The Military Intelligence Service (Japanese: アメリカ陸軍情報部, America Rikugun Jōhōbu) was a World War II U.S. military unit consisting of two branches, the Japanese American unit (described here) and the German-Austrian unit based at Camp Ritchie, best known as the "Ritchie Boys". The unit described here was primarily composed of Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) who were trained as linguists. Graduates of the MIS language school (MISLS) were attached to other military units to provide translation, interpretation, and interrogation services. "President Harry Truman called the Japanese Americans in the Military Intelligence Service (M.I.S.) the 'human secret weapon for the U.S. Armed Forces' against the Japanese in the Pacific. Major General Charles Willoughby said, 'The Nisei shortened the Pacific War by two years and saved possibly a million American lives.'" They served with the United States Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, as well as with British, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, Chinese, and Indian combat units fighting the Japanese. General Hayes Adlai Kroner was Chief of MIS at the War Department for most of the War.
History The U.S. Army long recognized the need for foreign language comprehension going back to the establishment of West Point in 1802, requiring its cadets to understand French, which was considered the language of diplomacy, as well as the source of the majority of the military engineering texts at the time. Spanish was added to the curriculum following the Mexican-American War and German after World War I. George Strong and Joseph Stilwell, both West Point graduates of the class of 1904, served as military attaches to Japan and China respectively. They took the opportunity to study the local language there, and understood the need to provide language training for enlisted troops. They were among the first US commanders to establish language programs offering classes for both officers and interested enlisted soldiers, teaching rudimentary spoken Chinese and Japanese. As relations worsened with Japan in the buildup to the war, a group of officers with previous tours of duty in Japan including Rufus S. Bratton and Sidney Mashbir recognized the need for an intelligence unit able to comprehend not only the spoken Japanese language but the intricacies of military terminology. US Army G-2 intelligence staff first surveyed colleges for Japanese language students and came to the realization that in all of America, only 60 military aged Caucasian males had any interest in Japan, mostly for purely academic reasons. The possibility of using Japanese Americans, or Nisei, with language skills was suggested as the number of Caucasian personnel qualified in Japanese was almost non-existent, and there was little time to train additional Caucasian personnel. The Army directed the Fourth Army, responsible for the defense of the West Coast, to start a school, assigning Lt. Col. John Weckerling and Capt. Kai E. Rasmussen, graduates of the Japanese language program in Tokyo, to stand up the school. Nisei soldiers John F. Aiso and Arthur Kaneko were found to be qualified linguists and recruited along with two civilian instructors, Akira Oshida and Shigeya Kihara, and became the Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS)'s first instructors.
The Military Intelligence Service Language School
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