World War II Day by Day

Washington, D.C. • February 19, 1942

Eighty-one years ago on this date in 1942, cele­brated today as the Day of Remem­brance, Presi­dent Franklin D. Roose­velt signed Execu­tive Order 9066. It autho­rized the War Depart­ment to desig­nate “mili­tary areas” in the U.S. and admit, exclude, or remove from these areas any­one whom the depart­ment felt to be a danger to the security of the nation. The next month Roose­velt signed an Act of Congress that made any viola­tion of man­dates issued under his execu­tive order (e.g., public procla­ma­tions issued by senior mili­tary author­i­ties) a federal crime. Although the unprec­e­dented order appeared care­fully neu­tral, Execu­tive Order 9066 ulti­mately led to the exile and intern­ment of almost 120,000 per­sons of Japa­nese ancestry, citizens and noncitizens alike, living along the U.S. West Coast.

Approximately 80,000 of those interned under FDR’s exec­u­tive order were second-gener­a­tion Amer­i­can citi­zens born in the United States (Nisei), not-so-cleverly reclas­si­fied by the govern­ment as “non-aliens” in a ham-fisted sus­pen­sion of their birth­right under the 14th Amend­ment to the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion. Almost half the internees were chil­dren. (In Canada, 22,000 Japa­nese Cana­dians and Japa­nese [62 per­cent Cana­dian-born] suffered simi­lar and worse treat­ment: the govern­ment confis­cated and sold their pro­perty to help defray the cost of relo­cating and detaining them. South of the border almost 5,000 Japa­nese were evicted from Mexico’s Pacific Coast and plunked down in Mexico City and Gua­da­la­jara.) Suddenly uprooted from their homes and work­places and deprived of or forced to sell off prac­ti­cally every­thing they had acquired over a life­time (many had their bank accounts frozen), native-born Japa­nese Amer­icans and Japa­nese-born U.S. resi­dents (the latter known as Issei and pre­vented by law from holding U.S. citizen­ship) were taken first to one of 15 assem­bly cen­ters, or tem­porary deten­tion camps. Cali­for­nia’s San Joa­quin County Fair­grounds and Santa Anita and Tan­foran race­track stables, still reeking of their former occu­pants, were three con­verted tem­porary camps. Then they were shipped to one of 10 per­ma­nent in­land relo­cation cen­ters where they were impri­soned with­out charge and “for the dura­tion” inside barbed wire enclo­sures, watched over by armed guards (see map below).

People of Japanese ancestry living in Hawaii and German Amer­i­cans and German U.S. resi­dents were not interned en masse and there­fore escaped disen­fran­chise­ment, measure­less sepa­ra­tion, precious lost years, miser­able depri­va­tion, mono­tonous camp routine, enforced idle­ness, and depend­ence on the federal govern­ment for their food and shelter. Under the U.S. Jus­tice Depart­ment’s Enemy Alien Con­trol Pro­gram, the govern­ment detained and in­terned just over 11,000 German enemy aliens, as well as a small num­ber of German Amer­i­can citi­zens, either natu­ral­ized or native born. The popu­la­tion of German citi­zens in the United States—not to men­tion Amer­i­can citizens of German birth—was far too large for a gen­eral policy of disen­fran­chise­ment and in­tern­ment compa­rable to that used against the Japa­nese. Instead, German citizens were detained and removed from coastal areas on an indi­vid­ual basis. The evic­tions amounted to only several hun­dred. In addi­tion, over 4,500 eth­nic Germans were brought to the U.S. from Central and South Amer­ica and the Carib­bean island of Cuba and sim­i­larly detained based on a list covertly drawn up by the Federal Bureau of Inves­ti­gation with the encour­age­ment of Presi­dent Roose­velt. The FBI sus­pected these Germans of sub­ver­sive activ­i­ties abroad and, following Germany’s declara­tion of war on the U.S., demanded the evic­tion of these “danger­ous Axis agents” to this coun­try for deten­tion in camps oper­ated by the U.S. Immi­gra­tion and Natu­ra­li­za­tion Ser­vice and the Justice Depart­ment or else their repat­ri­a­tion to Germany. Many Germans had been resi­dents of Latin Amer­ica for years, some for decades. Nine Latin American countries and Canada set up their own Axis intern­ment camps. Only pro-Fascist Argentina refused to play along.

Executive Order 9066 Cleared the Way for the Forced Exile and Relocation of West Coast Enemy Aliens and Japanese Americans to a New Existence in Internment Camps Far From Their Homes

Above: Map showing (a) the massive West Coast World War II exclusion area (Mili­tary Areas 1 and 2) and (b) intern­ment camps in the conti­nen­tal U.S. for Japa­nese Amer­i­cans as well as for over 31,000 sus­pected enemy aliens and their fami­lies interned under the Enemy Alien Con­trol Pro­gram. The 10 hastily built intern­ment camps, euphe­mis­tically called “relo­ca­tion centers,” are iden­ti­fied by black triangles. The camps were built in 7 states all west of the Mis­sis­sippi. All the camps were remote; many were situ­ated in deso­late deserts or swamps. U.S. Depart­ment of Justice-admin­is­tered camps (there were 27) and U.S. Army camps (18) are repre­sented by stars; for example, Fort Mis­soula Intern­ment Camp in Mon­tana and Fort Lincoln Intern­ment Camp 5 miles south of Bis­marck, North Dakota. It was to these often former Civil­ian Con­ser­va­tion Corps camps that people arrested in Decem­ber 1941 and early 1942—that is, before Exec­u­tive Order 9066 was in place—as well as thou­sands of German and Ital­ian nationals living in the U.S. or deported from Cen­tral and South America were brought. In the map legend, WCCA = War­time Civil Con­trol Admin­is­tra­tion, WRA = War Relo­cation Autho­rity. Pur­portedly for their own safety roughly 75,000 Japa­nese Amer­i­can citizens and 45,000 immi­grants from Japan living in the U.S., a num­ber equiv­a­lent to the popu­la­tion of Wil­ming­ton, N.C., would even­tu­ally be torn from their homes, neighbor­hoods, farms, fishing boats, and places of employ­ment and wor­ship in Cali­for­nia (where the major­ity lived), West­ern Oregon and Wash­ing­ton, and South­ern Arizona as part of the single-largest forced relo­ca­tion in U.S. his­tory. Eighty-five per­cent of all ethnic Japa­nese living in the conti­nen­tal U.S. were affected. The Poston War Relo­cation Cen­ter on the Colo­rado Indian Reser­va­tion south of Parker was the largest such camp in America (peak popu­la­tion 17,814). Housing Japa­nese Amer­i­cans and Japa­nese nationals mostly from South­ern and Central Cali­fornia, Posten became the third-largest “city” in Arizona at the time. Together with the Rivers War Relo­ca­tion Center on the Gila River Indian Reser­va­tion south­east of Phoenix, the two sites grew to hold 30,000 peo­ple of Japa­nese descent, most of them Amer­i­can citi­zens. In Hawaii, where 150,000-plus Japa­nese Amer­icans com­prised over one-third of the popu­la­tion, only 1,200 to 1,800 were removed to the main­land and interned. On the Hawai­ian island of Oahu, there were 17 intern­ment sites, the largest and longest-oper­ating being Honou­liuli Intern­ment Camp, which held 320 in­ternees and 4,000 pri­soners of war. For their own “protec­tion,” nearly 900 in­dig­e­nous Aleuts were rounded up and interned in aban­doned salmon can­neries near Alaska’s capi­tal Juneau, 2,000 miles from their island vil­lages, which were burned to the ground as part of a “scorched earth” policy. On Decem­ber 17, 1944, the Roose­velt admin­is­tra­tion rescinded Execu­tive Order 9066, ending mass forced reloca­tion and allowing intern­ees to return to the West Coast exclu­sion area (Mili­tary Areas 1 and 2). Except for Tule Lake, the WRA camps would be emptied by the end of 1945.

Left: “OUSTER OF ALL JAPS IN CALIFORNIA NEAR!” San Fran­cisco Exam­iner head­lines of Japa­nese relo­ca­tion, Febru­ary 27, 1942. On May 21, 1942, the rival San Fran­cisco Chron­icle told its readers: “S.F. Clear of All But 6 Sick Japs. . . . The last group, 274 of them, were moved yes­ter­day.” Photo by Doro­thea Lange. Lange was one of three photo­graphers in the WRA Photo­graphy Sec­tion, or WRAPS, in 1942–1943. The other two were Clem Albers and Francis Stewart.

Right: Official notice of exclusion and removal, April 1, 1942. Photo­graph by Dorothea Lange. The posted exclu­sion order directed Japa­nese Amer­icans living in the first San Francisco sec­tion to evac­u­ate. Years before the Decem­ber 7, 1941, Japa­nese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the U.S. govern­ment had drafted plans to intern some Japa­nese Amer­icans and immi­grant aliens and had already placed some West Coast com­mu­ni­ties under su­rveil­lance. This in spite of years worth of FBI and naval intel­ligence data that attested to resi­dents of Japanese descent posing no national security threat. The exclu­sion order also swept up Japa­nese Amer­i­can sol­diers who had taken an oath of allegiance to their country of birth.

Left: With luggage tags affixed to their clothing—an aid in keeping family units intact during all phases of their forced removal—members of the Mochida family await an evac­u­a­tion bus, Ala­meda County (San Francisco Bay area), Cali­for­nia, May 8, 1942. On the luggage tags was written the family’s desig­nated iden­ti­fi­ca­tion number. The Mochidas had oper­ated a two-acre nursery and green­house in Eden, Ala­meda County, before the family’s incar­cer­ation. Photograph by Dorothea Lange.

Right: The forced exodus of Japanese in Los Angeles started at the end of March 1942. Staring into uncer­tainty 2-year-old Yuki Oki­naga Haya­kawa, clutching a tiny purse and an apple with a few bites gone, waits with the family’s allot­ment of bag­gage before leaving Los Angeles’s Union Sta­tion, even­tu­ally arriving with her mother at Man­za­nar War Relo­ca­tion Cen­ter, more than 200 miles north of LA in Cali­for­nia’s Owens Valley, which would be her home for the next 3 years. Each family mem­ber was permitted to take bedding and linens (no mat­tress), toilet arti­cles, extra clothing, and “essen­tial per­sonal effects,” nothing more; in other words, only what could be carried. Photograph by Clem Albers.

Left: This Oakland, California green grocer closed his store in March 1942 following orders to persons of Japa­nese descent to evac­u­ate from certain West Coast areas (Military Area 1; see map above). The owner, a Uni­ver­sity of Cali­for­nia grad­u­ate, had placed the “I AM AN AMER­I­CAN” sign on his store front on Decem­ber 8, the day after Pearl Harbor. Dec­la­ra­tions like this San Fran­cisco area store owner’s were insuf­fi­cient to over­come the sus­pi­cion and con­tempt directed at people who looked like the enemy and who, it was com­monly assumed at the time, remained loyal to Japan and its em­peror Hiro­hito (post­humously referred to as Emperor Shōwa). Photo­graph by Dorothea Lange.

Right: In 1944 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the consti­tu­tionality of the exclu­sion orders, described by many Amer­i­cans as the worst offi­cial civil rights vio­la­tion of modern U.S. history. After years of law­suits and nego­ti­a­tions, on August 10, 1988, Presi­dent Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liber­ties Act of 1988, which formally acknowl­edged that the war­time exclu­sion, evac­u­a­tion, and intern­ment of Japa­nese Amer­i­cans had been unrea­son­able. The act granted $20,000 in repa­ra­tions to each sur­viving Japa­nese Amer­i­can (about 82,000 people), costing the U.S. Treas­ury $1.6 billion. (A month later the Cana­dian prime minis­ter signed a simi­lar settle­ment and apol­ogy.) It took a decade to locate all eligi­ble U.S. recip­i­ents and deliver them their checks and formal apol­ogy. In 1991 sur­vi­vors of the more than 2,200 Latin Amer­i­cans of Japa­nese descent who were evicted by their govern­ments and incar­cer­ated in U.S. camps were com­pen­sated with a piti­fully small $5,000 check. A late 20th-cen­tury study con­cluded that the inter­nal govern­ment deci­sions that led to Roose­velt issuing Exe­cu­tive Order 9066 were based on racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and failed political leadership.

Injustice Camouflaged as Military Necessity: Japanese American Intern­ment During World War II

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