by Oliver Stone
Despite the fact that there was no evidence of Japanese-American sabotage, on February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which laid the groundwork for the evacuation and incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans from California, Oregon, and Washington, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens by birth. Although the executive order made no explicit mention of race or ethnicity, its intended target population was unmistakable.
U.S. authorities abandoned the sweeping evacuation plans made for Hawaii’s large Japanese population when wealthy white sugarcane and pineapple plantation owners complained that they would lose their labor force. However, the government did impose martial law, suspend the writ of habeas corpus, and locked up some two thousand kibei, people of Japanese descent who had visited Japan for education and acculturation.
On the mainland, especially in California, where the Japanese represented only slightly above 2 percent of the population, the situation was very different. Executive Order 9066 forced some 120,000 to evacuate their homes and settle outside the prohibited defense zones. But their entry was blocked by surrounding states. The governor of Idaho, Chase Clark, spewed, “The Japs live like rats, breed like rats and act like rats. We don’t want them.” The governor of Wyoming warned that if the Japanese were moved to his state, “There would be Japs hanging from every pine tree.” The attorney general of Idaho recommended that “all Japanese . . . be put in concentration camps.” “We want to keep this a white man’s country.”59
By February 25, 1942, the FBI had incarcerated all adult males of Japanese ancestry on Terminal Island, California. The U.S. Navy gave all other residents of Japanese ancestry forty-eight hours to clear out. Between March and October 1942, the Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA) opened temporary camps, known as assembly centers, to hold Japanese inmates, who were registered and given numbers. In Santa Anita and Tanforan, California, families were housed in horse stables, a single stall accommodating five or six people. They were later moved to more permanent relocation centers, referred to at the time as “concentration camps.” Conditions in the camps were deplorable; they often lacked running water, bathroom facilities, decent schools, insulated cabins, and proper roofs. The camps did, however, have adequate barbed-wire fencing, machine-gun installations, and guard towers. Appalled by the treatment of the prisoners, Milton Eisenhower resigned as director of the War Relocation Authority (WRA).60
Some westerners were motivated by greed in supporting the evacuations. Because evacuees were allowed to take away only what they could carry, their former neighbors eagerly bought their property at a fraction of its real value or seized what was left behind, including abandoned crops. A leader of the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association of Central California admitted, “We’re 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.” The Japanese lost an estimated $400 million in personal property—worth perhaps $5.4 billion today.61
Starting in March 1942, the War Relocation Authority moved prisoners to ten hastily constructed relocation centers in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. The Poston and Gila River Relocation Centers in Arizona soon housed populations of 17,814 and 13,348, respectively, making them the third and fourth largest cities in the state virtually overnight. Heart Mountain became the third largest city in Wyoming.62
Inside the camps, Japanese toiled under scorching desert sun in Arizona and California, swamplike conditions in Arkansas, and bitter cold in Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah, and were paid a paltry $12 per month for unskilled labor and $19 for skilled. Japanese doctors earned $228 per year, while a white senior medical officer earned $4,600. White nurses who earned $80 per month at Yellowstone County Hospital received $150 at Heart Mountain, eight to ten times as much as their Japanese counterparts.63 Federal authorities sent photographers Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange to capture images of daily camp life, instructing them to take no photos showing barbed wire, watchtowers, or armed soldiers. Still Adams, Lange, and a Japanese inmate, Toyo Miyatake, captured a few of the banned images.64
In February 1943, the U.S. government pulled a shameless about-face. Needing more manpower to fight the war, Roosevelt called upon American-born Nisei to join the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, in conjunction with the 100th Battalion Hawaii already stationed in Camp Shelby, Mississippi. The “One PukaPuka,” as the Hawaiian members called their unit, had volunteered early in the war and had had to struggle long and hard to be recognized as worthy to serve. The 442nd Regiment became one of the most decorated units in U.S. military history, fighting bravely in Italy and France and suffering 1,072 casualties, including 216 deaths in October 1944.65
That Japanese Americans were capable of such sacrifice for their country was apparently beyond the comprehension of the head of the Western Defense Command. In April 1943, DeWitt told the House Naval Affairs Subcommittee that he wasn’t worried about Germans or Italians, “but the Japs we will be worried about all the time until they are wiped off the face of the map.” “A Jap’s a Jap,” he informed them, whether a U.S. citizen or not. DeWitt’s racist remarks rankled the Washington Post, which shot back, “The general should be told that American democracy and the Constitution of the United States are too vital to be ignored and flouted by any military zealot. . . . Whatever excuse there once was for evacuating and holding them indiscriminately no longer exists.” 66
Japanese Americans arrive at the Santa Anita Assembly Center from San Pedro, California, where they were housed in horse stables before being moved to more permanent relocation centers.
Inside relocation centers, Japanese toiled under scorching desert sun in Arizona and California, swamplike conditions in Arkansas, and bitter cold in Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah, and were paid minuscule wages for their efforts.
Many Americans agreed. Some drew parallels with Nazi policies, although the differences, admittedly, were much greater than the similarities. In June 1942, Christian Century wrote, “The whole policy of resort to concentration camps is headed . . . toward the destruction of constitutional rights . . . and toward the establishment of racial discrimination as a principle of American government. It is moving in the same direction Germany moved.” Eugene V. (Victor Debs) Rostow published a scathing piece in the Yale Law Journal in 1945, arguing, “We believe that the German people bear a common political responsibility for outrages secretly committed by the Gestapo and the SS. What are we to think of our own part in a program which violates every democratic social value, yet has been approved by the Congress, the President and the Supreme Court?”67
In June 1943, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in the government’s favor in the first two cases to come before it. Although the ruling in Hirabayashi v. United States did not address the fundamental issues of evacuation and incarceration, Justice Frank Murphy’s concurring opinion came very close to doing so:
To say that any group cannot be assimilated is to admit that the great American experiment has failed. . . . Today is the first time, so far as I am aware, that we have sustained a substantial restriction of the personal liberty of citizens of the United States based upon the accident of race or ancestry. . . . In this sense, it bears a melancholy resemblance to the treatment accorded to members of the Jewish race in Germany and in other parts of Europe.68
On January 2, 1945, the WRA “ended” forced incarceration but provided little assistance as prisoners tried to rebuild their shattered lives. Some decided to migrate as far away from the West Coast as possible. According to the National Park Service, the Japanese received only “$25 per person, a train ticket, and meals on route for those with less than $500 in cash.”69
It was not until the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 that many of the older Japanese, the Issei, were deemed “fit to be citizens.” Moreover, it took over forty years for a national apology and monetary redress of $1.5 billion for surviv
ors of the incarceration centers.70
The United States’ moral threshold—particularly its indifference to inflicting civilian casualties on a massive scale—had also been dramatically lowered by years of bombing civilian populations, particularly in the air war against Japan. Urban area bombing had begun during the First World War. The Germans, British, French, Italians, and Austrians had all bombed one another’s cities, and some of this continued in brutal fashion during the interwar period. To its credit, the United States strongly condemned the Japanese bombing of Chinese cities in 1937. When war began in Europe in 1939, Roosevelt implored the combatants to refrain from the “inhuman barbarism” involved in bombing defenseless civilians.71
Undeterred, Germany began bombing British cities. The British responded with thousand-plane bombing raids on urban targets in Germany. By the mid-1940s, great cities such as Barcelona, Madrid, Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, Warsaw, London, Rotterdam, Moscow, Stalingrad, Leningrad, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, and many others had been severely bombed.
The United States, by contrast, concentrated almost entirely on precision bombing of key industries and transportation networks until late in the European war. In August 1942, Captain Paul Tibbets, who would later pilot the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, expressed apprehension at the possibility of causing civilian casualties as he prepared to lead the first daytime raid by U.S. bombers against German targets in occupied France. He told a reporter that he felt “sick with thoughts of the civilians who might suffer from the bombs dropped by this machine.” Watching the bombs fall, he thought, “My God, women and children are getting killed!”72 But as the war continued, Americans’ scruples began to soften. The October 1943 area-bombing raid on Münster was an important turning point. The most tragic exception to the earlier standards was U.S. participation in the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945.
The United States adopted a far more ruthless bombing policy in Japan. When Major General Haywood Hansell, head of the 21st Bomber Command, resisted orders to use incendiaries against large urban areas, Air Force General Henry “Hap” Arnold replaced him with General Curtis LeMay. Nicknamed “Iron Ass” by his men because he was so relentless and demanding, LeMay had made his reputation in the air war in Europe. In Japan, he revolutionized bombing tactics and took what was already being referred to as “terror bombing” to an entirely different level.
On the night of March 9–10, 1945, LeMay sent 334 planes to attack Tokyo with incendiary bombs consisting of napalm, thermite, white phosphorus, and other inflammable materials. The bombs destroyed sixteen square miles, killing perhaps 100,000 people and injuring even more. The scalding inferno caused canals to boil, metal to melt, and people to burst into flames spontaneously. The victims, LeMay reported, were “scorched and boiled and baked to death.” By May, 75 percent of bombs dropped were incendiaries designed to burn down Japan’s “paper cities.” According to Japanese scholar Yuki Tanaka, the United States firebombed over a hundred Japanese cities.73 Destruction reached 99.5 percent in the city of Toyama, driving Secretary of War Henry Stimson to tell Truman that he “did not want to have the US get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities,” though Stimson did almost nothing to halt the slaughter. He had managed to delude himself into believing Arnold’s promise that he would limit “damage to civilians.”74 Future Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who was on LeMay’s staff in 1945, agreed with his boss’s comment that if the United States lost the war, they’d all be tried as war criminals and deserved to be convicted.75
On the night of March 9–10, 1945, General Curtis LeMay sent 334 planes to attack Tokyo with incendiary bombs consisting of napalm, thermite, white phosphorus, and other inflammable materials. The bombs destroyed sixteen square miles, killing over eighty thousand and injuring close to a million. The scalding inferno caused canals to boil, metal to melt, and people to burst spontaneously into flames. The victims, LeMay reported, were “scorched and boiled and baked to death.”
Hatred toward the Japanese ran so deep that almost no one objected to the mass slaughter of civilians. Oppenheimer recalled Stimson’s disappointment over Americans’ indifference: “I remember Mr. Stimson saying to me that he thought it appalling that there should be no protest over the air raids which we were conducting against Japan, which in the case of Tokyo led to such extraordinarily heavy loss of life. He didn’t say that the air strikes shouldn’t be carried on, but he did think there was something wrong with a country where no one questioned that.”76 Brigadier General Bonner Fellers called it “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all history.”77 Arnold felt that “90% of Americans would have killed every Japanese.”78
General Groves’s Target Committee decided that the atomic bombs would be dropped on military facilities surrounded by workers’ homes in previously unbombed cities. The committee decided to make the initial use so spectacular that people everywhere would appreciate the weapons’ significance. When members of Stimson’s Interim Committee, which examined a number of issues surrounding the use of the atomic bombs, raised alternatives, including a demonstration, Byrnes, as Truman’s personal representative on the committee, overrode them.
At its May 31 meeting, the Interim Committee also addressed the future of nuclear weapons. Scientists understood that the bombs under production were the most rudimentary, primitive prototypes of what was to follow. The prospect terrified them. Oppenheimer informed the nation’s top military and civilian officials that within three years the United States could have weapons of between 10 and 100 megatons—potentially almost seven thousand times as powerful as the bomb that would soon be dropped on Hiroshima.79
In late May, Szilard, Nobel Prize–winning chemist Harold Urey, and astronomer Walter Bartky attempted to see Truman to caution against using the bomb. They were rerouted to Spartanburg, South Carolina, to speak with Byrnes, whose response appalled Szilard: “Mr. Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the war. He knew at that time, as the rest of the government knew, that Japan was essentially defeated. . . . At that time Mr. Byrnes was much concerned about the spreading of Russian influence in Europe; [insisting] that our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe.”80 Groves also admitted that in his mind the Soviet Union had always been the enemy: “There was never from about two weeks from the time I took charge of this Project any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and the Project was conducted on that basis.”81 Groves shocked Joseph Rotblat when he said over dinner in March 1944, “You realize of course that the main purpose of this project is to subdue the Russians.”82 Byrnes’s and Groves’s statements shed crucial light on Byrnes’s April 13 remark to Truman that the atomic bomb “might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.”83
While Los Alamos scientists worked feverishly to complete the bomb, others began to have doubts about the wisdom of what they had done. In June, Chicago Met Lab scientists set up a series of committees to explore various aspects of atomic energy. The Committee on Social and Political Implications, chaired by the Nobel Laureate James Franck, issued a report, greatly influenced by Leo Szilard, questioning the wisdom of using atomic bombs in the current war. It warned that a surprise attack on Japan would not only destroy the United States’ moral position, it could instigate a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union spurred by the threat of “total mutual destruction.”84 The report also noted that because there was no secret to the scientific principles behind the bomb, the Soviet Union would soon catch up.
Szilard understood the dangers better than anyone else. He desperately attempted to prevent the bombs’ use. He circulated the Franck Committee report to scientists at other laboratories. After security officers had it classified and banned its circulation, Szilard drew up a petition warning the president:
The atomic bombs at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction,
and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available in the course of their future development. Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for the purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.85
One hundred fifty-five scientists at Chicago’s Met Lab and the uranium plant in Oak Ridge signed the petition. Oppenheimer banned its circulation at Los Alamos and alerted Groves, who made sure it didn’t reach Stimson and Truman until it was too late to stop the bomb’s use. Groves’s security agents had been conducting extensive surveillance of Szilard throughout the war. At one point, Groves went so far as to draft a letter to the attorney general labeling Szilard an “enemy alien” and requesting that he “be interned for the duration of the war.” Fortunately, Compton persuaded him not to send it. Groves ordered his own poll among scientists and was chagrined to see that 83 percent favored demonstrating the bomb before using it against Japan.86 He hushed up the results.
Others also tried to prevent the bombs’ use but, sadly, had no more success than Szilard. On June 27, Undersecretary of the Navy Ralph Bard, the navy representative to the Interim Committee, wrote Stimson a memo, stating, “During recent weeks I have also had the feeling very definitely that the Japanese Government may be searching for some opportunity which they could use as a medium of surrender.” He urged that the United States, “as a great humanitarian nation,” warn Japan about the Soviet entry into the war and the development of the atomic bomb and clarify the surrender terms. Some historians believe that after leaving the government a few days later, Bard met with the president to press those points, but the record is ambiguous. It is clear, however, that when Truman met with the Joint Chiefs on June 18, Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy recommended that he tell the Japanese “that they would be permitted to retain the Emperor and a form of government of their own choosing” and “that we had another and terrifyingly destructive weapon which we would have to use if they did not surrender.”87