Japan's Own Language Ended Its Last Island Garrisons

Japan's own language ended its last island garrisons. In April 1944, on a hill in Burma called Nhpum Ga, a Japanese American staff sergeant named Roy Matsumoto heard a Japanese officer give the order to withdraw, countermanded it, and shouted the order to charge in its place. Fifty-four Japanese soldiers attacked into the American line. None of them ever learned whose voice they had obeyed. This is the story of the Military Intelligence Service — roughly six thousand Japanese Americans who translated twenty and a half million pages of Japanese documents, and who then walked up to cave mouths on Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa and talked the enemy out of them. It covers the internment camps that produced the Army's best linguists, the captured Z Plan that helped destroy the Japanese fleet at the Philippine Sea, Bob Hoichi Kubo's cave at Saipan with 122 hostages and eight armed guards, Guy Gabaldon's bluff in East L.A. Japanese, and the July 1944 shift that turned a rear-echelon translator into an assault weapon. Built from Military Intelligence Hall of Fame citations, USAICoE command histories, National WWII Museum records and unit accounts — read against each other, not the legends. Subscribe for the definitive history of the United States in the Second World War — new documentaries every few days. #WW2 #WorldWarII #PacificWar #Nisei #MilitaryIntelligenceService #Saipan #MerrillsMarauders #WWIIHistory #USArmy #USAInWW2