Learn About Minnesota's Secret Language School at Fort Snelling

ST. PAUL (WJON News) -- You can learn about a secret language school based in Minnesota during World War II.

The Minnesota Historical Society will have presentations at 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. this Saturday on Pearl Harbor Day.

The program is at Historic Fort Snelling which was the home of the Military Intelligence Service Language School.

Minnesota Historical Society

The U.S. military took second-generation Japanese Americans and transformed them into secret weapons, while many of them had family and friends in concentration camps.

The MISLS was originally set up in San Francisco, but in 1942 President Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order forced the removal of all Japanese Americans from the west coast.

Program Facilitator Jacob Noll says Minnesota's Governor Harold Stassen offered to host the school, first in Savage and then as the program grew moving it to Fort Snelling.

However, as that center wound down by 1944, the MISLS had simply grown too big and had a significant need for a larger space, and Fort Snelling was much more available. So, the school would move in here and stay here until 1946 and help graduate a little more than half of the total soldiers that would go through that school.

Over 6,000 soldiers went through the secret school in Minnesota. After a six to nine-month course, the linguists were sent to the Pacific front.

Minnesota Historical Society

They are credited with shortening the war in the east by two years, saving nearly a million lives and billions of dollars.