Remembering CAPT Forrest R. Biard, Japanese Linguist and Code Breaker!

CAPT Forrest R. Biard was the last surviving pre-war trained Japanese cryptolinguist member of the U.S. Naval codebreaking organization during World War II. CAPT Biard served in all three Navy codebreaking units during the war.

CAPT Biard was born December 21, 1912, in Bonham, Texas and attended North Dallas High School, graduating in 1930. Following high school, Biard attended the U.S. Naval Academy graduating 11th in the class of 1934.

By the end of WWI, the Navy had only one Navy officer and two Marine Corps officers trained in the Japanese language, history and culture. After WWI ended, international political developments made it apparent that the Japanese navy might become a future threat to United States interests in the Pacific theater. In 1920, the navy began assigning two or three promising young bachelor officers each year to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo for a three year training program in Japanese language.

In 1939, Biard was accepted to this Japanese language program. In September 1941, three months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he and four others, the last to study Japanese managed to slip out of Japan by a freighter to Shanghai.