<Begin Segment 15>

Q: Can you tell us about the two viewpoints in the military regarding the evacuation?

RD: At the very top, General Marshall and his subordinates and the tasks assigned to General Mark Clark, decided that it was not rational to lock up the West Coast Japanese Americans. After all, more than sixty days had passed since Pearl Harbor, there'd been no sabotage. They assumed that if there were sabotage, they would then deal with that, but it was simply a question of scarce resources and that it just did not seem to them to be worthwhile. Before this report could be transmitted to the civilian heads of the army, Stimson, on the urging of his deputy, John J. McCloy, under Karl Bendetsen, and of General Gullion, went directly to the President of the United States, apparently without consulting General Marshall, and got Roosevelt to issue, to approve the issuance of Executive Order 9066. And once that was issued on the 19th of February, the work of the general staff was moot. And Marshall, a good soldier, did what a soldier's supposed to do. He obeyed his civilian superiors and did not raise another issue. The irony of all of this is that on the West Coast, which was not a combat zone, one submarine showed up and fired a few shells, some bombs were dropped, Japanese Americans were considered a danger and were put into concentration camps based on a fictitious military necessity, it was really political necessity. In the Hawaiian islands, where Japanese were a third of the population, which actually had been a theatre of war, almost the entire Japanese American population was left at liberty, simply because among other things, you can't lock up one-third of the population without doing terrible things to the civilian labor force, to available resources, etcetera. It was just not a rational thing to do.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.