Why Were Japanese-Americans Interned during World War II?
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin
Conservatism, as I understand it, implies a respect for individual rights and liberty which were trampled on by the Internment. Conservatism also stresses the importance of remembering the past and allowing its lessons to help guide our future. Every partisan Republican bone in my body rises up to criticize the extremism of Democrat FDR's blatant statist power grab as exemplified by the Internment. For these reasons, I salute George Takei and his artistic endeavors. Moreover, my own father, Robert Kelly, grew up in Sacramento, CA and knew of neighbors who hid a Japanese-American family in their basement for the duration of the war. I heartily commend this act of courageous civil disobedience. Internment was a horrible policy and a crime against human rights.
Internment also usefully serves to remind us about the fundamental clumsiness of nearly all government interventions. When the federal Government gets wrought up over ANY issue it typically acts with all the finesse of an enraged bull elephant. It tramples all in its path indiscriminately.
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And yet...? And yet, there's a bit more to the story...
It is incredibly difficulty for those of us who live in the 21st century to understand the horrendously difficult decisions that were faced by those alive and in charge in 1942.
The American fleet at Pearl Harbor had been effectively wiped out. The allies appeared to be losing the war on all fronts. German panzers were advancing to the oilfields of the Caucasus. The Japanese conquered in short order Guam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Burma and the "invincible" British fortress at Singapore. The inevitability of Allied victory was completely opaque to the leaders of 1942.
The historian Niall Ferguson writes, "The Germans had already made the concept of 'lightning war' their own. But never in military history has lightning struck in so many places with such devastating results as it did in Asia and the Pacific between the beginning of December 1941 and the end of April 1942. Moreover, the distances involved were vastly greater than those being covered simultaneously by the Germans in Europe. At its maximum extent, the Japanese Empire stretched 6,400 miles from west to east and 5,300 miles from north to south; its circumference was a staggering 14,200 miles. By the beginning of May 1942, the Japanese could plausibly contemplate attacks on Midway, New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa, New Guinea and even Australia , Ceylon and India." The War of the World, Niall Ferguson, 2006. (http:/www.amzn.com/0143112392)
The West coast of the United states lay almost completely unprotected form Japanese assault. The Japanese did, in fact, invade and occupy some of the Aleutian islands as part of the Midway campaign. A Japanese submarine surfaced and shelled a lighthouse on the coast of British Columbia. Submarines were spotted off the coast of Santa Barbara. A Japanese submarine shelled Fort Stevens on the Oregon coast. A Japanese sea plane bomber actually bombed Oregon in 1942. There were some in the US government that actually considered the evacuation of US forces to positions east of the Mississippi due to the vulnerability and indefensiblity of the West coast.
More than 1/3 (about 50,000 out of 120,000) of the Interned were not, in fact, US citizens. These were the Issei. There were Japanese citizens and residents of Hawaii that assuredly did spy on US naval and military assets prior to Pearl Harbor. Here is the most well know and devastating example...(http://www.historynet.com/takeo-yoshikawa-world-war-ii-japanese-pearl-harbor-spy.htm).
Please indulge me in a brief interruption for a thought experiment. If, God forbid, Iran were to attack and sink a US aircraft carrier tomorrow in the straits of Hormuz, would we not expect the US government to, at the very least, monitor the activities of Iranian citizens now in the US? The legal justification for the detainment of foreign aliens in wartime goes back to the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and is still in place today. Furthermore, would we not expect the US government to monitor the activities of US citizens who had become naturalized US citizens in the past five years? My point is merely that the World War II Internment was not based on race, but rather on nationality.
It is also an established historic fact that the Second World War, in addition to its record setting casualty count, also caused enormous dislocations of people throughout the world. Civilian Refugees fled one war zone after the other. There were more than FOUR times more Volga Germans (500,000) than US Internment victims were deported by the Soviet government, mainly to Siberia, with many of them dying along the way. Half a million Chechens were also deported by the Soviet Union during the course of the war.
Here in the UK, there were massive evacuations of women and children away from exposed urban areas in the face of the blitz. Later in the war, the civilian populations of Dover and Cornwall to forced to abandon their homes and relocated to other parts of Britain. This was not, of course, on account of their race or nationality, but rather a military precaution. The allies needed to do their rehearsals for D-day and they did not want any nosy civilians watching! (http://dave-harris.hubpages.com/hub/World-War-Two-Secrets-of-D-Day)
From 1939 through 1941, the victories of the Axis powers had been unbounded. Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia and Greece were all swiftly conquered by the German war machine. It was the overwhelming initial success of Hitler's operation Barbarrossa (the invasion of the Soviet Union) that convinced Japanese diplomatic and military advisers based in Europe that Germany was unbeatable and would quickly compel a Soviet capitulation. The Japanese dramatically spread their sphere of influence throughout the Pacific, invading New Guinea, bombing Darwin Australia and sallying their fleet into the Indian Ocean. 1942 was, however, the decisive year of World War II. It was in 1942 that the German 6th army under the command of Paulus was trapped and surrendered at Stalingrad. In June of 1942, American naval aviators sank four precious aircraft carriers of the Japanese Imperial fleet at the battle of Midway. From then on out it was all downhill for the Axis powers.
Meanwhile the Japanese, who had been fighting longer than any other combatant nation (since 1937 with the war in China), were unwilling to give up the struggle. They desperately grabbed at any opportunity to win the war or to make its prosecution so costly to the allies as to force a negotiated settlement to the conflict.
Japanese women were mobilised to sew paper balloons that would use the jet stream to carry incendiary devices to the United States. These early intercontinental weapons were responsible for many forest fires in the Pacific Northwest. In May 1945 a pregnant woman in Oregon, Elsie Mitchell, found one of these balloons and accidentally set off the device which killed her and five local children. (http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/on-this-day/May-June-08/On-this-Day--Japanese-WWII--Balloon-Bomb--Kills-Six-in-Oregon.html).
The recently declassified Magic decrypts (uncovered by the US equivalent of Bletchley Park) clearly demonstrate that there was a systematic effort on the part of the Japanese to recruit and exploit the Japanese-American population of the United States. There was a substantial increase in radio traffic around Hawaii and the US West coast before and after Pearl Harbor which is not explicable without reference to the Japanese and Japanese-American population. While the vast majority of the interned were innocent of any wrongdoing, there were exceptions. According to the Honolulu Star, Richard Koshimodo was a Japanese American who actively aided Japanese spies keeping track of ship movements in Pearl Harbor. Another Japanese American was shot in Kanehoe when he fled after being discovered signalling a Japanese submarine. T
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"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." In March of 1945 an aircraft carrier, the USS Franklin, was subjected to Japanese air attacks that left over 800 sailors dead--the greatest damage to any US aircraft carrier that still survived the war. I would suspect that Benjamin Franklin, understanding all the circumstances in their historic context, might appreciate why the Internees deserve our appreciation for "giving up a little temporary liberty to help purchase the safety and essential liberty of all Americans" during World War II's darkest hours.*
Acknowledgements. Special thanks go to Adam Wilson for first bringing Allegiance the musical to my attention. I must also thank fellow Americans in London Chris Moran, David Michaelson, William Funk and Jon Shields for patiently enduring my earlier rantings and ravings on this topic.
For more on the Internment you may want to read...http://www.ww2pacific.com/relocation.html and http://www.theamericanconservative.com/article/2004/mar/15/00022/, Magic David Lowman 2000,
* Interestingly, this is almost exactly the sentiment expressed by Mike Masaoka, the national secretary of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) in an April 1942 bulletin, "Our primary consideration as good Americans is the total war effort...We may be temporarily suspending or sacrificing some of our privileges and rights of citizenship in the greater aim of protecting them for all time to come and to defeat those powers which seek to destroy them." Source: In Defense of Internment, Michelle Malkin, 2004.
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