The Secret Role of Japanese Americans Who Fought in the WW2 Pacific Theatre

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2022

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Several thousand Japanese Americans were trained by the US Military Intelligence Service and sent to the Pacific to serve as interpreters, translators, and interrogators, even as their own families were being held in internment camps in America. Why haven’t we heard about their story?

Today’s guest is Bruce Henderson, author of “Bridge to the Sun.” He follows six of these soldiers, who were among the first Japanese Americans to serve in combat after Pearl Harbor, as they fight two wars simultaneously: one, overseas against their ancestral homeland, the other, against prejudice back home in America.

Exploring several first-person accounts including personal interviews, oral histories, diaries, and previously classified records, we look at the courage, heroism, and patriotism of these troops.

Transcript

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1:07.0	History is in just a bunch of names and dates and facts.
1:10.0	It's the collection of all the stories throughout human history that explain how and why we got here.
1:15.5	Welcome to the History Unplugged Podcast.
1:17.5	Where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange and even counterfactual stories that made our world what it is.
1:24.5	I'm your host, Scott Rank.
1:39.5	The internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II in what were essentially open air prison camps
1:46.5	is a fairly well known story.
1:48.5	What's less known is that several thousand Japanese Americans were trained by the US military intelligence service
1:54.0	and then sent to the Pacific to serve as interpreters, translators and interrogators.
	...

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