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gky: Can you explain what the MIS was and the relationship of the Nisei to it?

[Interruption]

JM: In early 1942 the War Department reorganized its intelligence division. They organized what they call the Military Intelligence Service. That was all Army Intelligence personnel, worldwide, who were not directly assigned to a regiment or division were considered part of the Military Intelligence Service, so that included a lot of intelligence disciplines, like translation interrogation, like radio intercept, like photo interpretation, the whole range of intelligence specialties. That's why when the Nisei graduated from the MIS Language School they were assigned to the MIS as Japanese language specialists, so the MIS had, had thousands of members worldwide.

gky: And how did the Nisei fit in this whole, this big thing, I mean, as a small piece of the puzzle on the West Coast dealing with the Pacific? 'Cause only three of 'em went over to Europe at this time.

JM: Right, there were several thousand MIS personnel in Europe, but only three Nisei. You're right, which is a good illustration of the difference. For a combat operation in the Pacific, normally a division would have an MIS team assigned to it, a division or a corps headquarters, for the duration of that operation. Some of the teams were able to stay with a division throughout the whole war, but others just got assigned for that operation, and then when the battle was over they went back to ATIS and spent sometimes several months there doing other stuff until another battle came up and they went back again. So they were never part of those divisions. They were always attached for temporary purposes.

gky: So they were on temporary duty. Why was the army the only branch of service that would even consider inducting Nisei Intelligence?

JM: It's always puzzled me why the army was the only branch of the military to take Nisei in World War II. The army for most of the war was the only branch of the military that had to use selective service. The air corps and the navy for most of the war were able to rely on volunteers, so the army was more democratic, if you will. They had to take all comers and had to use the selective service system, but more than that, I think it's a philosophic difference. The army had to actually go head to head with the Japanese on the ground. They had to get up close and personal with those Japanese army units, and you can't do that without getting that firsthand information, using that language capability, so the army, on the one hand, had to take the Nisei because of selective service. On the other hand, the army was the branch of the military which had to confront the Japanese military face to face. They couldn't stand off in an airplane or an aircraft carrier or a battleship and blow them up from miles away. They actually had to get in there and wrestle, get down in the mud and the jungles and fight the Japanese army, and to do that they had to get that firsthand intelligence, so they had heavy language requirements compared to the navy. The navy, for example, got most of its intelligence from intercepted radio communications, and that was low enough in volume that they, that the Caucasian linguists that the navy had could handle most of that translation work, and so that's how they tracked the Japanese navy. The army didn't have that luxury.

gky: At the same time, it is mostly Caucasians we're talking about. There were not many Hispanics in the army at this time. There were not many blacks. When blacks were in they were in segregated units.

JM: That's right.

gky: Was this, I guess, sort of a history of racism on the army's part, or was it a reflection of the times? Now we can speak in hindsight, but we've had the whole Civil Rights Movement in the '60s.

JM: Right. It was a transition time for America and for the army. The Nisei, like the African Americans, were allowed to fight in the army, but in segregated units. The army didn't want to get too far out ahead of American society. The, the watch word at the time was no social experiments. In fact, at the end of the war the Secretary of War recommended that the army not integrate. He said publically and explicitly that, that black Americans and white Americans would never work well together in individual units until such time as American society was no longer segregated. So it was a transition time for the army. The army couldn't get out too far ahead of, of the society at large. On the other hand, the army was the only branch of service that gave the Nisei the opportunity to show what they could do. They were shut out of the air corps almost completely, they were shut out of the navy completely, and the army was willing to give 'em a chance to show what they could do.

gky: So Douglas Wada was a, an exception in the navy. Although, he wasn't, as I understand it, he wasn't in Intelligence.

JM: He was prewar. Yeah, he was.

gky: He wasn't in Intelligence until after, I thought.

JM: No. No, I don't remember. I'd have to look it up in, in the '93 Hawaii book, but yeah, Douglas Wada was recruited by Naval Intelligence before the war to do intelligence stuff. But he was quite an exception and stayed in Hawaii. The local District Intelligence Officer in Hawaii knew him personally and used him just right within that district, yeah, but otherwise, no. It's interesting, the navy actually had some history going back earlier of using Issei. Just as Japanese men joined merchant fleets in the late nineteenth century, they joined the U.S. navy, as well, and several Issei actually lost their lives when the battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbor in 1898. Sometime a few years after that, as tensions rose between the United States and Japan, the navy reversed its policy, so for a period of probably thirty or forty years after that the navy didn't have a single Japanese sailor. Likewise, the army was really not much better. In the recruiting environment of the '20s and '30s the army did not allow Japanese to enlist. Interestingly, though, the army allowed them to take ROTC, and that was a very wise investment because those ROTC grads from University of California or University of Hawaii, some of them ended up in the MIS and some of them ended up as junior officers in the 442nd.

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