Part II: James Robert Ruchti Memoirs of World War II

 PART II: Japanese Air Net Traffic Analysis in Fresno, California

James Robert Ruchti, University of Wisconsin, 1943

The story of my life in the army is that I was trained for things that I never used, and I never used the training for any of the things that I had worked for with hardly any exception. It just seemed to work that way for me every single time.  After I finished my training in meteorology I was selected by the army because of my high academic standing at the University of Wisconsin and my high score on the army general qualifications examination to go to a special training program called the ASTP the Army Specialist Training Program. We were selected, there were quite a lot of us who were selected, to go back to the universities and to be trained in special subjects.  Among those subjects were foreign languages, military government, engineering, and some communication specialties.  I was selected for language training because I had four years of German at the university and knew the language quite well and had received fairly good grades.  That seemed to be the place for me to go. So I never used the meteorology with a combat unit. Rather, I went back to school, which took quite a long time because, as I found out much later, were also keeping an eye on a handful of us for a special program in the Japanese language. That program did not begin [right away]. I waited from the end of September 1943 all the way until April of 1944 before I was assigned to actual study of the Japanese language, although I knew by April that that's what I was going to do. 

We were sent first to Oklahoma A&M University at Stillwater, Oklahoma and there pretty soon there were all of the other men around us were assigned to various universities for study of German, to study of the the Yugoslav languages,  the Slavic languages, to study French, to study the languages that were used primarily in Europe.  But there were none in our unit assigned to the Asiatic languages. Then one day the officer in charge called me in and he said, “Private Ruchti we would like to have you become a Japanese language specialist but you missed one qualification by one point. You have the German.  You have to know one language well before you can be selected, You do that. You know that.  But you have to have a score of 135 on your army general classification examination, and you only have the score of 134. So what we're going to do is give you the examination again so that you can get one more point and thereby be qualified for the program.”  Well of course that was easy for me to say yes to, and so I agreed and I took the examination again. And of course I achieved a better score.  I don't remember what it was but it was more than 135 because they put me into the program. 

Then we went from Oklahoma A&M, after we spent almost all winter doing not really very much of anything except going to the music room at the university -  which was fabulous because there were very few students left on the campuses those days except a few women. We went to the music room everyday to listen to very fine classical music -  all of the Bach, Beethoven, all of the specialists Chaikovsky and all of those very famous of musicians- to listen to recordings in the music room.  Of course this was a fabulous opportunity because there were only 7 of us, all together 7 soldiers, and we were just waiting to be assigned.  So we ate in the student cafeteria, which was much better than military food, and we had a very pleasant time because we were about the only men on the campus and we had plenty of girlfriends we could go out almost any night we wanted to. But of course we didn't have much money either so that kind of limited that. Our biggest event was always on Saturday night because then we would each save about 75 or 80 cents from our meager salary and go down to a local restaurant where we could get a very good steak for that amount of money.  You may not believe it now but that's what it cost.  And it was delicious. Of course soldiers received very fine treatment from everybody because patriotic sentiment meant that you would do everything you could for a soldier because your son, or relative, or friend who also had people in the army - boys and young men and women- so they treated us royally. 

We started our Japanese language program training after a stop for about a month at the University of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois, where the Asiatic language students: Thai, Vietnamese, Korean and so forth had all been assembled. There were a handful of us.  Seven of us were the only ones in Japanese and sure enough a little while after in late April of 1944 we were sent to the University of California at Berkeley.  There we had a very special situation. There were 7 of us in the class. We went to class every day, 7 days a week, from 8 o'clock in the morning until five or 5:30 in the afternoon with a half an hour off for lunch. We had 8 instructors, so each instructor would come in for one hour and work on us. Some taught us spoken language, some taught the written language, some reviewed the grammar. All of the various parts of the Japanese language had to be learned from scratch because of course none of us knew it.  We worked very hard until 5:30 each day, and then we would have a half an hour break before we had our dinner at the student cafeteria at 6 o'clock. So  if we got through promptly at 5:30 pm, and the weather was kind of nice, sometimes we would go for a swim just to get a little exercise in order to get a break from the classroom routine. We worked very very hard in our classes. Of course we were called on by our instructors who came in fresh. We were called on almost every minute of the time that we were in the class so we had to be prepared. After our evening meal, which ended at 6:30pm, we would go back to our dormitory, or to the fraternity house that eventually was given to us. We had the whole house to ourselves, and we would study until we couldn't keep our eyes open anymore -  usually 11-11:30pm sometimes 12am reviewing and going over the material that we had [learned]  that the same day. And the next day of course we would start on fresh material but always there was a bit of review before we went on to new material.  It was very easy the first week. We all had a lot of fun.  We studied. We knew everything inside out. My friends in that unit were among the brightest young men I had ever been with. They were not only extremely intelligent but, they were young, active physically in good shape and very quick in learning. So, the group was an excellent one and we helped each other all we could. But we had to work very, very hard after the first week because it was easy to remember the day's lesson but the day before became a little more difficult. The day before and the day before was even more difficult.  When you got back a week or so it was extremely difficult to remember all the details. The objective of the course was to give us a high school education in Japanese in 4 months. 

Somehow we all survive this summer with one of the most difficult assignments any of us had ever had.  This was the most difficult I have ever had in any time in my life with that course of study. Every other Saturday night we’d have 2 hours free to ourselves. Otherwise all of the time was spent on Japanese, either in the classroom or study.  We had no time at all to go to a movie or do anything like that. The 2 hours we had off every other Saturday night was usually spent doing things like getting our laundry taken care of or writing a letter. It was very difficult to find time for anything else and we worked very very hard. It was nerve wracking; extraordinarily intense. Actually we were beaten into learning Japanese. It was the hardest job I've ever had. Anyway we eventually finished it. All of us did extremely well. 

The graduation from the school was a special treat and I want to mention that. One of our instructors was a lady. She was our instructor in spoken Japanese. She, as a young woman, had gone with her father and mother who were White Russians, that is they were against the Communist regime and Soviet Union, and had fled from the Moscow area all the way across Asia to Japan. She was a teenager at the time and because she was a European, that is she was white, (of course everybody else in Japan were mostly Asiatic) she became quite famous because she learned to speak Japanese absolutely fluently like all young people do when they live in the country very long.  She was a very attractive woman, a very pretty woman.  She became an actress in Japanese films playing always the European parts. Of course she spoke the language fluently and knew all the Japanese customs. For our graduation ceremony she came to our house, that is the fraternity house where we were living, and she put on the Japanese tea ceremony. That is a very famous part of Japanese culture. She wore her Japanese costume. She brought a record with Japanese music on it which she played on a little wind up phonograph. We really enjoyed that. It was a very, very pleasant evening. Of course most of us remember that event as one of the highlights of our long ardor, our long pressure in learning Japanese language. It was almost worth it. Anyway it was fun when we did it.

After about a week or 10 days of leave after finishing the course in September, we were assigned to a military army air force base in Fresno, California. There we had a very unusual arrangement. There was a big field with a little hut in the middle of it, and it was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. In this little hut were teletype machines and of course a very high powered radio. We received messages that had been sent by the Japanese air force on what was called the Japanese Air Net all over the Pacific. It had been discovered that we would not have to be assigned, our group of seven, to the Pacific area because technology had been improved to the extent that they could intercept Japanese messages, pretty nearly all of them, from most of the main parts of the Pacific where there was combat going on, right there from the high mountain part tops of the range along the west coast of the United States. We had teletypes stations run by American soldiers. They didn't know Japanese but they could copy down what had been sent because the Japanese used morse code. They would send those messages by teletype to us in our little hut in Fresno, and we would work on the messages and try to break the Japanese codes.  Our job of course was called traffic analysis. Traffic analysts are people who look at incoming messages, try to decide which ones are relevant, which ones are less relevant, to work on those that are more relevant and to try to decide what they say. Of course the Japanese sent their messages in various codes in order to protect them so that Americans and their other enemies wouldn't know what they were saying. It was very difficult work because of course all kinds of information was sent that was entirely insignificant and not at all related to what we were interested in from the point of view of military intelligence. We wanted to know of course major forces, where they were going, who their commanders were, what kind of armament they had, when they were going to make a major attack, or when they were going to retreat -  all of those things that directly affected operations.  But 99% of the messages that were sent in the Japanese Air Net that had to do with things like “so and so's mother is sick and she hasn't heard from him for a long time. Why doesn't he write home?” or “How many pounds of rice do you need to support your troops?” or “What kind of insecticide have you found to be the most useful in combating the fleas?” that all soldiers seem to get when they’re in large numbers and concentrated areas, or “what kinds of relations are you having with the local people there? Are there any difficulties that have to be taken into account?” -  all kinds of things that were not directly related to military operations but in some respects had a bearing on them however remote. Our job was to try to find the wheat and separate it from the chaff and there was an awful, awful lot of chaff. 

There was terrible pressure with these messages coming in from 17 stations in the high mountain ranges. The big pressure was of course to keep up with the flow of traffic as we were getting many, many more messages intercepted from the Japanese than we could process.  That was really a difficult job because we had to decide fairly quickly which messages we thought might have some significance and which did not. One of the things that helped us in doing that was the way the Japanese sent their messages. The first lines in their messages, called the date and time group, were in clear language which meant that they were in Japanese but not encoded and encrypted so we could just read it.  We knew quite a bit of Japanese and if they put down the date and the time, and we had an idea of where the messages were being sent from and to, and because of our technical capability then we could begin to see a pattern.  If we suddenly saw that there were an awful lot of messages going from Tokyo to Eniwetok and that was more than there had been the day before or the day before that, we would understand then that something significant was happening in that area and that would help us also.  So we had a few devices like that that helped us. Another thing that helped us very greatly was everyday the US army air force flew in captured materials taken from Japanese troops in the pacific area. We had frontline Japanese army newspapers. We even had captured letters, some of them taken from Japanese soldiers who had been killed. So we were able to use that information too. It was very helpful to us because the Japanese language requires a special symbol called a Kanji for a specific thing. For example Winston Churchill had a Kanji that had nothing to do with Churchill, which of course means nothing in Japanese,  but unless you know that particular symbol for Winston Churchill you wouldn't possibly be able to understand what it meant because it had no significance. But once you knew that, and you could get that from the captured Japanese army newspaper because of the context in which it was used, once you have that symbol then of course it would help you with the work. 

We had a break each day from our arduous activities in our little hut in the middle of our little field. We had a half an hour radio reception from Tokyo Rose.  Tokyo Rose was a very famous American voice that appeared over Tokyo radio broadcasting to the United States forces all through the Pacific.  We used to listen to her. Her job was to disrupt the morale of US forces,  British forces, Australian forces, but she broadcast mainly to the Americans.  She was to disrupt their morale by telling them that their girlfriends at home were going out with other boys, or that the food was short at home, or that the war was never gonna end, or all kinds of things like that.  She mixed it in with popular American music and so forth.  Of course we knew a good deal about what was going on in the Pacific from our work, and so we were able to really enjoy some of her attempts to dissuade our soldiers from fighting. Of course it didn't work at all and on the contrary almost all of the army and navy units that we had any contact with considered Tokyo Rose to be entertainment. She was helping morale, not hurting morale. But anyway she was doing illegal work from the point of view of the United States government trying to weaken the resolve of our loyal troops fighting in the Pacific. 

One of the Japanese female broadcasters known as "Tokyo Rose" as coined by United States newspapers in 1943. 

My work with the Japanese language and  the traffic analysts work group was extremely strenuous. Almost everyone of us suffered acutely from that work because it was never ending and  we worked under great pressure and very, very hard. We had some help, in that we had direct telephone connection with the first computer that existed in the United States which was located in Virginia at a place called Vint Hill just outside of Washington. That helped us in sorting out the probabilities in the Japanese language. I don't need to go into technical details but the the principle word there is that we needed that kind of help and we were able to get it when we had a message that we thought it looked like it might be useful we could use that computer to help us sort out the prospects of what the messages would mean. But then the work was very very stressful. We worked many many hours everyday. I don't remember how many hours everyday,  but maybe 15,16,18 depending on how long we could stay at our desks. Then we would try to get a little sleep and something to eat and then be back again at it as soon as we were awake the next morning. Usually we started before 6:00 am. It was very hot in in California and even though in the Fresno central valley, even though it was in the fall of the year, we wanted to get as much done as we could while the day was still relatively cool. And so we would start early usually about six and we’d finish the next night maybe eight, ten, twelve, whenever.

Anyway that was very stressful work and sooner or later all of us suffered the consequences of that. I had a recurrence of rheumatic fever, which is a disease of the heart, which I originally had when I was a boy about 7 or 8 years of age back at my home in Janesville, Wisconsin. This reoccurred because of the pressure and the stress. I ended up in the hospital in Fresno and that was a tough time for me because it's a very painful disease. I was unable to move my arms and legs very much. In fact that first week or so it hurt me even when I used to blink my eyes. But like all things it eventually passed. The treatment for it is mainly just aspirin and rest. 

So I was in a ward at the hospital nearby in Fresno. One of the nice things about that was that after I started to feel a little bit better, after a week or so, I could read. So one of my friends from our group of 7 came to see me and I sent him over to the library to see if he could find me something that I might like. He was a very bright young fella named Max Jacobi, a very, very able young man from New York. Max found a copy in German of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell. Well I had studied a lot of German but I had never read Wilhelm Tell.  It's sort of the equivalent of a Shakespeare in the English language.  He brought me Wilhelm Tell. Of course I had no dictionary or anything like that and it's a very long play, But I was able to read it and was in no hurry. And it helped me greatly with the language because I learned a lot of words that I didn't know before.  But I really enjoyed doing that. That was my entertainment while I was in the hospital. 

Anyway after I had recovered sufficiently, I went back to my unit and we worked a little bit longer on our japanese codes. But by that time we had supplied some useful information to the military intelligence people which was useful in the conduct of naval operations against the Japanese air force which of course in the Pacific in many instances was flown from aircraft carriers or was assigned to an able unit. We were able to help our air forces find some of those Japanese naval units because of the Air Net information that we had and that led to some substantial victories or at least contributed to some of those victories that our navy had, and increasingly had, as the war went on in the pacific. However an end to our program was ahead because there were no replacements for us. Many of us had been sick. We were actually exhausted. But the army knew that this wouldn't go on for very long, so they had no one to replace us. In other words we were expendable and they worked us until we dropped. That was the way it was.  That was the war. It wasn't combat, but it was in its own way a very difficult assignment. 

By that time, most of us were so sick of Japanese that we did never want to see anything that remotely resembled a Japanese character or hear a Japanese phrase again. One day my friend Douglas Way, who was a member of our group, told me that there was an announcement on the bulletin board about officers candidate school. Sure enough I went over and read the bulletin board and there was an announcement for officers candidate school to train young officers in the field artillery back at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Well I didn't think that I’d have much of a chance because of my rheumatic fever and because of the Japanese language investment that the army had in me. But no, I applied, and somewhat to my surprise I was accepted. They didn't even give me a physical examination.  I guess they didn't think that it would matter but anyway I didn't have much of a physical. They just asked me if I felt OK and I said yes. So I was then assigned to Fort Sill, Oklahoma.  I left my good friends behind in Fresno and went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma to be trained as an officer in the field artillery.