Yang Murray History of Military Necessity Ch2 in Historical Memories of The Japanese Internment

ONE
The History of “Military Necessity”

and the Justification for Internment
Murray, Alice Yang. Historical Memories of the Japanese

American Internment and the Struggle for Redress. Stanford,
Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2008. http://archive.org/details/
historicalmemori00murr.
On November 2,1981, John J. McCloy testified about his role as assistant sec¬
retary of war before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment
of Civilians (CWRIC). This congressional body was set up to investigate the
internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. At first McCloy
was treated with the deference usually accorded America’s elder statesmen.
Commissioner Arthur J. Goldberg, a former justice of the Supreme Court,
recounted McCloy’s distinguished career—high commissioner of occu¬
pied Germany, the president of the World Bank, chair of the Council on
Foreign Relations, and a man who had “befriended and advised nine Presi¬
dents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.” But now, the eighty-six-
year-old McCloy, once dubbed “Chairman of the Establishment” by journal¬
ist Richard Rovere, was shocked to find himself on the defensive.1 Although
Goldberg continued to address him as “High Commissioner,” most of the
spectators at the hearing were former internees who now publicly mocked
his account of the decision to intern Japanese Americans. Several hissed
when McCloy claimed that he saw “pretty well-authenticated espionage” by
Japanese Americans, and then they laughed when he maintained that “very
pleasant” camps were established “for the protection of the Japanese popula¬
tion from possible local disorders, demonstrations and reprisals.”2
Even though he had not been subpoenaed or required to testify under
oath, McCloy brought a lawyer with him for his second day of testimony.
He casually described attorney Adrian Fisher as an “associate from his War
Department days,” whom he “just happened to see” the night before and
16 The History of “Military Necessity ”
who “might be able to offer additional recollections” to the commission.

McCloy’s nervousness was betrayed, however, when Fisher referred to him
as his “client” while speaking to the CWRIC commissioners. Even though
McCloy seemed more cautious during the second day of his testimony, he
was thrown off guard when Commissioner William Marutani, a former in¬
ternee, asked him directly whether racism had played a role in the decision
to intern Japanese Americans. McCloy insisted that he “didn’t see the slight¬
est suggestion.” He defended Secretary of War Henry Stimson as “a man of
great integrity” who “saved the town of Kyoto from bombing.” As “compas¬
sionate, as thorough a statesman I know,” Stimson “couldn’t possibly de¬
cide this thing on racial grounds.” Marutani then pointedly asked, “What
other Americans, Mr. McCloy, shared in the war by having their mothers,
fathers, grandfathers, younger brothers and sisters incarcerated during the
war?” Somewhat taken aback, McCloy responded:
Lots of Americans. I saw what was done, the solicitude extended. I don’t
think the Japanese population was unduly subjected, considering all the
exigencies to which—the amount it did share in the way of retribution for
the attack that was made on Pearl Harbor.3
Observers held their breath as Marutani asked the stenotypist to repeat

McCloy’s testimony. Realizing this was an important moment, the steno¬
typist decided to play the audio recording rather than read the transcript.
The spectators listened intently as they heard McCloy again describe the “ret¬
ribution for the attack that was made on Pearl Harbor.” Obviously flustered,
McCloy tried to amend his statement: “I think ‘retribution’ is wrong ... I
don’t think I like to use the word ‘retribution’ in connection with it. I say
‘consequences.’ ” Other words McCloy had used during the war would come
back to haunt him. The ever-persistent Marutani read to the former assistant
secretary of war a transcript of a phone conversation in which the provost
marshal, Major General Allen W. Gullion, said, “I think McCloy did say
this to [Attorney General Francis] Biddle, you are putting the Wall Street
lawyer in a hell of a box, but if it is a question of the safety of the country
and the Constitution, why the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”4
McCloy, a lawyer, promptly denounced the statement as “hearsay.” He then
proclaimed, “I don’t remember saying it; I don’t believe I could.”
Even forty years later McCloy continued to equate the Japanese who
attacked Pearl Harbor with people of Japanese ancestry who lived in the
The History of “Military Necessity " 17
United States. He continually referred to Japanese Americans as “the

Japanese” and maintained they had posed a threat to national security. Angus
MacBeth, special counsel to the CWRIC, asked McCloy to confirm that the
“general history of the war” and the record of military service by Japanese
Americans in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which McCloy had
helped form, showed “the overwhelming history of loyalty to this country
on behalf of Japanese aliens and citizens.” McCloy replied, “I think some
of them—if [the Battle of] Midway had been lost—ah, there might have
been some who were pledging allegiance to the other side.” Still convinced
that ethnicity sometimes determines loyalty, McCloy argued that America
might, in fact, need to intern another group of Americans in the future:
Within ninety miles of our shores [there are] a hundred, roughly a hun¬
dred thousand people, thoroughly trained, thoroughly equipped, well
trained in modern warfare, that are being set up to serve as proxies for the
Soviet Union in the various strategic parts of the world. Suppose there was
a raid some ten, twenty, thirty years hence on [Florida], wouldn’t you be
apt to think about moving [Cuban Americans] if there was a raid there?
You can’t tell.5
The testimony before the CWRIC of Colonel Karl R. Bendetsen, former

assistant chief of staff in charge of civil affairs for the Western Defense
Command, also unintentionally exposed the racist motives for internment.
At first Bendetsen, like McCloy, insisted that racism had nothing to do
with the history of the decision. “The time is long overdue,” he declared, for
the government “to make its own unprejudiced investigation and defend
the government against the grotesque charges . . . that it was race prejudice
and not realistic precautions which induced President Roosevelt’s order.”
Bendetsen had been proud of his role during the war and boasted in his
1946 Who's Who in America entry of having “conceived method, formulated
details and directed evacuation of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry
from military areas.”6 In 1981 he was more circumspect and said he was
responsible only for “methods” rather than “policy.” When asked by Com¬
missioner Goldberg why he had eliminated the description of his intern¬
ment role from subsequent editions of Who's Who, Bendetsen smiled and
said his secretary had probably made the change.7
At the beginning of his testimony Bendetsen echoed McCloy’s claim
that Japanese Americans were “evacuated” for their own protection. News
figure i. John J. McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War. World Bank Group

Archives.
of the atrocities Japan committed in the Philippines and the history of anti-
Japanese sentiment on the West Coast prompted, according to Bendetsen,
concern for internees’ safety. But when pressed about whether internment
was a mistake, Bendetsen defended the policy by attacking the loyalty of
the Japanese Americans he said he had wanted to protect. Acknowledging
The History of “Military Necessity” 19
that if officials “had known then what we know today, the Order would
never have been issued at all,” Bendetsen maintained:
Under the then circumstances, entailing the destruction of most of our

Pacific Fleet and of our defenses, the Japanese Naval, Air and Ground
Forces were certainly in a position to invade the West Coast of the United
States. They remained so for at least a year and a half to two years after
December 7, 1941. They did invade the Aleutian Islands. Both the Nisei
[second generation] and the Kibei [second generation educated in Japan]
would have been in a very different position and their attitudes might well
have been very different than you are now assuming they would have been.
The situation could well have been disastrous.
Later, Bendetsen was even more assertive about the threat of Japanese
American treachery. “If a major attack had come and if there had been no
evacuation,” he proclaimed, “most Japanese residents along the Western Sea
Frontier, whether U.S. or Japanese born, would have supported the invad¬
ing forces, even though some would not have welcomed them.”8
Thus despite initial attempts to portray internment as a measure to
defend Japanese Americans from violence, McCloy and Bendetsen ulti¬
mately revealed the racial assumptions that led to the incarceration. Even
in 1981 they refused to distinguish between soldiers in the imperial forces
and Japanese immigrants and their children on the West Coast. Unfortu¬
nately for Bendetsen and McCloy, however, there was abundant evidence
available in 1981 that contradicted their history of a concern for Japanese
American safety and the “military necessity” of internment. After reviewing
public statements, phone transcripts, intelligence reports, memos, and let¬
ters, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians
concluded in 1983 that internment was caused by “race prejudice, war hys¬
teria, and a failure of political leadership.”9 Fiistorical documents showed
not only that there was no military necessity for internment but that of¬
ficials like Bendetsen and McCloy knew there was no evidence of Japanese
American sabotage or espionage. In fact, the CWRIC learned both men
had been aware of reports clearing Japanese Americans of disloyalty charges
and advising against mass removal and incarceration. These reports came
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Office of Naval Intel¬
ligence, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Furthermore, the commission could find no evidence to support Bend¬
etsen and McCloy s claims that Japanese Americans were protected from
vigilantes. No government officials offered this justification when the deci¬

sion was announced. However, the CWRIC did uncover a letter written
by McCloy in 1943. In this letter he explicitly denied the military had a
responsibility to defend Japanese Americans. He acknowledged that former
internees who returned to California might suffer from sporadic violence.
What’s more, McCloy insisted in 1943 that only local “civil authorities” were
responsible for maintaining “the general public peace.”10
The biggest problem with Bendetsen and McCloy’s attempt to conceal
the role of racism in the decision for internment, however, was the fact that
the government’s official history of the decision presented a blatantly racist
rationale. The document, Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West
Coast, 1942, included Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt’s “Final Recom¬
mendation” to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, dated February 14, 1942.
His recommendation, drafted for him by Bendetsen, presented a forthright
account of the supposed danger from the “Japanese race”:
In the war in which we are now engaged racial affinities are not severed by
migration. 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.11
In a press conference one year after Japanese Americans were interned,

DeWitt justified the decision by stating simply, “a Jap’s a Jap.”12 DeWitt’s
Final Report, which was actually ghost-written by Karl Bendetsen, tried to
put more of a military gloss on the rationale for mass exclusion and deten¬
tion.13 The “surprise attack at Pearl Harbor by the enemy,” the report de¬
clared, “crippled a major portion of the Pacific Fleet and exposed the West
Coast to an attack which could not have been substantially impeded by
defensive fleet operations.” More than “115,0000 persons of Japanese ances¬
try resided along the coast and were significantly concentrated near many
highly sensitive installations essential to the war effort.” The report went
on to say:
The continued presence of a large, unassimilated, tightly knit racial group,

bound to an enemy nation by strong ties of race, culture, custom, and
religion along a frontier vulnerable to attack constituted a menace which
had to be dealt with. Their loyalties were unknown and time was of the
essence. The evident aspirations of the enemy emboldened by his recent
The History of ‘‘Military Necessity ” 21
successes made it worse than folly to have left any stone unturned in the
building up of our defenses. It is better to have had this protection and
not to have needed it than to have needed it and not to have had it—as we
have learned to our sorrow.14
Officials had no grounds “for assuming that any Japanese, barred

from assimilation by convention as he is, though born and raised in the
United States, will not turn against this nation, when the final test of loy¬
alty comes.” The fact that no sabotage had taken place on the West Coast
was a “disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be
taken.”15
Anyone who read DeWitt’s “Final Recommendation” or Final Report
could have recognized the racism and circular logic underlying his justifica¬
tion for mass exclusion and detention. But few criticized the government’s
announced plans for mass removal or the Final Report's portrayal of the
history of the decision. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, a century of racism
against Asians made the public receptive to images of “treacherous Japs” in
Hawaii and on the West Coast. An irresponsible press fanned the fires of
hatred with sensationalistic but unsubstantiated rumors of Japanese Ameri¬
can sabotage. Whipping up this public hysteria, opportunistic politicians
clamored for the removal of these “enemy spies.”
In this climate the architects of internment could proceed without seri¬
ous challenge. Officials in charge of military intelligence and the FBI knew
the incarceration was unjustified but remained silent. Attorney General
Francis Biddle questioned the necessity of internment before the president
but did not criticize it on constitutional grounds. After Roosevelt gave his
approval, Biddle never publicly criticized the policy. Members of Congress
praised the president’s executive order and enacted laws to imprison Japa¬
nese Americans who resisted internment. Lawyers at the Department of
Justice who were preparing briefs to defend internment before the Supreme
Court discovered that DeWitt and other government officials knew of in¬
telligence reports that contradicted their claims of military necessity. These
lawyers considered disclosing this information to the Supreme Court. Ul¬
timately, however, they bowed to War Department pressure, withheld the
evidence, and misrepresented their cases before the Supreme Court. Finally,
the highest court in the land went on to not only approve internment but to
cite many of DeWitt’s racist arguments in the process.
22 The His to ry of“Military Necessity ”
The “Enemy Race”
Few Americans questioned Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt’s call to

remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast because they shared his
assumption that Japanese Americans were members of an enemy race and
were predisposed to be spies and saboteurs. People throughout the nation
had long viewed both Japanese immigrants and their American-born chil¬
dren as suspicious foreigners, but the West Coast had a particularly viru¬
lent history of racism. Anti-Asian activists who had first mobilized against
Chinese immigrants when they began arriving in the mid-i8oos employed
the same “yellow peril” imagery to attack Japanese immigrants later in the
century. They portrayed Japanese immigrant men as spies or sex fiends and
immigrant women as “mindless-immoral-fecund laborers.”16 Japanese im¬
migrant women were accused of “breeding like rats” and producing more
“unassimilable” Japanese children.17 Hoping to stem this tide of hostility,
the Japanese foreign ministry stopped issuing passports to picture brides in
1920. Not satisfied with this measure, the anti-Japanese forces in California
persuaded the federal government to terminate all immigration from Japan
in 1924. Denied the right to become naturalized citizens, Japanese immi¬
grants were barred from owning land in California and other western states.
Although the Nisei were citizens by virtue of being born on American soil,
they lacked political clout. Small in number, they were just reaching voting
age by the time World War II began.
The first weeks following the onset of war saw little organized activity
against Japanese Americans; nevertheless, stories of sabotage at Pearl Har¬
bor and Japans military victories in Asia energized anti-Japanese forces.
In January 1942 the Native Sons of the Golden West along with its sister
organization, the Native Daughters, proclaimed the attack on Pearl Har¬
bor a vindication of the groups’ history of activism against the Japanese in
America:
Had the warnings been heeded—had the federal and state authorities
been “on the alert” and rigidly enforced the Exclusion Law and the Alien
Land Law; had the Jap propaganda agencies in this country been silenced;
had the legislation been enacted . . . denying citizenship to offspring of all
aliens ineligible to citizenship; had the Japs been prohibited from coloniz¬
ing in strategic locations; . . . had Japan been denied the privilege of using
The History of “Military Necessity ” 23
California as a breeding ground for dual-citizens (nisei);—the treacherous

Japs probably would not have attacked Pearl Harbor.18
The Joint Immigration Committee sent a manifesto to California news¬

papers on January 2 warning that as the Nisei might be “American citi¬
zens by right of birth,” they were liable “to be called to bear arms for their
Emperor, either in front of, or behind, enemy lines.” Along with the Cali¬
fornia Department of the American Legion, both groups began to urge that
Japanese Americans “be placed in concentration camps.”19
Some who argued for the removal of Japanese Americans were clearly
motivated by economic interest in addition to being swayed by cultural ste¬
reotypes. In the Saturday Evening Post, Frank Taylor of the Grower-Shipper
Vegetable Association admitted:
Were charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We
might as well be honest. We do. It’s a question of whether the white man
lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man. They came into this valley to
work, and they stayed to take over ... If all the Japs were removed tomor¬
row, we’d never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can
take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we don’t want them
back when the war ends, either.20
By the end of January, many California papers were also lobbying for
internment. Henry McLemore, a syndicated Hearst newspaper columnist,
called for the “immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to
a point deep in the interior”:
I don’t mean a nice part of the interior either. Herd ’em up, pack ’em off
and give ’em the inside room in the badlands. Let ’em be pinched, hurt,
hungry and dead up against it . . . Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that
goes for all of them.21
A rapid succession of victories by Japanese forces in the Pacific intensified

the hostility against Japanese immigrants and their children in America.
On the same day as the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japan struck the Malay
Peninsula, Hong Kong, Wake and Midway islands, and the Philippines.
Thailand was invaded the next day. Guam fell on December 13. The Japa¬
nese took over Wake Island on December 24 and Hong Kong on the 25th.
American forces had to abandon Manila on December 27 and retreat to the
Bataan peninsula.
24 The History ofMilitary Necessity”
As Americans struggled to make sense of these defeats, reports of the at¬

tack on Pearl Harbor set off more alarm bells. Secretary of the Navy Frank
Knox had gone to Hawaii on December 9 to investigate the reasons for Amer¬
ican losses at Pearl Harbor. On December 15, he returned to the mainland,
and speaking to the press, said, “I think the most effective Fifth Column
work of the entire war was done in Hawaii with the possible exception
of Norway.” Knox knew there was, in fact, no evidence of a Japanese “fifth
column” on the islands, but he undoubtedly hoped the comment might
relieve some of the public criticism directed at him and other officials for
being unprepared for the attack. His official report, released to the public
the next day, made no mention of any fifth column activities. The report
described espionage by Japanese consular officers but praised Japanese Ha-
waiians who had manned machine guns against the attacking planes. This
report, however, remained classified even as headlines blared “Secretary of
Navy Blames Fifth Column for the Raid,” “Fifth Column Prepared At¬
tack,” and “Fifth Column Treachery Told.”22
As it happens, Knox wasn’t the only one misleading the public about Jap¬
anese American sabotage and espionage at Pearl Harbor. On January 25 the
press was given a report by an official committee of inquiry led by Supreme
Court Justice Owen J. Roberts. The report declared Japanese spies, includ¬
ing “persons having no open relations with the Japanese foreign service,”
helped the enemy during the “sneak” attack. The false accounts by Knox
and Roberts encouraged newspapers throughout the country to report wild
rumors about the bombing of Pearl Harbor as fact. The Los Angeles Times an¬
nounced that Japanese fliers shot down over Pearl Harbor were wearing class
rings from the University of Hawaii and Honolulu High School.23 The paper
also claimed a Japanese resident who was painted green “had camouflaged
himself so he could hide in the foliage and aid attacking Japs.”24 Papers all
over the country declared on December 30 and 31 that Japanese residents in
Hawaii pointed the attacking planes to strategic installations by cutting ar¬
rows in sugarcane fields.25 Investigations by Naval Intelligence, the FBI, and
Military Intelligence would later affirm all these reports to be false and that
no Japanese Hawaiians had participated in a single act of sabotage.26
Quick to report unsubstantiated charges against Japanese Americans,
most West Coast newspapers ignored evidence of Japanese American patrio¬
tism. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) later gave a civil rights
award to Walt and Milly Woodward, the owners and editors of the Bain-
bridge Review, because their paper was the only one on the West Coast that
consistently supported the rights of Japanese Americans. In a special “War
Extra” distributed on the night of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Bain-
bridge Review reminded the residents of Bainbridge Island, “These Japanese-
Americans of ours haven’t bombed anybody” Ironically, the first exclusion
order was issued for Bainbridge Island because the navy considered the area
strategically important. After the 272 Japanese Americans in the commu¬
nity were uprooted from their homes and confined at Manzanar, in the
desert near Independence, California, the Woodwards published a weekly
column about life in the camp, by Paul Ohtaki. By consistently presenting
Japanese Americans as a part of the Bainbridge Island community, even if
they were sequestered far away, these columns may help explain the lack
of violence that greeted Japanese Americans who returned to the area after
leaving Manzanar. “They didn’t come back as strangers,” Walt Woodward
explained. “We already knew that So-and-So had married So-and-So and
had a baby boy and we were looking forward to meeting the new baby.”27
Other mainstream newspapers ignored Japanese American perspectives.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco Chronicle and San Fran¬
cisco News each reported one comment by JACL president Saburo Kido
pledging Nisei loyalty and cooperation but nothing else.28 The ethnic press,
on the other hand, noted a flurry of activity in the weeks that followed
designed to prove Nisei loyalty. The JACL sponsored a “Give a Bomber to
Uncle Sam” bond drive in San Francisco. Other chapters vowed to raise
between $25,000 and $75,000 for war bonds. A Red Cross drive was orga¬
nized by the Berkeley JACL. The national JACL offered to aid the federal
government’s program of registering alien enemies and urged a voluntary
shut-down of all Japanese language schools.29 Immigrants in the Japanese
Association gave $1,400 to the city and county of Fresno, California, to
purchase an ambulance for civil defense activities. The Buddhist Mission of
North America issued a statement declaring “the suddenness and the un¬
warranted and inhumane attack upon these United States of America leave
us, the Buddhists in America, with but one decision: the condemnation of
that attack.” The organization announced, “the loyalty to the United States
which we have pledged at all times must now be placed into instant action
for the defense of the United States of America.” This vow of patriotism was
repeated by the Japanese American Committee for Democracy, a New York
group of immigrants and citizens.30
But the chorus of hysteria grew louder. Giving credence to every rumor,
military intelligence on the West Coast and members of the press issued
warnings about an imminent invasion of the West Coast. Major General
Joseph W. Stillwell, who served under Lieutenant General DeWitt for a
month after Pearl Harbor, recorded in his diary the numerous false alarms
spread by DeWitt’s G-2 Army Intelligence Branch:
Dec. 9 Fleet of thirty-four [Japanese] ships between San Francisco and

Los Angeles. Later—not authentic.
Dec. ii [Phone call from 4th Army] “The main Japanese fleet is 164 miles
off San Francisco.” I believed it, like a damn fool . . . Of course [4th
Army] passed the buck on this report. They had it from a “usually reli¬
able source,” but they should never have put it out without check.
Dec. 13 Not content with the above blah, [4th] Army pulled another at
ten-thirty today. “Reliable information that attack on Los Angeles is
imminent. A general alarm being considered . . .” What jackass would
send a general alarm under the circumstances. The Army G-2 is just
another amateur, just like all the rest of the staff. Rule: the higher the
headquarters, the more important is calm.31
Stillwell concluded that “nothing should go unconfirmed” because “com¬

mon sense is thrown to the wind and any absurdity is believed” at the
Western Defense Command.32
The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover also criticized the “hysteria and lack of judg¬
ment” at DeWitt’s intelligence division. Leaders of the army, he noted, had
a tendency of “losing their heads as they did in the Booneville Dam affair,
where the power lines were sabotaged by cattle scratching their backs on the
wires, or the ‘arrows of fire’ near Seattle, which was only a farmer burning
brush as he had done for years.”33
Yet the press reported unsubstantiated sightings of Japanese ships and
undocumented accounts of Japanese American subversion as actual events
for the first few months of the war. By the end of January, prominent voices
warned of “treacherous” Japanese Americans. Even Edward R. Murrow,
speaking to a Seattle audience, said, “I think it’s probable that, if Seattle
ever does get bombed, you will be able to look up and see some University
of Washington sweaters on the boys doing the bombing.”34
West Coast politicians began to clamor for internment. On January 16,
1942, U.S. Congressman Leland Ford, from California, wrote the secre¬
taries of the war and navy as well as the FBI director, and requested that
“all Japanese, whether citizens or not, be placed in inland concentration

camps.” To justify this action, Ford submitted:
If an American born Japanese, who is a citizen, is really patriotic and

wishes to make his contribution to the safety and welfare of this country,
right here is his opportunity to do so, namely that by permitting himself
to be placed in a concentration camp, he would be making his sacrifice
and he should be willing to do it if he is patriotic and is working for us. As
against his sacrifice, millions of other native born citizens are willing to
lay down their lives, which is a far greater sacrifice, of course, than being
placed in a concentration camp.35
On February 13, U.S. congressional representatives from California,

Washington, and Oregon met to discuss a resolution on internment. Only
Senator Sheridan Downey and Congressman H. Jerry Voorhis, both from
California, and Congressman John Coffee, from Washington, expressed
any doubts about the need for mass removal. But they were eventually worn
down by Ford’s strident attacks and demands for a resolution endorsing
mass exclusion. Consequently, Congressman Clarence Lea, from Califor¬
nia, sent a letter to President Roosevelt on behalf of the delegations, re¬
commending “the immediate evacuation of all persons of Japanese lineage”
from the three states. “We make these recommendations,” explained Lea,
“in order that no citizen, located in a strategic area, may cloak his disloyalty
or subversive activity under the mantle of his citizenship alone.”36
Most other members of Congress showed little interest in the issue of
mass removal. They neither supported nor opposed the proposal made by
their West Coast colleagues. A trio of Southern Democrats, however, pro¬
vided a ringing endorsement of the plan to force Japanese Americans from
the West Coast. Senator Tom Stewart, from Tennessee, Representative John
Rankin, from Mississippi, and Representative Martin Dies, from Texas, had
no trouble accepting the racist rationale for internment. According to Stew¬
art, the “cowardly and immoral” individuals of Japanese ancestry “are dif¬
ferent from Americans in every conceivable way, and no Japanese . . . should
have the right to claim American citizenship.” In his eyes, “a Jap is a Jap
anywhere you find him, and his taking the oath of allegiance to this country
would not help even if he should be permitted to do so.” Rankin declared,
“This is a race war . . .” and “. . . the white man’s civilization has come into
conflict with Japanese barbarism ... I say it is of vital importance that we
get rid of every Japanese whether in Hawaii or on the mainland. 37
Despite the calls for a West Coast evacuation, fueled by the purported
“evidence” of sabotage at Pearl Harbor, there was never a mass removal of
residents of Japanese ancestry from Hawaii. This was not because of any
good will evinced by politicians in Washington. Intelligence agencies had
kept Japanese Hawaiians under surveillance since 1932. Roosevelt even
solicited proposals to intern Japanese Hawaiians five years before the attack
on Pearl Harbor when in 1936 he asked the navy to prepare a list of Nikkei
(individuals of Japanese ancestry) who visited Japanese ships in Hawaiian
ports and urged that these individuals be placed in “concentration camps”
in the event of war.38
In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii’s “enemy aliens” and “citizens
of enemy ancestry” were singled out under martial law. The military es¬
tablished an Alien Registration Bureau and required enemy aliens to carry
registration cards at all times. The bureau had to approve any proposed
residential or occupational changes or plans to travel outside a home island.
Ultimately, 1,250 Nikkei from the Hawaiian Islands, less than 1 percent of
the 150,000, were interned.39 The manuscript History of the Provost Marshal’s
Office later claimed, “It is certain that many persons who might have been
tempted to give aid, support or comfort to our enemy were deterred from so
doing by the severity and promptness with which punishment was meted
out by the Provost Courts operating under the martial regime.” Governor
Joseph B. Poindexter declared in an April 27, 1946 edition of the Hono¬
lulu Advertiser, “Internment of all suspected enemy aliens was the only safe
course to put the Tear of god’ in the hearts of those who would assist the
enemy. ”40
Most Hawaiian Japanese avoided internment even though the islands
had been bombed and seemed much more vulnerable to an invasion than
the West Coast. Nikkei made up only 2 percent of California’s population,
yet every third person living in Hawaii was of Japanese ancestry. The mili¬
tary commander of Hawaii, General Delos Emmons, resisted Washington’s
calls for the mass incarceration of Japanese Hawaiians, not because of a
commitment to civil rights, but because Japanese labor was critical to both
the civilian and military economies of the islands. In Oahu, 90 percent of
the carpenters, almost all of the transportation workers, and a significant
proportion of the agricultural laborers were of Japanese ancestry. Emmons
knew he needed Nikkei workers to help rebuild Pearl Harbor. Even with
Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox demanding that “all of the Japs” be
The History of “'Military Necessity ” 29
removed from Oahu, and the War Department sending several requests to
remove Nikkei residents to the mainland, Emmons stalled and delayed. In
a letter, he tried to reassure Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy that
“the feeling that an invasion is imminent is not the belief of most of the re¬
sponsible people . . . There have been no known acts of sabotage committed
in Hawaii.” When the pressure intensified, Emmons tried to placate the
politicians in Washington by proposing to send out three hundred Japa¬
nese every two weeks “if berths were available.” Repeatedly citing the lo¬
gistical and labor problems removing Nikkei to the mainland would entail,
Emmons succeeded in fending off Washington calls for mass internment.41
The difference in the way Delos Emmons and John L. DeWitt re¬
sponded to calls to remove and confine Nikkei living under their command
shows how individual personalities could affect the history of internment.
Emmons recognized that the rumors of Nikkei sabotage at Pearl Harbor
were unfounded. A shrewd pragmatist, Emmons hindered Washington
internment plans because he realized that he needed Nikkei labor to re¬
establish Hawaii’s defenses and economy. DeWitt, on the other hand, was
insecure, inconsistent, and indecisive. Almost twenty years earlier he had
helped devise a plan to militarize Hawaii in case of war, a plan that in¬
cluded the possible selective internment of civilians by the military. Wit¬
nessing the disgrace and removal of Lieutenant General Walter C. Short
following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, DeWitt wanted to make sure he
was never accused of sleeping at his post. At first, he did not distinguish
between the threat posed by Japanese, Italian, and German “enemy” aliens.
On December 19 his headquarters recommended that “all alien subjects
fourteen years of age and over, of enemy nations” be removed to the interior
of the United States and held “under restraint after removal” to prevent
their clandestine return.
This proposal caught the eye of Major General Allen W. Gullion, the ar¬
my’s provost marshal. An ambitious bureaucrat, Gullion hoped to acquire
control over enemy aliens through the Department of Justice. Transcriptions
of phone calls recorded by the army reveal how the provost marshal and his
subordinate, Colonel Karl R. Bendetsen, strenuously lobbied DeWitt and
members of the departments of Justice and War to support a plan for mass
exclusion. It was Gullion who urged DeWitt to round up Japanese American
citizens as well as immigrants. DeWitt initially opposed the idea, and on De¬
cember 26 told Gullion:
I’m very doubtful that it would be common sense procedure to try and
intern 117,000 Japanese in this theater . . . An American citizen, after all,
is an American citizen. And while they may not be loyal, I think we can
weed the disloyal out of the loyal and lock them up if necessary.
But Gullion and Bendetsen’s repeated calls and unreliable army reports
of Japanese American radio transmissions gradually convinced DeWitt of
the need to focus on the threat posed by “Jap” citizens as well as immi¬
grants. Relying on improperly trained army personnel to monitor radio
transmissions, DeWitt believed reports that Japanese Americans were com¬
municating with the Japanese navy at sea. On January 9 George Sterling,
head of the FCC’s Radio Intelligence Division, had warned DeWitt about
the inadequacies of the general’s monitoring operations. Sterling’s memo
on his conference with DeWitt characterized army personnel as “unskilled
and untrained”:
Most are privates who can read only ten words a minute. They know
nothing about signal identification, wave propagation and other technical
subjects, so essential to radio intelligence procedure. They take bearings
with loop equipment on Japanese stations in Tokio . . . and report to their
commanding officers, knowing no different, pass it on to the General and
he takes their word for it. It’s pathetic to say the least.42
Yet even as Sterling tried to make DeWitt aware of these problems, he could
sense the general “seemed concerned and, in fact, seemed to believe that the
woods were full of Japs with transmitters.”43
Sterling’s assessment of the general’s irrational fears was correct, and on
January 24, DeWitt told Bendetsen of “reports” that Japanese Americans
were communicating with the Japanese navy at sea. Convinced of the ex¬
istence of a spy network, he now saw the “Jap” problem in a “new light”
and told Bendetsen, “The fact that we have [not even] sporadic attempts at
sabotage clearly means that control is being exercised somewhere.”44
Executive Order 9066
By the end of January, DeWitt seemed to have accepted Gullion and Bend¬
etsen’s advice to include citizens in his removal plans. On January 29 Ben¬
detsen called DeWitt to confirm, “You are of the opinion that there will
have to be an evacuation on the West coast, not only of Japanese aliens

but also of Japanese citizens, that is you would include citizens along with
alien enemies.”45 Even though DeWitt affirmed that internment was in¬
evitable, Bendetsen called two days later to make sure the general had not
wavered yet again. This time DeWitt was quite emphatic about his removal
plans: “First the Japanese . . . the most dangerous . . . the next group, the
Germans . . . the third group, the Italians . . . We’ve waited too long as it
is. Get them all out.”46
But when Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy called on Febru¬
ary 3, just two days later, and said that the army “should not take the posi¬
tion, even in your conversations with political figures out there [favoring]
a wholesale withdrawal of Japanese citizens and aliens from the Coast,”
DeWitt declared, “I haven’t taken any position.” McCloy and Secretary of
War Henry Stimson were still concerned about the legality of a mass re¬
moval of citizens. On February 3, Stimson wrote in his diary that although
he distrusted the Nisei, he recognized that mass exclusion would constitute
a racist violation of their citizenship rights:
If we base our evacuation upon the ground of removing enemy aliens, it

will not get rid of the Nisei who are the second generation naturalized
Japanese, and as I said, the more dangerous ones. If on the other hand
we evacuated everybody including citizens, we must base it as far as I can
see upon solely the protection of specified plants. We cannot discriminate
among our citizens on the ground of racial origin. We talked the matter
over for quite a while and then postponed it in order to hear further from
General DeWitt who has not yet outlined all of the places that he wishes
protected.47
In light of Stimson and McCloy’s concerns and after meeting with James
Rowe, of the Department of Justice, and California governor Culbert Olson,
DeWitt expressed a willingness to change his plans again. He said he would
agree to allow Japanese Americans to move from the coastal zone to the
interior of California, where they could “raise vegetables like they are doing
now.” Colonel Archer Leach, another deputy of Gullion’s, called Bendet¬
sen and complained about the “decided weakening on the part of Gen.
DeWitt.” 48
But in the next few days, more false reports about Japanese Ameri¬
cans communicating with the Japanese navy were spread by the press and
politicians throughout California. There was talk of the possibility of an¬

other aPearl Harbor” on the Pacific Coast. Gullion used these reports to
solidify DeWitts support for mass removal and to convince McCloy to
intern all Japanese Americans in “camps east of the Sierra Nevada.” Mc¬
Cloy, like Stimson, wanted to get rid of Japanese Americans but was con¬
cerned about the legality of mass exclusion. On February 3 he had called
DeWitt to advocate a policy of designating restricted military zones and
allowing reentry by permit. They could then allow back in “everyone but
the Japs.”
In the next two weeks McCloy and Stimson were nevertheless converted
to the idea of mass exclusion. It is not exactly clear what caused them to
overcome their concerns about what they recognized as a racist and un¬
constitutional policy. Public hysteria mounted as the press and West Coast
politicians began calling for an evacuation. But McCloy had received a
letter on February 9, from Archibald MacLeish of the Office of Facts and
Figures, indicating that public opinion was not uniform. According to a
California public opinion poll, between 23 and 43 percent of the popula¬
tion felt further action was needed. Most of these people tended “to cluster
in the low income, poorly educated groups, and they are the ones who are
most suspicious of local Japanese in general.” MacTeish concluded that al¬
though “the situation in California is serious, it is not as desperate as some
people are said to believe . . . We can be pretty definite in saying that a
majority of people think that the Government (chiefly the FBI) has the
situation in hand.”49
In his 1947 memoir, On Active Service in Peace and War, Stimson de¬
fended the decision to intern Japanese Americans, arguing, “Japanese raids
on the west coast seemed not only possible but probable in the first months
of the war, and it was quite impossible to be sure that the raiders would not
receive important help from individuals of Japanese origin.” Stimson then
went on to advance the “protective custody” rationale that McCloy and
Bendetsen would try to revive in 1981. “More than that,” Stimson wrote,
“anti-Japanese feeling on the west coast had reached a level which endan¬
gered the lives of all such individuals; incidents of extra-legal violence were
increasingly frequent.”30 Yet neither his public statements nor his diary ever
evinced this concern about guaranteeing the safety of Japanese Americans
before the decision was made. Stimsons diary entry for February 10 indi-
The History of “Military Necessity” 33
cates that his only reservation about mass removal was a concern that it
would be recognized as blatantly racist and unconstitutional:
The second generation Japanese (Nisei) can only be evacuated either as

part of a total evacuation, giving them access to the areas only by per¬
mits, or by frankly trying to put them out on the ground that their racial
characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen
Japanese. This latter is the fact but I am afraid it will make a tremendous
hole in our constitutional system to apply it?1
Perhaps Stimson decided that enough people might share his own view that
the Nisei just couldn’t be trusted and would ignore the constitutional im¬
plications. In any case, the next day Stimson agreed to telephone Roosevelt
to recommend the mass removal of Japanese Americans. Later that after¬
noon, McCloy called Bendetsen to tell him Roosevelt “says go ahead and do
anything you think necessary ... if it involves citizens, we will take care of
them too . . . but it has got to be dictated by military necessity.”1,2
Roosevelt had already received information that should have made him
question the military necessity argument. The president’s own informal in¬
telligence system, overseen by John Franklin Carter, a journalist, had earlier
affirmed the overall loyalty of Japanese Americans. Carter relied on reports
from Curtis B. Munson, a Chicago businessman who gathered intelligence
by posing as a representative of the State Department. Munson based his
intelligence reports on information from the FBI agent in charge of Ho¬
nolulu, on British Intelligence in California, and on Naval Intelligence in
southern California. On November 7, 1941, Carter forwarded to Roosevelt
a report by Munson assessing Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Cart¬
er’s summary of the report quoted Munson’s conclusion that “there are still
Japanese in the United States who will tie dynamite around their waist and
make a human bomb out of themselves . . . but today they are few.” Carter
also highlighted Munson’s horror that “dams, bridges, harbors, power sta¬
tions etc. are wholly unguarded everywhere.” Nevertheless, Munson pro¬
claimed, “There is no Japanese problem’ on the coast.” Munson explained,
“For the most part, the local Japanese are loyal to the United States, or at
worst, hope that by remaining quiet they can avoid concentration camps or
irresponsible mobs.”53 Munson’s complete report stated, “Japan will com¬
mit some sabotage largely depending on imported Japanese as they are
34 The History of “Military Necessity "
afraid of and do not trust the Nisei.” He concluded, “We do not believe
that they would be at least any more disloyal than any other racial group
in the United States with whom we went to war.”54 Munson sent three
or four more reports to Carter between December—after the attack—and
February that reconfirmed this estimate of the passive loyalty at least of
Japanese Americans on the West Coast. These reports were shared with the
Western Defense Command.55
One reason Munson felt most Japanese Americans did not pose a serious
threat to security was because he respected the views of Lieutenant Com¬
mander Kenneth D. Ringle of the Office of Naval Intelligence in southern
California. In the spring of 1941 Ringle had organized a break-in at the
Japanese consulate in Los Angeles and found evidence that Japanese of¬
ficials regarded both Nisei and first-generation Issei as “cultural traitors”
who could not be relied on for espionage work. Consular officials felt white
Americans would make better agents.56 After Secretary of the Navy Frank
Knox made his unsubstantiated claims of a fifth column threat, Munson
and Carter urged that a statement affirming the loyalty of ethnic Japanese
be made by the president or vice president. Nothing was done, however, to
contradict the hysteria Knox promoted.57
FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover also felt Knox’s claims of a fifth column were
unfounded and that the great majority of Japanese immigrants were law-
abiding, but he never stated this in public. Instead, he sent Attorney Gen¬
eral Francis Biddle a memo. At Biddle’s request, he also sent an analysis of
the proposal for mass exclusion. Hoover’s position was clear: “The necessity
for mass evacuation” was based primarily on public and political pressure
rather than on “factual data.” Attributing this political pressure to “pub¬
lic hysteria and in some instances, the comments of the press and radio
announcers,” Hoover concluded that the case to justify mass removal on
security grounds had not been made.58
Yet as this evidence was never made public, DeWitt, Gullion, Bendetsen,
McCloy, and Stimson could proceed with their internment plans without
worry of interference. The only government official who made any real effort
to prevent internment was Attorney General Biddle. Throughout Decem¬
ber, January, and February, he tried to calm public hysteria and persuade
Roosevelt that mass removal was unnecessary. On December 8,1941, shortly
after Congress declared war on Japan, Biddle issued a statement in Wash¬
ington. He let it be known that “only a comparatively small number” of
Japanese nationals were “dangerous to the peace and security” of the nation
and would be taken into custody. He warned against any tendency to view
all of them as enemies, and declared later in the day that “even in the present
emergency, there are persons of Japanese extraction whose loyalty is unques¬
tioned.” On December 10, he offered this assurance to the country: “The
great majority of our population will continue to be loyal to our democratic
principles if we, the citizens of the United States, permit them to be.”59
Then on February 1 Biddle tried in vain to get the War Department to
agree to a joint press release. In the release he wanted to reassure the public
of these two facts: “There has been no substantial evidence of planned sabo¬
tage by any alien,” and both the Justice and War departments “are in agree¬
ment that the present military situation does not at this time require the
removal of American citizens of the Japanese race.”60 At a meeting to dis¬
cuss the press release, Biddle and his aide James Rowe tried to counter the
efforts of Gullion and Bendetsen to win Stimson and McCloy’s support for
mass exclusion. In a phone conversation with General Mark Clark, Gullion
recounted the battle between the two sides:
[The Justice officials] said there is too much hysteria about this thing; said
these Western Congressmen are just nuts about it and the people [are]
getting hysterical and there is no evidence whatsoever of any reason for
disturbing citizens, and the Department of Justice, Rowe started it and
Biddle finished it—The Department of Justice will have nothing whatso¬
ever to do with any interference with citizens, whether they are Japanese or
not. They made me a little sore and I said, well listen Mr. Biddle, do you
mean to tell me that if the Army, the men on the ground, determine it is
a military necessity to move citizens, Jap citizens, that you won’t help me.
He didn’t give a direct answer, he said the Department of Justice would be
through if we interfered with citizens and writ of habeas corpus, etc.61
The attorney general then tried to convince the president to oppose the
plan at a luncheon conference on February 7. He informed Roosevelt, say¬
ing, “We believe mass evacuation at this time inadvisable, that the F.B.I.
was not staffed to perform it; that this was an Army job not, in our opinion,
advisable”; and “that there were no reasons for mass evacuation.”62 In a
last ditch effort Biddle sent FDR a memo on February 17. It was described
as a briefing paper for a press conference that summarized his reasons
against mass exclusion. Biddle hoped to convince the president that the
wild charges being made by national figures were unfounded. On Lincoln’s

birthday, nationally respected columnist Walter Lippmann wrote of an
impending invasion of the West Coast. Lippmann bad met with DeWitt
and was convinced by the general’s “evidence” of shore-to-sbip signaling by
Japanese Americans. Thus in his column he declared, “The Pacific Coast is
in imminent danger of a combined attack from within and from without.”
Lippmann also wrote:
It is the fact that the Japanese navy has been reconnoitering the Pacific
Coast more or less continually and for a considerable period of time,
testing and feeling out the American defenses. It is the fact that commu¬
nication takes place between the enemy at sea and enemy agents on land.
These are facts which we shall ignore or minimize at our peril.
Acknowledging that there had been no sabotage on the Pacific Coast, he

echoed DeWitt in insisting that this was a “sign that the blow is well orga¬
nized and that it is held back until it can be struck with maximum effect.”
Declaring the Pacific a “combat zone,” he insisted that “nobody’s constitu¬
tional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield.”63
Bolstered by Lippmann’s support for mass exclusion, Scripps-Howard
news service commentator Westbrook Pegler proclaimed, “The Japanese in
California should be under guard to the last man and woman right now and
to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.”64 A single column by
Scripps-Howard commentator Ernie Pyle, extolling the loyalty of a Japanese
American friend, and a series of San Francisco Chronicle articles by Chester
Rowell, supporting Japanese Americans, could not counter the sensational-
istic images of spies and saboteurs filling the public’s mind.65 Denouncing
the baseless charges of Lippmann and Pegler, Biddle told Roosevelt, “It is
extremely dangerous for the columnists, acting as Armchair Strategists and
Junior G-Men,’ to suggest that an attack on the West Coast and planned
sabotage is imminent when the military authorities and F.B.I. have indi¬
cated that this is not the fact.” He also reminded the president that “under
the Constitution 60,000 of these Japanese are American citizens.”66
In his memoirs, published in 1962, Biddle speculated, “If, instead of deal¬
ing almost exclusively with McCloy and Bendetsen, I had urged [Stimson]
to resist the pressure of his subordinates, the result might have been differ¬
ent.” Biddle explained, “But I was new to the Cabinet and disinclined to in¬
sist on my view to an elder statesman whose wisdom and integrity I greatly
The History of “Military Necessity " 37
respected.”67 What the attorney general neglected to mention, however, was

that although he had opposed mass exclusion, he had also advised Stimson
in a letter, dated February 12, of how it could be “legally” justified:
I have no doubt that the Army can legally, at any time, evacuate all
persons in a specified territory if such action is deemed essential from a
military point of view . . . No legal problem arises when Japanese citi¬
zens are evacuated but American citizens of Japanese origin could not,
in my opinion, be singled out of an area and evacuated with the other
Japanese . . . However, the result might be accomplished by evacuating
all persons in the area and then licensing back those whom the military
authorities thought were not objectionable from a military point of view.68
Furthermore, even though Biddle voiced to Roosevelt his objections, he

never declared to the president that mass removal was unconstitutional. He
also never exposed to the public the intelligence reports that showed no evi¬
dence of sabotage or espionage. Once Roosevelt decided to support intern¬
ment, Biddle ended his campaign because, as he said in his autobiography,
“I did not think I should oppose it any further.” Instead, he sent a memo
counseling the president as to how to justify the order and the powers it
granted to the military.69
On February 19, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which gave De-
Witt the authority to order mass exclusion. Ironically, later that day in Los
Angeles, the United Citizens Federation held its first meeting, of around a
thousand people, to persuade the public, the press, and the government that
attacks on Japanese American loyalty and patriotism were unjustified.70 But
the decision to uproot Japanese American immigrants and citizens from
their homes had already been made. It was too late.
Once internment was decided, Japanese Americans and their supporters
were not in a strong position to mount an effective campaign to combat it.
They didn’t know about the evidence that President Roosevelt, Attorney
General Biddle, and the War Department had seen that could have been
used to challenge the order. Not revealed to the public was the report by
businessman Curtis Munson sent to journalist John Franklin Carter, Roos¬
evelt, and the War Department; the naval intelligence reports of Lieutenant
Commander Kenneth Ringle referred to by Munson; J. Edgar Hoover’s re¬
view of LBI intelligence; and Biddle’s recommendations against exclusion.
Consequently, Japanese Americans couldn’t know that intelligence experts
such as Ringle and high-ranking officials such as Hoover and Biddle be¬
lieved they posed no threat to national security.
Lacking access to the complete historical record behind the decision as
well as the evidence countering its rationale, Japanese Americans were at a
loss to mount a good defense. How could declarations of patriotism relieve
the “yellow peril” fears promoted by the anti-Japanese forces for more than
four decades, which were reinforced by the “sneak attack” at Pearl Harbor
and devastating military losses in the Pacific? How could a few individual
and organizational vows of loyalty compete with the esteemed Lippmann’s
description of “shore-to-ship signaling” and “imminent invasion”? How
could bond-raising drives combat the secretary of the navy’s account of a
fifth column?
The inherently weak position of Japanese Americans and the few non-
Japanese Americans who supported them became clear during congressio¬
nal committee hearings held in February, after Executive Order 9066 was
signed. The decree gave DeWitt the power to issue orders but not the power
to punish those who disobeyed them. The War Department thus asked
Congress to provide DeWitt with that authority. The General wanted non-
compliance to be a felony punishable by mandatory imprisonment because
“you have greater liberty to enforce a felony than you have a misdemeanor,
viz. You can shoot a man to prevent the commission of a felony.”71
Congressman John H. Tolan, from California, chaired the House Se¬
lect Committee, which was charged with holding public hearings along the
West Coast to examine mass exclusion. He noted Executive Order 9066
paralleled “the recommendation in almost the same words of the Pacific
Coast delegation.”72 The deck was clearly stacked against any thoughtful
consideration of the evidence. Yet a small group of academics, ministers,
labor activists from the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and Nisei
appeared before many of the same politicians who had earlier signed a reso¬
lution demanding the removal of Japanese Americans. Less than one-tenth
of the witnesses who testified in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and
Seattle opposed mass removal. Most of the speakers had a long history of
anti-Japanese activism and, therefore, endorsed exclusion. Some of the more
vicious speakers also called for forced deportation to Japan, disfranchise¬
ment of Nisei citizens, and even sterilization.73
On the other side, those who defended Japanese Americans argued for in¬
dividual investigations of suspects and selective removal. In San Francisco,
Rev. Galen Fisher, of the Pacific Coast Committee for Fair Play, emphasized
that anyone who might have posed a threat had already been rounded up by
the FBI. Consequently, even in the unlikely case that potential troublemak¬
ers remained at large, they had no leaders to guide them. Mass removal,
moreover, was impractical and would not only wreak great suffering but
would drain off financial resources better spent on supporting the war ef¬
fort. Finally, Fisher warned that Tokyo could use the proposed measure as
“devastating propaganda” against the United States. This argument was
echoed by Rev. E. W. Thompson, pastor of the Japanese Methodist Church,
in Seattle. “It would be defeating democracy, doing what Hitler did to the
Jews,” Thompson declared.74
The few Nisei who were called upon to testify before the House Select
Committee encountered condescension and skepticism from their question¬
ers. Nisei who came to pledge their loyalty were grilled about where they
had learned English so well and how they felt about the imperial “indoc¬
trination” promoted by Japanese language schools. Mike Masaoka, a Nisei
who testified on behalf of the Japanese American Citizens League, tried to
recount evidence of patriotism by Japanese Americans. He was cut off by
Congressman Tolan, who then proceeded to perpetuate the false history of
fifth column activity during the bombing of Pearl Harbor to justify why the
Nisei could never be trusted. “We had our FBI in Honolulu,” Tolan declared,
“yet they had probably the greatest, the most perfect system of espionage and
sabotage ever in the history of war, native-born Japanese.” Continuing, Tolan
insisted, “On the only roadway to the shipping harbor, there were hundreds
and hundreds of automobiles clogging the street, don’t you see.” 5 In Seattle,
Congressman Laurence Arnold told another Nisei, “Of course, you probably
recognize that if the Japanese in Honolulu and Hawaii had not conducted
themselves as they did on December 7, that perhaps such drastic action
would not be thought of in this area of the United States at this time.”76
Months later the committee would receive information that directly
contradicted this inaccurate history of spies and saboteurs at Pearl Har¬
bor. Honolulu’s chief of police, W. A. Gabrielson, reported to the commit¬
tee that there were “no acts of sabotage in the city and county of Hono¬
lulu.” Colonel Kendall J. Fielder, chief of Hawaii’s military intelligence,
informed Tolan that there had been no sabotage on any of the Hawaiian
Islands. Even Stimson, who authorized the mass removal, acknowledged to
the committee that the “War Department has received no information of
DEVELOPMENT AND EXECUTION OF EVACUATION PLAN
WESTERN DEFENSE COMMAND AND FOURTH ARMY

WARTIME CIVIL CONTROL ADMINISTRATION
Presidio of San Francisco, California
INSTRUCTIONS
TO ALL PERSONS OF
JAPANESE
ANCESTRY
LIVING IN THE FOLLOWING AREA:
All of that portion of the County of Alameda, State of California, within
that boundary beginning at the point at which the southerly limits of
the City of Berkeley meet San Francisco Bay; thence easterly and following
the southerly limits of said city to College Avenue; thence southerly on
College Avenue to Broadway; thence southerly on Broadway to the south¬
erly limits of the City of Oakland; thence following the limits of said
city westerly and northerly, and following the shoreline of San Francisco
Bay to the point of beginning.
Pursuant to the provisions of Civilian Exclusion Order No. 27, this Head¬
quarters, dated April 30, 1942, all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and
non-alien, will be evacuated from the above area by 12 o’clock noon, P.W.T.,
Thursday May 7, 1942.
No Japanese person living in the above area will be permitted to change
residence after 12 o’clock noon, P.W.T., Thursday, April 30, 1942, without
obtaining special permission from the representative of the Commanding Gen¬
eral, Northern California Sector, at the Civil Control Station located at:
530 Eighteenth Street,
Oakland, California.
Such permits will only be granted for the purpose of uniting members of a
family, or in cases of grave emergency.
The Civil Control Station is equipped to assist the Japanese population
affected by this evacuation in the following ways:
1. Give advice and instructions on the evacuation.
2. Provide services with respect to the management, leasing, sale, storage
or other disposition of most kinds of property, such as real estate, business and
professional equipment, household goods, boats, automobiles and livestock.
3. Provide temporary residence elsewhere for all Japanese in family groups.
4. Transport persons and a limited amount of clothing and equipment to
their new residence.
figure 2 . Evacuation Order. U.S. War Department, Final Report: Japanese

Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1943), 99—100.
THE FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS MUST BE OBSERVED:
1. A responsible member of each family, preferably the head of the family,
or the person in whose name most of the property is held, and each individual
living alone, will report to the Civil Control Station to receive further in¬
structions. This must be done between 8:00 A. M. and 5:00 P. M. on Friday,
May 1, 1942, or between 8:00 A. M. and 5:00 P. M. on Saturday, May 2, 1942.
2. Evacuees must carry with them on departure for the Assembly Center,
the following property:
(a) Bedding and linens (no mattress) for each member of the family;
(b) Toilet articles for each member of the family;
(c) Extra clothing for each member of the family;
(d) Sufficient knives, forks, spoons, plates, bowls and cups for each mem¬
ber of the family;
(e) Essential personal effects for each member of the family.
Ail items carried will be securely packaged, tied and plainly marked with
the name of the owner and numbered in accordance with instructions obtained
at the Civil Control Station. The size and number of packages is limited to
that which can be carried by the individual or family group.
3. No pets of any kind will be permitted.
4. No personal items and no household goods will be shipped to the As¬
sembly Center.
5. The United States Government through its agencies will provide for
the storage at the sole risk of the owner of the more substantial household
items, such as iceboxes, washing machines, pianos and other heavy furniture.
Cooking utensils and other small items will be accepted for storage if crated,
packed and plainly marked with the name and address of the owner. Only one
name and address will be used by a given family.
6. Each family, and individual living alone will be furnished transportation
to the Assembly Center or will be authorized to travel by private automobile
in a supervised group. All instructions pertaining to the movement wilt be ob¬
tained at the Civil Control Station.
Go to the Civil Control Station between the hours of 8:00 A. M. and

5:00 P. M., Friday, May 1, 1942, or between the hours of
8:00 A. M. and 5:00 P. M., Saturday, May 2, 1942, to receive
further instructions,
J. L. DeWitt
Lieutenant General, U. S. Army
Commanding
April 30, 1942
See Civilian Exclusion Order No. 27.

42 The History of “Military Necessity”
figure 3 . Grandfather and grandchildren “tagged” for transport to an assembly

center await evacuation bus in Hayward, California. Photographer: Dorothea Lange.
Hayward, California. 5/8/42. Series 14, Group 29, Volume 59, Section G, WRA no.
C-160, War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japanese-American Evacuation and
Resettlement Collection, BANC PIC 1967.014—PIC, Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley.
sabotage committed by Japanese during the attack on Pearl Harbor.” Also,

James Rowe, assistant to the attorney general, wrote Tolan that he had been
advised by Hoover that “there was no sabotage committed there [in Hawaii]
prior to December 7, on December 7, or subsequent to that time.”77
However, none of these reports were received before Congress voted
on the issue. Still, the fact that there was little interest in discussing any
of the pros and cons of the bill that provided criminal penalties for fail¬
ing to comply with the exclusion order raises doubts about whether such
evidence might have made a difference. Accepting the rationale for intern¬
ment, members of both houses simply assumed the bill would pass. The
only debate concerned the wording of the bill and the definition of a “re¬
stricted area.” Once that was clarified, the bill passed easily and was signed
into law by President Roosevelt on March 21.78 Defying the exclusion order
was now a crime.
The Tolan Committees decision to then support a bill punishing anyone
who violated the exclusion orders was practically preordained. One speaker
who appeared before the committee, however, would make a difference in
the history of the decision to intern Japanese Americans. California’s at¬
torney general Earl Warren, who later became chief justice of the Supreme
Court, appeared before the committee to lend his vigorous support for
forced removal. Armed with fifty pages of written testimony, lists of orga¬
nizations and names, and reams of detailed maps, Warren impressed his
listeners with his “expertise” on the history of California settlement pat¬
terns. In a professorial manner, Warren displayed maps showing suspicious
“clusters” of Japanese American farms surrounding a “vast array of strategic
installations,” including military bases, aircraft plants, airports, highways,
dams, pumping stations, and bridges. When Congressman Laurence Ar¬
nold, from Illinois, asked why “it just couldn’t have happened that way,”
Warren replied, “We don’t believe that it could in all of these instances,
and knowing what happened at Pearl Harbor and other places, we believe
that there is a pattern to these land ownerships in California.” No one
challenged Warren’s misrepresentation of the history of Pearl Harbor or
California. Later, Bill Hosokawa, a former internee and journalist, would
wonder why no one had pointed out that “many of the areas had been
wilderness when Japanese immigrants cleared the brush and leveled the
land for farms—long before highways, military camps, power lines and the
Wright brothers had appeared on the scene.”79
Still, no one corrected Warren. On the contrary, DeWitt’s Final Report
repeated Warren’s settlement “history” verbatim and without attribution.
This official explanation of why Japanese Americans were removed from
the West Coast repeated a presentation given after the decision had already
been announced.
Perhaps DeWitt felt justified in appropriating Warren’s statements for his
Final Report because the California attorney general’s testimony before the
House Select Committee had a familiar ring. Warren had met with DeWitt
right around the time the lieutenant general was articulating his analysis
of why there was no evidence of sabotage on the West Coast. In any case
Warren’s explanation of the lack of sabotage on the West Coast clearly paid
tribute to DeWitt’s belief that “control is being exercised somewhere”:
I take the view that this is the most ominous sign in our whole situation.
It convinces me more than perhaps any other factor that the sabotage we
are to get, the fifth column activities that we are to get, are timed just like
Pearl Harbor was timed ... we are just being lulled into a false sense of
security.80
Tolan readily agreed with Warren that any sabotage would naturally
“come coincident with” a Pearl Harbor—type surprise attack on the Pacific
Coast. The Nisei were left to ponder how they would ever prove their al¬
legiance when all signs of innocence were seen as nothing more than a
“sneaky plot.”
The History of the Decision Presented to the Supreme Court
The baffling logic that a plot was afoot also dismayed Edward Ennis and
the other lawyers at the Department of Justice who were supposed to jus¬
tify mass exclusion and detention before the Supreme Court. Ennis, along
with his boss Francis Biddle, had argued strenuously against the decision
to uproot Japanese Americans from the West Coast. After DeWitt issued
his orders, Japanese Americans Minoru Yasui, Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred
Korematsu, and Mitsuye Endo challenged in court the legality of mass re¬
moval and detention. Ennis was then given the unenviable assignment of
preparing the government briefs to defend policies he personally felt were
indefensible.
The blatant racism in DeWitt’s official explanation of why he interned
Japanese Americans made that task even more difficult for Ennis and his
colleagues. For even though most of the Supreme Court justices, like other
Americans, might share DeWitt’s fear and hatred of the “Japs,” they might
not be willing to proclaim that racism, and racism alone, warranted intern¬
ment. They needed a more appealing account of why the government, in
times of crisis, should defer to military authorities who deemed military
necessity required the incarceration of Japanese Americans. In other words,

they needed a plausible “military” veil, one to shroud the racist assumptions
surrounding disloyalty, that they could parade before the highest court in
the land.
But the twisted logic, unsubstantiated facts, and deliberate lies in De-
Witt’s official history of the decision kept threatening to unravel the veil
of military necessity members of the departments of Justice and War were
weaving. Consequently, throughout 1943 and 1944, Department of Justice
lawyers Edward Ennis and John Burling would grapple with the issue of
how to use, or excuse, this problematic history. Ultimately, the lawyers rep¬
resenting the government would present before the Court a history of the
decision that deliberately suppressed and misrepresented critical evidence.
Some officials, Edward Ennis among them, would suffer a “crisis of con¬
science” over their roles in writing this deceptive history of military neces¬
sity. Others, like John J. McCloy, assistant secretary of war, and Colonel
Karl R. Bendetsen, assistant chief of staff in charge of civil affairs for the
Western Defense Command, had no qualms about conspiring to distort
the historical record to promote false arguments of military necessity, be¬
fore the Court and the public.
At first McCloy was quite pleased when the Final Report: Japanese Evacu¬
ation from the West Coast, 1942 was printed in 1943. As he picked up one
of the first copies, he had high hopes the report would provide the Justice
Department with the evidence it needed for the Supreme Court. But a
quick perusal alarmed the assistant secretary of war. Chapter 2, entitled
“Need for Military Control and for Evacuation,” included the declaration
that it was “impossible to establish the identity of the loyal and the disloyal
with any degree of safety.” The next sentence explained, “It was not that
there was insufficient time in which to make such a determination; it was
simply a matter of facing the realities that a positive determination could
not be made, that an exact separating of the ‘sheep from the goats’ was
unfeasible.”81 The rest of the chapter argued that the characteristics of this
“tightly-knit racial group” made it impossible to distinguish a “good Jap”
from a “bad Jap.”
A perceptive lawyer, McCloy knew this passage would undermine the
case the Department of Justice was mounting. Lawyers preparing the Hi-
rabayashi brief, the argument for the curfew and exclusion orders, were
claiming DeWitt’s task, “of promptly segregating the potentially disloyal
from the loyal” among Japanese Americans, was “virtually impossible.” This
46 The History of “Military Necessity”
was because he lacked the time required to conduct individual loyalty hear¬
ings. The brief would later argue: “Many months, or perhaps years, would
be required for such investigations.”82 McCloy recognized that DeWitts
statement confessing time was not a factor in his decision to recommend
mass removal would undermine the military necessity pretense. He imme¬
diately called Bendetsen and learned only ten copies of the Final Report had
been printed. McCloy then recalled these copies and ordered the “burning
of the galley proofs, galley pages, drafts and memorandums” pertaining to
the original report. He then had his legal deputy, Captain John M. Hall,
work with Bendetsen to delete DeWitts dangerous statements and prepare
a “final ” Final Report that could be presented to the public and the Depart¬
ment of Justice. When lawyers at the Department of Justice asked to look
at DeWitts official history, McCloy lied and told them it had not yet been
printed. He should have said the expurgated version he and Bendetsen were
preparing was not yet available.83
Lacking access to the military “evidence” they assumed was in the re¬
port, the Department of Justice lawyers prepared their own “historical”
argument for the Hirabayashi brief. The final brief would admit “the re¬
cord in this case does not contain any comprehensive account of the facts
which gave rise to the exclusion and curfew measures here involved.” The
brief, therefore, asked the Court to consider “historical facts” on the “gen¬
eral military, political, economic, and social conditions under which the
challenged orders were issued.”84 These “facts” indicated that Japanese
Americans were likely to be disloyal not only because they were foreign and
unassimilable but because they had been treated as such throughout their
history in America. In other words, four decades of racism against Japanese
Americans justified racist assumptions about them during the war.
Staff member Nanette Dembitz combed the card catalog at the Library of
Congress to find information on the “racial characteristics” of the Japanese
and Japanese Americans. Her extensive list of sources on Japanese Ameri¬
can family structure, religion, and education included studies in history,
political science, anthropology, and articles from Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Even though she knew she was supposed to find evidence to use against Jap¬
anese Americans, Dembitz tried to be evenhanded in her research, noting
in the text and in footnotes evidence that contradicted negative portrayals
of the Nikkei. She described, for example, “the stimulation of prejudice by
opportunistic politicians and by the sensational press” as sources of hostility
toward Japanese Americans and as reasons for their “lack of assimilation”

into mainstream culture. She also noted that “assaults and hoodlumism”
led to the “keen realization” by Japanese Americans of “the fact of dis¬
crimination and prejudice against them.” In the final brief, however, this
more sympathetic account of the history of discrimination against Japanese
Americans was transformed into the conclusion, “An unknown number of
the Japanese may lack to some extent a feeling of loyalty toward the United
States as a result of their treatment.” The brief would go on to assert, with¬
out supplying any evidence, that this treatment produced “a consequent tie
to Japan” and a “compensatory feeling of racial pride ... in Japan’s achieve¬
ments.” The very existence of Shinto shrines, Japanese language schools,
mutual assistance organizations, and the like, supposedly proved that Japa¬
nese Americans were not “true Americans.”85
The Court affirmed this interpretation of Japanese American history in its
decision. Writing for the majority in Hirabayashi, Chief Justice Harlan Fiske
Stone recounted the history of race discrimination that had barred assimila¬
tion and promoted ethnic solidarity. He then made the big leap that eth¬
nic solidarity equaled potential disloyalty, legitimating the view of Japanese
Americans as a security risk. Unwilling to endorse the racism underlying
this justification for removal, Justice William O. Douglas recognized that
it implied “Japs who are citizens cannot be trusted because we have treated
them so badly.” He thus based his concurring opinion on the belief the Court
could not “sit in judgment of the military requirements at that hour.”86
McCloy must have breathed a sigh of relief that Douglas had not seen
DeWitt’s original Final Report. By the time the Department of Justice law¬
yers began work on the next part of their defense, the Korematsu brief, the
sanitized version of the report was ready. But even this revised history was
full of land mines. Hoping to embarrass the Department of Justice for its
initial opposition to the decision and bolster public support for internment,
McCloy and DeWitt published the report and then released sections to the
press. Headlines in the Los Angeles Times declared, “DeWitt Raps Biddle
Failure to Check Japs” and “DeWitt Shows Plenty of Reasons for Remov¬
ing Japs.” The Washington Post announced, “Japs Attacked All Ships Leav¬
ing Coast,” and quoted from the report that “signals from the shore aided
the Japanese in attacks on the west coast early in the war.” Both to protect
the Department of Justice from criticism that it overlooked this evidence
justifying internment and because they needed the material for their brief,
48 The History of uMilitary Necessity ”
Edward Ennis and colleague John Burling began to look for verification of
these charges.
Ennis and Burling discovered that not only was the “shore-to-ship” sig¬
naling evidence false but that DeWitt knew it was false before he included
it in his report. They learned about George Sterlings luncheon conference
with DeWitt and his memo declaring the generals monitoring operations
“pathetic.” More important, they found out that early in 1942 the FCC com¬
plied with DeWitt’s request to establish a system of roving coastal patrols
with mobile direction-finding units. Ennis and Burling had sent a memo
to DeWitt about reports of 760 “suspicious” radio signals that occurred
before July 1, 1942. Of these signals, 641 turned out not to be radio signals
at all. The remaining 119 were traced to licensed commercial stations, police
equipment, army and navy transmitters, stations located in Japan, and pho¬
nograph oscillators. The FCC thus informed DeWitt, “No cases involved
signals which could not be identified.” Hoping perhaps that DeWitt was not
really aware of this monitoring operation, the Department of Justice sent
the FCC a letter asking about “the extent to which General DeWitt or his
subordinates were informed of the operations of the Commission’s Radio
Intelligence Division.” They were told in no uncertain terms that DeWitt
and his staff “were kept continuously informed of the Commission’s work,
both through occasional conferences and day-to-day liaison.”87
Further investigation revealed to the lawyers that DeWitt and McCloy
knew about the FBI and naval intelligence reports verifying Japanese Amer¬
ican loyalty and advising against internment. Yet all of this evidence was
excluded from the Final Report. Burling noted:
We are now therefore in possession of substantially incontrovertible

evidence that the most important statements of fact advanced by General
DeWitt to justify the evacuation and detention were incorrect, and fur¬
thermore that General DeWitt had cause to know, and in all probability
did know, that they were incorrect at the time he embodied them in his
final report to General Marshall.88
In light of this evidence, Burling wanted to attach a footnote to the gov¬

ernment’s brief that disavowed use of the report’s deceptive and misleading
rationale for internment:
The Final Report of General DeWitt is relied on in this brief for statistics
and other details concerning the actual evacuation and the events that
took place subsequent thereto. The recital of the circumstances justify¬

ing that evacuation as a matter of military necessity, however, is in several
respects, particularly with reference to the use of illegal radio transmitters
and to shore-to-ship signalling by persons of Japanese ancestry, in conflict
with information in the possession of the Department of Justice. In view
of the contrariety of the reports on this matter, we do not ask the Court to
take judicial notice of the recital of those facts contained in the Report.89
But Solicitor General Charles Fahy knew such an admission might irrep¬
arably damage the government’s case. He amended the footnote to read
simply that “the views of this Department” differed from those of the War
Department on the contested issues. The FBI and FCC reports were never
presented to the Court, and the Department of Justice had now participated
in the conspiracy to conceal evidence that exposed the myth of military
necessity. Ennis and Burling protested against this evisceration of the foot¬
note, acknowledging their reservations about the general’s justification for
internment, and threatened not to sign the brief. But under pressure from
higher officials in both the departments of Justice and War, the two gave in,
signed the brief, and acquiesced to the cover-up.90
By tampering with and concealing historical evidence, the departments
of Justice and War deliberately misled the public and the Court. McCloy’s
suppression of DeWitt’s original report and the failure of the Department of
Justice to note evidence clearing Japanese Americans of charges of sabotage
and espionage undoubtedly influenced the history of the internment cases.
In the Korematsu decision, Justice Hugo Black wrote, “The need for action
was great, and time was short.” Deferring to military judgment, Black in¬
sisted that “real military dangers” and not racial antagonism justified the
order for exclusion.91
Not everyone on the Court, however, failed to see the racism behind
the veil of military necessity. Three justices wrote dissenting opinions in
the Korematsu case. Justice Owen J. Roberts could not condone “convict¬
ing a citizen ... for not submitting to imprisonment in a concentration
camp solely because of his ancestry.” Justice Robert Jackson felt there was
no way to test the soundness of DeWitt’s military decisions. Nevertheless,
he concluded the evacuation was unconstitutional and that if the Court
approved the procedure, “we may as well say that any military order will
be constitutional and have done with it.” The dissent by Justice Frank Mur¬
phy provided a much harsher indictment of the rationale for internment.
Murphy found no credible evidence within the Final Report of a military

necessity that justified denying Japanese Americans their “constitutional
rights to procedural due process.” Murphy condemned DeWitt’s orders for
going “over the brink of constitutional power” and into “the ugly abyss of
racism.” In Murphys eyes the Courts approval of the evacuation consti¬
tuted a “legalization of racism”:
All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood and culture to a
foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessarily a part of this new and
distinct civilization of the United States. They must accordingly be treated
at all times as the heirs of the American experiment and as entitled to all
the rights and freedoms granted by the Constitution.92
In 1945, calling the cases a “disaster,” legal historian Eugene V. Ros-

tow wondered about the footnote in the government’s Korematsu brief that
disclaimed use of the general’s justification for internment. Though not
privy to the controversy that had produced the footnote, Rostow couldn’t
help but observe the failure of the Department of Justice to use “the clos¬
est approximation we have in these cases to an authoritative determination
of fact”:
Not only was there insufficient evidence in those cases to satisfy a reason¬
ably prudent judge or a reasonably prudent general: there was no evi¬
dence whatever by which a court might test the responsibility of General
DeWitt’s action . . . the military proclamations record conclusions, not
evidence of espionage or sabotage.
Yet even without the historical evidence that directly challenged DeWitt’s
“conclusions,” Rostow bemoaned the obvious racism that caused intern¬
ment: “General DeWitt’s Final Report and his testimony before committees
of the Congress” clearly indicated that “his motivation was ignorant race
prejudice, not facts to support the hypothesis that there was a greater risk of
sabotage among the Japanese than among residents of German, Italian, or
any other ethnic affiliation.”93
Other Americans also condemned the rationale for internment. The De¬
partment of Justice received letters of protest from church groups, the Amer¬
ican Association of University Women, the International Ladies Garment
Workers Union, and the National Association for the Advancement of Col¬
ored People (NAACP).94 The role racism played in the decision was pub-
licly denounced in the Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP. Harry
Paxton Howard’s article “Americans in Concentration Camps’’ pointedly
noted that Japanese Americans had been “deprived of their constitutional
rights and constitutional protection” because they had the “misfortune to in¬
clude among their ancestors persons of a non-white country.” Internment was
of “direct concern to the American Negro,” Howard explained, because “the
barbarous treatment of these Americans is the result of the color line.”95
Most other Americans had no problem endorsing this color line, how¬
ever. They simply accepted the rationale presented in the Final Report. By
appealing to racist images of Japanese Americans and suppressing evidence
that showed there was not a single case of espionage or sabotage, officials
successfully promoted the myth of military necessity for decades. In 1967
the Japanese American Research Project conducted a public opinion survey
indicating 48 percent of Californians still approved of the internment.96
Even in 1981 McCloy and Bendetsen thought they could convince the
government and the public that internment was justified. But by then
scholars and Japanese American community activists had uncovered the
reports, memos, and other documents that directly contradicted their testi¬
mony. McCloy and Bendetsen could no longer control how internment was
remembered. In fact, even as they were testifying, law professor Peter Irons
was completing archival research that would disclose how they had ma¬
nipulated and concealed evidence before the Supreme Court. Through the
Freedom of Information Act, Irons gained access to Department of Justice
records for the wartime cases. While examining “dusty cardboard boxes”
for a book about the lawyers who participated in the cases, Irons found the
correspondence and memos that charged government officials with lying
to the Supreme Court. In 1982 he contacted Korematsu, Yasui, and Hi-
rabayashi, urging them to petition the court to overturn their wartime con¬
victions. All three had their convictions vacated by federal courts between
1983 and 1988. It may have taken forty years, but the judicial system finally
acknowledged that government officials such as McCloy and Bendetsen
always knew that military necessity was nothing more than a myth.97
Notes to Introduction and Chapter i 459
31. John Bodnar, Remaking America, 13-20.

32. Examples of exciting scholarship that explore Issei views of internment
include Brian Hayashi, “For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren: Assimilation,
Nationalism, and Protestantism among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895—1942
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); Inside an American Concentration
Camp: Japanese American Resistance at Poston, ed. Lane Ryo Hirabayashi (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1995); and Morning Glory, Evening Shadow: Yamato
Ichihashi and His Internment Writings, 1942—1945, ed. Gordon Chang (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
33. Works that document Sansei activism include Glen Ikuo Kitayama,
“Japanese Americans and the Movement for Redress: A Case Study of Grassroots
Activism in the Los Angeles Chapter for the National Coalition for Redress/
Reparations” (masters thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1993);
Yasuko Takezawa, Breaking the Silence: Redress and Japanese American Ethnicity
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Jere Takahashi, Nisei/Sansei:
Shifting Japanese American Identities and Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1997).
chapter 1
1. Richard Rovere, The American Establishment and Other Reports, Opinions

and Speculations (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1962).
2. Testimony of John J. McCloy, Commission on Wartime Relocation
and Internment of Civilians (hereafter cited as CWRIC), Washington, DC,
November 2, 1981, CWRIC files, National Archives and Records Service (hereaf¬
ter cited as NARS); Japanese Americans’ “sarcastic laughter” and “vocal disagree¬
ment” were noted in “Ex-Aide Calls Japanese Internment ‘Humane,’” New York
Times, November 4, 1981.
3. Testimony of John J. McCloy, CWRIC, November 3, 1981.
4. Ibid. William Marutani came to the hearings prepared to confront Mc¬
Cloy with this evidence of his disregard for the Constitution. William Marutani,
author’s interview, Sacramento, May 17, 1998.
5. Ibid.
6. Who’s Who in America, 1946-1947 (Chicago: A. N. Marquis, 1946), 173.
7. Testimony of Karl R. Bendetsen, CWRIC, November 2,1981.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (here¬
after cited as CWRIC), Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on War¬
time Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Washington, DC: GPO, 1982), 89.
460 Notes to Chapter 1
11. U.S. Department of War, Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West
Coast, 1942 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1943), 33-34.
12. “Transcript of Conference, DeWitt and Newspapermen,” April 14, 1943,
RG 338, NARS.
13. Although DeWitt was listed as the author of the Final Report, the actual
text was written by Karl Bendetsen, then head of the Aliens Division of the Pro¬
vost Marshal General. See Glen Kitayama, “John Lesesne DeWitt,” in Japanese
American History: An A—Z Reference from 1868 to the Present, ed. Brian Niiya
(Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, 1993), 128.
14. U.S. Department of War, Final Report, vii.
15. Ibid., 34.
16. Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in
California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1962), 86, 89, 90; Susan McCoin Kataoka, “Issei
Women: A Study in Subordinate Status” (Ph.D. diss., University of California,
Los Angeles, 1977), 97-98.
17. Emma Gee, “Issei Women,” in Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian
America, ed. Emma Gee (Los Angeles: University of California Asian American
Studies Center, 1976), 361.
18. “Grizzly Bear,” January 1942, cited in Morton Grodzins, Americans
Betrayed: Politics and the Japanese Evacuation (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1949), 48.
19. Jacobus tenBroek, Edward N. Barnhart, and Floyd M. Matson, Prejudice,
War and the Constitution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1954), 79.
20. Frank J. Taylor, “The People Nobody Wants,” Saturday Evening Post,
May 9, 1942.
21. tenBroek et ah, Prejudice, 75.
22. San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, and Los Angeles
Examiner, December 16, 1941, cited in Grodzins, Americans Betrayed, 399.
23. Los Angeles Limes, December 28, 1941, cited in Grodzins, Americans Be¬
trayed, 399.
24. Ibid., January 8, 1942.
25. Ibid., 399.
26. District Intelligence Officer, Fourteenth Naval District, to District Intel¬
ligence Officer, Third Naval District, memorandum, 9 February 1942, in House
Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Hearings
Pursuant to S. Res. 27, 79th Cong., 1st sess., 1942, part 35, 337—38.
27. Ron Dorfman, “The Media and the New Nativism,” Los Angeles Limes,
August 1986.
Notes to Chapter i 461
28. San Francisco News (December 8, 1941) and San Francisco Chronicle
(December 14, 1941), cited in Grodzins, Americans Betrayed.
29. Nichi Bei, December 5, 1941, and February 3, 1942, cited in Grodzins,
Americans Betrayed, 185.
30. Nichi Bei (January 24, 1942), Rafu Shimpo (December 20, 1941), and Nichi
Bei (January 20, 1942), cited in Grodzins, Americans Betrayed, 186.
31. Roger Daniels, Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 30.
32. CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, 64.
33. Ibid., 65.
34. Daniels, Prisoners without Trial, 38.
35- Leland M. Ford to Henry L. Stimson, 16 January 1942, cited in American
Concentration Camps: A Documentary History of the Relocation and Incarceration
of Japanese Americans, January 1, 1942—February 19, 1942, vol. 2, ed. Roger Daniels
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1989).
36. Recommendations of the Pacific Coast Subcommittee on Alien Enemies and
Sabotage (stamped received in the Assistant Secretary’s Office, War Department,
February 15, 1942), cited in CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, 81-82.
37- Bill Hosokawa, Nisei: The Quiet Americans; The Story of a People (New
York: William Morrow, 1969), 281.
38. Michael Slackman, Target: Pearl Harbor (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press / Arizona Memorial Museum Association, 1990), 37-38.
39. Dennis M. Ogawa and Evarts C. Fox Jr., “Japanese Internment and
Relocation: The Hawaii Experience,” in Japanese Americans: From Relocation to
Redress, rev. ed., ed. Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H. L. Kitano
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 135.
40. Office of the Chief of Military History, United States Forces Middle Pacific
and Predecessor Commands during World War II, 7 December 1941—2 September
1949: History of Provost Marshal's Office, historical manuscript file, vol. 24, pt. 2,
198—99, cited in Gary Y. Okihiro, Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in
Hawaii, 1869-1949 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 211-12.
41. CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, 272—73.
42. Peter Irons, Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment
Cases (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 283.
43. Ibid.
44. Daniels, Prisoners without Trial, 36.
45. Ibid., 38.
46. Ibid., 39.
48. Ibid., 42.
462 Notes to Chapter 1
49. Ibid., 77.

50. Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and
War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), 406.
52. Ibid., 43-44.
53- John Franklin Carter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Memorandum
on C. B. Munson’s Report ‘Japanese on the West Coast,”’ 7 November 1941,
in American Concentration Camps: A Documentary History of the Relocation and
Incarceration of Japanese Americans, July 1, 1940-December 31, 1941, vol. 1, ed.
Roger Daniels (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989).
54. Curtis B. Munson, “Japanese on the West Coast” (report attached to
memo from Carter to Roosevelt), 7 November 1941, cited in CWRIC, Personal
Justice Denied, 52—53.
55. Ibid., 65.
56. Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States
since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 212.
58. Ibid., 55, 73.
59. WRA: The Story of Human Conservation, WRA files (Washington, DC:
GPO, 1946), 7-8.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., 78.
63. Walter Lippmann, “The Fifth Column on the West Coast,” Washington
Post, February 12, 1942.
64. Westbrook Pegler, “Fifth Column Problem on Pacific Coast Very Seri¬
ous,” Los Angeles Times, February 16,1942.
65. Ernie Pyle, San Francisco News (December 25, 1941), and Chester Rowell,
San Francisco Chronicle (February 2, 1942), cited in Grodzins, Americans Be¬
trayed, 184.
67. Francis B. Biddle, In Brief Authority (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1962), 226.
68. Francis B. Biddle to Henry L. Stimson, 12 February 1941, in American
Concentration Camps, vol. 2, ed. Roger Daniels.
69. Ibid., 85.
70. Ibid.
72. Ibid.
Notes to Chapter i 463
73. Audrie Girdner and Anne Loftis, The Great Betrayal: The Evacuation
of the Japanese-Americans during World War II (New York: Macmillan, 1969),
104-5.
74. Sandra C. Taylor, “‘Fellow-Feelers with the Afflicted’: The Christian
Churches and the Relocation of the Japanese during World War II,” in Japanese
Americans: From Relocation to Redress, ed. Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and
Harry H. L. Kitano (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986), 124.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid.
77. Hosokawa, Nisei: The Quiet Americans, 293.
80. Ibid., 288.
81. Irons, Justice at War, 208.
82. Ibid., 212.
83. Ibid., 206-212.
85. Ibid., 196-97.
86. Daniels, Asian America, 275-76.
87. Irons, Justice at War, 284.
88. Ibid., 285.
89. Ibid., 286.
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid., 340. See also Daniels, Prisoners without Trial, 62.
92. Daniels, Asian America, 279-81.
93. Eugene Rostow, “The Japanese American Cases—a Disaster,” Yale Law
Journal 54, no. 489 (1945): 489. Rostow also wrote an article for a popular audi¬
ence portraying internment as “hasty, unnecessary, and mistaken.” See Eugene
Rostow, “Our Worst Wartime Mistake,” Harpers Magazine 191, no. 1144 (Sep¬
tember 1945): 193-201.
94. Grodzins, Americans Betrayed, 190.
95. Harry Paxton Howard, “Americans in Concentration Camps,” Crisis,
September 1942, 281-84, 301-2, cited in Grodzins, Americans Betrayed, 164. See
also Cheryl Greenberg, “Black and Jewish Responses to Japanese Internment,”
Journal of American Ethnic History 14, no. 2 (1995): 3—37; and Robert Shaffer,
“Cracking the Consensus: Defending the Rights of Japanese Americans during
World War II,” Radical History Review 72 (Fall 1998): 84-120.
97. This campaign is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 7.

Yang Murray History of Military Necessity Ch2 in Historical Memories of The Japanese Internment

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ONE

The History of “Military Necessity”

Murray, Alice Yang. Historical Memories of the Japanese

who “might be able to offer additional recollections” to the commission.

Observers held their breath as Marutani asked the stenotypist to repeat

United States. He continually referred to Japanese Americans as “the

The testimony before the CWRIC of Colonel Karl R. Bendetsen, former

figure i. John J. McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War. World Bank Group

Under the then circumstances, entailing the destruction of most of our

vigilantes. No government officials offered this justification when the deci¬

In a press conference one year after Japanese Americans were interned,

The continued presence of a large, unassimilated, tightly knit racial group,

Officials had no grounds “for assuming that any Japanese, barred

The “Enemy Race”

Few Americans questioned Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt’s call to

California as a breeding ground for dual-citizens (nisei);—the treacherous

The Joint Immigration Committee sent a manifesto to California news¬

A rapid succession of victories by Japanese forces in the Pacific intensified

As Americans struggled to make sense of these defeats, reports of the at¬

Dec. 9 Fleet of thirty-four [Japanese] ships between San Francisco and

Stillwell concluded that “nothing should go unconfirmed” because “com¬

“all Japanese, whether citizens or not, be placed in inland concentration

If an American born Japanese, who is a citizen, is really patriotic and

On February 13, U.S. congressional representatives from California,

Executive Order 9066

have to be an evacuation on the West coast, not only of Japanese aliens

If we base our evacuation upon the ground of removing enemy aliens, it

politicians throughout California. There was talk of the possibility of an¬

The second generation Japanese (Nisei) can only be evacuated either as

wild charges being made by national figures were unfounded. On Lincoln’s

Acknowledging that there had been no sabotage on the Pacific Coast, he

respected.”67 What the attorney general neglected to mention, however, was

Furthermore, even though Biddle voiced to Roosevelt his objections, he

WESTERN DEFENSE COMMAND AND FOURTH ARMY

figure 2 . Evacuation Order. U.S. War Department, Final Report: Japanese

Go to the Civil Control Station between the hours of 8:00 A. M. and

See Civilian Exclusion Order No. 27.

figure 3 . Grandfather and grandchildren “tagged” for transport to an assembly

sabotage committed by Japanese during the attack on Pearl Harbor.” Also,

The History of the Decision Presented to the Supreme Court

necessity required the incarceration of Japanese Americans. In other words,

toward Japanese Americans and as reasons for their “lack of assimilation”

We are now therefore in possession of substantially incontrovertible

In light of this evidence, Burling wanted to attach a footnote to the gov¬

took place subsequent thereto. The recital of the circumstances justify¬

Murphy found no credible evidence within the Final Report of a military

In 1945, calling the cases a “disaster,” legal historian Eugene V. Ros-

31. John Bodnar, Remaking America, 13-20.

1. Richard Rovere, The American Establishment and Other Reports, Opinions

49. Ibid., 77.

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