinking about what island to invade next. He's thinking about, where is that Japanese battalion? Is it on this hill or this hill over here? And the only way you can find that out is to go out, send a patrol out to capture a prisoner alive and interrogate him, find out, what hill are your buddies on? So for example, there was a document captured on Saipan -- actually there were tons of documents captured on Saipan in 1944 -- the folks at JICPOA didn't have time to go through them carefully. There was just so much, so a lot of it they packed up and shipped back Stateside for training purposes, of no intelligence value, and some of those materials ended up at Fort Ritchie, Maryland, where there was another intelligence center, PACMEARS, and there was a Nisei there who opened up one of these crates and looked through the stack of documents, and he found one particular document -- this was in October of '44 -- which was a report of a recent Japanese conference, a high level conference that spelled out in the minutes of that meeting where all of their major items of munitions were, where they were stockpiled, what they were short on, and how they had it all distributed. It was just a snapshot of the Japanese armaments as of the spring of '44, and if he hadn't spotted, that it would've probably just been shredded or burned, or just lined, lain completely unexploited, so every now and then you could find something of tremendous value.

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