Densho Digital Archive - George Hara Interview (denshovh-hgeorge

<Begin Segment 13>

GH: Then when school started again, I was in my second year and doing well making honor roll in premedic. When the navy recruiter came by, and they had a program called the V-12 in which premedic students were chosen. Premedic schools, if they passed their physics would be enrolled as a sailor or in the U.S. Navy, and they would pay your room, board, supply you with the Navy uniform, pay your tuition, the whole ball of wax, and this answered my, you know, prayer. I got in line. Finally, they recruited. The first question they asked me, "Are you Japanese?" and I says, "Yes, I am." And he said, "There's no use applying because we'll turn you down." And he told me that the week before, he had gone to Ohio State campus. That's the biggest school in Ohio, and one of the people applying for the program was from Hawaii, a Japanese Nisei, Ken Nakao, a world class Olympic candidate swimmer who was there on a swimming scholarship undoubtedly, and he was turned down and that really flipped me out. I couldn't concentrate studying when I was studying with 90 percent of my class in Navy uniform and I and the conscientious theological students were the only ones without access, you know, to that program, so I dropped out of school. I found my way back to not home but Minidoka with my folks.

And as soon as I dropped out of school, you know, I was eligible for the draft because I lost, while I was a premedic student, I was deferred. So the notice came for me, and I was a member to be inducted as a member in the United States Army. But the thing about that is that I had taken a language test of some kind somewhere in between. I don't remember doing that, but I must have. So they had a record saying that, you know, I went to Japanese school, my folks are Japanese, I spoke Japanese at home, and I must have taken some kind of a test and did well, and so I was assigned right away to go to Camp Savage located in Minnesota where there's the language school, and so I reported in at Fort Douglas. And even in my civvies, I wasn't issued the army clothing yet, spent the first night on top of a double decker bunk, and I remember being woken, Hara, you know, shake, yes, you're on KP, you know. This is about four in the morning, and I wondered what the hell KP was. And I soon found out in my civvies, you know, stripped down we're in the kitchen cleaning pots and pans, peeling potatoes and outside, picking up cigarette butts, and these were all the new draftees. From, I don't know, five in the morning we were doing all these menial work. And it was interesting because they had about a dozen German war prisoners, prisoners of war that were assigned to camp, and they were sitting around, you know, sweeping the floor and washing up. And geez, those guys should be doing the work. We're in the army now, but we were the lowest rank.

Anyway, I finally ended up at Camp Savage and then the first thing instead of classes, excuse me, we were shipped down to McClelland, Fort McClelland, Alabama, for our basic training. And being in the military intelligence and not going to Europe to join the 442, ours was an accelerated program. We had most of the hard things being, you know, digging in trenches and having tanks run over you, over the holes, you know, going, wearing a gas mask into a gas filled room, and then the 20-mile hike at night, full battle gear, rifles, and all that sort of thing. And during my childhood, my mother sort of overprotected me, and the one thing I didn't want to be labeled was, you know, a mama's boy or teacher's pet, and so I really strived to do, you know, keep up with the other Nisei soldiers and got through all the grueling test, and then we were shipped back to Minnesota. By then, the camp had transferred to a sort of a temporary camp setting to a more permanent protocol, Fort Snelling, which was located between Minnesota and Saint Paul, the two largest city. I didn't realize the Mississippi River extended all the way up to, you know, somehow I thought that was a Tom Sawyer thing down south. The Mississippi River started way up north. Anyway, I didn't get to see much of the Mississippi River, and I was placed in the accelerated Military Intelligence language class. And the Japanese that we studied and learned, memorized came strictly out of a Japanese officers' field manual, how to act. And we learned how the Japanese army was composed, division, how many soldiers, you know, troops, artillery and all that, little bit about interrogating prisoners, entirely new vocabulary, and very intensified and I might have had difficulty because it was a new part of the Japanese language, and I, you know, it's not Nampo Gakuen stuff anymore. This is more professional soldiers' talk. And our class, I think we had about twelve or fifteen, had all age groups. I was one of the younger ones, and others had gone to college were architects or engineer, other businessmen. So there was a diversity of classmates in my class, and we got along well.

And our schedule usually started about, woken up by whatever they call, the wake-up call, lined up outside, and the outside could get awfully cold in the winter. Anyway, eat a breakfast, line up, march to classroom. Classes began, I think, at 8 and classes, three, four classes learning different aspects of the Japanese army, Japanese language, lasted from about 8:30 'til 12 and then march back for lunch and then started in again about 1 till 4 and then march back after supper for compulsory study class from about 7 until 10. And some of the more industrious ones would study for the, down in the latrine, the restroom down the basement. Anyway, after six weeks, we graduate, and one of the inequities I thought that existed there was the fact that the teachers or Kibeis and some Niseis were very fluent in Japanese. They too had to learn this new language, but they were very efficient in teaching, but they were all staff sergeants, not officers. The only, there were a few officers among the top echelon; John Aiso was a colonel. He was a very brilliant Nisei lawyer.

Anyway, the rank and file, us who finished the course, finished, and we elevated to the rank of corporal technical grades. So we had two bars and a five, I think, or a T, technician corporal. Now there's a group contingent of thirty or so hakujin, took the same course. They came from the Michigan ROTC as I understand, and they took a similar course, at least they said a similar course, in Japanese, and they graduated. They were second lieutenants, officer. Anyway, that wasn't a big point; it is something you can live with. So after graduation, my basic wish was to get, serve. And at that time, the war with Japan was going pretty well, full blast, and the Marines and units of the Navy and Army were involved in the island-to-island mopping up operation. We were getting the heroic things that the Niseis were doing and all the good things, translating military documents saves a lot of lives, and I was anxious to get right into the thick of those things. But for some reason, we're put on hold in this sort of repo-depo area in the back of the Fort Snelling. And instead of shipping out in a week or ten days or so, we were there almost a month and a half waiting for assignment. During that time, it wasn't wasted because I developed good friendships with other MIS students from other parts of the country.