Military Intelligence Service Language School

During World War II, the War Department opened the Military Intelligence Service Language School in San Francisco in November 1941 to train Japanese-language translators for service in the Pacific because few soldiers spoke or read Japanese. The school recruited many Nisei soldiers, American-born children of Japanese parents, but after Executive Order 9066 forced the internment or relocation of Japanese Americans on the West Coast in 1942, Governor Harold Stassen volunteered to host the school in Minnesota. The school moved first to a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Savage and then, in 1944, to Fort Snelling, where the former Band Barracks became its headquarters. Students in the six-month course worked long days studying Japanese language, writing, and culture, with supervised evening study, and they practiced sosho, beigo, document translation, and monitoring Tokyo radio broadcasts. Enrollment peaked in 1945, when the school added spoken Japanese and Chinese- and Korean-language courses. While in Minnesota, the school trained over 6,000 students, including 51 Women's Army Corps students sent in June 1945, and these servicemen and women served around the world as interpreters, translators, interrogators, researchers, language teachers, and other specialists.

Minnesota · United States