After two months of basic infantry training at Camp Blanding, Florida, Warren was shipped back to Fort Snelling, where he and nine other Nisei got their overseas orders and a last leave. “I spent it on a train to Heart Mountain to say goodbye,” he recalls. “I was in uniform, but the guard at the gate didn’t acknowledge that. He didn’t blink an eye.”

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His mother, like many in the camps, was at the other end of that spectrum. He pulls out a picture: two unsmiling Issei mothers, one his, each holding small banners with four blue stars—the number of sons each had serving in the American military. (In addition to Hughes, Warren had two other brothers in the MIS.) “She didn’t understand why I was doing this,” he says simply. “I didn’t write home a lot either.”

On Oahu from early June into August 1944, the new MIS unit underwent jungle training then boarded a troopship for what Warren describes as “a leisurely voyage touching at Kwajalein for a warm beer party ashore and the Manus Islands.” Soon he and his buddies “returned” with Gen. Douglas MacArthur to the Philippines, landing on Leyte on October 20, 1944.

The Nisei MIS was a secret weapon that ranked near, if not with, the more celebrated code breakers. Convinced that Americans could never read their complex ideograms, the Japanese maintained extraordinarily lax security about documents, even at the front: orders were carelessly stored and disposed of, and soldiers routinely kept diaries and letters that contained military data right down to the order of battle. In the right Nisei hands, these could be mined for gold. As prisoners gradually began to be taken, their surprise at being confronted with friendly Nisei interrogators often opened them right up, producing more valuable information. And so, unlike the 442nd, the very existence of the Military Intelligence Service Language School and Nisei intel ops was hushed up.

That first night on Leyte, Warren watched Japanese air attacks from a hilltop with his assigned bodyguard: “We weren’t fully trusted, but it was also for our protection, they said.” He then went to work and was up all night translating captured documents. “They were top-secret operational orders, found on the body of one of the attackers,” he says. “They spelled out in detail the mission, objectives, personnel, and equipment of the airborne force.” The mission: to knock out airstrips the Seabees were building, then link up with ground forces. “Needless to say,” he adds dryly, “their mission failed.”

Then came an urgent radio call from the Camotes Islands: the Japanese were slaughtering civilians, couldn’t MacArthur do something? Warren and a colleague joined the battalion sent to rescue them. “Bodies were stacked up like cordwood in homes,” he reports. “I translated a document that identified the occupying force as a naval engineer unit of perhaps 400 men.” He shrugs. “They were wiped out in a banzai attack.”

On April 1, 1945, Warren landed on the beaches of Okinawa: “There was virtually no resistance on the beachhead, which wasn’t classic Japanese military strategy, but was consistent with what happened on Iwo Jima. We soon found out why. I helped translate the top-secret operational orders that laid out the defense strategy: let the enemy land their full forces and supplies with minimum resistance; take up dug-in defense lines on the escarpment bisecting the island; let the Imperial Navy kamikaze attack and destroy U.S. naval and supply ships; then destroy the isolated enemy at leisure.” He adds, “Knowing enemy intentions is half the battle.” In this case, the battle still ran eighty-two days and cost over 72,000 American casualties, including some 12,000 dead, and 66,000 Japanese dead, 7,000 captured, and an estimated 30,000 suicides. More than 150,000 Okinawans, a third of the island’s population, were killed.

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