Military Intelligence Service Learning Center

Exhibits inside MIS Learning Center

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Historical/Interpretive Information/Exhibits

This building is the first site of the Top-Secret Military Intelligence Service Language School, a US military program that trained a group of Japanese Americans to become linguist soldiers for a variety of specialized operations in the Pacific Theater just prior to the US entering WWII. The cover story was that this place was an industrial laundry. Instead, this building was the training facility of the first MIS class, which had 30 graduates who had an accelerated six-month training after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The school was then moved to Fort Snelling in Minnesota, where over 6,000 men were trained over time.

The graduates of the MIS became interpreters, interrogators, instructors, propaganda specialists and signal technicians whose work provided vital intelligence during the war. They saved countless Allied lives and hastened the end of the war. Collectively, the graduates of the MIS earned the Presidential Unit Citation.

The army moved the school to Fort Snelling after its short time in the Presidio, when, in a dark historical twist, Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were placed in camps following President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066. This decision, a knee-jerk reaction to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was implemented across the road from MIS in Building 35 at the Presidio Main Post.

The center is now a museum with exhibits and information about its historical use.

Japanese Internment

Soon after the Pearl Harbor attack, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. It granted the armed forces the authority to designate sections of the U.S. "military areas," geographic zones where "any and all persons may be excluded," if deemed potentially threatening or capable of carrying out acts of sabotage.

Senior US Army official and Commander of the 4th Army and Western Defense Command at the Presidio in San Francisco, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, designated the entire West Coast of the U.S a military area as per Order 9066. He then classified all persons of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast potentially threatening, regardless of their citizenship. This decision led to a policy of internment, forcing Japanese men, women and children out of their homes to live in impoverished conditions in concentration camps.

Even as families were living in camps, many had relatives fighting for the U.S. in the Pacific. Some were MIS graduates, highly trained linguists who provided invaluable service to US military efforts. These men fought bravely for a nation that assumed their families were capable of treason and stripped them of their rights, yet not a single internee was ever convicted of acting against the U.S. When the war ended, so did internment. But the effects of living in the camps continued and were passed down through the minds and bodies of former internees and their descendants.