Intelligence in Recent Public Literature
James C. McNaughton. Department of the Army: Washington, D.C.,
2006. 514 pp., photos, maps, bibliography, index. Foreword by Jeffrey J.
Clarke.
Reviewed by Stephen C. Mercado
Victory in war and peace goes most often
to those who know their enemies and themselves. A state that wages war without
good intelligence is like a dim-sighted boxer who, even if he avoids losing,
will suffer unseen blows a fighter with sure vision would likely have parried.[i] James C. McNaughton, a military historian whose career includes service as command
historian for the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center and US
Army Pacific, has written a history of Japanese Americans whose service as
linguists of the US Army Military Intelligence Service (MIS) contributed
greatly to the US victory over the Japanese Empire in the Second World War and
to the lasting bilateral alliance that followed. As the US Army chief of
military history wrote in his foreword to the book, the history of the MIS in
World War II suggests lessons for Washington
in the “sustained struggle ahead” in the Global War on Terrorism.
In 1941, when the United States faced the looming prospect of war
with Japan,
the War Department moved to develop linguists by directing the Fourth Army to
open an intelligence school at the Presidio of San Francisco. Lt. Col. John
Weckerling and Capt. Kai Rasmussen, both of whom had learned the language in Japan,
proceeded to screen Japanese Americans as instructors and students, develop a
curriculum, and otherwise build a school from scratch. The recruitment of John
Aiso, a Harvard-educated lawyer famous among California’s
Japanese Americans for his intellect and drive, as chief instructor was a major
step to putting the enterprise in gear. The school, training second-generation
Japanese Americans (Nisei), moved in 1942 to Camp Savage, Minnesota,
as the Western Defense Command was removing over 100,000 Japanese immigrants
(Issei) and their American children from their homes on the West Coast and
interning them in camps in the interior. In 1944, the growing school, by then
designated the Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS), moved to Ft. Snelling, Minnesota. Comparing the
graduating classes gives some idea of the school’s impressive growth: 42 Nisei
of the first class graduated on 1 May 1942; on 18 August 1945, 552
students graduated. Trained in interpreting, interrogation, and translation
with materials ranging from standard textbooks to captured documents,
thousands of Nisei and hundreds of Caucasian Americans left the school to serve
as linguists in the war against Japan.
The US Army was far from alone in
working to recruit, train, and deploy Japanese linguists, a situation the
author brings to light by writing with some detail on developments in the US
Navy as well as on an alphabet soup of intelligence organizations that included
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service
(FBIS), and Office of War Information (OWI). In addition to such major training
centers as the MISLS, the Army Intensive Japanese Language School at the
University of Michigan and the Navy Japanese Language School at the University
of Colorado/Boulder, the book touches on other wartime programs, from Japanese
classes at the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, Maryland,
to the Navy School of Military Government and Administration at Columbia
University. McNaughton even devotes some ink to describing the Japanese
programs of the Allied forces of Britain,
Australia,
and Canada.
Striking among the book’s myriad details is the contrast between the Army’s
decision to recruit its linguists primarily from the pool of eligible Japanese
Americans and the Navy’s preference in selecting Caucasians with experience
living in Japan,
an outstanding academic record, or some demonstrated aptitude in learning
foreign languages.
From the early campaign to oust the
Japanese from their footholds in Alaska
to the invasion of Okinawa
near the war’s end, Nisei graduates of the MISLS demonstrated their worth at
the front lines time and again. Tactical intelligence gained from captured
documents, prisoner interrogations, and enemy radio contributed greatly to US
Army and Marine ground campaigns. Technical Sergeant Roy Uyehata, for example,
learned in early March 1944 in a “routine interrogation” at XIV Corps
headquarters on Bougainville,
Papua New Guinea,
that Japanese forces planned a major assault on American positions for 23
March, an auspicious imperial holiday. A tactical enemy map captured the day of
the planned attack confirmed Uyehata’s discovery in detail; prepared, XIV Corps
began the annihilation of the enemy with a preemptive artillery barrage just as
they were moving into assault positions that night. Nisei linguists also showed
extraordinary bravery in saving thousands of civilian lives in the fierce
fighting for Saipan and Okinawa.
Sgt. Hoichi “Bob” Kubo saved over 100 civilians in Okinawa from involuntary mass suicide by
crawling alone into a cave and convincing the Japanese soldiers there to let
them go. In two hours of negotiations, he gained their trust by sharing his
K-rations, letting them know that his grandfathers had served in the
Russo-Japanese War in the Imperial Japanese Army’s (IJA) famed 5th (Hiroshima) and 6th (Kumamoto)
Divisions, and appealed to their sense of honor as warriors. For his bravery,
Kubo won the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second highest award for
combat valor.
Nisei linguists also proved their worth
in organizations far from the front lines. In such organizations as the Allied
Translator and Interpreter Service (ATIS) in Australia, the Southeast Asia
Translator and Interrogation
Center
(SEATIC) in India,
and the Signal Security Agency monitoring station at Vint Hill Farms, Virginia,
Japanese Americans interpreted, interrogated, and translated. ATIS Nisei
translated the captured Japanese Army List, producing in May 1943 a 683-page
translation that proved a gold mine for detailed intelligence on the IJA order
of battle. Nisei linguists also participated in the ATIS translation of a
captured copy of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) “Z Plan” of 8 March 1944. The
IJN, unaware, executed their compromised plan to disastrous loss in June at the
decisive Battle of the Philippine Sea where, in history’s largest
carrier battle, the IJN in effect lost its air arm.
McNaughton relates not only Nisei
triumphs but their hardships and handicaps as well. Many were recruited or conscripted
for military service from behind the barbed wire of internment camps where
their families remained confined. Japanese Americans with outstanding command
of Japanese, even those who had gone to school or university in Japan (a Nisei
subset known as Kibei), generally served under Caucasian officers less gifted
in the language yet more likely to earn officer commissions. On the other hand,
many Nisei linguists suffered from such handicaps as a rudimentary grasp of
their parents’ language, limited formal education, and poor proficiency in
English. Beyond the sting of racism, Nisei linguists at the front often had
bodyguards with them and ran the risk of friendly fire from fellow soldiers
mistaking them for the enemy. Technical Sgt. Fred Tanakatsubo was only one of
those linguists who felt it necessary to tell his Caucasian comrades, “Take a
good look, and remember me, because I’m going in with you!” The fight
against Japan
was for them, in a sense, a civil war. Many Nisei going into Okinawa, for example, worried that family and
friends would die in the invasion. Second Lt. Harry Fukuhara was far from the
only Nisei shaken at news of the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki; his mother and siblings were
residents of Hiroshima.[ii]
Having contributed to victory in the
war, Nisei linguists continued serving with distinction in the peace that
followed. Lt. Ralph Yempuku parachuted on 27 August 1945, before the formal
Japanese surrender, with an OSS team under Capt.
John K. Singlaub onto the Chinese island of Hainan to rescue from a
Japanese camp several hundred Australian and Dutch POWs in danger of execution.
Nearly 100 Nisei went to Japan
in the early weeks of the occupation to search for Japanese intelligence
pertaining to the Soviet Union.
Others sifted for documents relating to Japanese programs for weapons of mass
destruction as well as conventional military and naval technology. Japanese
Americans participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and other war
crimes trials; some prepared defenses, others gathered evidence for the
prosecution. Japanese Americans in ATIS, which took over the NYK Building across from the Imperial Palace,
translated Japanese letters and petitions to General MacArthur and monitored
the media. Still other Nisei served in occupied Japan
(1945–52) in such intelligence organs as the Civilian Censorship Detachment and
Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC).
DCI George Tenet on Chiyoki Ikeda,
14 May 1998 |
It
is also our tradition on Memorial Day to recognize the addition of a new star
to the Memorial Wall. The star was engraved last October 15. It belongs to
Chiyoki “Chick” Ikeda. He was killed in the line of duty four decades ago in an
air accident. Chick Ikeda knew the price of patriotism. He paid it willingly
and dearly. In September 1940, Chick, who possessed dual citizenship, chose to
pledge his full allegiance to the United States
and renounced his Japanese citizenship, even at a time when our Nisei were
shamefully declared “enemy aliens.” In 1943, when President Roosevelt
established an all Nisei combat team, Chick joined the famous 442nd. He was
selected for behind-the-lines duty in China
[with the OSS] and was decorated with a
Bronze Star. After the war, he fulfilled various military assignments, then
joined the Agency in 1954, where he served with distinction until his death in
1960. The work Chick Ikeda did building strategic liaison relationships for the
Agency must still remain unspoken, for it continues to yield valuable dividends
today. We are honored to have Mrs. Ikeda, their sons George and John, and
Senator Akaka here today. |
McNaughton’s history of Japanese
American linguists is so engrossing that his ending the story in 1946, on page
456, feels abrupt. The author does define his subject as Nisei linguists in
World War II, but writing even an epilogue of “what happened next” would have been
illuminating. Left untold are tales of Nisei veterans of the Second World War
interrogating North Korean prisoners in Japanese in the Korean War, executing
CIC operations against the Japanese Communist Party and other targets during
the occupation, and serving down through the years of the Cold War in various
components of the military and CIA.[iii] Chiyoki “Chick” Ikeda, who earned a star on the CIA Memorial Wall, is one good
example. Ikeda became an important officer in the latter half of the 1950s in
the Directorate of Operations and served in a variety of positions, including
in Japan,
until his death in 1960. Ikeda managed a counterintelligence program that
detected and turned Soviet agents among the tens of thousands of Japanese
prisoners of war repatriated from the Soviet
Union during 1947–48.
In fact, the story of the Nisei linguists
extends from before the Second World War until the end of the Cold War. As
McNaughton notes, the CIC had sent two Nisei officers, Arthur Komori and
Richard Sakakida, under cover into Manila in the
spring of 1941 to gather intelligence on Japanese fifth-column activity in the US
colony.[iv] Perhaps the central figure of such a postwar epilogue would be Harry Fukuhara,
a counterintelligence officer who retired from active military service in 1971
with the rank of colonel after governing an island in the occupied Ryukyu
archipelago, became a Department of the Army civilian (DAC), then retired in
1990 as chief of the 500th MI’s Foreign Liaison Detachment (FLD). His
decorations from President George H. W. Bush, DCI William Webster, and Emperor
Akihito hint at the valuable role, far from the limelight, that Nisei played in
US-Japan relations from the beginning of the occupation to the end of the Cold
War.[v] Former Administrative Vice Minister for Defense Maruyama Ko,[vi] a key military official of postwar Japan once explained, “What I would
like to stress is that it was really fortunate for Japanese to have many Nisei
working for Japan
the way that Fukuhara did after the war.”[vii]
McNaughton’s Nisei Linguists is a
wide-ranging work whose 12 chapters cover both the development of the language
programs and the growth of the Nisei contribution over the course of the war.
The numerous footnotes and long bibliography attest to the years of research
devoted to this book, although the absence of Japanese sources is regrettable.[viii] This is an excellent history. Moreover, many readers will agree with the chief
of military history that the book offers “valuable lessons to US Army officers
both present and future” seeking to understand present foes in the Global War
on Terrorism. As one example, McNaughton relates how MISLS taught harsh
interrogation techniques at Camp Savage until “reports from
the field indicated that compassion and kind treatment tended to work better.”
A military that holds true to the legacy of its Nisei linguists by facing its
enemies with fluent, literate, and compassionate intelligence officers will
likely prevail.
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Footnotes
[i]According
to a classic military treatise, “Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred
battles you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know
yourself, your chances of winning and losing are equal. If ignorant of both
your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril.”
Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Samuel B. Griffith, translator (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 84.
[ii]Fukuhara
left his native Seattle as a teen when his
mother took him and his siblings to her hometown of Hiroshima following his father’s death in
1933. He returned to the United States
for college; his three brothers remained in Japan. He served in the US Army;
they served in the Japanese Army. His mother and oldest brother suffered
radiation sickness, with his brother dying before the end of 1945. “‘Futatsu no
sokoku’ hazama ni ikite” [Living Between ‘Two Fatherlands,’], Tokyo
Shimbun, 11 June 1996, p. 28.
[iii]McNaughton
did touch on the role of Nisei serving in the Korean War with the 500th
Military Intelligence Support Group Far East and other organizations in his paper
“Nisei Linguists and New Perspectives on the Pacific War: Intelligence, Race,
and Continuity,” presented at the 1994 Conference of Army Historians and
available on line at http://www.history.army.mil/topics/apam/Nisei.htm.
[iv]Sakakida related his
wartime exploits to his brother-in-law, Wayne Kiyosaki, who wrote A
Spy in Their Midst: The World War II Struggle of a Japanese-American Hero
(1995). An unclassified review of this book appeared in Studies in
Intelligence 40, no 2 (1996).
[v]Fukuhara
received the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, the
National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, and the Order of the Rising
Sun, 3rd Class. See “Colonel Harry Fukuhara to Speak at Reed High School On
Friday, May 9th,” JACL News,
May 2003: 1–2 (http:// wolfweb.unr.edu/homepage/vjohnson/jacl/jaclMAY03.PDF).
[vi]Names of Japanese in this
review appear in their traditional order, surname preceding given name.
[vii]Toshikawa
Takao, “Nikkei nisei, Beigun joho shoko ga hajimete shogen shita: ‘Futatsu no
sokoku’ rimenshi,” [“Nisei,
U.S. Military
Officer Testifies for First Time: The Inside Story of ‘Two Fatherlands’”], Shukan Posuto, 3 March
1995: 219.
[viii]Many Japanese histories,
memoirs, and media reports tell the stories of Nisei in service to one country
or the other. One history of Japanese Americans is Kikuchi Yuki’s Hawai
Nikkei nisei no Taieheiyo Senso [The
Pacific War of Hawaiian Nisei] (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobo, 1995). A story of
Japanese Americans on the other side is Tachibana Yuzuru’s Teikoku Kaigun
shikan ni natta Nikkei Nisei [The Nisei Who Became an Officer of the
Imperial Navy] (Tokyo: Tsukiji Shokan, 1994). As Nisei who were living in the
United States a t the start of the war joined the US military and intelligence
organs, so many of those in Japan at that time served as linguists in the IJA
and IJN, the Foreign Ministry, and the official Domei News Agency which, like
the BBC, monitored foreign media broadcasts.
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All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed in this article are those of the author. Nothing in the article should be construed as asserting or implying US government endorsement of an article’s factual statements and interpretations.