Japanese Americans at the Presidio: A Secret Language School and Mass Incarceration

Japanese Americans being processed for removal. NPS.

One of the most poignant — and ironic — home front stories of World War II belongs to the Presidio of San Francisco. After Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Presidio officers ordered Americans of Japanese ancestry removed to concentration camps, while half a mile away a secret Army language school trained Japanese American soldiers. The soldiers' loyalty and sacrifice were honored at the highest levels; their families endured a very different sacrifice.

The Military Intelligence Service Language School

Studying Japanese at the Military Intelligence Service Language School at the Presidio, 1941. Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Park Archives.

• Why: worsening relations with Japan through the 1930s signaled possible war, and in November 1941 the Army opened the 4th Army Intelligence School at the Presidio.
• Where: Building 640, a hangar on Crissy Field, converted into classrooms and a barrack.
• Who: Nisei — Japanese Americans born in the U.S. to parents from Japan — trained as translators for the war against Japan. Planned for a year, the course was cut to 6 months after the attack on December 7.
• Where they went: Presidio graduates served on every major Pacific battlefield. After the first class graduated, the school moved to a more secure inland site in Minnesota.
• Impact: its 6,000 graduates interrogated prisoners, translated captured documents, and used their knowledge of Japanese culture during the occupation of Japan. An officer on General Douglas MacArthur's staff said the Nisei "saved countless Allied lives and shortened the war by two years."

A language school graduate interrogates a captured Japanese soldier. National Archives.

Incarceration

Japanese Americans on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco, waiting to be sent to camps. National Archives.

• War hysteria: anti-Japanese feeling surged after Pearl Harbor. At the Presidio, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, wrote to Secretary of War Henry Stimson calling Japanese Americans "potential enemies" and urging their exclusion from the West Coast as a "military necessity."
• Executive Order 9066: after Stimson passed this on, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the order on February 19, 1942, letting the War Department set military zones from which people of "enemy" ancestry could be excluded.
• From the Presidio: DeWitt signed the 108 Civilian Exclusion Orders and directives that carried out the order along the West Coast. One of many detention camps opened at Sharp Park, near Mori Point — now part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
• The camps: by fall 1942, every Japanese American had been removed from California to one of ten concentration camps. Allowed only what they could carry, many lost property and savings — sold, confiscated, or destroyed in government storage. Four or five families shared each tar-papered barrack; communal mess halls and scarce work disrupted family and cultural routines, though some patterns of socializing and school went on. People judged "disloyal" were sent to a segregation camp at Tule Lake, California.
• No crimes: no person of Japanese ancestry living in the U.S. was ever convicted of any serious act of espionage or sabotage.

A mess line at the Manzanar Relocation Center. Ansel Adams, Library of Congress.

Losses and redress

• Losses: the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco put the incarcerated citizens' losses at $400 million.
• Acknowledgment: nearly 40 years later, the federal government formally acknowledged that "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership" — not "military necessity" — drove the mass incarceration.
• Apology: the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 recognized the injustice, apologized, and paid $20,000 to each surviving incarceree.

Sources

Based on "Patriotism and Prejudice: Japanese Americans and World War II," Presidio of San Francisco, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The street is Van Ness Avenue; the source's caption says "Van Ness Street."