In making
this recommendation the Army commander on the Pacific coast, Lt.
Gen. John L. DeWitt, was acting not only as commanding general
of the Fourth Army and Western Defense Command but also as commander
of the Western Theater of Operations, established on 11 December
with the same territorial limits as those of the defense command.
However General DeWitt may have felt during December about the
treatment of enemy aliens, he was then firmly opposed to an evacuation
of citizens. During a telephone conversation between Maj. Gen.
Allen W. Gullion, the War Department's Provost Marshal General,
and General DeWitt on 26 December 1941, General Gullion remarked
that he had just been visited by a representative of the Los Angeles
Chamber of Commerce, who had asked for a roundup of all Japanese
in the Los Angeles area. In response, General DeWitt said (and
General Gullion expressed agreement with what he said):
I thought that thing out to my satisfaction.... If we go ahead
and arrest the 93,000 Japanese, native born and foreign born,
we are going to have an awful job on our hands and are very liable
to alienate the loyal Japanese from disloyal.... I'm very doubtful
that it would be common sense procedure to try and intern or to
intern 117,000 Japanese in this theater.... I told the governors
of all the states that those people should be watched better if
they were watched by the police and people of the community in
which they live and have been living for years.... and then inform
the F.B.I. or the military authorities of any suspicious action
so we could take necessary steps to handle it ... rather than
try to intern all those people, men, women and children, and hold
them under military control and under guard. I don't think it's
a sensible thing to do.... I'd rather go along the way we are
now ... rather than attempt any such wholesale internment....
An American citizen, after all, is an American citizen. And while
they all may not be loyal, I think we can weed the disloyal out
of the loyal and lock them up if necessary.
In any event,
all planning for mass evacuation of either aliens or citizens
from strategic areas was deferred pending new arrangements that
were in the making with the Department of Justice for more effective
control of enemy aliens.
While these
arrangements were being worked out, the Provost Marshal General
proposed that responsibility for the alien program be transferred
from Justice to the War Department in all theaters of operations.
After the decision to activate an Eastern Theater of Operations,
he amended his proposal so that, in the continental United States,
it would apply only in the Western Defense Command. General DeWitt
opposed the transfer, at least until it became evident that the
Department of Justice through the FBI could not control the situation
on the west coast. He thought the FBI organization on the coast
could handle matters effectively if Attorney General Francis Biddle
would provide the FBI with adequate authority. General DeWitt
also thought civil control of the alien program better than military
control of it. General Gullion therefore decided to hold up his
proposal until there was better evidence of its necessity.
What General
DeWitt wanted at this time was the issuance of clear instructions
to FBI agents on the west coast that would enable them to take
more positive steps to prevent sabotage and espionage. At his
urging Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson had conferred with Mr.
Biddle, and thereafter the Attorney General speeded up the implementation
of the Presidential proclamations of 7 and 8 December. In late
December the Department of Justice announced regulations requiring
enemy aliens in the Western Defense Command to surrender radio
transmitters, short-wave radio receivers, and certain types of
cameras by 5 January 1942. On 30 December General DeWitt was informed
that the Attorney General had also authorized the issuance of
warrants for search and arrest in any house where an enemy alien
lived upon representation by an FBI agent that there was reasonable
cause to believe that there was contraband on the premises. In
addition, the Department of Justice and the Provost Marshal General
had arranged to send representatives to San Francisco to confer
with General DeWitt in order to work out more specific arrangements
for controlling enemy aliens. To centralize and expedite Army
action in Washington, Gullion also arranged for DeWitt to deal
directly with the Provost Marshal General's office on west coast
alien problems, and for the latter to keep General Headquarters
(GHQ) informed of developments. As a result of this arrangement,
the responsible Army command headquarters in Washington had little
to do during January and February 1942 with the plans and decision
for Japanese evacuation.
The San Francisco
conference took place on 4 and 5 January 1942. Before the meetings
the War Department's representative, Maj. Karl R. Bendetsen, chief
of the Aliens Division, Provost Marshal General's office, recommended
that General DeWitt insist on several measures beyond those already
ordered by the Attorney General. In particular he urged the definition
of strategic areas from which all enemy aliens were to be excluded
and that authority to prescribe such areas be vested in the Army.
He also insisted that there must be a new and complete registration
of enemy aliens and a "pass and permit" system similar
to the one prevalent in prewar Europe. The Justice representative,
Assistant Attorney General James Rowe, Jr., also presented broader
plans for action than any the Attorney General had hitherto approved.
In opening the conference, General DeWitt emphatically declared
his serious concern over the alien situation and his distrust
in particular of the Japanese population-both aliens and citizens.
But, according to the later recollections of Mr. Rowe, the general
during the meetings expressed strong opposition to a mass evacuation
of the Japanese. What he wanted was a full implementation of the
President's proclamations. He particularly wanted the FBI to have
blanket authority to "search, enter, and arrest" at
the homes and business premises of all suspected individuals.
In a formal commentary on Mr. Rowe's proposals, General DeWitt
expressed some apprehensions that they would prove inadequate,
but further discussion on 5 January led to an exchange of identical
memorandums on the following day representing a plan of action
mutually agreeable to General DeWitt, to Mr. Rowe, and to Mr.
N. J. L. Pieper, the chief FBI agent on the Pacific coast who
had also attended these meetings. These memorandums provided for
an alien registration with the least delay, for FBI searches of
suspected premises under regulations that subsequently proved
entirely satisfactory to General DeWitt, and for the designation
of restricted areas from which enemy aliens would be barred by
the Attorney General, who would "entertain" Army recommendations
on this score if they were accompanied by an exact description
of each area.
The arrangements
agreed upon at the San Francisco meetings took much longer to
put into effect than either General DeWitt or the Justice Department
representatives had anticipated. The registration of enemy aliens
was finally undertaken between 2 and 9 February, and the large-scale
"spot" raids that General DeWitt was especially anxious
to have launched did not get under way until the same week; thus
both operations took place in the period when agitation against
the Japanese was rapidly mounting. General DeWitt had anticipated
that he could fix the boundaries of the restricted areas by 9
January, but it was 21 January before he sent the first of his
lists (for California only) to Washington for transmission to
the Attorney General. One of his principal difficulties was to
reconcile the recommendations of the Navy, which by agreement
were to be made through General DeWitt, with the position of the
Department of Justice. Navy commanders wanted to exclude not only
enemy aliens but also all American-born Japanese who could not
show "actual severance of all allegiance to the Japanese
Government."
General DeWitt's
recommendation of 21 January dealing with California called for
the exclusion of enemy aliens from eighty-six "Category A"
restricted zones and their close control by a pass and permit
system in eight "Category B" zones. Many of the Category
A areas, in the vicinity of strategic installations, were uninhabited
or had no alien population, but the execution of the recommendation
nevertheless would have required the evacuation of more than 7,000
persons. Only 40 percent of these would have been Japanese aliens;
the majority would have been Italians.
The Secretary
of War's letter (drafted in the Provost Marshal General's office),
which forwarded this recommendation to Mr. Biddle, added the following
comments:
In recent
conferences with General DeWitt, he has expressed great apprehension
because of the presence on the Pacific coast of many thousand
alien enemies. As late as yesterday, 24 January, he stated over
the telephone that shore-to-ship and ship-to-shore radio communications,
undoubtedly coordinated by intelligent enemy control were continually
operating. A few days ago it was reported by military observers
on the Pacific coast that not a single ship had sailed from our
Pacific ports without being subsequently attacked. General DeWitt's
apprehensions have been confirmed by recent visits of military
observers from the War Department to the Pacific coast.
The alarming
and dangerous situation just described, in my opinion, calls for
immediate and stringent action.
Actually there
had been no Japanese submarine or surface vessels anywhere near
the west coast during the preceding month, and careful investigation
subsequently indicated that all claims of hostile shore-to-ship
and ship-to-shore communications lacked any foundation whatsoever.
General DeWitt's recommendations for restricted areas in
Arizona followed
on 24 January, and for Oregon and Washington on 31 January; the
recommendations were forwarded by the War Department to Justice
on 29 January and 3 February, respectively. By the latter date
the position of the Japanese population was under heavy attack,
and in consequence the alien exclusion program was being eclipsed
by a drive to evacuate all people of Japanese descent from the
west coast states.
Agitation
for a mass evacuation of the Japanese did not reach significant
dimensions until more than a month after the outbreak of war.
Then, beginning in mid-January 1942, public and private demands
for federal and state action increased rapidly in tempo and volume.
Behind these demands lay a profound suspicion of the Japanese
population, fanned, of course, by the nature and scope of Japan's
early military successes in the Pacific. Army estimates of the
situation reflected this suspicion. An intelligence bulletin of
21 January concluded that there was an "espionage net containing
Japanese aliens, first and second generation Japanese and other
nationals ... thoroughly organized and working underground."
In conversations with Brig. Gen. Mark W. Clark of GHQ on 20 and
21 January, General DeWitt expressed his apprehension that any
enemy raid on the west coast would probably be accompanied by
"a violent outburst of coordinated and controlled sabotage"
among the Japanese population. In talking with General Gullion
on 24 January, General DeWitt stated what was to become one of
the principal arguments for evacuation. "The fact that nothing
has happened so far is more or less ... ominous," he said,
"in that I feel that in view of the fact that we have had
no sporadic attempts at sabotage there is control being exercised
and when we have it it will be on a mass basis." But in this
same conversation he also said that he was still opposed to any
move to transfer authority from Justice to the War Department
because he thought there was "every indication" that
the arrangements made with the Department of Justice and its FBI
were going to prove satisfactory.
The publication
of the report of the Roberts Commission, which had investigated
the Pearl Harbor attack, on 25 January had a large and immediate
effect on both public opinion and government action. The report
concluded that there had been widespread espionage in Hawaii before
Pearl Harbor, both by Japanese consular agents and by Japanese
residents of Oahu who had "no open relations with the Japanese
foreign service." The latter charge, though proved false
after the war was over, was especially inflammatory at the time
it was made. On 27 January General DeWitt had a long talk with
Governor Culbert L. Olson of California and afterward reported:
There's a
tremendous volume of public opinion now developing against the
Japanese of all classes, that is aliens and non-aliens, to get
them off the land, and in Southern California around Los Angeles-in
that area too-they want and they are bringing pressure on the
government to move all the Japanese out. As a matter of fact,
it's not being instigated or developed by people who are not thinking
but by the best people of California. Since the publication of
the Roberts Report they feel that they are living in the midst
of a lot of enemies. They don't trust the Japanese, none of them.
Two days later
the general and Mr. Pieper, the FBI chief, met with the Attorney
General of California, Mr. Earl Warren. General DeWitt reported
that Mr. Warren was in thorough agreement with Governor Olson
that the Japanese population should be removed from the state
of California and the general expressed his own unqualified concurrence
in this proposal and also his willingness to accept responsibility
for the enemy alien program if it were transferred to him.
In Washington,
as Major Bendetsen told General DeWitt on 29 January, the California
Congressional delegation was "beginning to get up in arms,"
and its representatives had scheduled an informal meeting for
the following afternoon to formulate recommendations for action.
Some Washington state congressmen also attended the meeting, to
which representatives of the Justice and War Departments were
invited. Major Bendetsen reported General DeWitt's views to the.
assembled congressmen and, though denying that he was authorized
to speak for the War Department, nevertheless expressed the opinion
that the Army would be entirely willing to take over from Justice,
"provided they accorded the Army, and the Secretary of War,
and the military commander under him, full authority to require
the services of any other federal agency, and provided that federal
agency was required to respond." The congressmen unanimously
approved a suggested program of action, which called for an evacuation
of enemy aliens and "dual" citizens from critical areas,
but which made no specific mention of the Japanese. In presenting
the Congressional program to his chief, Major Bendetsen described
it as actually "calling for the immediate evacuation of all
Japanese from the Pacific coastal strip including Japanese citizens
of the age of 21 and under, and calling for an executive order
of the President, imposing full responsibility and authority (with
power to requisition the services of other Federal agencies) upon
the War Department." He also reported the Congressional recommendations,
as adopted, to General DeWitt, who expressed general approval
of them despite some technical objections. The next day, the general
recorded this opinion:
As a matter
of fact, the steps now being taken by the Attorney General through
the F.B.I. will do nothing more than exercise a controlling influence
and preventative action against sabotage; it will not, in my opinion,
be able to stop it. The only positive answer to this question
is evacuation of all enemy aliens from the West Coast and resettlement
or internment under positive control, military or otherwise.
The Department
of Justice in the meantime had agreed informally to accept General
DeWitt's initial recommendation for restricted areas in California,
and it was preparing to carry out this and other aspects of the
alien control program. On 28 January it announced the appointment
of Thomas C. Clark as Co-ordinator of the Alien Enemy Control
program within the Western Defense Command, and Mr. Clark arrived
on the scene of action on the following day. On 29 January Justice
made its first public announcement about the restricted Category
A areas that were to be cleared of enemy aliens by 24 February.
As a result
of the Congressional recommendations and other developments, Attorney
General Biddle asked War Department representatives to attend
a meeting in his office on Saturday afternoon, 1 February. There
he presented them with the draft of a press release to be issued
jointly by the Justice and War Departments, indicating agreement
on all alien control measures taken to date and including the
statement: "The Department of War and the Department of Justice
are in agreement that the present military situation does not
at this time require the removal of American citizens of the Japanese
race." In opening the meeting Mr. Biddle stated that Justice
would have nothing whatever to do with any interference with citizens
or with a suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. The War Department
representatives--Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, General
Gullion, and Major Bendetsen--agreed to the wording of the press
release except for the sentence quoted. The meeting then adjourned,
the War Department representatives withholding approval of any
press release until General DeWitt's views could be obtained,
and until they learned the outcome of a conference at Sacramento
that had been arranged for 2 February between General DeWitt,
Mr. Clark, the governor of California, and other federal and state
officials. Major Bendetsen informed the Chief of Staffs office
that the Justice Department's proposal had been held up also because
General DeWitt in telephone conversations had been provisionally
recommending the evacuation of the whole Japanese population from
the Pacific coastal frontier. In the meantime the Provost Marshal
General's office had been formulating plans for mass evacuation
and had already located sufficient nontroop shelter to provide
for substantially all of the west coast Japanese. In a telephone
conversation immediately after the meeting with Justice representatives,
Major Bendetsen reported, General DeWitt agreed to submit a recommendation
for mass evacuation in writing.
Before General
DeWitt could report the outcome of the Sacramento meeting, Secretary
Stimson met, on 3 February, with Mr. McCloy, General Gullion,
and Major Bendetsen to confer about the proposed press release
and the Japanese problem in general. They discussed a proposal
under which military reservations would be established around
the big aircraft factories and some port and harbor installations,
and from which everyone could be excluded at the outset and until
they were licensed to return. In practice, licenses would not
be issued to Japanese residents or to other groups or individuals
under suspicion. It appeared that under this plan citizens as
well as aliens could be excluded legally without obvious discrimination.
During the
3 February discussion, Mr. Stimson was handed a record of a telephone
conversation between General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff,
and General DeWitt, who had called just as the Secretary of War's
meeting was getting under way. In it, General DeWitt said:
I had a conference
yesterday with the Governor and several representatives from the
Department of Justice and Department of Agriculture with a view
to removal of the Japanese from where they are now living to other
portions of the State. And the Governor thinks it can be satisfactorily
handled without having a resettlement somewhere in the central
part of the United States and removing them entirely from the
state of California. As you know the people out here are very
much disturbed over these aliens, the Japanese being among them,
and want to get them out of the several communities. And I've
agreed that if they can solve the problem by getting them out
of the areas limited as the combat zone, that it would be satisfactory.
That would take them 100 to 150 miles from the coast, and they're
working on it. The Department of Justice has a representative
here and the Department of Agriculture, and they think the plan
is an excellent one. I'm only concerned with getting them away
from around these aircraft factories and other places.
In other exchanges
on this and succeeding days General DeWitt explained that what
the California authorities proposed to do was to move both citizen
and alien Japanese (voluntarily if possible, and in collaboration
with American-born Japanese leaders) from urban areas and from
along the seacoast to agricultural areas within the state. They
wanted to do this in particular in order to avoid having to replace
the Japanese with Mexican and Negro laborers who might otherwise
have to be brought into California in considerable numbers. The
California officials felt they needed about ten days to study
the problem and come up with a workable plan. By 4 February it
appeared to General DeWitt that they could produce a plan that
would be satisfactory from the standpoint of defense.
After meeting
with Secretary Stimson on 3 February, McCloy called DeWitt to
tell him about the licensing plan and to caution him against taking
any position in favor of mass Japanese evacuation. The next day
General Gullion told General Clark that Mr. Stimson and Mr. McCloy
were against mass evacuation of the Japanese. "They are pretty
much against it," he said, "and they are also pretty
much against interfering with citizens unless it can be done legally."
While agreeing that the Stimson-McCloy point of view represented
the War Department position for the moment, Gullion also said
that personally he did not think the licensing action proposed
was going to cure the situation. On this same day, 4 February,
Colonel Bendetsen (just promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel)
in talking with General DeWitt remarked that he was sure that
American citizens of Japanese extraction would have to be excluded
from some areas at least. General DeWitt evaded a direct comment
at this point in the conversation, but later said:
You see, the
situation is this: I have never on my own initiative recommended
a mass evacuation, or the removal of any man, any Jap, other than
an alien. In other words, I have made no distinction between an
alien as to whether he is Jap, Italian, or German-that they must
all get out of Area A, that is the Category A area. The agitation
to move all the Japanese away from the Coast, and some suggestions,
out of California entirely-is within the State, the population
of the State, which has been espoused by the Governor. I have
never been a body [sic] to that, but I have said, if you do that,
and can solve that problem, it will be a positive step toward
the protection of the coast ... But I have never said, "You've
got to do it, in order to protect the coast"; ... I can take
such measures as are necessary from a military standpoint to control
the American Jap if he is going to cause trouble within those
restricted areas.
The projected
joint press release of the War and Justice Departments, which
had been submerged in this more fundamental issue, was finally
issued in revised form on 5 February, and in terms that differed
from what either General DeWitt or the Provost Marshal General's
office had wanted. With respect to citizens, it stated innocuously:
"The Government is fully aware of the problem presented by
dual nationalities, particularly among the Japanese. The appropriate
Governmental agencies are now dealing with the problem."
Three days
earlier, on 2 February, members of Congress from all three Pacific
states had organized informally under the leadership of their
senior Senator, Hiram Johnson. He had appointed two subcommittees,
one headed by Senator Rufus C. Holman of Oregon to consider plans
for increased military strength along the Pacific coast, and the
other by Senator Mon C. Wallgren of Washington to deal with the
questions of enemy aliens and the prevention of sabotage. On 4
February General Clark of GHQ and Admiral Harold R. Stark, the
Chief of Naval Operations, were asked to testify on the west coast
military outlook at a meeting of the first of these subcommittees.
Before they spoke, Senator Holman summed up the situation by saying
that the people on the west coast were alarmed and horrified as
to their persons, their employment, and their homes. General Clark
said that he thought the Pacific states were unduly alarmed. While
both he and Admiral Stark agreed that the west coast defenses
were not adequate to prevent the enemy from attacking, they also
agreed that the chance of any sustained attack or of an invasion
was--as General Clark put it--nil. They believed that sporadic
air raids on key installations were a distinct possibility, but
they also held that the west coast military defenses were considerable
and in fairly good shape; and as Admiral Stark said, from the
military point of view the Pacific coast necessarily had a low
priority as compared with Hawaii and the far Pacific. These authoritative
Army and Navy views were passed on to the Wallgren subcommittee,
but they do not seem to have made much impression.
On this same
day, 4 February, the federal government's Office of Facts and
Figures completed an analysis of a hasty survey of public opinion
in California and concluded: "Even with such a small sample,
... one can infer that the situation in California is serious;
that it is loaded with potential dynamite; but that it is not
as desperate as some people believe." A contemporary Navy
report described what was happening to the Japanese population
in the Los Angeles area in these words: "... loss of employment
and income due to anti-Japanese agitation by and among Caucasian
Americans, continued personal attacks by Filipinos and other racial
groups, denial of relief funds to desperately needy cases, cancellation
of licenses for markets, produce houses, stores, etc., by California
State authorities, discharges from jobs by the wholesale, unnecessarily
harsh restrictions on travel including discriminatory regulations
against all Nisei preventing them from engaging in commercial
fishing." While expressing opposition to any mass evacuation
of the Japanese, the report concluded that if practices such as
those described continued there would "most certainly be
outbreaks of sabotage, riots, and other civil strife in the not
too distant future."
In fact, no
proved instances of sabotage or of espionage after Pearl Harbor
among the west coast Japanese population were ever uncovered.
The most damaging tangible evidence turned up against the Japanese
was that produced by the intensive searches of their premises
by the FBI from early February onward. By May it had seized 2,592
guns of various kinds, 199,000 rounds of ammunition, 1,652 sticks
of dynamite, 1,458 radio receivers, 2,914 cameras, 37 motion picture
cameras, and numerous other articles that the alien Japanese had
been ordered to turn in at the beginning of January. A major portion
of the guns and ammunition was picked up in a raid on a sporting
goods shop. After assessing this evidence, Department of Justice
officials concluded:
We have not,
however, uncovered through these searches any dangerous persons
that we could not otherwise know about. We have not found among
all the sticks of dynamite and gun powder any evidence that any
of it was to be used in bombs. We have not found a single machine
gun nor have we found any gun in any circumstances indicating
that it was to be used in a manner helpful to our enemies. We
have not found a camera which we have reason to believe was for
use in espionage.
There were
better if less tangible grounds for suspecting that some of the
Japanese people-citizens as well as aliens--might become disloyal
in the event of a Japanese invasion. The Navy report mentioned
above indicated that a small but significant minority of the west
coast Japanese could be expected to be highly undependable in
a crisis; and subsequently the War Relocation Authority concluded
that for this reason "a selective evacuation of people of
Japanese descent from the west coast military area was justified
and administratively feasible in the spring of 1942," although
it concluded also that a mass evacuation such as was actually
carried out was never justified.
Within this
setting Colonel Bendetsen on 4 February wrote a long memorandum
to General Gullion that stated at the outset his conclusion that
an enemy alien evacuation "would accomplish little as a measure
of safety," since the alien Japanese were mostly elderly
people who could do little harm if they would. Furthermore, their
removal would inevitably antagonize large numbers of their relatives
among the American-born Japanese. After considering the various
alternatives that had been suggested for dealing with citizens,
Colonel Bendetsen recommended the designation of military areas
from which all persons who did not have permission to enter and
remain would be excluded as a measure of military necessity. In
his opinion, this plan was clearly legal and he recommended that
it be executed by three steps: first, the issuance of an executive
order by the President authorizing the Secretary of War to designate
military areas; second, the designation of military areas upon
the recommendation of General DeWitt; and, third, the immediate
evacuation from areas so designated of all persons to whom it
was not proposed to issue permits to re-enter or remain. Colonel
Bendetsen assumed that, if military areas were established on
the west coast in place of all Category A restricted areas thus
far recommended by General DeWitt, about 30,000 people would have
to be evacuated.
The Deputy
Provost Marshal General, Col. Archer L. Lerch, endorsed Colonel
Bendetsen's proposals, and in doing so commented on what he called
the "decided weakening of General DeWitt" on the question
of Japanese evacuation, which he considered "most unfortunate."
He also thought the plan for resettlement within California being
worked out between General DeWitt and the state authorities savored
"too much of the spirit of Rotary" and overlooked "the
necessary cold-bloodedness of war." General Gullion presented
a condensed version of Colonel Bendetsen's observations and recommendations
in a memorandum to Mr. McCloy on the following day. In doing so,
he also noted that General DeWitt had changed his position, and
now appeared to favor a more lenient treatment of the American-born
Japanese to be worked out in co-operation with their leaders;
in General Gullion's opinion, such co-operation was dangerous
and the delay involved was "extremely dangerous." A
revision of this memorandum, with all reference to General DeWitt
deleted, became the Provost Marshal General's recommendation of
6 February to Mr. McCloy that steps be taken immediately to eliminate
what General Gullion described as the great danger of Japanese-inspired
sabotage on the west coast. He advised that these steps should
include the internment by the Army of all alien Japanese east
of the Sierra Nevada mountains, together with as many citizen
members of their families as would voluntarily accompany them,
and the exclusion of all citizen Japanese from restricted zones
and their resettlement with the assistance of various federal
agencies.
On the following
day, 7 February, Colonel Bendetsen read General Gullion's memorandum
to General DeWitt, who expressed some enthusiasm for its recommendations
but did not want to endorse them without further study. By 7 February,
also, Mr. McCloy had decided to send Colonel Bendetsen to the
west coast "to confer with General DeWitt in connection with
mass evacuation of all Japanese. When Colonel Bendetsen departed
for San Francisco he carried new instructions for the Army's west
coast commander. These instructions, together with President Roosevelt's
decisions on 11 February, presently to be mentioned, were to produce
new and detailed recommendations from General DeWitt.
In the meantime,
the War and Justice Departments had been approaching an impasse
over the area evacuations contemplated under the enemy alien control
program. After agreeing informally to accept General DeWitt's
initial California recommendation, Justice officials balked at
accepting the very large size Category A areas he recommended
for Washington and Oregon, since they included the entire cities
of Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland. The execution of this recommendation
would have required the evacuation of about 10,700 additional
enemy aliens and, as in the case of California, only about 40
percent of these would have been Japanese. As a practical matter
the Department of Justice would have found it extremely difficult
to supply either the manpower or the internment facilities that
a compulsory evacuation of seventeen or eighteen thousand enemy
aliens would have required, and by 4 February its Washington representatives
were intimating that, if there were any further Category A recommendations
or if the evacuation of any citizens were to be involved, Justice
would have to bow out and turn its evacuation responsibilities
over to the War Department. General DeWitt on 4 February was considering
putting the whole Los Angeles area into Category A because his
air commander had recommended Category A zones around 220 different
installations that, when plotted on the map, almost blanketed
the area anyway. For the same reason, General DeWitt believed
he might have to put all of San Diego in Category A also. He finally
recommended the blanket Category A coverage of the two cities
in a letter of 7 February, and five days later he recommended
that almost all of the San Francisco Bay area be put in Category
A. If all of General DeWitt's recommendations for Category A areas
through 12 February had been accepted, it would have made necessary
the evacuation of nearly 89,000 enemy aliens from areas along
the Pacific coast-only 25,000 of whom would have been Japanese.
It should
be borne in mind that none of the enemy alien program recommendations
submitted by General DeWitt through 16 February included American
citizens of Japanese or other extraction. The concentration of
the Japanese population near strategic points seemed in itself
to be sinister in 1942. Actually, there was a greater proportionate
concentration of German and Italian aliens near strategic points
than there was of Japanese. General DeWitt's Category A recommendations
would have affected nine tenths of the west coast German alien
population and nearly three fourths of the Italian aliens, but
less than two thirds of the Japanese aliens. Of course General
DeWitt after 3 February was also counting upon the California
state authorities to persuade the citizen Japanese to evacuate
California's urban areas and other sensitive points along the
coast.
In a letter
to the Secretary of War on 9 February, Attorney General Biddle
formally agreed to announce the Category A areas initially recommended
for Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington as prohibited
to enemy aliens by 15 or 24 February-applying the latter date
to those areas that had a considerable alien population. But Mr.
Biddle questioned the necessity of forcibly excluding German and
Italian aliens from all of these areas and wondered why whole
cities had been included in Washington and Oregon and none in
California. He added that if, as he had been informally advised,
all of Los Angeles County was going to be recommended as a Category
A area, the Department of Justice would have to step out of the
picture because it did not have the physical means to carry out
a mass evacuation of such scope. In conclusion, he stated that
the Department of Justice was not authorized under any circumstances
to evacuate American citizens; if the Army for reasons of military
necessity wanted that done in particular areas, the Army itself
would have to do it.
The Attorney
General's stand led naturally to the drafting of a War Department
memorandum summarizing the "questions to be determined re
Japanese exclusion" that needed to be presented to President
Roosevelt for decision. These questions were:
A follow-up
letter explained that 100,000 enemy aliens would be involved,
60,000 of whom would be women and children, and that all were
to be interned east of the Western Defense Command, "50 percent
in the Eighth Corps Area, 30 percent in the Seventh, and 10 percent
each in the Fourth and Sixth." There were three reasons for
the intention (as of 17 February) of removing the Pacific coast
Japanese to areas east of the Western Defense Command. Since mid-December
General DeWitt had insisted that internment of enemy aliens ought
to be outside his theater of operations; some of the governments
of the intermountain states had already indicated that they would
not countenance any free settlement of the west coast Japanese
within their borders; and, lastly, an Army survey of existing
facilities for internment in the five interior states of the Ninth
Corps Area disclosed that they could not accommodate more than
2,500 people.
The final
steps toward a decision on the evacuation of the west coast Japanese
began on 17 February with another conference between Secretary
Stimson and President Roosevelt. Thereafter, Mr. Stimson met in
the afternoon with Mr. McCloy, General Clark, General Gullion,
and Colonel Bendetsen. General Clark protested that a mass evacuation
would involve the use of too many troops. Mr. Stimson again expressed
his dislike of mass evacuation. But finally the Secretary decided
that General DeWitt should be instructed to commence an evacuation
immediately and to the extent he deemed necessary for the protection
of vital installations. At the conclusion of this meeting, General
Clark consulted his GHQ chief, Lt. Gen. Lesley J. McNair, who
decided that General DeWitt should not be allotted any additional
troops for evacuation purposes.
On the evening
of 17 February, McCloy, Gullion, and Bendetsen met with Justice
representatives at the home of Attorney General Biddle. After
some preliminary discussion, General Gullion pulled from his pocket
and proceeded to read the draft of a proposed Presidential executive
order that would authorize the Secretary of War to remove both
citizens and aliens from areas that he might designate. Mr. Biddle
accepted the draft without further argument, because the President
had already indicated to him that this was a matter for military
decision. After several more meetings between Justice and War
Department officials during the next two days, the executive order
was presented to the President and signed by him late on 19 February.
Between 18 and 20 February Mr. McCloy, General Gullion, and Colonel
Bendetsen drafted the instructions for General DeWitt to guide
his execution of the evacuation plan, and embodied them in two
letter directives, both dated 20 February. These directives and
a copy of Executive Order 9066 reached General DeWitt on 23 February.
On 21 February
the Secretary of War, in accordance with the President's request,
answered the Congressional letter of 13 February by assuring the
west coast delegation that plans for the partial or complete evacuation
of the Japanese from the Pacific coast were being formulated.
In consultation with the Department of Justice. War Department
officials at this time also prepared a draft of legislation that
would put teeth into the enforcement of the new evacuation program,
but did not submit it to Congress until 9 March. This draft as
a bill became Public Law 503 after brief debate; it was passed
by a voice vote in both houses on 19 March and signed by the President
on 21 March. Three days later, the Western Defense Command issued
its first compulsory exclusion order.
As already
noted, the plan for evacuation presented in the War Department's
directives of 20 February differed materially from the plan recommended
by General DeWitt in his memorandum of 13 February. The central
objective of the DeWitt plan was to move all enemy aliens and
American-born Japanese out of all Category A areas in California,
Oregon, and Washington that the general had recommended through
12 February. Although General DeWitt had repeatedly described
the Japanese as the most dangerous element of the west coast population,
he also made it clear as late as 17 February that he was "opposed
to any preferential treatment to any alien irrespective of race,"
and therefore that he wanted German and Italian aliens as well
as all Japanese evacuated from Category A areas. His plan assumed
that all enemy aliens would be interned under guard outside the
Western Defense Command, at least until arrangements could be
made for their resettlement. Citizen evacuees would either accept
internment voluntarily, or relocate themselves with such assistance
as state and federal agencies might offer. Although this group
would be permitted to resettle in Category B areas within the
coastal zone, General DeWitt clearly preferred that they move
inland. The central objective of the War Department plan was to
move all Japanese out of the California Category A areas first,
and they were not to be permitted to resettle within Category
B areas or within a larger Military Area No. 1 to be established
along the coast. There was to be no evacuation of Italians without
the express permission of the Secretary of War except on an individual
basis. Although the War Department plan ostensibly provided that
German aliens were to be treated in the same manner as the Japanese,
it qualified this intention by providing for the exemption of
bone fide German refugees. This qualification automatically stayed
the evacuation of German aliens until General DeWitt could discover
who among them were genuine refugees. The War Department plan
contemplated voluntary relocation of all types of evacuees to
the maximum extent possible, with internment as necessary outside
the Western Defense Command. Another major difference between
the two plans was related to General DeWitt's recommendation of
a licensing system for Category A areas; the President's executive
order of 19 February did not require the application of the licensing
plan, and licensing was not embodied in the War Department's directives
of 20 February.
There were
other lesser differences between the two plans. General DeWitt
had recommended that before any evacuation all preparations should
be complete, including the "selection and establishment of
internment facilities in the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Corps
Areas." As already noted, the War Department at this time
was also planning to put all internees east of the Ninth Corps
Area, but its directives did not contemplate postponement of evacuation
until internment facilities were ready. General DeWitt had also
recommended the initial and separate internment of all enemy alien
males over fourteen years of age until family units could be established
in internment camps. The War Department plan had no such provision.
As for the number of people to be involved, General DeWitt's memorandum
contained an estimate that 133,000 people would have to be evacuated
either voluntarily or by compulsion. A breakdown of the figure
(based on his previous Category A recommendations) discloses that
his plan would have involved about 69,000 Japanese (25,000 aliens
and 44,000 American citizens), about 44,000 Italians, and about
20,000 Germans. The War Department planners apparently made no
estimate of the numbers that their directives would involve, but
eventually they did involve more than 110,000 Japanese residents-citizens
and aliens-of the Pacific coast states.
Nearly three
years later, in December 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality
of mass evacuation, in the test case of Korematsu v. United States.
Its decision, rendered in the midst of war, also had to be made
without access to many pertinent records. The Court concluded:
Korematsu
was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to
him or his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the
Japanese Empire, because the properly constituted military authorities
feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take
proper security measures, because they decided that the military
urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese
ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily, and finally,
because Congress, reposing its confidence in this time of war
in our military leaders--as inevitably it must--determined that
they should have the power to do just this. There was evidence
of disloyalty on the part of some, the military authorities considered
that the need for action was great, and time was short. We cannot--by
availing ourselves of the calm perspective of hindsight--now say
that these actions were unjustified.
Would the
Court's conclusion have been the same in the light of present
knowledge? Considering the evidence now available, the reasonable
deductions seem to be that General DeWitt's recommendation of
13 February 1942 was not used in drafting the War Department directives
of 20 February for a mass evacuation of the Japanese people, and
that the only responsible commander who backed the War Department's
plan as a measure required by military necessity was the President
himself, as Commander in Chief.