Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Browse subjects
  3. History
  4. Military history
  5. Content listing

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

15418 results in Military history

Page 215 of 771

  • 12 - Wartime Attitudes toward Relocation

  • from Part II - Concentration Camps or Relocation Centers?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 179-207

  • Summary

    Ostensibly the centers imposed strains upon the American Japanese family. Nonetheless the residents of the centers found many ways to combat the centrifugal trends of the families. And many residents found solace in the movement: adult women had a respite from food preparation; young women found more freedom generally; kids “had a ball”; even older men developed hobbies and pastimes they never would have in the traditional family. Everyone enjoyed freedom within the centers and any number of associational outlets in clubs, dance groups, orchestras, sports, and newspapers. They moved about freely and policed themselves. The race paradigm has always emphasized the barbed wire and soldiers with bayonets. But the Nikkei police had charge inside the centers, and as the leave policies indicate, the infamous barbed wire was thoroughly, absurdly porous. In contrast, in Nazi concentration camps everything was regimented and demeaning. The Nazi vision constantly sapped the mental health of prisoners. Michael Neufeld noted that in the Mittelwerk camp the authorities periodically performed public hangings, often hanging several people at a time. It was fueled by “the pitiless process of natural selection” that destroyed the bonds between prisoners. Levi described existence as akin to Hobbes’s “war of all on all.”

  • 3 - The Chinese and European Origins of the West Coast Alien Dilemma

  • from Part I - The Reach of American Racism?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 40-48

  • Summary

    The exaggeration of race is underscored by the fact that the origin of anti-alien sentiment in the West was neither racial nor western. Historians have commenced this story too late. The story of relocation began in December 1937, with the outbreak of the Sino Japanese conflict. It was fueled further in early May 1940 by the outbreak of war in Europe. In each case these conflicts grew out of wars between two or more nationalities of the same race, not two races. Predictably the struggle between nationalities abroad encouraged one in California as the two nationalities fought over U.S. trade with Japan and commercial space in downtown San Francisco. The uproar about enemy aliens was orchestrated nationally by two key congressmen, Martin Dies of Texas and Samuel Dickstein of New York. Dies was head of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Dickstein wanted to be. Their struggle over this powerful committee put the issue of enemy aliens in the political spotlight, especially the fear of Fifth Columnists, who had supposedly aided the European Nazis. Yet, as JACL leaders recognized, their dramatization of the European aliens issue was bound to rub off onto the West Coast and largely Japanese alien ones as well.

  • 24 - The Politics of Equilibrium

  • from Part III - The Demise of Relocation
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 293-304

  • Summary

    To end with a final gruesome contrast, how were the two kinds of centers terminated? When Allied military advances made it impossible to transport prisoners to the death and concentration camps by truck or train, Hitler commanded that all inmates be killed. That prompted a series of death marches to the West. In the United States, the Supreme Court ruled against the centers in in late 1944. Counterintuitively, a majority returned, in good physical health, to the West, by bus or train, not on foot. Although the Nikkei faced complex problems upon return, the WRA did little to resolve them. The Nikkei coped in their traditional cooperative manner. Like millions of immigrants before them, families sent out pathfinders to investigate. If appropriate, relatives followed. A majority went right back to their former supposedly jaundiced homes. But why would they? Because Californians were not as biased as traditionally portrayed.

  • 13 - Family Life, Personal Freedom, and Combat Fatigue

  • from Part II - Concentration Camps or Relocation Centers?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 208-211

  • Summary

    Almost all of those who left personal memoirs of relocation centers remembered the omnipresent, choking dust of those desert locales. Yet both memory and history served to obscure reality, which was one of remarkable productivity. The centers usually were in drylands because that is where there was unpopulated space. However, these drylands were eminently irrigable, and in some cases perfect for agriculture. And even where the soil was supposedly not so suitable, the Nikkei made it so. Water was available everywhere. Far from being unsettled, every single one of the centers resided near smaller existing towns and communities. When not working outside the centers on seasonal leave, Nikkei provided their own labor force. The Amache/Granada settlement was one of the smallest centers, but it was large enough to produce prodigious amounts. There has obviously been conflict in American history and at the relocation centers. However, this conflict paradigm misses the larger narrative of relocation, and that is one of cooperation and voluntarism. The other side of the coin was the impact of the centers on neighboring communities, which was economically stimulating to the small town and farming communities. Despite the collective productivity of the centers, they represented a huge economic loss for individual Japanese Americans.

  • 6 - The Looming Roberts Report

  • from Part I - The Reach of American Racism?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 73-95

  • Summary

    This chapter explores the way in which the charge of racism got entangled with the relocation story. It grew out of a few of General DeWitt’s statements taken out of context from his Final Report. DeWitt described Japanese American identity as a nationality, a complex one including race, religion, ancestry, language, and history. Nonetheless critics, first politicians, then historians, seized on the one factor of race to explain relocation. Less important were the habitual equation of the terms “race” and “nationality.” To that 1940s generation race meant nationality and the term “race,” in the biological sense, had not yet emerged from that entanglement as the preeminent marker of groups. Inevitably, this exaggerated the prevalence of racism to those politicians and historians. And the Race Paradigm also emphasized the use of the word “Jap” as a racist marker despite the fact that it implies no racial meaning and that the Nikkei themselves often employed it. In February 1942 Congressman Jon Tolan of Oakland held hearings to determine what to do with the Nikkei. Question number two asked whether Japanese aliens should be treated like German and Italian aliens. The police chief of Nikkei-hostile Sacramento and Mayor Angelo Rossi of San Francisco were lonely voices calling for singling out the Nikkei aliens. Most officials did not.

  • 10 - Bowling in Twin Falls

  • from Part II - Concentration Camps or Relocation Centers?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 152-166

  • Summary

    Food was one of the foremost differences between the relocation centers and Nazi and historic concentration camps, where enervating hunger was omnipresent. American food did not always suit Nikkei palates, but they got plenty of it and much of their own cuisine as well. The conditions of work were also always humane. Evacuees were not required to work, but if they did they were paid a small wage, equivalent to that of an American Army private, which they could increase by working outside the camps in temporary leave (daily, weekly, monthly, semi-annually, or permanently), where they received the going wage scale in that locality. And in the centers their pay was supplemented by free housing, food, clothing, and medical care. Those on permanent leave made much higher incomes than center wages and often allotments for room and board as well. Health care was much better than that available to residents of neighboring small towns. Every center had a hospital and trained evacuee doctors and nurses. These conditions were unimaginably better than those in historic or Nazi concentration camps, where health care scarcely existed. Finally, indifference to the condition of the weak constituted one of the fundamental markers between Nazi and historic camps and the American relocation centers. In the Cuban, Boer, and Philippine Insurrection confinements, the weak perished in droves. The WRA struggled mightily to protect the weak; the SS strove to exploit them.

  • 5 - The Lagging Backlash

  • from Part I - The Reach of American Racism?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 55-72

  • Summary

    Chapter 6 discusses the myriad and always complicated ways in which the final move to relocation played out. It is possible that the president could have taken command of the story and dictated a different outcome. Yet this course would have presented F. D. R. with many hazards without a commensurate possibility of gain, and Roosevelt was notoriously risk averse. Because of the interaction of many parts of the federal system and the economy, a myriad of events combined to worsen the position of the Nikkei. Government departments, city councils, boards of supervisors, banks, landowners, mayors, and others all played a role, but, notoriously, so did actions of the Japanese government, whose brilliant military actions inflamed the situation for all of the American actors. Finally, a series of events between January 25 and January 30, 1942, starting with the “Roberts Report” and ending with the organization on Jan. 30 of the West Coast Congressional Delegation, sped out of control. None was specifically racial; all were political responses to military matters. On Feb. 19 the president responded with Executive Order 9066, which authorized General John DeWitt to ban any persons from the West Coast on security grounds, and De Witt designated the Nikkei.

  • 9 - Resistance or Cooperation?

  • from Part II - Concentration Camps or Relocation Centers?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 130-151

  • Summary

    From the beginning, the WRA centers all had very liberal leave policies, although these were worked out over time and were not identical from center to center. These included daily leave to shop, compete in sports, and participate in cultural affairs in neighboring towns, and recreational leaves to wander or fish in nearby streams, forests, deserts, or mountains. They also included short-term medical and seasonal work leaves. High school and college-age students left for schooling from mid-1942, and from early 1943 residents took permanent leaves. These latter resulted in wartime colonies of Nikkei in Salt Lake City, Denver, Des Moines, St. Louis, and Cleveland. Chicago attracted the largest colony at several thousand. Overall more than 30,000 took permanent leaves from centers well before the government decided to close them. Eventually, between these leaves and the draft the only Nikkei left in the centers were the very young and the Issei, afraid to settle amongst what they feared was a hostile population. The WRA conducted these policies very carefully, vetting both the re-settlers and the communities where they were destined to live. The centers also had very generous visitation policies. People came and went for all kinds of reasons: relatives touching bases, soldiers visiting families, Caucasian allies building legal cases, and neighbors from adjacent camps. No historic concentration camp had such open-door policies.

  • 11 - Food, Labor, Sickness, and Health

  • from Part II - Concentration Camps or Relocation Centers?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 167-178

  • Summary

    The attitudes of diverse groups toward the Nikkei cannot be understood within the race paradigm. These opinions were nuanced, complex, and eminently situational. Racism was only one of a very graded spectrum of feelings. These ran the gamut from outright racism to profound respect and varied according to motivation. The closest one can come to biological racism is in the attitude of the Native Sons. Yet even they specifically eschewed the idea of racial superiority and did not accuse the Nikkei of being snakes, insects, vermin, or lice. So beyond race, the Nikkei were opposed on grounds of class, culture, labor standards, business habits, proto feminism, dual citizenship, experience with the war, religious background, assimilability, and family practices. And the Nikkei, like Caucasians, also had their own biases. Even so, despite all, it is entirely possible that there was never a majority on the West Coast who opposed or wanted the Nikkei relocated. But the keepers of the race paradigm do not understand this. If there was ever an “absolute doctrine” of history, an orthodoxy, where the complex is made simple, it is the story of race in Japanese Relocation.

  • 7 - Races and Racism

  • from Part I - The Reach of American Racism?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 96-114

  • Summary

    One of the most telling arguments against the race thesis was the humane way in which the American centers were administered. Camp resident Jeanne Wakutsuki Houston rightly thought that they were comparable to American small towns. This chapter insists that the only proper definition of the centers should be based on historic standards of existence within the centers, instead of abstract or linguistic ones. Thus it discusses historic concentration camps in the Cuban Revolution of the 1890s (where the term originated), the Boer War, the Philippine Insurrection (1899-1902), and finally the World War II camps of the Japanese Army. No American relocation center was even remotely comparable to these. The term “relocation centers” is consistent with the WRA name, and it distinguishes their centers from those run by the Justice Department. This misuse of the term “internment camp” confuses the two. During the Tolan Hearings at least five different kinds of confinement were discussed, all but one of which would have been highly exploitative. Fortunately the government chose the most humane, as a systematic comparison of the alternatives indicates. The condition in the historic ones listed in the preceding paragraph were horrible, and those in the Philippines quite bad.

  • 15 - Consumerism

  • from Part II - Concentration Camps or Relocation Centers?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 221-227

  • Summary

    Many historians have written of the Leisure Revolution in the United States and other western countries. Supposedly modern Americans enjoy more leisure activities than kings and queens earlier. Maybe not, but sport and recreation are one of the distinguishing features of modern American culture. It was in the centers, too, where the evacuees created a remarkable network of leisure activities. They enjoyed the wonderful natural environment of the West and in or near the centers themselves, Nikkei women and boys enjoyed a full range of recreations: baseball, football, basketball, volleyball, golf, tennis, fishing, hiking, and ice skating in winter, in addition to Japanese sports like Sumo, Kendo, and Judo. And they devised to stage every kind of musical activity imaginable. Music suffused everything. Nazi camps did not feature any of this.

  • 23 - Administrators and Administration

  • from Part II - Concentration Camps or Relocation Centers?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 288-290

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the support and opposition to the Nikkei. Although victimization has usually been emphasized more fully, the Japanese in the centers could count on all kinds of support from other Americans. And these friends of the Japanese also faced stiff opposition from very powerful political blocs. These proposed many measures ranging from exclusion from the West Coast to deportation to Japan. The WRA and the JACL believed that the rehabilitation of the Japanese Americans depended on their release into the mainstream and their performance in war. Yet the powerful anti-Japanese American political blocs opposed any concessions. Thus, the return of the Nikkei was often painful. Yet, with the exception of studies of the court cases that freed the Nikkei, we have no comparable tale of good works to balance this record of woe. Potent though they were, by the fall of 1944 these opposition groups were fighting an uphill battle. The military threat to the West Coast had vanished, and the media and the politicians could no longer conjure it up. Then as Americans got to know the resettled Nikkei, preachers, publishers, columnists, celebrated hostesses, radio commentators, bureaucrats, whole Protestant denominations, and ordinary people began to side with the Nikkei. Certainly there were incidents, but toleration was winning. Most of this preceded the constitutional cases which undermined the legality of the centers. Minority rights won out in the end.

  • 25 - Endgame

  • from Part III - The Demise of Relocation
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 305-308

  • Summary

    This book has proposed three principal hypotheses. One is that the American centers were not comparable to any kind of 1940s or historic concentration camp. Still, most who employ the term concentration camp will not stop using it. So we should at least remind readers that, in short, the inhabitants of American centers enjoyed privileges and opportunities that an inmate of a concentration camp could not even have dreamed of. A second thesis is that the Roosevelt Administration bungled its handling of the Nikkei and largely stumbled into the relocation centers solution. It had a plan for dealing with the dangerous Nikkei minority, but not for dealing with the vast majority of non-dangerous ones. It had not foreseen how its diplomatic measures might affect the American overseas Japanese, much less how its unsettling of public opinion might impact the Nikkei economy. Only bungling on this scale could have made the relocation centers seem a logical and even humane solution to the war caused dilemmas of the Nikkei. In fairness to FDR, he was heavily involved in myriad, terrible military problems, but this one was not well done. A third thesis is that the issue of racism has been greatly exaggerated by historians and that anti-Japanese feeling was a much more complex and nuanced matter than has usually been assumed.

  • 16 - The Leisure Revolution

  • from Part II - Concentration Camps or Relocation Centers?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 228-237

  • Summary

    Horse stalls have haunted the memories of evacuees and their historians. Recollection after recollection has chronicled the indignity of living in horse stalls at assembly centers at racetracks or state and county fairgrounds. Housing certainly was inadequate to begin with, but barracks quickly became standard. There is overwhelming photographic and anecdotal evidence that most Nikkei never set foot in a horse stall. Initially, quarters were either too dusty or too hot or too cold or too windy, but they soon improved. A near universal complaint about both assembly and relocation centers was the lack of privacy. Aside from gender, no one had much privacy in 1940s public restrooms or showers. Certainly servicemen did not, so for a time, the residents had to improvise privacy. Still, the government certainly could not be blamed for not having adequate accommodations for 112,000 people when the Imperial Japanese suddenly made them suspect. Several historians have likened the centers to prisons, but the fact is that they were built like standard American army posts or even instant cities.

  • 22 - The Right to Know

  • from Part II - Concentration Camps or Relocation Centers?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 282-287

  • Summary

    The contrasting reality of the camps’ stood out in their administration and staffing. In American centers, staff were usually drawn from the idealistic or humane professions. They came from the ranks of New Deal bureaucrats, especially the departments of Agriculture and Interior, from the Indian Bureau, then under the reformer John Collier, from the Settlement House Movement, the ranks of the Baptist, Quaker, and Brethren religious denominations, from theological seminaries, the YMCA and YWCA, nursing and from former school administrators, recreationists, and teachers. The only two directors of the WRA, were both 1940s liberals and they screened center guards carefully to exclude Nikkei haters. No administrator came from such famous American penal institutions as Sing Sing or Alcatraz. In contrast, concentration camp staff was appalling and the Nazis always found ways to make it more so. Beneath the governing SS, stood layer upon layer of riff raff, often anti-Semitic. The SS soon realized that criminals made perfect foremen or kapos, who would drive workers remorselessly. Finally, there was often a communist underground among the prisoners, who often won out in the struggles to dominate. The SS often incorporated them into the camp government, a sort of Hitler-Stalin Pact redivivus, writ small. In contrast, Professor Sandra Taylor found relocation authority: “if ultimately absolute, rarely dictatorial or coercive.”

  • 17 - Of Horse Stalls and Modern “Memory”

  • from Part II - Concentration Camps or Relocation Centers?
  • Roger W. Lotchin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book:
    Japanese American Relocation in World War II
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018, pp 238-244

  • Summary

    The oft-repeated remark that Japanese American relocation was the greatest violation of civil rights in American history is manifestly ill informed. The violation of black rights during segregation was much greater. Relocation deprived Nikkei of some of their rights to participate in outside politics, but it did not deprive them entirely of their civil rights. In the relocation centers, the residents politicked incessantly and openly, either for or against other Nikkei factions, or the centers’ authorities, or ill-conceived outside initiatives. In 1942 the Native Sons sued to deprive “Japanese Americans and all Americans of non-white ancestry, except Negro Americans, of the franchise.” The national courts rejected the Sons’ case. The evacuees voted absentee in state and national elections in places, which helped them defeat Congressman Leland Ford, of LA, a long time Nikkei opponent. The evacuees were not disfranchised in state and national elections by relocation, but by apathy. But on matters of direct interest like center constitutions, the Nikkei were anything but apathetic. Even the Issei cast ballots on center matters.

Page 215 of 771