Infamy (7 page)

In memos to Biddle dated February 2 and February 3, Hoover wrote, “The necessity for mass evacuation is based primarily upon public and political pressure rather than on factual data. Public hysteria and in some instances, the comments of the press and radio announcers, have resulted in a tremendous amount of pressure being brought to bear on Governor Olson and Earl Warren, Attorney General of the State, and on the military authorities.” The army’s deputy chief of staff General Mark Clark, who had served in Hawaii, was one of the few military men willing to say that he thought evacuation of the 160,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans on the islands was not necessary. He also said the chances of a Japanese attack on the West Coast was “nil.”

The FBI director and General Clark were backed up the next day, February 4, by cablegrams from Honolulu’s police chief William Gabrielson and Lieutenant General Delos Emmons, the army commander in Hawaii, stating that there were no acts of sabotage preceding or during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

*   *   *

General DeWitt, however, more often than not pressed the idea that mass evacuation was necessary and critical. He phoned Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy on February 3 and insisted that a way be found to get around constitutional guarantees of liberties for American citizens. “Out here,” said DeWitt, “a Jap is a Jap to these people now.… You can’t 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 World War I. General Gullion, sixty-one, also favored mass evacuation as soon as war was declared and had already suggested that camps be built to hold all Japanese, citizens and aliens, men, women, and children. Secretary of War Stimson immediately rejected the idea. After being blocked by Stimson and snubbed by Attorney General Biddle, Gullion called DeWitt as early as December 22, 1941, and urged him to do the job. He wanted DeWitt to recommend the evacuation and incarceration. But as memos and calls went back and forth between Washington and San Francisco, DeWitt sometimes seemed to be changing his mind, something he did regularly. Twice before December 26, DeWitt sent Gullion reports arguing against mass evacuation, saying, “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.” He went on to say that the evacuation would not be sensible: “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.”

Gullion, the army’s top legal officer, was learning what others already knew: men who worked with DeWitt saw him as indecisive, often influenced by the last person with whom he talked. One day he would tell California congressmen he favored evacuation of all Japanese, the next he would be arguing that mass evacuation would be a logistical nightmare. Those who knew the general, his chief deputy General Stilwell among them, thought his real concern was evading the fate of Pearl Harbor commanders Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short, whose military careers were essentially ended because they were totally unprepared for the sneak attack.

In fact, General DeWitt, the army’s man on the West Coast, tried to avoid confronting the politicians of California, Oregon, and Washington. Those politicians were giving in to public hysteria and to their states’ racists, including farmers and fishermen determined to eliminate Japanese competition. Despite what he had been telling Gullion about logistics, DeWitt was still using his “A Jap’s a Jap” line, talking of segregation of all Japanese of “undiluted racial strain.” Then, day after day, he changed, twisting his arguments again and again—often depending on his audience of the moment. At times, he characterized evacuation warnings and preparations as “damned nonsense”—and then he suggested that the War Department issue a proclamation declaring the states of Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Utah as military zones. That grand plan was quickly killed in Washington and Provost General Gullion soon realized that DeWitt was too weak or ignorant to be trusted.

The provost general’s next move was to send one of his young assistants, a thirty-three-year-old captain named Karl Bendetson, to San Francisco by plane to be an “adviser” to General DeWitt. Bendetson was a talented and ambitious Stanford Law School graduate from Aberdeen, Washington, a small town 110 miles southwest of Seattle, whose army reserve unit was called up early in 1941. He was then assigned to Gullion’s staff in Washington, D.C. The thinking of the young captain and General DeWitt was not dissimilar. In one phone call between them, DeWitt, speaking of the Japanese Americans offering to cooperate in the war effort, said, “Those are the fellows I suspect the most.” Bendetson agreed, saying, “Definitely. The ones who are giving you lip service are the ones always to suspect.”

Bendetson quickly became DeWitt’s confidant and deputy chief of staff. He had also, on February 4, 1942, changed the spelling of his name from “Bendetson” to “Bendetsen” to make it seem less Jewish. “Bendetsen” was, in fact, a serial liar from a prominent Orthodox Jewish family that had emigrated from Lithuania in 1869, settling first in Elmira, New York, then moving west to the Seattle area. But in 1929 he denied all that, claiming to be a Christian to get into a Stanford fraternity, Theta Delta Chi, which barred Jews from membership. As the years went by, he created a new biography under the name Bendetsen, saying that he was from a Danish logging family and that a fictional great-grandfather had come from Denmark to America in 1670.

Bendetsen signed the first official document with his new name that same day, February 4, in a memorandum to McCloy titled, “Alien Enemies on the West Coast.” In the memo, he endorsed the idea that there was an American Japanese Fifth Column: “A substantial majority of the
Nisei
bear allegiance to Japan, are well controlled and disciplined by the enemy, and at the proper time will engage in organized sabotage, particularly should a raid along the Pacific Coast be attempted by the Japanese.… This will require an evacuation and internment problem of some considerable proportions.”

In Washington, the young lawyer had quickly earned Gullion’s trust by creating a craftily worded legal strategy to evacuate the Japanese and Japanese Americans from the West Coast: the military would have authority to remove any American from new “Military Zones” and the power to allow any of them to return to the zones. “Race,” “ethnicity,” or “ancestry” were never mentioned in regard to the zones. The plan was described by Stetson Conn, the chief historian of the Department of the Army: “Bendetsen recommended the designation of military areas from which all persons who did not have permission to enter or remain would be excluded as a matter of military necessity. In his opinion, this plan was clearly legal and he recommended that it be executed in 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 Zones’ in the Western United States on the recommendation of the Western commander, General DeWitt; and third, the immediate evacuation from areas so designated of all persons to whom it was not proposed to issue licenses to re-enter or remain.”

The proposed licenses were not authorized, but they did not have to be. Only one group of “persons,” Japanese and Japanese Americans, would be denied permission to enter or remain in the zones.

The first military zone designated by General DeWitt was all of the West Coast from California to Washington State and a corner of Arizona within two hundred miles of the coast. The idea could then be presented to President Roosevelt as a way to authorize the relocation of the West Coast Japanese and Japanese Americans, with an executive document that did not mention race—and then not allow any of them to return.

Bendetsen, the chief strategist for both Gullion and DeWitt, the reservist from a one-man law office, was promoted again and again. He had been promoted from captain to major and then lieutenant colonel on February 4, 1942, and then, ten days later, to full colonel on February 14, 1942. Along with McCloy, he tweaked and polished their ideas into an executive order. McCloy, who favored evacuation, said he thought it was barely constitutional. But he was willing to go along and told Bendetsen and DeWitt, “We can cover the legal situation.”

Bendetsen had already explained more of his thinking in a memo to Gullion, calling mass evacuation “undoubtedly the safest course to follow, that is to say as you cannot distinguish or penetrate Oriental thinking and as you cannot tell which ones are loyal and which ones are not and it is, therefore, the easiest course (aside from the mechanical problem involved) to remove them all from the West Coast and place them in the ‘Zone of the Interior’ in uninhabited areas where they can do no harm under guard.”

Deeming them all to be potential traitors, Bendetsen wanted all American Japanese removed from western states. Back in his family’s hometown in Aberdeen, Washington, there was only one Japanese American family, the Saitos. Natsu Saito, a forty-two-year-old widow and mother, owned the Oriental Art Store, a novelty shop down the street from Bendetsen’s law office. Fluent in both Japanese and English, Mrs. Saito had been arrested within forty-eight hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor. To the extent that there were any charges against her, it was that her shop catered to Japanese seamen in town who came by while their ships were loaded with timber, and that her oldest son, Lincoln, was a student at a Presbyterian seminary in Japan. That was more than enough for the FBI. Agents ransacked her store before she was taken away from her three younger children. They had no idea where she was for more than three weeks. Learning that their mother was being held in a detention center in Seattle, the teenage children, Morse, Perry, and Dahlia, drove the 112 miles to the big city on Christmas day. They were turned away, told there were no visiting hours on the holiday. They returned home and tried to run their mother’s shop, but many of the customers who came knocked goods off shelves and then spit in their faces. After several hearings, Mrs. Saito was released on probation, and she and the three children were ordered to take a bus to Olympia, Washington—paying their own way—to board a train to the Tule Lake camp on a barren lava field in northern California, five miles from the Oregon border.