WWII

American Concentration Camps

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The day after Pearl Harbor, an angry FDR called it ‘a date which will live in infamy’, and he began to restrict the rights of Japanese Americans. First there was a curfew, then bank accounts were seized overnight, businesses shuttered, homes were searched, guns were collected, cameras and radios were taken, Japanese language schools were closed, and travel was restricted. US citizens of German and Italian descent were free to live their lives, but US citizens of Japanese descent were not. Then, at noon, on 30 March 1942: any person of Japanese descent found on Bainbridge Island—opposite Seattle—would be arrested and charged as a criminal. Families were given short notice, allowed two small bags—or one and a baby—, and were sent to the state fairground at Puyallup—near Tacoma. Barbed wire fences and armed soldiers surrounded the ‘assembly centers’. There, they were lined up by family, with their family number tags tied to their clothes, oldest in front, youngest in back.

San Francisco residents went to Tanforan—now a shopping mall on the peninsula. Los Angeles residents were sent to Santa Anita or Pomona. Some were housed in racetrack horse stalls, which they needed to clean out themselves. California and half of Washington, Oregon and Arizona were declared ‘exclusion zones’ by the military, and no person of Japanese descent was allowed to remain there. Instead, they were transported from the assembly centers to one of ten camps. The American woman and her baby above were sent to Manzanar in California and then to Minidoka in Idaho. Others went to Amache in Colorado, Rohwer & Jerome in Arkansas, Topaz in Utah, Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Poston & Gila River in Arizona, and some were sent to the ‘segregation camp’ at Tule Lake in California near Oregon. Some male inmates were ordered to build their own barracks, latrines and other buildings. Women prepared meals for thousands. Guard towers were raised along barbed wire fences with searchlights and machine guns pointed inward. There was no privacy, not among family, not at meals, not in the group latrines and not in the group showers. The camps were in remote, desolate, dusty, unpopulated areas away from towns, many were deserts, some mountains and all were sabishii—lonely and forsaken.

Many Americans, including those incarcerated, were lied to about the program by our government: “temporary”, “for your own safety”, “normal” and “happy”. Even today, the program is referred to as “Japanese Internment Camps”, but the vast majority of those incarcerated were not Japanese, they were US citizens, mainly by birth, many never having been to Japan. Propaganda films lied and stated that “household belongings” were shipped to “pioneer villages”, that only those “within a stone’s throw” of military bases were forced to move, that people were “given jobs and more space in which to live” and “managed their own security”. The program was sold as being exemplarily generous, that the military provided for all needs and that the Japanese Americans “approved whole-heartedly”. Journalists and others were periodically given limited access only to the barracks of the most cooperative inmates.

In fact, there were water shortages, food shortages, food poisoning, unsafe living and working conditions, military brutality, unfair punishments, false charges, and inmates fatally shot, including a dog walker at Topaz, a truck driver at Tule Lake, and two protesters at Manzanar where guards fired into a crowd. Some elderly patients had been taken to the camps from their hospital beds, and over 1,850 died of disease and medical problems, including many infants. Complaints were discouraged or mocked. Pressure campaigns were used to enlist men into active combat in Europe. And always, anyone suspected of being disloyal was encouraged to renounce their citizenship and leave the country. In this system, particularly at Tule Lake, some reacted to their treatment by trying to be more Japanese, organizing protests and yelling Banzai—‘long live the Emperor’—at the guards.

They were Americans, and their Constitutional Rights of speech, to be secure in their homes and to due process were all violated for years. The root of this program was racism. Americans of Japanese descent were assumed to have loyalty to a foreign power, and even when they were natural born American citizens, they couldn’t be trusted and would have to prove their loyalty again and again. The Issei—1st generation—chose this country rather than the one of their birth. The Nissei—second generation—were born here, but some parents sent their children back for schooling Japan to preserve their language and culture. These children were called Kibei—returnees to America—, indicating that their parents wanted them to live here. All were Americans, either by their own choice or by their parents’. Only their fellow citizens refused to see them as truly Americans.

Although I quote Eleanor Roosevelt below, FDR and many other Americans believed in the ‘melting pot’—meaning melting metal to forge steel—, that Americans had a duty to assimilate and that their cultures would be purified into one culture. But the price of citizenship does not include giving up one’s culture, whether your name is Ohara or O’Hara. Imagine something happens in the future, and people of your family background are herded up and sent to Guantanamo. Even though you did nothing wrong, your guilt is suspected based on your family cultural background. Your communications are censored, and you are treated the same as foreigners or prisoners of war. And when you finally are freed, all your property has been taken, and nobody will help.

Visit national park sites for camps like Manzanar, Minidoka, Amache and Tule Lake, and interpretive sites in Seattle like the Klondike visitor center which partners with Bainbridge Island and the Wing Luke Museum. Topaz has a museum in Delta Utah (off I-15 towards Great Basin). Poston (off I-10) has a historic marker placed by internees & the Colorado River Indian Tribes near Parker on the Arizona border with California. Heart Mountain has an interpretive center between Cody and Powell in Wyoming (on the road between Yellowstone and Bighorn Canyon). Gila River is on restricted reservation land near Hohokam Pima—neither are open to the public—but the Huhugam Heritage Center has a small free exhibit, not far from Phoenix. There’s a museum in McGehee Arkansas for Rohwer and a monument for Jerome; both are just south of Arkansas Post. The Hawaiian experience was very different, but Honouliuli will eventually open as a historic site. Please encourage your elected representatives to preserve the history at all the camps.

I encourage you to read more about the experiences of the Americans who were sent to American Concentration Camps during WWII: Farewell to Manzanar, Only What We Could Carry, Journey to Topaz, Snow Falling on Cedars, and They Called Us Enemy, among many others. And take a moment to think about how you would feel, if it happened to your family.

“We have no common race in this country, but we have an ideal to which all of us are loyal:
we cannot progress if we look down upon any group of people amongst us
because of race or religion.
Every citizen in this country has a right to our basic freedoms,
to justice and to equality of opportunity.
We retain the right to lead our individual lives as we please,
but we can only do so if we grant to others the freedoms that we wish for ourselves.”

Eleanor Roosevelt, after visiting Gila River during WWII

Gila River

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Despite not being on the West Coast, the US military evicted all American citizens from the southern part of Arizona during WWII as potential ‘navy base saboteurs’, if they had Japanese ancestry. The military’s arbitrary exclusion zone ran through Phoenix, so if you lived on the south side of the city, you wound up incarcerated while your family on the north side kept their homes.

Like Poston, most Japanese-Americans were taken from their homes in Southern California. The barracks in the background of the photo above comprised a small part of camp 2 or Butte Camp at Gila. The Gila River Tribal Community protested, but the military appropriated over 17,000 acres of their land anyway and concentrated roughly 15,000 people here according to their ethnicity. 

The tribal community had been struggling since the Gila River was diverted by white settlers beginning in the 1880s. In 1934, archaeologists dug up their ancestral burial grounds, and after they dug again in 1964, the government also created a national park site. Now that site is closed and the tribes don’t allow visitors there. 

Survivors of internment built a monument on the ‘internment camp’ site, but someone shot it up with a machine gun a few years back, and unless you’re family, you can’t visit the site now. Given all the tragedies and harm done here under the American flag, seems like folks might benefit from a government funded educational center explaining the history and the importance of respecting Constitutional rights. 

The Gila River Tribal Community runs the excellent nearby Huhugam Culture Center free museum, which contains a small display case of ‘relocation center’ artifacts, including two busts of young prisoners. The one pictured is Sayoko ‘Jean’ Kawamura, and the other has no name, forgotten to history. 

Heart Mountain

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Heart Mountain (above) is the site of an American Concentration Camp in Wyoming. One of the incarcerees left a bequest for ‘something to be done’, and now much is being done here to teach people about the injustice sustained here from 1942 until 1945. There is an original barracks, a guard tower ‘built to spec’, memorials, artwork, and a remarkably personal and revealing museum. Renovations, expansion, acquisitions and outreach are ongoing.

While most sites choose not to use the term “concentration camp”, due to its association with the Holocaust, one of the incarcerees in the film uses that term plainly, the then Governor used the term in arguing in favor, and that was the term used most commonly at the time. Many of the Americans who were sent there had never seen so many people of Japanese descent in one place at the same time. What else are you going to call a facility that literally concentrates one group of citizens based on racial/ethnic identity in a prison camp?

What makes the exhibits here better than other sites is that they go one or two steps deeper in describing the experience. When the site started, “it was like pulling teeth” to get incarcerees to talk about it, but then gradually the stories started coming out: a dog left behind that refused to eat and died alone, a beautiful older lady describing how she was spat on and called a slur as a child, and a family recounting the suicide of their father after being robbed and rejected by their community upon release with $25.

The museum pulls no punches in their descriptions, making it plain that these innocent American civilians had their rights abrogated and in many cases lost everything, due to racism. Instead of recognizing that we were at war with an enemy nation, our government and most Americans also declared war on a racial/ ethnic group of their fellow citizens. While J Edgar Hoover and Eleanor Roosevelt counseled against the program as ‘unfounded’ and ‘unjust’ respectively, FDR approved the military’s ‘relocation program’ recommendation for ‘sensitive military areas’, which the military interpreted as the entire west coast.

“The Japanese race is an enemy race
and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil,
possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized’,
the racial strains are undiluted.”
“A Jap is a Jap.”

Lt. Gen. John DeWitt,
architect and overseer of the American Concentration Camps

Camp Hale – Continental Divide National Monument

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The first troops to join the war from Colorado’s Camp Hale were the Viking Battalion, comprised of Norwegian exiles and Norwegian Americans, who joined the war in Europe in 1943, most fighting in uniform, but some as spies for Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS, the pre-cursor of the CIA. By 1944, the Allies had liberated Paris & Rome, but the Germans stubbornly held the mountains north of Rome and Florence, despite numerous assaults. That winter, the 10th Mountain Division, specially selected for mountaineering, having completed months of rigorous high altitude training, including mountain climbing and skiing among the 12,000 foot peaks behind Camp Hale above, arrived in Italy to take over the assault. Despite heavy casualties, they pushed the Germans out of the mountains, across the next valley, and up into the Alps, before the Germans surrendered. One of the young 10th Mountain soldiers left for dead after terrible injuries in Italy was Bob Dole, who survived and served as US Senator for Kansas from ‘69 to ‘96.

President Biden recently made this area and some of the mountains beyond a national monument, managed by the forest service. At this point, there’s not a lot to see and the roads are in poor condition, but it’s easy to feel the altitude when walking around, even without 90 pounds of military gear. There are still alpine huts between the trails up on Machine Gun Ridge above, and after the war, many 10th Mountain Veterans helped start a boom in recreational skiing nearby in Vail and Aspen Colorado. Today, the 10th Mountain operates out of New York and is frequently deployed on dangerous missions abroad.