Professional Translating: The Unsung Unit of WWII

A Lack of Professional Translating Services

Imperial Japan’s December 7^th surprise attack on the U.S. Naval Station at Honolulu in 1941 shocked the American public. Although all American aircraft carriers were spared from destruction, over 2,000 American sailors lay dead and 8 U.S. battleships were sunk or damaged as a result.  This nearly crippled the might of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific. However, the greatest shock of all was not the loss of men and materiel; it was that the American military establishment was completely unprepared to fight their newly-found enemy in Japan. U.S. foreign policy makers knew virtually nothing about Japanese culture at the time, especially their language. This lack of cultural and linguistic knowledge necessitated the creation of a military unit to make up for this deficit in professional translating and translation services. However, the American military would have to look to their supposed enemies in order to solve this critical problem.

Development of Professional Translating Abilities

In 1941, only 25 white American scholars scattered across the United States knew how to speak Japanese. Although a classified program to train Nisei (American-born citizens of Japanese descent) citizens to become interpreters for the U.S. Army began a month before Pearl Harbor in San Francisco, the military’s Japanese language capabilities were almost non-existent at the outbreak of war. Nevertheless, the 45 original graduates of the school proved vital to American intelligence efforts during the early stage of the war. Despite American efforts to move Japanese-American citizens to internment camps in the mid-west to prevent potential sabotage operations, as well as a ban on Japanese recruits for the Army, the U.S. War Department recognized the value of these Japanese linguists and decided to expand the program.  They created the Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS) in the spring of 1942. After six months of intense language training, the 6,000 graduates of the program were sent to the Pacific Theater, where they worked for the newly-minted Allied Translator and Interpreter Service (ATIS).

A Major Victory

The Nisei linguists proved instrumental to the Allied victory in the Pacific due to their professional translating efforts. Perhaps their greatest achievement occurred in 1944 with the uncovering of the “Z Plan.” Drafted by Japanese Admiral Mineichi Koga, the plan was designed to provoke the U.S. Navy into a decisive battle in the Philippine Sea, where the Japanese Navy would lie in wait to completely destroy them. However, after the loss of Admiral Koga in a plane crash over the Philippines, Filipino guerrillas sympathetic to the Allied cause retrieved a copy of the “Z Plan” from the wreckage of Koga’s plane and turned the plans over to the Americans. With the help of the Nisei professional translator, Yoshikazu Yamada, and his partner, George Yamashiro, the U.S. Navy gained critical intelligence on the position of the Japanese fleet in the Philippine Sea; vital information that would lead to the American victory in the famous Battle of the Philippine Sea in which the Japanese Navy would be virtually destroyed. Clearly, thanks to their ability to translate documents related to the Japanese invasion, the Nisei translators were able to change the course of the WWII, and the field of global translation services, forever.