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Article by Dr. Fiona Holter, USAICoE Staff Historian
On 14 February 1945, Kazuo Yamane, a Nisei linguist with the Military Intelligence Service (MIS), deployed for a special mission to Europe to collect intelligence pertaining to the Far East. This assignment and his previous role with the Pacific Military Intelligence Research Section (PACMIRS) marked the most significant achievements of his military service and defined his unique contribution to military intelligence and the Second World War.
Kazuo Yamane was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. After graduating high school in 1934, Yamane spent five years in Japan studying Japanese culture and language. He returned to Hawaii in August 1940 and was drafted into the Hawaii National Guard in November 1941. In the spring of 1942, Yamane and 1,500 other Nisei soldiers were sent to Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, where they were organized as the 100th Infantry Battalion and began training for combat. In December 1942, when the MIS began recruiting Nisei, Yamane was one of sixty selected to join.
In July 1943, the War Department selected Yamane, one of the top four translators in the MIS, to work at the Pentagon translating a Japanese officer list found in the Southwest Pacific. The list included the names, ranks, and units for all officers in the Japanese Army. After this project was complete, Yamane joined PACMIRS at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, where he worked with a team of translators to decipher other Japanese documents captured in the Pacific.
Yamane recalled that his time at PACMIRS was the most significant of his career because his thorough knowledge of both the English and Japanese language led to the discovery of a significant document in a crate labeled “no military value.” Going through this crate, Yamane found a tattered document that was barely legible. Immediately upon opening it, he discovered its importance: it was the published minutes of a May 1944 meeting of all leaders in the Japanese armaments industry. It detailed Japan’s production rate of armaments, locations of manufacturing facilities, and plans for future production of war materiel. This information was essential to the American bombing campaign in Japan and gave the War Department the strategic advantage to defeat Japan.
On 14 February 1945, Yamane left his position with PACMIRS to embark on a secret mission under the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). The mission called for Yamane and two other men to work with a British Commando team to recover documents and information from the Japanese Embassy in Berlin. Their brief explained they would parachute in, gather the documents, and withdraw as soon as possible. However, when the Soviet Army invaded Berlin on 16 April 1945, the Army called off the mission. Yamane then spent several months traveling through Europe, translating documents and interrogating Japanese nationals.
Yamane left the military after the war and returned to Hawaii to take over a family business. On 3 February 1997, he was awarded the Legion of Merit for “exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of duties which profoundly influenced the successful outcome of the war against Japan.” He passed away on 28 April 2010 at the age of ninety-three.
| Date Taken: | 02.14.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 02.14.2022 10:31 |
| Story ID: | 414589 |
| Location: | FORT HUACHUCA, ARIZONA, US |
| Web Views: | 231 |
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