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(More customer reviews)The inside cover of "Deciphering the Rising Sun", by Roger Dingman, succinctly summarizes the book by stating "This book is the first to document the vital role played by Americans not of Japanese ancestry who served as Japanese language officers in World War II." It continues "This book reveals an exciting and previously unknown aspect of the Pacific War and demonstrates the enduring importance of linguistic and cross-cultural knowledge within America's armed forces in war and peace." The book was fully successful in living up to these goals.
I am always fascinated with the foresight America had in preparing for World War II months or years prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Dingman opens the book by examining the efforts "to try and remedy an importance deficiency in the Navy and Marines Corps' readiness for war" by increasing the number of officers who were truly fluent in Japanese. So, in October 1940, the United States began the effort to train hundreds of officers in Japanese almost a full year before the Day that lives in infamy. What follows is the fascinating saga of how the United States ended up with language schools on both coasts, and finally at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Dingman next captures the memoirs of the students as they went through the demanding curriculum of the language school. These stories not only cover the technical aspects of learning the seemingly indecipherable Japanese characters; but also cover many of the personal stories that took place during the rare off-hours not spent studying.
The balance of the book is a continuation of the memoirs of the men's and women's combat assignments. Two chapters are logically grouped by service assignments - Marine Corps or Navy. The Marines were quickly thrown into the stresses of combat as combat interpreters, whereas the Navy interpreters served equally important but less dangerous assignments in Hawaii, Australia, or aboard ships. For these officers who trained together at Boulder, fate would take them down two very distinct paths. For some, their paths converged again on an island named Okinawa. These paths would remain intertwined through the surrender and the occupation of Japan.
Dingman does an excellent job of capturing the memories of these men and women who served in very unique assignments during the war. As an example of the writing style, Dingman writes "[Lt Hart Spiegel] had worried that he would be unable to understand the locals, who purportedly spoke an impenetrable dialect... sure enough, when he tried to question an approaching group of ragtag men, Spiegel could not understand a word they said. His sense of humiliation and incompetence vanished only when he learned they had wandered out of a home for the mentally incompetent." In this story, Spiegel was serving ashore with the invasion forces, and is serves to highlight the humor that Dingman laces throughout the book.
The front cover recommends this book for "those interested in America's intelligence establishment and in Japan's relations with the United States." A much broader audience can get value from this book. This book is an excellent case study for in bridging cultural divides. The United States identified a strategic cultural gap; mobilized academia to train a cadre of officers; and successfully integrated those personnel into military operations. This is certainly a lesson that America could dust off and apply again today.
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