Following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and America's declaration of war on Japan, the U.S. War Department allowed up to five hundred second-generation, or "Nisei," Japanese American women to enlist in the Women's Army Corps and, in smaller numbers, in the Army Medical Corps.

Through in-depth interviews with surviving Nisei women who served, Brenda L. Moore provides fascinating firsthand accounts of their experiences. 

Before the war

Contradictions and paradoxes

Women's army corps recruitment of nisei women

Service in the women's army corps

Commissions in the Army medical corps

The postwar years

Wacs who entered the Army from Hawaii, December 1944

Brenda L. Moore is an associate professor of sociology at SUNY Buffalo, and is the author of To Serve My Country, To Serve My Race: The Story of the Only African American WACS Stationed Overseas during World War II.