Read Online Infamy by Richard Reeves - Free Book Online

tell one Jap from another. They all look the same.”
    McCloy, a New York lawyer before entering the administration, was well known for having proved that German agents were responsible for the “Black Tom” munitions depot explosion, which killed seven people during World War I. He replied to DeWitt that something could be worked out, adding, “You are putting a Wall Street lawyer in a helluva 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.”
    On February 14, DeWitt followed up his conversations with McCloy in a long memo to Secretary of War Stimson, writing:
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 American citizenship, have become “Americanized,” the racial strains are undiluted. To conclude otherwise is to expect that children born of white parents on Japanese soil sever all racial affinity and become loyal Japanese and, if necessary, die for Japan against the nation of their parents. That Japan is allied with Germany and Italy in this struggle is no ground 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 loyalty comes.
    DeWitt told Stimson that he believed that every one of the more than 112,000 American Japanese living along the Pacific Coast were “potential enemies of Japanese extraction” and that “there are indications that they were organized and ready for concerted operation at a favorable opportunity. The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.” He then laid out what he thought was likely to happen: sabotage, naval attacks, and air raids “assisted by enemy agents signaling from the coastline.”
    The official story being spread on the West Coast by politicians and the press—and by California agricultural interests eager to take over Japanese fields and crops—was that the Japanese had deliberately moved onto farms close to military bases, airports, defense factories, power stations, and power lines. That fantasy was “verified” by California officials, particularly Attorney General Warren, who, with the help of the state’s county sheriffs, prepared maps of the distribution of California Japanese, including entries as vague as “Jap across the street from boat works [in Sausalito].” What the maps did not show was that Japanese farmers and workers had usually been there for decades, even generations, before the bases and other facilities were built.
    The press was also buying any story the military was selling. The New York Times reported on February 18 an example of “threats to national security” that was almost comical: “On the farm of Isaburo Saki, 48 years old, agents found binoculars, flashlights, a radio, and what appeared to be a home-made blackjack.”
    The official phrase “military necessity” was the argument being fueled in Washington by daily reports from DeWitt’s headquarters. The general was reporting on every wild rumor bouncing around the state. After the Montebello incident, he told Washington that substantially every ship leaving a West Coast port was attacked by enemy submarines. Part of his paper war was an effort to discredit naval and FBI intelligence, who were stating that the West Coast Japanese were not a real threat. One of DeWitt’s memos reported that Japanese submarines were being signaled to by “enemy agents on shore”—even as navy intelligence was reporting that the Japanese navy had only one submarine between Hawaii and California. DeWitt, who was sixty-two years old, was no different than many of the mediocre officers who managed to survive in a smaller army after