World War II Day by Day

Washington, D.C. • December 18, 1944

On December 7 and 8, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched an unpro­voked air and sea attack on U.S. mili­tary assets in the Central and Western Pacific Ocean, at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the Philip­pines, respec­tively. On Decem­ber 11, 1941, the U.S. Con­gress declared war on the aggres­sor nation. Seventy days later, on Febru­ary 19, 1942, U.S. Presi­dent Frank­lin D. Roose­velt signed Exec­u­tive Order 9066. The order autho­rized the Secre­tary of War and the U.S. armed forces to remove people of Japa­nese ances­try from what were now desig­nated Mili­tary Exclu­sion Areas 1 and 2. Viola­tion of man­dates issued under Exec­u­tive Order 9066 by top War Depart­ment person­nel were hence­forth fed­er­al crimes. The mili­tary areas were now legally off limits to Japan­ese-born resi­dents (labeled “alien enemies”) and Japa­nese Amer­i­can citi­zens who were born in the U.S. (labeled “non-alien enemies”). FDR’s order con­tra­dicted many years’ worth of Feder­al Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion (FBI) and U.S. naval intel­ligence data that attested to resi­dents of Japa­nese descent posing no nation­al secu­rity threat, and the order flew in the face of govern­ment studies that recom­mended against mass exclusion and incarceration.

Executive Order 9066 set in motion the mass deten­tion and forced relo­ca­tion of more than 120,000 peo­ple of Japa­nese ances­try to intern­ment camps surrounded by barbed wire fencing and armed guards. Most peo­ple up­rooted, dis­pos­sessed of their real pro­per­ty (homes, busi­nesses, farms, farming imple­ments, cars, boats, bank and savings accounts, etc.), and incar­ce­rated in the boon­docks came from the West Coast and two-thirds of them (nearly 80,000) were Amer­i­can citi­zens. Almost half were chil­dren. In accor­dance with Roose­velt’s exec­u­tive order, the mili­tary trans­ported the evac­uees to 27 sites in states west of the Mississippi (see map below).

Japanese nationals and Ameri­can-born West Coast resi­dents swept up by FDR’s Civil­ian Exclu­sion Order (offi­cial name of the mili­tary evac­u­a­tion order) put their lives on hold and entered impri­son­ment, perhaps con­soled by the Japa­nese expres­sion “shikata ga nai,” or “it can’t be helped.” Owner of a flower nur­sery in San Lean­dro, Cali­for­nia, Kaku­sa­buro Kore­mat­su, his wife, and all but one son obeyed their evac­u­a­tion order upon receipt. Twenty-three-year-old Fred did not. In what was the most momen­tous deci­sion of his life, Fred opted to dis­obey the curfew and exclu­sion orders. He thought that the stat­ute under which he faced removal and impri­sonment was a vio­la­tion of his rights as an American.

Fred Korematsu went into hiding only to be arrested on May 30, 1942. Even­tu­ally he landed in the San Fran­cisco county jail. At the behest of the Amer­i­can Civil Libert­ies Union Kore­mat­su agreed to use his arrest to test the lega­lity of Japa­nese Amer­i­can evic­tion and intern­ment. His attor­neys charged the presi­dent, Con­gress, and the mili­tary with having engaged in uncon­sti­tu­tional actions against Kore­mat­su and, in effect, Japa­nese Ame­r­icans by seeking to deny them a hearing or other due process pro­tec­tions. On Septem­ber 8, 1942, Kore­mat­su was con­victed in a U.S. district court for vio­lating mili­tary exclu­sion orders issued under the author­ity of Exec­u­tive Order 9066. In time he ended up in the Topaz Relo­ca­tion Center in Utah where his parents had been sent.

Twice Korematsu appealed his 1942 conviction without success. In Octo­ber 1944 the nation’s highest court agreed to hear his appeal. On this date, Decem­ber 18, 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 6‑to‑3 deci­sion that the evac­u­a­tion order vio­lated by Kore­mat­us was valid, one jus­tice opining that the “mar­tial neces­sity arising from the danger of espi­o­nage and sabo­tage” by Japa­nese Amer­i­cans war­ranted the evac­u­a­tion order. The majo­rity of jus­tices dodged the consti­tu­tional racial dis­crim­i­na­tion issue in the case. Two dis­senting jus­tices faced that issue head on: one said the nation’s war­time secu­rity con­cerns were not suffi­cient to strip Kore­mat­su and 120,000 people of Japa­nese descent of the Equal Pro­tec­tion Clause of the Four­teenth Amend­ment to the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion. A second dis­senter denounced the decision as the “legalization of racism.”

Executive Order 9066 Cleared the Way for the Forced Exile and Relocation of West Coast Japanese Nationals and Japanese Americans

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/­8 km 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. On Decem­ber 17, 1944, one month after the in­famous deci­sion by the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld the legal­ity of Exec­u­tive Order 9066, the Roose­velt admin­is­tra­tion rescinded the mili­tary exclu­sion order, ending mass forced reloca­tion and allowing incar­cerees to return to the West Coast. Except for Tule Lake, the WRA camps would be emptied by the end of 1945.

Left: Overseen by U.S. soldiers, these Japanese Amer­i­can “evac­uees” await their fate: either a train ride to an assem­bly cen­ter for ini­tial proces­sing while their relo­ca­tion cen­ter was under con­struc­tion or a train ride to their finished abodes. Fred Kore­ma­tu’s assem­bly cen­ter was the Tan­fo­ran Race­track south of San Fran­cisco, where over a month earlier his parents and sib­lings had been sum­moned by their mili­tary evac­u­a­tion order. Incarcerees at Tan­fo­ran lodged in cramped, crowded, and dirty horse stalls infested with mice and other vermin. Full-term women gave birth in such stalls.

Right: This bleak 1942 aerial view depicts the Topaz Relo­ca­tion Center at Topaz, Utah. Com­plete with armed guards, watch towers, and barbed wire, the prison camp became the tem­porary home “for the dura­tion of the war” for 9,000 Japa­nese Amer­i­cans, among them Fred Kore­mat­su and his family who were for­cibly evicted from the U.S. West Coast. The poorly built wooden barracks typi­cally con­sisted of 4 rooms (“apart­ments”) each (one room per family) and were occu­pied in roughly 14 weeks from start to finish. Each drab, thin-walled apart­ment was fur­nished with hard army cots, a pot­bellied stove to heat the space, and one naked light bulb screwed into a cera­mic socket on the end of a long cord hanging from a rafter. There were no ceilings. The Topaz camp was closed in October 1945.

Left: Acclaimed civil rights activist and pioneer Fred Korematsu (1919–2005), who fought against World War II Japa­nese intern­ment, described by many Amer­i­cans as the worst offi­cial civil rights vio­la­tion in modern U.S. his­tory. Nineteen-year-old Kore­mat­su, Castle­mont High School photo­graph, Oak­land, Cali­for­nia, 1938. When the U.S. Army forced Japa­nese Amer­i­cans into con­cen­tra­tion camps during World War II, Kore­mat­su refused to comply with the orders and was arrested, tried, and con­victed in federal court. Kore­mat­su fought his con­vic­tion and intern­ment, his case reaching the U.S. Supreme Court in 1944.

Right: In recognition of his courageous stand against the in­justice of war­time intern­ment, Presid­ent Bill Clinton in 1998 awarded Fred Kore­mat­su the Presi­den­tial Medal of Free­dom, the highest civil­ian award given on behalf of the U.S. govern­ment. Four decades after Kore­mat­su’s 1942 con­vic­tion, the orig­i­nal federal court reopened his case. The govern­ment’s own records proved that the war­time govern­ment had sup­pressed, altered, and destroyed material evi­dence when it was arguing the Korematsu case before the Supreme Court. The writ of error coram nobis liti­ga­tion cleared Kore­mat­su’s name as well as the names of all other Exec­u­tive Order 9066 internees. It also laid the legal corner­stone for the 1988 Civil Liber­ties Act signed by Presi­dent Ronald Reagan, which formally acknowl­edged that the war­time exclu­sion and deten­tion of Japa­nese Amer­i­cans had been unrea­son­able. (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.) The Civil Liber­ties Act granted $20,000 in repa­ra­tions to each survi­vor of the camps (a little over 82,000 people), costing the U.S. Treas­ury $1.6 billion (equi­va­lent to over $4.26 billion today).

The Fred Korematsu Story