Wednesday, Dec. 8, 2021 at 10 p.m. on KPBS 2 / On Demand
"Armed With Language" tells the story of how a little-known military intelligence school in Minnesota played a pivotal role in ending World War II. The institution trained more than 6,000 Japanese Americans, or Nisei, to be translators, interrogators, and Japanese military specialists. After decades of being classified, the story of their courage, sacrifice, and valor is finally being told.
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‘B School’ Battalion soldiers at Ft. Snelling. St. Paul, Minn. (undated photo)
Courtesy of Go For Broke National Education Center - James Murata Photographic Collection / American Public Television
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A group of Nisei WACs receive a briefing from a U.S. Army officer. (undated photo)
Courtesy of American Public Television
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A guard stands next to a family visiting through a barbed wire fence. "Armed With Language" tells the story of how a little-known military intelligence school in Minnesota played a pivotal role in ending World War II. The institution trained more than 6,000 Japanese Americans, or Nisei, to be translators, interrogators, and Japanese military specialists.
Courtesy of American Public Television
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Fumiko Hayashida and her daughter, Bainbridge Island, Wash. (undated photo)
Courtesy of American Public Television
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Forcibly removed Japanese Americans add a front porch to their barracks at the Rohwer Relocation Center in McGehee, Ark. (Undated photo)
Courtesy of American Public Television
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Major J. Alfred Burden and Tateshi Miyasaki, MIS linguists with the 25th Infantry Division, interrogate a captured Japanese sailor in the Solomon Islands in the Pacific. (undated photo)
Courtesy of American Public Television / The National Archives
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Sgt. Robert Oda takes a message for transmittal from Sgt. Edward Matsuda. 1943.
Courtesy of Densho / American Public Television
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Nisei soldiers at Detachment 101 work on a Morale Operations Project. (undated photo)
Courtesy of US Army | Office of the Command Historian / American Public Television
Minnesota was home to a little-known military intelligence school during WWII that trained Japanese Americans to be translators. Primarily recruited from concentration camps on the West Coast, these men and women, served while many of their families remained imprisoned. For their efforts it is said that they "shortened the Pacific War by two years and saved possibly a million American lives."
Presented by TPT / Twin Cities PBS. Distributed by American Public Television.
