During World War II, some 5,000-6,000 Japanese American soldiers in the U.S. Army's Military Intelligence Service received intensive and accelerated Japanese language training at Camp Savage. The program began in the fall of 1941 at the Presidio in San Francisco, a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, and for security reasons moved in May 1942 to Camp Savage, a 132-acre site chosen by commandant Colonel Kai E. Rasmussen because he believed Savage would accept Japanese Americans as American soldiers. The site had previously served as a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in the 1930s and later housed elderly indigent men, and conditions in the early months were extremely difficult, with the first students studying without desks, chairs, or even beds. By August 1944 the program had outgrown Camp Savage and moved to larger facilities at Fort Snelling. Most of the English-speaking Japanese Americans, known as Nisei, came from the West Coast; some were already in U.S. military service, while others volunteered from internment camps where American citizens of Japanese ancestry had been confined after Pearl Harbor. Their later work translating captured documents, maps, battle plans, diaries, letters, and printed materials and interrogating Japanese prisoners led President Harry Truman to call them "Our human secret weapons," and General Charles Willoughby said the 6,000 Nisei shortened the Pacific war by two years.