Case Against the W.R.A. Looks Stronger Than Ever

As was to have been expected, a Japanese government "spokesman" seeks to justify the barbarities inflicted on American prisoners by blaming the Allies for "cruelties committed against Japanese civilian internees."

There is no basis whatever for such a charge, as will be attested by the Japanese who have been released from relocation centers. Yet it calls to mind the position taken by our War Relocation Authority officials in defense of some of their attitudes toward the Japanese evacuees.

It should be emphatically stated that there is no disposition on the part of the American people by and large, nor has there ever been, to mete out retribution in kind against Japanese war prisoners of any class. There is little possibility that the cruelties inflicted on American prisoners by the Japs will be duplicated in our own prison camps, either for war captives or civilian internees.

Our leniency springs from an innate desire on the part of a civilized nation to be decently humane. But officials of the War Relocation Authority have implied a more expeditious reason for too-tolerant policy toward their Japanese charges. We were told it was important to treat the Japanese reasonably well because that would somehow insure better treatment for American prisoners at the hands of the Japanese. After all these months, we now know what was really going on while these statements were being made.

Perhaps the War Relocation Authority was kept in ignorance of the true state of affairs in the Jap prison camps. It is not uncommon in our scheme of things for the left hand to be blissfully ignorant of the doings of the right.

But whether the W.R.A. knew the truth or not, to entertain any hope that kindness on our part would be reflected by clemency on the part of the Japs obviously was simply chimerical from the start. Now that the facts have been disclosed, all that talk has the sound of empty hypocrisy.

And there will be more public inclination up and down the Pacific Coast to point to incompetence on the part of W.R.A. policy-makers and to renew the oft-heard and as oft-ignored demands that Dillon Myer and some of his key men be ousted from their soft berths.

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