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FA: We were talking about the army recruiting teams. Let's take it from the point of view of the people, the Nisei in camp. What was the reaction of the Nisei in camp to the army recruiting teams coming in?

MW: Well, initially, they saw the notice in the newspaper and they said, "Hmm, more propaganda." But when they saw that the meeting were to be attended, they, in some of the camps, like Heart Mountain, there was no attendance. They simply didn't show up. They were having their own meetings. Each camp reacted differently; the Minidoka camp, there was a project director by the name of Stafford and he had been clever enough to have meetings prior to the appearance of the army team. And he had made sure that the Issei leaders of the community would all be told the nature of the visit of the army team. So the Issei were able to transmit, in an authoritative way, the reason why they were coming for volunteers. And so of course they, they outshone the other camps. I think there were three hundred who volunteered from that camp as compared to Heart Mountain where thirty-seven, I think, volunteered. So... well, for instance Heart Mountain, they, they had many, many meetings. But these were meetings that were generally called by the young men who were very perplexed.

As a matter of fact -- this may be my going off the subject -- but I have come across documents which show that the War Department deliberately and knowingly wanted the questionnaires to be complex. It is my theory now, after having written Years of Infamy, that the ultimate and the key goal in imposing this ridiculous registration of having people declare whether they were loyal or disloyal was to be able to justify the fact that they had spent so much tax dollars on those camps unnecessarily. These were innocent people. They needed to create a whole lot of "disloyals" to be able to tell Congress that, "We were justified." "Hey, we ended up with so many thousands of 'disloyals' and we were right to have established those camps."

So in a nutshell, this was very, very much in the back of the mind of War Department officials who realized that after all, after they started winning the war, after the Battle of Midway, and they had a feeling that, "The Japanese Americans aren't really that dangerous, but we've got to save face. We can't just say, 'Let's close the camps up. We made a mistake, we're sorry, you may go home now.'" Which would've been the decent thing to do. As a matter of fact, Dillon Myer had already in 1943 suggested that -- and I think McCloy thought that well, it did make some sense, but of course FDR was not, in no mood to admit that such a huge mistake had been made. And, you know, McCloy and Knox and Stimson, those people in power, the military simply were not going to capitulate and say, "We have... we have been, we've had a chance to sort out the 'loyals' from the 'disloyals' and now the rest can return to their home community." And of course that was the genesis, the beginnings of the resisters.

But that is my theory now, that it was really a stupid questionnaire and don't think that the people in the War Department didn't realize that it was very perplexed, perplexing, a rather stupid questionnaire in that there is that document in which McCloy and DeWitt are discussing, and there's a transcript that has been left over. And they are saying, "Wow, it's really happening." Those people in Gila, 60 percent -- or was it 70 percent -- have refused to declare their allegiance to U.S. and the mothers and fathers are being urged by some of the men, just a group of men, I think there were like seventeen, or no more than twenty-three --

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<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.