Courtesy Photo | Cartoon illustrating the mass of captured documents regularly arriving at PACMIRS from...... read more read more
by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian
On September 6, 1944, the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) established a captured documents translation center at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. The Pacific Military Intelligence Research Section (PACMIRS), primarily staffed with Japanese American soldiers, operated throughout the final year of World War II.
In September 1942, the Allied Translator and Interpreter Service (ATIS) was created and manned with thousands of Japanese American Nisei linguists who conducted interrogations and translated captured documents in the Southwest Pacific Area. As Allied forces moved closer to Japan, the increase in the number of captured documents overwhelmed ATIS and its translation centers. Recognizing not all captured materials would prove immediately valuable to ground commanders, the MID established a stateside translation center to focus on documents of a more routine, technical, and strategic nature.
On September 6, 1944, Maj. (later Col.) Sidney “Fred” Gronich arrived at Camp Ritchie, the site of the Military Intelligence Training Center, to establish PACMIRS. Gronich, a 28-year-old Czech native who had immigrated with his family to New York in 1929, served as PACMIRS’ first chief. He borrowed five Nisei from MID’s Pacific Order of Battle Section and soon added seven white officers and twenty-four more Nisei from the Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS). They settled into a rickety warehouse previously used to house Italian prisoners of war.
After the first month in operation, the War Department’s G-2, Maj. Gen. Clayton Bissell, reoriented the PACMIRS mission. Instead of scanning documents to help build Japanese order of battle, PACMIRS translators were to conduct word-for-word translations of documents it received. To accomplish this tall and ultimately unattainable order, Major Gronich divided PACMIRS into four sections. The Document Section made recommendations to the PACMIRS Panel on the priority of translation work, which was then completed by the Translation Section. Order of battle was handled by the Operational Intelligence Section. Finally, the Dissemination Section edited and distributed finished translations. By the end of the war, these sections employed almost 160 Allied personnel, including some British and Canadian military personnel, as well as twenty-one white, Japanese American, and Chinese American Women’s Army Corps graduates of the MISLS.
To ensure the intelligence needs of all U.S. and Allied military services were met, the Washington Document Center (WDC) was established in February 1945. The WDC processed the tons (literally) of Japanese documents arriving in the United States, and assigned them, based on content, to either PACMIRS or the Office of Naval Intelligence’s Far Eastern Branch. PACMIRS had ordnance, engineer, signal, chemical warfare, transportation, quartermaster, and Army Air Force liaison officers who apprised translators of the long-range intelligence requirements of their respective services.
By the end of the war in August 1945, PACMIRS had received nearly 120,000 documents totaling more than eight million pages. Of these, 22,985 pages were fully translated, revealing details about Japanese air forces, tactics and strategy, and chemical warfare. One important document highlighted Japanese war materiel production and manufacturing plant locations, which became targets for American bomber aircraft. The rest of the voluminous documents were deemed of “no intelligence value” for the war effort. In the immediate postwar period, however, many of these documents were reappraised for information relevant to Counter Intelligence Corps occupation duties in Japan, evidence for war crimes trials, and details on Soviet military capabilities.
In mid-April 1946, Col. Sidney P. Marland, who had replaced Gronich as PACMIRS chief in July 1945, began to close down the Camp Ritchie location as the Army’s lease on the property ran out. The remaining PACMIRS employees were merged into MID’s WDC to continue its important work in the postwar period.
| Date Taken: | 09.06.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 09.06.2022 14:00 |
| Story ID: | 428686 |
| Location: | FORT HUACHUCA, ARIZONA, US |
| Web Views: | 99 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, MID establishes PACMIRS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
No keywords found.
