Still looking for a History Day topic for this year’s theme: The Individual in History?  Here’s another possibility.

Anne Bosano enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) in September, 1944. Sent sent letters home to her parents about her activities in the WAC, her course work and training as a medical technician, her social life inside and outside of her various posts, and her travel between assignments.

Those letters have been published as: One Woman’s War: Letters Home from the Women’s Army Corps, 1944-46, by Anne B. Green., St. Paul, Minn.: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1989; MHS call number: Reading Room D 807 .U6 G74 1989.   There was also an article in Minnesota History (vol. 51, no. 7, fall 1989, pp. 246-258) entitled “Private Bosanko Goes to Basic: A Minnesota Woman in World War II,” by Anne Bosanko Green, MHS call number: F 601.5 M66 v.51:7.

The original letters are in the Minnesota Historical Society Library. See the green Alpha Manuscripts Notebooks—filed under Green, Anne Bosanko—for more details and a locator number (there is 1 box of material).

See the Minnesota History Topics for more sources on Women in the Military During World War II.

As the U.S. drew close to joining World War II in 1941, a few military officers—notably Lt. Col. John Weckerling and Capt. Kai Rasmussen—realized that there would be a need for Japanese translators in the Pacific. Unfortunately, the military could only find a few soldiers already proficient in Japanese, so Weckerling and Rasmussen began to push for the creation of a language school to intensively train people to be military linguists.

Weckerling and Rasmussen put their jobs on the line and got the 4th Army Intelligence School opened in San Francisco on November 1, 1941, where John Aiso, Shigeya Kihara, Akira Oshida, and Tetsuo Imagawa taught fifty-eight Nisei and two Caucasians. A few months later President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 that forced the internment or relocation of Japanese families. Because the school was housing Nisei, it had to move or lose nearly all of its students. After a number of other mid-western states declined, Governor Harold Stassen of Minnesota agreed to take in the school, so it moved to Camp Savage and changed its name to the Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS).

Within a couple of years, the school outgrew itself and moved again, this time to Fort Snelling in St. Paul. Eventually MISLS graduated more than 6,000 linguists. Its graduates broke codes, served on the front lines, and even became instructors themselves. Their service in the Pacific theater of World War II was so successful that it prompted Major General Charles Willoughby—General Douglas MacArthur’s Chief of Staff for Military Intelligence—to say, “The Nisei shortened the Pacific War by two years and saved possibly a million American lives and saved probably billions of dollars.”

The Minnesota Historical Society Library has a number of primary and secondary resources about this topic. Check it out in the Minnesota History Topics: Military Intelligence Service Language School at Fort Snelling.