Zaslow Begins Language Training at Camp Savage (JUL 1943)
Zaslow had just graduated from the City College of New York when the war in the Pacific broke out in December 1941. He was contemplating joining the U.S. Army when he was asked by an acquaintance to participate in an experimental Japanese language course at New York University in New York City. Zaslow, who had no prior language training, spent the next few months entirely immersed in the Japanese language. After the course concluded, he was interviewed by an Army officer who urged Zaslow to enlist as a linguist with the MIS.
He did, and the Army sent Zaslow to the University of Michigan in January 1943, where he participated in another intensive Japanese language course. After six months, he was one of thirty-five students from this program selected to attend courses at the MISLS in Minnesota. He began his military training at Camp Savage in July 1943, though he admitted the Army “didn’t pay much attention to our soldierly skills.” He and the other MISLS students were instead seen, first and foremost, as linguists, translators, and interpreters.
At the end of the training course, Zaslow was commissioned as a second lieutenant and placed in command of a team of ten Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) sergeants. They were assigned to the Joint Intelligence Center/Pacific Ocean Area (JICPOA), a joint U.S. Army-Navy organization established in September 1943 to provide intelligence for ground and naval operations in the Pacific. Zaslow’s team was responsible for translating captured documents and preparing propaganda leaflets for use in the Pacific Theater.
In 1944, his team was one of three from the JICPOA to deploy overseas. Attached to a U.S. Marine division, they were used to help flush out Japanese soldiers hiding in caves on the island of Tinian. Zaslow described this work as especially dangerous because his Nisei team members could easily be mistaken for enemy combatants. In spring 1945, Zaslow landed with the U.S. XXIV Corps on Okinawa, where he helped translate documents and conduct prisoner interrogations. His team was still on Okinawa when the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Afterwards, they were among the first American units to enter Nagasaki and assisted reconstruction efforts there.
After the war, then Capt. Zaslow transitioned to a civilian linguist position with the Army Security Agency (ASA), where he added Chinese to his language repertoire. This became especially useful as tensions heightened in Korea in the late 1940s. Zaslow was one of three language analysts who noticed a concerning trend in disregarded communications traffic indicating the Chinese were preparing to invade the peninsula months before they actually did in November 1950.
When the National Security Agency (NSA) was formed to centralize defense cryptologic capabilities in 1952, Zaslow moved from ASA to NSA. He rose through the ranks, becoming chief of operations in Japan in the early 1960s. During the Vietnam War, he served as chief of the agency’s intelligence efforts in support of the U.S. Armed Forces and was involved in the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident and the attempted rescue of American prisoners of war from the Son Tay Prison Camp in 1970.
In 1969, Zaslow became NSA’s first liaison to the Pentagon, where he oversaw groups handling Eastern Bloc nations. He held several managerial positions within the agency until he retired in 1979 as the deputy director for Telecommunications and Computer Services, the second highest ranking civilian position in the NSA. In 2007, Zaslow was inducted into the NSA Cryptologic Hall of Honor. One year later, and sixty-five years after he began his career in military intelligence, Zaslow passed away at his home in Maryland on July 15, 2008, at the age of 87.
To learn more about Mr. Zaslow’s time with the MIS, visit: https://www.loc.gov/item/afc2001001.27130/
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Article by Erin E. Thompson, USAICoE Staff Historian. New issues of This Week in MI History are published each week. To report story errors, ask questions, request previous articles, or be added to our distribution list, please contact: TR-ICoE-Command-Historian@army.mil.
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