World Language Communications Blog

The history of America’s multilingual military

BY THE WORLD

by Alex Gallafent

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A shortage of interpreters and translators has been a recurring theme of the US military’s recent adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. To make matters more difficult, over the last few years, more than 50 Arabic translators lost their jobs in the military as a result of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

But none of this is to say that America’s armed forces aren’t interested in language training: they are. It just took a long time to get it going.

West Point

The military’s interest in languages goes back a couple of centuries.

When the US Military Academy at West Point was founded in 1802, all the textbooks pretty much that were used for science and military were in French. That’s what was available to the academy. But books are pretty useless if you can’t read them: something had to be done.

“By 1803 Congress authorized money to hire a native speaker to teach French to the new cadets,” said Stephen Payne, command historian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif.

And so the military’s journey along the linguistic yellow brick road began. First one language was needed, then another. In the late 1840s there was the Mexican-American War.

Payne said that conflict brought Spanish into the military curriculum, in 1854.

Not long after, American interests expanded into the Pacific. The military realized it’d be useful to have officers who spoke the languages of the major regional powers: China and, especially, Japan.

So during the 1920s and early 30s it sent a handful of officers to the embassy in Tokyo for a three-year course in Japanese. But Payne said by 1941, with war against Japan looming, it was clear the United States hadn’t trained nearly enough people.

“It probably had around 60 or 70 officers,” said Payne, “Most of them were either retired or near retirement or were only suited for desk jobs: they weren’t going to be in the field if a war broke out.”

The US military did have some experience with language training. During WWI it ran an enormous program to make sure that thousands upon thousands of enlisted immigrants could communicate with each other. Historian Nancy Gentile Ford wrote a book about soldiers of that time, called “Americans All!”

“While they’re getting the regular training like gas masks and trench digging, they’re also being taught English,” said Ford.

But when it came to the military teaching other languages? Not so much.

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