Book - Yankee Samurai: The Secret Role of Nisei in America's Pacific Victory

The author talks about the 100th and 442nd and notes that the story of the Nisei in the Pacific is sometimes overlooked. It concerned about 5000 Nisei who served as translators, interpreters, interrogators and combat infantry. The author starts by relating the story of two Nisei who served as spies for the U.S. shortly before the war began, and relates one of them to the rumor of a Japanese pilot during Pearl Harbor being shot down and wearing a high school ring from a U.S. high school.

At the start of the war apparently only about 100 people in the U.S. (other than the Issei and Nisei) spoke Japanese The Japanese military thus continued to mark their maps, etc, in regular Japanese and didn't bother to put everything into code, thinking no U.S. soldiers could translate what they had written.

Convincing the military to use Nisei was not an easy task, but eventually the decision was made and it proved to be one of the best ones made during the entire war. It's also pointed out that many Nisei had little if any knowledge of Japanese, they had become so "Americanized."