How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  “Are we foreigners out here?” an Alaskan asked.39 “Aren’t we Americans, too?”

  An incensed Ernest Gruening traveled to Washington to complain of the “introduction of Gestapo methods to the United States.”40 But he found, in a perfect catch-22,41 that the censorship was so complete that even congressmen didn’t know of it.

  Alaska was thus the “quietest war theater,”42 or the “hidden front,”43 as journalists called it. Today it is the forgotten war. Many people are surprised to learn that the Japanese even came near Alaska.

  They are also surprised to learn of the Aleut internment.44

  *

  Japanese internment during World War II is one of the most regretted episodes in U.S. history. In May 1942 some 112,000 residents of western states, some Japanese nationals and some U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry, were forcibly removed from their homes and held in camps for years. In 1988 Congress apologized for the “fundamental injustice” of this and awarded each internee $20,000—a rare instance of the government paying reparations.45

  Yet internment is one of those episodes that appear different once you look beyond the logo map. It was in the territories that the government’s willingness to violate the civil liberties of its own subjects was on the fullest display. Hawai‘i offers one example—a quasi-internment that, instead of targeting a racial group, turned an entire territory into a barbed-wire-encased armed camp, with the military monitoring the movement, communications, and political activity of every inhabitant.

  Less familiar is what happened in the Aleutians, the chain of Alaskan islands that stretches toward Asia. Before the war started, Gruening and his colleagues had discussed the possibility of a Japanese attack. Should the islands be evacuated, just in case? Gruening was against it: to remove the Aleuts from their homes, he believed, would be disastrous.

  The Japanese invasion forced the issue. The Alaska Command ordered that all Natives living on the Aleutians west of Unimak and on the nearby Pribilof Islands be removed and sent farther inland. This wasn’t from fear of disloyalty. It was, rather, a “for your own good” internment, a way to keep civilians out of a war zone (though Aleuts noticed that the white residents of Unalaska Island were allowed to stay).46

  Because Gruening and his colleagues had resisted the notion of Aleut internment, there were no plans in place. Nearly nine hundred Aleuts were shoved hastily onto ships (“while eating breakfast,”47 an officer on Atka recalled—“the eggs were still on the table”) and dropped off in unfamiliar Southeast Alaska.

  They found this new environment unsettling. By all accounts, the large stands of trees unnerved them. “Feels funny,” the chief of the Atka tribe noted with alarm. “No room to walk.”48

  The trees, though, were the least of the Aleuts’ problems. Their new “homes” were whatever spaces the navy could find on short notice: abandoned mining camps, fish canneries, and labor camps. Many lacked running water. And despite the millions the military was pouring into the Alaska Highway, it never found the money to fix the internment camps.

  So what were the camps like? “I have no language at my command which can adequately describe what I saw,”49 wrote Alaska’s attorney general to Gruening after he toured one. “If I had I am confident you would not believe my statements.”

  A desperate internee tried to draw a picture for officials. The camp was “no place for a living creature,”50 she explained in a letter. “We drink impure water and then get sick the children’s get skin disease even the grown ups are sick from the cold. We ate from the mess house and it is near the toilet only a few yards away. We eat the filth that is flying around. We got no place to take a bath and no place to wash our clothes or dry them when it rains.”

  Gruening visited, accompanied by a doctor. The complaints were accurate. “As we entered the first bunkhouse the odor of human excreta and waste was so pungent that I could hardly make the grade,”51 the doctor recorded. The buildings had no lights, nonfunctioning sewage, and water that was “discolored, contaminated and unattractive.”

  Despite being loyal citizens who had surrendered their homes at the navy’s request, the Aleuts languished in these camps. Though no barbed wire surrounded them, leaving was impossible: the Aleuts needed military permission and (in most camps) a boat to leave, neither of which was forthcoming.

  So they stayed, for years. After Japan had been rousted from the Aleutians and the tides of war had turned, there was little likelihood that the islands would face continued peril. At least, the government was comfortable taking the men of the Pribilof Islands back to their homes to work the 1943 seal harvest (the Fish and Wildlife Service had a lucrative deal with a fur company). But once the Pribilovians turned over the furs,52 they were sent straight back to the camps.

  The long internment wasn’t born of any animosity toward the Aleuts. They weren’t the “enemy.” It just seems that officials found it easier to keep the Aleuts where they were—far away—than to bring them home. Plus, the military had taken over many of their homes. And because censorship was watertight, there was no public pressure. Nobody knew.

  The delay mattered, though. Sickness in the camps—the predictable result of a near-total lack of infrastructure—turned to death. In the West Coast camps, the death rate of internees was no greater than that of normal civilians. But in Alaskan camps, by the war’s end, 10 percent had died.

  *

  The story of internment in the Greater United States does not end with Hawaiian martial law or the Aleuts’ relocation. Though the episode is barely known, the United States interned Japanese in the Philippines, too.

  Roosevelt signed the infamous Executive Order 9906, calling for the internment of Japanese in the U.S. West, in February 1942, after much deliberation. The internment of the Japanese-ancestry population (numbering about thirty thousand) in the Philippines required less talk. Months before Pearl Harbor, the Philippine Assembly had passed a bill requiring foreign nationals to register with the government and have their finger-prints taken. Then, on the day of the attack, MacArthur ordered police to round up the Japanese population,53 including naturalized Philippine citizens and people of Japanese ancestry born in the Philippines. Only career consular officials were excluded.

  This was not a polite affair. Soldiers raided Japanese homes,54 stores, and offices and dragged the Japanese out if necessary. One Filipina described a truckload of families being hauled through the streets:

  People hooted.55 My houseboy was delirious. “Hang them, the traitors!” he shouted over the fence. He stooped to pick up a stone but I stopped him. “You are not to meddle,” I told him sharply. “You must leave it to the Americans, whatever must be done.”

  With encouragement from the authorities, civilians hunted for any Japanese who remained hidden.56 Filipinos who helped hide them were arrested.57 Japanese women were raped,58 by both civilians and soldiers, and Japanese homes and businesses were ransacked. In Manila, the police parked trucks containing more than a hundred internees in the middle of the street during an air raid,59 a tempting target for Japan’s bombers and a terrifying ordeal for those trapped inside. In Davao, guards repeatedly vented their rage against Japan by arbitrarily shooting prisoners—one internee estimated that they killed fifty in all.60

  Kiyoshi Osawa, an internee who had lived in the Philippines for sixteen years, since he was a teenager, remembered “the indescribable wave of uncertainty and humiliation” as he “languished in prison.”61

  Osawa and his fellow internees are never mentioned in U.S. accounts of Japanese internment. That’s partly because of the general tendency to exclude the colonies from U.S. history, though it surely also has to do with the short-lived nature of the affair. Whereas West Coast internment, Hawaiian martial law, and Aleut internment lasted years, the Philippine internment was ended in weeks by the Japanese invasion in late 1941.

  That invasion put internees like Osawa in an interesting position. On the West Coast, official fears that Japanese-ancestry residents wo
uld collaborate with Japan turned out to be baseless. There are only a handful of known cases in which mainlanders materially aided Japan. Yet in the Philippines the question of loyalty was posed in a much more acute way, as Japan had actually conquered the territory. Would the Japanese in the Philippines side with Japan or the United States?

  Nearly unanimously, they chose Japan. The former internees, bearing guns provided by the Japanese army, took swift and brutal revenge on those who had locked them up.62 They then served the Japanese occupation as intermediaries and interpreters. Filipinos got used to seeing familiar faces—the gardener, the ice-cream peddler, the house servant—parading in Japanese military uniforms.

  “Words cannot describe the seriousness of the dilemma faced by the Japanese residents as we found ourselves caught between the brutality of the Japanese military and the misery of our Filipino friends,”63 Osawa remembered. Nevertheless, he joined the occupation government and served it throughout the war. Despite his “assimilation into Philippine society,” he still felt a “fierce pride of being Japanese.”

  No doubt Osawa’s feelings were helped along by the fact that he had just been incarcerated by his Filipino neighbors.

  *

  Kiyoshi Osawa’s predicament wasn’t uncommon. Colonized subjects had cause for complaint against the United States—internees especially so. It wasn’t unreasonable to suppose that some might side with Japan during the war, as Osawa did. Certainly that fear pervaded the minds of colonial officials throughout the Pacific empire.

  Yet that fear was not realized in the Pacific territories beyond Japan’s direct reach. Instead, the inhabitants of Hawai‘i and Alaska broke the other way and stood behind the United States as few others did. Much in the way that many African Americans fought abroad to vindicate their demands for equality at home, the inhabitants of the Pacific territory joined the war effort with a clear determination, as if they had something to prove. Hawai‘i’s war bond sales were the highest in the country,64 consistently between two and nearly four times the national average. Alaska’s,65 as of at least the middle of the war, ranked second. Even as they faced more extreme governmental intrusions than mainlanders, the people of the Pacific territories bankrolled the war.

  But the government asked more of them than bond purchases. In Alaska, Gruening, concerned about a Japanese invasion (this was a month before Japan attacked the Aleutians), set out to organize the Alaska Territorial Guard. It was to be a militia, armed citizens prepared to fend off invaders. As Gruening needed the guard to extend up the whole coast, this meant enrolling indigenous people.

  “Up until then,”66 Gruening remembers, “I had had very little contact with the Eskimos.” He wondered how they might react to the prospect of joining the military. Alaska Natives endured a harsh Jim Crow system: separate seating in theaters, segregated schools, and no natives allowed signs on hotels and restaurants. Gruening confessed that he “did not know what resentment might lurk behind their smiling faces.” Nor did the mainland soldiers, who worried that Alaska Natives, if armed, might turn their guns against the army.67

  Gruening wagered that they wouldn’t, and he toured the territory with Major Marvin Marston to start recruiting. It was the first time a governor had ever visited the Natives of the north. Gruening spoke first, addressing them as “fellow citizens of the United States.”68 Marston then explained the request. They wouldn’t be paid or have uniforms, but they’d be soldiers—the “eyes and ears of the Army”—with shoulder badges to signify their membership.

  “We will give you guns and ammunition,”69 Marston continued. “If Jap comes here and lands his boat, will you shoot him quick?”

  They would. “Everywhere I found only the heartiest response to my pleas for organization in self-defense,”70 Gruening remembered. “In every Eskimo village, I would call a meeting. Everyone came: men, women, children, infants.” Counting auxiliaries, some twenty thousand Alaska Natives joined “Gruening’s Guerrillas.”71

  They had no funding and little contact with their commanders. And what contact they did have with the military could be exasperating. “I had a heck of a time,” Simeon Pletnikoff remembered,72 recounting how mainland soldiers captured him, threatened to kill him, and sought to bring him before the provost marshal on the charge of impersonating a soldier.

  Major Marston presenting an Alaska Territorial Guard member with his rifle. Painting by Rusty Heurlin, who also trained ATG members

  “What’s the matter with you guys?” Pletnikoff asked. “I’m an Aleut.”

  Despite the humiliations, Territorial Guard members set about fortifying Alaska’s north.73 They built trails, constructed armories and shelters, enforced blackouts, put out tundra fires, and kept watch. When the Japanese floated flaming balloons across the Pacific in a futile attempt to firebomb North America, the Territorial Guard located and retrieved them. Their rifles were the same obsolete World War I–era models that the Filipinos got, but that didn’t stop the Alaska Natives from drilling weekly with them.

  And, once activated, the Native units continued to serve under the auspices of the National Guard of Alaska, enlisting at rates far outstripping those of mainlanders.74 They carried out their duties quietly but with remarkable fidelity, well into the Cold War. A general who landed on Little Diomede Island unannounced in 1969 was shocked to see armed men in uniform meet his plane. Had there been an alert? he asked.75

  No, they explained, they were just prepared.

  *

  Alaska Natives toiled in obscurity. The same could not be said of the Japanese Americans from Hawai‘i who enlisted in the army. In May 1942 the 100th Infantry Battalion (Separate) was formed from more than fourteen hundred men of Japanese descent, all U.S. citizens. Journalists took a great interest in this outfit, known as the “guinea pigs from Pearl Harbor.”76 “We knew that we had to be as good as any other Caucasian outfit,”77 recalled one member. “And we knew that we had to shed blood.”

  Japanese from Hawai‘i could feel the spotlight’s heat. And so they performed. When, the next year, the army called for troops of Japanese ancestry to form the 442nd Infantry Regiment, the slots reserved for mainland Japanese went unfilled (many were still in camps). But nearly ten thousand Japanese from Hawai‘i flooded the recruitment office. More than three-quarters of the original recruits in the 442nd were from the islands.

  Both the all-Hawai‘i 100th and the mainly Hawai‘i 442nd, which absorbed the 100th, were sent to Europe. The men fought there with conspicuous valor—“valor” in this case being a euphemism for an extreme disregard for personal safety in the enthusiastic service of killing Nazis.

  One soldier, Daniel Inouye,78 exhibited near-inconceivable levels of valor in Tuscany at the war’s end. When three German machine guns pinned his men down, he stood up to charge. He was immediately shot in the stomach, but he ran toward the first machine-gun nest and blew it up with a grenade. He then, in his words, “lurched up the hill” toward the second emplacement, dispatching it with two grenades. On his way toward the third nest, his last grenade in hand, a German rifle grenade hit his right elbow and “all but tore my arm off.” But his right fist, hanging now from “a few bloody shreds of tissue,” still clenched an armed grenade. He pried the grenade free with his left hand and hurled it into the third machine-gun nest. As the few surviving Germans ran out, Inouye unslung his tommy gun and, left-handed, sprayed them with machine-gun fire. It was only after getting shot again, in the leg, that he finally collapsed.

  “Get back up that hill!” he berated his comrades as they rushed to help him. “Nobody called off the war!”

  Inouye lost the arm but won a Medal of Honor,79 the highest military decoration the United States bestows. In the Second World War, only four army divisions earned more than ten. The 100th/442nd, though a regiment—one-third the size of a division—earned twenty-one (twenty-two if you count Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid). It won thousands of other awards, too. Pound for pound,80 the 100th/442nd was one of the most decorat
ed units in U.S. history.

  12

  THERE ARE TIMES WHEN MEN HAVE TO DIE

  Hawai‘i and Alaska were militarized to prepare for an invasion that never came. Both territories were attacked, but except for Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, both remained intact. In this, they were lucky. Elsewhere in the Pacific, the war saw Western colonies invaded and conquered.

  It started with Pearl Harbor. The event is remembered by mainlanders as an attack on a Hawaiian base, but of course that was only part of it. On that day, the Japanese launched a near-simultaneous strike on the Allies’ colonies throughout the Pacific.1 Because surprise bombings work best at the break of day, the idea was to attack the major targets—Hawai‘i, the Philippines, Guam, and Hong Kong—shortly after dawn.

  Dawn, however, is a relative concept. The unavoidable flaw in the Japanese plan was that territories that had been hit could warn those farther west, where it was still night. This was particularly a concern with regard to MacArthur’s B-17s, his “ace unit” in the Philippines that served as the pillar of Allied defense in the Pacific.2 With warning from Hawai‘i, those flying fortresses could be aloft and ready.

  Worse, the Japanese planes at Taiwan that were supposed to strike the Philippines didn’t take off on time. Thick fog grounded them for six hours,3 dramatically expanding the window in which MacArthur could react to the Hawai‘i news. Japan’s pilots had every reason to fear that by the time they reached the Philippines, MacArthur would be waiting. Perhaps his B-17s would bomb Taiwan before their planes could even take off.