Internment
One of the militaryıs largest undertakings during WWII was the mass evacuation of people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast of the United States. This stretched from Washington to Oregon and down to southern California. The decision to evacuate the Japanese was one made at the highest levelby the President of the United States, who was acting as Commander in Chief.[3 pp.6] What military plans and recommend-ations lay behind this decision? What alternatives was the President presented? To what extent was his decision based on military considerations?Initial plans for evacuation of suspected people from strategic areas along the West Coast concerned enemy aliens of all three Axis nations: Germany, Italy, and Japan rather than people of Japanese ancestry alone. The census in 1940 showed that out of a total of 126,947in the United States, 112,353 Japanese were living in the three Pacific states. California had 93,717 Japanese, or nearly three fourths of the national total. Out of the west coast Japanese, 40,869 were aliens (called Issei) ineligible for citizenship through naturalization proceedings, and 71,484 were American-born (called Nisei) and therefore U.S. citizens. For several decades the Japanese p
DeWitt had repeatedly described the Japanese as the most dangerous element of the west coast population. There is control being exercised and when we have it it will be on a mass basis. DeWitt thought that any enemy raid on the west coast would probably be accompanied by "violent outbursts of coordinated and controlled sabotage" among the Japanese population. The Department of Justice arranged to send representatives to San Francisco to confer with gen. DeWitt had recommended that before any evacuation all preparations should be complete, including the "selection and establishment of internment facilities in the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Corps Areas. Then beginning in mid-January of 1942, public and private demands for federal and state action increased rapidly in volume. Continued racial attacks, denial relief funds to desperalty needy cases, cancellation of licenses for markets, produce houses, stores, by the California State authorities discharges from jobs by the wholesale, unnecessarily harsh restrictions on travel including discriminatory regulations against all Nisei. Which is preventing them from engaging in commercial fishing. DeWitt stated what was to become one of the principal arguments for evacuation.
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Acceptance Essays
