

In June 1941, the U.S. Army drafted Walter Tanaka, and he began training at Camp Roberts, Calif. After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, the Army sent his unit up to Dillon's Beach to protect it against invasion. He received orders to report to company headquarters at the beach:

__BEGIN_QUOTE__
All the Nisei that were called in, we had to load onto the three-quarter-ton vehicle and go back to Santa Rosa.... And gosh, when we got back there to battalion at Santa Rosa at the Fairgrounds, all the Nisei were there.... We were all ordered to go to the battalion headquarters where they're bivouacked in the building and then they never told us anything. We just sat there....

They didn't say anything to us. At that point we still had our rifles. But pretty soon, they took the rifles away from us. [Uncommon Courage]
__END_QUOTE__

While all of the Battalion's Nisei waited, the commanding officers decided to put asphalt on the floor of the exposition building. They brought in convicts from the local jail and forced the two groups of men to do the work:

__BEGIN_QUOTE__
They called on us to work with them with a shovel, you know, to work with the convicts, work with the prisoners. And so we did that, and that's when I felt, boy things are getting pretty bad. If this is how they're going to treat us from here on. I had a pretty bad feeling-our guns were taken away, we worked with the prisoners. We weren't doing what other soldiers were doing. [Uncommon Courage]
__END_QUOTE__

The small group moved to Gilroy where more Nisei soldiers had gathered. After doing more menial labor, the Army put them on a train and shipped them all off the West Coast-the train's window shades pulled down so no one could see in or out:

__BEGIN_QUOTE__
I think it was since they didn't trust us, they thought we might support any kind of an invasion of the Japanese. Here they trained us to be soldiers to fight, with weapons and all that, so they felt they better get the Nisei out of the West Coast first. So, we were the first ones to leave. [Uncommon Courage]
__END_QUOTE__

Tanaka arrived in Fort Custer, Mich., and they called the group of Nisei the "Detached Enlisted Men's List"-a euphemism for a military labor force. The Nisei slept in segregated barracks, and Tanaka received coal-shoveling detail for several months during the cold winter.

While he was at Fort Custer, a recruiting team from the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) Language School came to talk to the Nisei soldiers:

__BEGIN_QUOTE__
This recruiting team of Caucasian officer and, I believe, it was a Nisei linguist came ... and asked for volunteers and then we took a test.... There was no point in having me read anything because, you know, I wasn't that good in reading and the translating of documents because I didn't get much opportunity to go to language school. It was during the Depression years, very hard times. [Uncommon Courage]
__END_QUOTE__

In June 1942, he joined the first class of MIS at Camp Savage, Minn.:

__BEGIN_QUOTE__
My reason for volunteering to go to the Military Intelligence Service, or to Camp Savage, was not that I wanted to, or that I felt that, you know, a question of loyalty or anything, I wanted to get the hell out of there. I thought, boy if I'm going to have to, for the duration of the war, I'm going to have to be pitching coal into the furnaces, there's gotta be something better than that. That's the reason I left. [Uncommon Courage]
__END_QUOTE__

While the Army was moving Tanaka around, the FBI picked up his father and put him jail. The rest of his family first moved inland, and then were forced to move to Poston Detention Camp in Arizona.

At Camp Savage, although he felt confident speaking Japanese, studying the written language, especially kanji, was difficult:

__BEGIN_QUOTE__
I'm one of the guys that used, after lights out you know, we were supposed to go to bed and we'd sneak into the latrine, sit on the toilet, commode, and study until after midnight or thereafter, to try to keep up with the studies. [Uncommon Courage]
__END_QUOTE__

In six months Tanaka graduated and then was assigned to a team of linguists in the Air Corps. They specialized in technical aviation terminology. 

After arriving in Brisbane, Australia, he interrogated POWs from the Japanese Army Air Force or Navy:

__BEGIN_QUOTE__
I would be assigned to an officer interrogator. And at first, I was the interpreter for an officer who was an Air Corps, he was an Air Corps captain, American, and we would go down to the interrogation cell. [Uncommon Courage]
__END_QUOTE__

He and the officer would ask questions about units, commanders, aircraft types, markings on the airplanes, and any other information they could gather:

__BEGIN_QUOTE__
We never punished or treated the prisoners badly. We demanded information, of course, but in so doing, a lot of times, particularly early in the war ... tended to tell a lie and try to get away with it.... But our system is that we would ask questions we already knew the answer to and mix it up with questions we didn't know. And eventually they get to the point where they feel hopeless because they feel that we know everything and then they'll tell us something because they think we already know anyway and then it turns out that we didn't know and that information is confirmed from other sources. [Uncommon Courage]
__END_QUOTE__

They also used other means of coercion:

__BEGIN_QUOTE__
There were a few times when I had occasion to smoke a cigarette while I'm down there. I never smoked in my life, you know, and boy, somebody's dying for a cigarette. I said, "Well if you cooperate, you know, we could give you a cigarette," or after the interrogation is over, they've been real good, give them a candy bar or something. [Uncommon Courage]
__END_QUOTE__

Japanese POWs never learned what to do when captured. In fact, the Japanese military told its men that Japanese people were "invincible" and should commit suicide upon capture. It did not teach soldiers how to cope with interrogation, and as a result, they willingly talked and provided valuable information.  Most of the soldiers felt ashamed they had been captured and did not want to return to Japan. They had already given up their allegiance:

__BEGIN_QUOTE__
Every single prisoner we had felt, "Well, what are you going to do with me when the interrogation's over with?" I said, well, we're certainly not going to kill them. "When the war's over we'll return you to Japan." "No," he says. "I'll never go back. I'll jump off the boat. I'll commit suicide." They would beg that, when the interrogation's over, let us live in Australia. It's a big country, a lot of resources. All I ask is give me a little plot of land where I can grow some vegetables and live out my life. [Uncommon Courage]
__END_QUOTE__

On August 13, 1945, the Army appointed Tanaka 2nd Lieutenant in preparation for the Occupation of Japan. He flew from ATIS, in Australia via the Philippines and Okinawa and landed in Japan on August 30, 1945. As the convoy of trucks and vehicles holding Occupation Forces drove from the airport, Japanese soldiers lined the streets guarding them against local resistance to the Occupation. Tanaka worked as an interpreter and remembers that the hostilities between the occupied and occupiers lay just below the surface: 

__BEGIN_QUOTE__	
One night after supper, at a roundtable discussion at the International House among American officers, Japanese interpreters, and Japanese press, one American captain of the U.S. Air Force faced his Japanese audience and declared that he was disappointed that an atomic bomb was not dropped on every major Japanese city before the war ended so that Japan can never rise again and wage war against the United States. [Biography]
__END_QUOTE__

In late 1945 and 1946, Tanaka worked as a commanding officer of the 166th Language Detachment and assigned linguists to daily interpreting duties. He continued to work in Japan until May 1950 when he returned to the United States to study Russian and Army Counterintelligence in Maryland. From 1953 to 1956, he worked in the Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) in Japan, and then went to Seoul, Korea, for 13 months. He retired from the Army in June 1961,as a Major, completing 20 years of military service.
Tanaka, Walter - bio.doc

Scott Hoshida	Page 4	4/7/03


