Having lost his mother to illness, Tatsuo Matsuda was forced to stay with relatives in Hiroshima, where he attended both elementary and middle school for a total of 11 years. Wanting to retain his American citizenship, he returned to the United States in 1937 and finished high school in Chualar, California. Right after graduation, Matsuda was drafted into the Army in July 1941. He was participating in infantry training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. He and five other Nisei soldiers were left behind when their division was ordered to head west for service. During this period recruiters from Camp Savage arrived to gather people like Matsuda for the Military Intelligence Service (MIS). Placed in a class of Kibei and university graduates, Matsuda studied at the MIS language school from December 1942 to June 1943. While he studied at the language school, his family had voluntarily moved from California to Nebraska to escape internment.
<br><br>Few months after graduation, Matsuda's team of linguists arrived in New Caledonia, then proceeded on to Bougainville where they stayed for exactly one year. He and the others interrogated prisoners and translated captured Japanese documents. They also created and disseminated leaflets urging the Japanese to surrender. Once, Matsuda's interrogation of four prisoners led to information about planned attacks on the XIV Corps to which Matsuda's team was attached. The incident turned heads because these prisoners came from the 6th Japanese Division, known as the bravest out of the entire Japanese Army. Also, prisoners were rare to find because they were typically trained to not give up. With this information, the XIV Corps was well prepared to face the enemy attack, and many more Japanese prisoners were taken after the planned assault. In his opinion, as long as interrogation work was coupled with humane treatment of the captured soldiers, extracting information was not difficult. The Japanese were willing to give up information about military plans and unit identities and discuss the condition of their supplies and other war-related materiel.
<br><br>After Bougainville, Matsuda and a now larger group of MIS men moved on to the Philippines, landing in Lingayen Gulf in January 1945. After serving in other locations within the islands, he was sent to Japan to become a member of the Occupational forces. Among the devastation and tragedies of wartorn Japan, he noticed that there was a strong sense of despair among the people he encountered. For example, one leader from the self-defense forces who was recuperating in a hospital talked about how they had trained women and children to fight with bamboo spears "to the very end." The man tearfully exclaimed that the situation was meaningless and the work in vain because Japan would lose the war sooner or later. In October of 1945,Matsuda returned to the United States and subsequently was discharged from military service.
