America's World War II Prison Camps

8/3/2019 America's World War II Prison Camps

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America's World War II Prison Camps

WORLD WAR II INTERNMENT CAMPS. Although many Americans are aware of theWorld War IIimprisonment of West Coast Japanese Americans in relocation centers, few know

of the smaller internment camps operated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Underthe authority of the Department of Justice, the INS directed about twenty such facilities. Texashad three of them, located at Seagoville, Kenedy, and Crystal City. Prisoners included JapaneseAmericans arrested by the FBI, members of Axis nationalities residing in Latin-Americancountries, and Axis sailors arrested in American ports after the attack on Pearl Harbor. About3,000 Japanese, Germans, andItaliansfrom Latin America were deported to the United States,and most of them were placed in the Texas internment camps. Twelve Latin-American countriesgave the United States Department of State custody of the Axis nationals. Eighty percent of theprisoners were from Peru, and about 70 percent were Japanese. The official reasons for thedeportations were to secure the Western Hemisphere from internal sabotage and to providebartering pawns for exchange of American citizens captured by Japan. However, the Axis

nationals were often deported arbitrarily as a result of racial prejudice and because they providedeconomic competition for the other Latin Americans, not because they were a security threat.Eventually, very few Japanese ever saw Latin America again, although some Germans andItalians were returned to their Latin American homes. The majority of Texas internment-campprisoners were Axis nationals from Latin America.

The Seagoville internment camp, built by the Bureau of Prisons as a minimum-security women'sreformatory in 1941, held prisoners from Central and South America, married couples withoutchildren from the United States, and about fifty Japanese language teachers from California. Thefacilities at Seagoville made it the most unusual camp operated by the INS. Twelve colonial-style, red-brick buildings with cream limestone trim were surrounded by spacious lawns. Paved

sidewalks and roads connected the buildings, and visitors remarked that the camp resembled acollege campus. Nevertheless, a high, woven-wire fence surrounded the camp, which had asingle guarded entrance. A white line painted down the middle of the paved road that encircledthe camp marked a boundary that internees could not pass. The six dormitories had single ordouble rooms and were furnished with chests of drawers, desks, chairs, and beds. Communallaundry, bathing, and toilet facilities were located on all floors. Each dormitory had a kitchenwith refrigerators, gas stove, and dishwasher, as well as a dining room with four-person mapletables, linen table coverings, cloth napkins, and china. Internees prepared their own food undersupervision. Other facilities at the Seagoville camp included a hospital and a large recreationbuilding. A female doctor directed the hospital and supervised a staff of six physicians, tenregistered nurses, a dentist, and a laboratory technician. The recreation building provided avariety of activities, such as ballet and stage productions performed by internees in theauditorium. In addition, the recreation building had orchestral instruments, twelve classrooms forEnglish and music instruction, a multilanguage library, and sewing and weaving rooms. Outsideactivities included gardening, farming, tennis, baseball, badminton, and walking around theprison grounds. Although conditions at the Seagoville camp were unusually comfortable for aprison environment, the internees did have some complaints. Many resented being held at a penalinstitution, which was still administered by a warden, Amy N. Stannard. The prisoners alsodisliked the censorship of their letters and the limit on their outgoing correspondence. In late
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summer of 1942, the INS planned to reunite Japanese men from other internment camps withtheir families already at Seagoville. Anticipating this transfer, Seagoville received fifty one-room, eighteen-square-foot plywood huts from the INS detention camp at Santa Fe, NewMexico, and a large building was constructed as a kitchen and mess hall. Laundry rooms andseparate male and female communal toilet and bath facilities were built. The largest population

interned at Seagoville was 647. In June 1945 the Seagoville alien enemy internment camp wasclosed and detainees were repatriated, paroled, or moved to other INS internment camps.

In contrast to Seagoville, theKenedy Alien Detention Camphoused only men. Before WorldWar II, the site was aCivilian Conservation Corpscamp; Kenedy business owners, in an effort toincrease local prosperity, lobbied the INS to use the camp as an internment station. The campreceived its first large group of prisoners on April 23, 1942, and during the course of itsexistence housed more than 3,500 aliens. The United States Army took over the operation onOctober 1, 1944, and from then until the end of the war it housed wounded and disabledGermanprisoners of war.

Crystal City was the location of the largest internment camp administered by the INS andDepartment of Justice. To reduce hardships during internment and to reunite families, the INSoriginally intended to detain only Japanese at Crystal City, especially the many Latin-AmericanJapanese families brought to the United States for internment pending repatriation. Germans andItalians, however, were also held in Crystal City. In the fall of 1942 the INS assumed ownershipof the Farm Security Administration's migratory farmworkers' camp on the outskirts of CrystalCity. Existing facilities were forty-one three-room cottages, 118 one-room structures, and someservice buildings. Eventually, the INS spent more than a million dollars to construct more than500 buildings on the camp's 290 acres. Warehouses, auditoriums, administration offices, schools,clothing and food stores, a hospital, and many housing units were built. Like the camps atKenedy and Seagoville, the Crystal City internment camp provided jobs and revenue for thetown. The first German internees arrived in December 1942. The first Japanese arrived fromSeagoville on March 10, 1943. In addition, prisoners were taken to Crystal City from other INSinternment camps in Hawaii and Alaska (not states at the time), the United States, Puerto Rico,the West Indies, and South and Central American countries. The population of the Crystal Citycamp peaked at 3,326 in May 1945. Languages spoken at Crystal City included Japanese,German, Italian, Spanish, and English; ages of internees ranged from newborn to elderly. Thevariety of prisoners added to the complexities of camp organization and administration. Campofficials tried to arrange housing so that similar races and nationalities would be together, buteven so, strong differences emerged between those who wanted repatriation and those whowanted to stay in the United States or return to the country they were expelled from. The campwas divided into separate sections for Germans and Japanese. Though no physical boundariesseparated the two groups, they did not interact often. They had separate auditoriums, communitycenters, schools, and stores. Housing units consisted of triplexes and duplexes that shared toiletand bath facilities, three-room cottages with indoor toilet and bath, and plywood huts withcentral latrines and baths. Except for the huts, all housing had cold running water, kitchen sinks,and oil stoves. Administrators assigned housing and set food allowances based on the age andsize of families. Token money was issued accordingly, and families purchased food at a largegrocery store. Two separate, large canteens were called the German General Store and theJapanese Union Store; these stores took tokens like the central grocery. The majority of store
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positions were held by internees, including cashiers, store clerks, butchers, and warehouseworkers. The Japanese were provided with special foods, such as soy sauce, tofu, seaweed, driedshrimp, and large quantities of rice. Internees could participate in a paid-work program. Workerswere paid ten cents an hour and employed in all aspects of camp organization. They plantedvegetables, tended orange orchards and beehives, raised pigs and chickens, washed laundry,

repaired clothes and shoes, manufactured mattresses, furniture, and clothes, and made sausageand bakery items. Others worked in the stores, administration offices, hospital, or schools.Employment kept the internees busy and lessened the frustrations of internment. In many ways,the Crystal City camp resembled a bustling small town.

The Crystal City internment camp had four schools to educate the numerous children detainedthere. The children of Germans and Japanese who desired repatriation were sent to languageschools taught by internees. The Federal Grammar and High School provided an American-styleeducation for a mostly Japanese student body. Gaining accreditation from the Texas StateDepartment of Education was a challenge because of teacher and school-supply shortages, aswell as the difficulty of organizing classes when all students were transfers. Team sports were

very popular: thirty-two softball teams were divided into two leagues with a schedule of gamesand tournament play-offs. A chapel with more than thirty internee priests and ministers providedworship services. Also, camp officials granted many requests for picnics by the Nueces River,which was not far outside the internment camp boundary. At Crystal City, the INS administratorstried to make camp life as normal as possible, but security constantly reminded detainees of theirlack of freedom. A ten-foot fence, guard towers, and floodlights surrounded the camp. Mountedguards patrolled the perimeter of the compound, a small police force was inside the camp at alltimes, and incoming and outgoing vehicles were searched at the gate. Officials kept dossiers oneach internee and conducted head counts every day in the housing units. All letters werecensored. Prisoners met visiting friends or relatives under surveillance, although college studentsand American soldiers on vacation were allowed to stay with their parents. Security was apriority; Crystal City did not have any escape attempts. With so many internees, camp officialsrealized a need for medical services. In December 1942 the medical division was composed oftwo nurses and a twenty-five-cent first aid kit. By July 1943 a seventy-bed hospital and clinicoperated twenty-four hours a day. Internee doctors performed more than a thousand major andminor operations, and a Japanese pharmacist dispensed more than 30,000 prescriptions.Hundreds of babies were born at the detention station. By July 1945 hundreds of Germans andJapanese had been repatriated from Crystal City. More than a hundred had been released orparoled, seventy-three had been transferred to other camps, and seventeen had died. In December1945 more than 600 Peruvian Japanese left for Japan because the Peruvian government wouldnot allow them to return to Peru. That same month, a similar number of Japanese were allowedto go home to Hawaii. Some prisoners resisted repatriation to Japan and were not allowed toreturn to Central and South America. In late 1947 the United States determined to let them stay.November 1, 1947, more than two years after the end of World War II, the Crystal Cityinternment camp closed-the last facility detaining alien enemies to do so.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Roger Daniels et al., eds.,Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress (Salt Lake City:University of Utah Press, 1986). Roger Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in


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World War II(New York: Hill and Wang, 1993). C. Harvey Gardiner, Pawns in a Triangle ofHate: The Peruvian Japanese and the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press,1981). Houston Chronicle, December 8, 9, 10, 1941. Houston Post, December 9, 10, 1941. JerreMangione,An Ethnic at Large: A Memoir of America in the Thirties and Forties (New York:Putnam, 1978). Dorothy Swaine Thomas and Richard S. Nishimito, The Spoilage (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1946). U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internmentof Civilians, Personal Justice Denied(Washington: GPO, 1983).

Emily Brosveen, "WORLD WAR II INTERNMENT CAMPS,"Handbook of Texas Online

(http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/quwby), accessed October 22, 2011. Published by

the Texas State Historical Association.

PRISONERS OF WAR

PRISONERS OF WAR. DuringWorld War IITexas had approximately twice as many prisoner-of-war

camps as any other state. Twenty-one prisoner base (permanent) camps were located on military

installations, and over twenty branch (temporary) camps were constructed throughout the state. More than

45,000 German, Italian, and Japanese prisoners were interned in Texas from 1942 to 1945. As the war

continued, a policy of maximum utilization replaced a policy of maximum security of the prisoners,

which resulted in the use of over 27,000 prisoners in numerous agricultural tasks, such as picking cotton,

pulling corn, and harvesting rice. The prisoners were well treated, and very few escape attempts occurred

from the Texas camps. After the war almost all prisoners were returned to their native countries, and

many expressed their desire to return to Texas. Over 100 prisoners who died of wounds or of natural

causes are still buried in the Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio. See alsoGERMAN

PRISONERS OF WAR,andWORLD WAR II, TEXANS IN.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Mark Choate,Nazis in the Pineywoods (Lufkin: Best of East Texas Publishers, 1989). Arnold Krammer,

Nazi Prisoners of War in America (New York: Stein and Day, 1979). Robert Tissing, "Stalag Texas,

19431945,"Military History of Texas and the Southwest13 (Fall 1976).

GERMAN PRISONERS OF WAR

GERMAN PRISONERS OF WAR. When the United States went to war in 1941, what to do with

enemy prisoners of war was among the last considerations of a country reeling from a Japanese attack and

preparing for war in Europe. The nation had never held large numbers of foreign prisoners and was

unprepared for the many tasks involved, which included registration, food, clothing, housing,

entertainment, and even reeducation. But prepared or not, the country suddenly found itself on the

receiving end of massive waves of German and Italian prisoners of war. More than 150,000 men arrivedafter the surrender of Gen. Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps in April 1943, followed by an average of

20,000 new POWs a month. From the Normandy invasion in June 1944 through December 30,000

prisoners a month arrived; for the last few months of the war 60,000 were arriving each month. When the

war was over, there were 425,000 enemy prisoners in 511 main and branch camps throughout the United

States.
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Texas had approximately twice as many POW camps as any other state, first because of the available

space, and second, curiously, because of the climate. The Geneva Convention of 1929 requires that

prisoners of war be moved to a climate similar to that where they are captured; apparently it was thought

that the climate of Texas is similar to that of North Africa. In August 1943 there were already twelve

main camps in Texas, and by June 1, 1944, there were thirty-three. At the end of the war Texas held

78,982 enemy prisoners, mainly Germans, at fourteen military installations: Camp Barkeley (TaylorCounty), Camp Bowie (Brown County), Camp Fannin (Smith County), Camp Hood (Bell County), Camp

Howze (Cooke County), Camp Hulen (Matagorda County), Camp Maxey (Lamar County), Camp Swift

(Bastrop County), Camp Wolters (Palo Pinto County), Fort Bliss (El Paso County), Fort Brown (Cameron

County), Fort Crockett (Galveston County), Fort D. A. Russell (Presidio County), andFort Sam Houston

(Bexar County).

In addition, seven base camps were set up especially for POWs: Brady (McCulloch County), Hearne

(Robertson County), Hereford (Deaf Smith County), Huntsville (Walker County), McLean (Gray

County), Mexia (Limestone County), and Wallace (Galveston County). The Hereford camp alone

contained Italian POWs (2,580 men), and a few Japanese POWs were kept in Hearne (323), Huntsville

(182), and Kenedy (560).

The main camps were generally built to standard specifications: they were military barracks covered by

tar paper or corrugated sheet iron; inside were rows of cots and footlockers. A potbellied stove sat in the

center aisle. Each camp held an average of 3,000 to 4,000 prisoners. In fact, the only real differences

between these POW camps and any normal army training installation were the watchtowers located along

a double barbed-wire fence, floodlights, and, at some camps, dog patrols. Guards were kept to a minimum

number and were usually GIs who, for reasons of health, lack of training, or psychological makeup, were

not needed overseas. The actual discipline among the prisoners was rigidly enforced by German officers

and sergeants themselves. However uncomfortable, the POW camps were sometimes considered too good

for the captive Germans, and many a Texas community called its local camp the "Fritz Ritz."

Since the war had drawn most of the nation's young men overseas, the War Department authorized a

major program to allow labor-starved farmers to utilize the POWs. Consequently, in addition to the base

camps, Texas had twenty-two branch camps, some containing as few as thirty-five or forty prisoners, to

provide labor to farms and factories located too far from the main POW camps. The branch camps, like

the labor program, were temporary and often housed in school buildings, oldCivilian Conservation Corps

facilities, fairgrounds, even circus tents like those erected for the Navasota branch camp. Grateful farmers

paid the government the prevailing wage of $1.50 per day, and the prisoner was paid eighty cents in

canteen coupons. The difference went to the federal treasury to pay for the POW program. German

officers, like their American counterparts in enemy hands, were not required to work, and few

volunteered. German POWs worked on such projects as the Denison Dam reservoir and the construction

of state roads; they also served as orderlies at Harmon General Hospital (now LeTourneau College in

Longview). Their greatest contribution, however, was to agriculture. From 1943, when the POWs arrived

in large numbers, until the end of the war in 1945, the POWs in Texas picked peaches and citrus fruits,

harvested rice, cut wood, baled hay, threshed grain, gathered pecans, and chopped records amounts of

cotton. Many Texas farmers recalled their POW laborers with admiration and even affection; indeed,

many farmers maintained warm friendships with them, and periodic reunions often saw entire

communities turn out to renew those memories.
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Daily life for the prisoners was basically the same at all base camps. Reveille was at 5:45 A.M., and lights

were turned off at 10:00 P.M. Between those times, the prisoners worked, took care of their own needs,

and entertained themselves with a large variety of handicraft and educational programs. Every camp had

an impressive selection of POW-taught courses, ranging from English to engineering, a POW orchestra, a

theater group, a camp newspaper, and a soccer team. Some prisoners even took correspondence courses

through local colleges and universities, and their academic credits were accepted by the Germans upontheir return. Apparently the majority of German prisoners who spent the war years in Texas remembered

their experience as one of the greatest adventures of their lives.

A few prisoners wanted to escape despite the insurmountable odds against success-the vast countryside,

the language difference, and the absence of an underground railroad or safe haven. The records indicate

that only twenty-one POWs escaped, the majority from Hearne and Mexia, and that every escapee was

caught within three weeks, most of them much sooner. Motivated by boredom, the need for privacy, or a

desire to meet girls, the prisoners often simply wandered away from their work parties and were picked

up within a few hours, confused and helpless. Most escapes were comical affairs: a prisoner from Mexia

calling for help after having been chased up a tree by an angry Brahman bull; three from Hearne who

were found on the Brazos River in a crude raft hoping somehow to sail back to Germany; and anotherfrom Hearne who was picked up along U.S. Highway 79, near Franklin, heartily singing German army

marching songs. There is no evidence that any of the escapees committed any act of sabotage while on the

loose.

AfterWorld War IIended, the prisoners were readied for repatriation. They were moved from the smaller

branch camps to the base camps, and from there to the military installations at forts Bliss, Sam Houston,

and Hood. Beginning in November 1945 the former POWs were returned to Europe at the rate of 50,000 a

month, though most were used to help rebuild war-damaged France and Britain before their ultimate

return to Germany. As the POWs left Texas by the trainload, the camps began to close. In Hearne the

campsite and its 200 buildings were put up for public auction; in the 1980s the space comprised a small

municipal airport and a proposed industrial park. The camp in Huntsville became part of Sam Houston

State Teachers College (now Sam Houston State University); in April 1946 Camp Mexia became the site

of Mexia State School for the Mentally Retarded; and Camp Swift in Bastrop later comprised scattered

housing developments, a University of Texas cancer research center, a unit of theTexas National Guard,

and an $11 million medium-security prison for first offenders. See alsoPRISONERS OF WAR.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Arnold Krammer,Nazi Prisoners of War in America (New York: Stein and Day, 1979). Arnold P.

Krammer, "When the Afrika Korps Came to Texas," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 80 (January

1977). Robert Tissing, "Stalag Texas, 19431945,"Military History of Texas and the Southwest13 (Fall

1976). Richard Paul Walker, Prisoners of War in Texas during World War II (Ph.D. dissertation, NorthTexas State University, 1980). Richard P. Walker, "The Swastika and the Lone Star: Nazi Activity in

Texas POW Camps,"Military History of the Southwest19 (Spring 1989). Weekly and Semi-Monthly

Reports on Prisoners of War, June 194230 June 1946, Office of the Provost Marshall General (U.S.

National Archives, Washington).

Arnold P. Krammer
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Citation

The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for

this article.

Arnold P. Krammer, "GERMAN PRISONERS OF WAR,"Handbook of Texas Online

(http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/qug01), accessed October 22, 2011. Published by the

Texas State Historical Association.

An excerpt from

Free to Die for Their

Country

The Story of the Japanese

American Draft Resisters

in World War II

Eric Muller

Illustration credit

Could it be, I asked myself, that

the United States government

had dared to conscript Japanese

American internees into the

army after forcing them into

internment camps on suspicion

of disloyalty?

from thePreface

Chapter 1

Untold Patriotism

A thoroughfare at the Minidoka Relocation Center in springtime.

(courtesy of the Bancroft Library)
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On the last day of spring in 1944, as American

infantrymen began their assault on the Nazi-held

port city of Cherbourg in northern France, the

United States Army staged an induction ceremony

for sixty-six new draftees in Idaho. In most ways,the ceremony was quite ordinary. The inductees,

three abreast and twenty-two rows deep, marched

into formation around a flagpole. Military music

blared over a loudspeaker. Proud but worried

parents and friends gathered around the new

soldiers to listen to speeches of welcome and

praise.

Only one thing was unusual about this ceremony.

The army that was welcoming these new draftees

was simultaneously guarding them and theirfamilies at gunpoint as potential subversives. The

ceremony was taking place behind the barbed wire

of the Minidoka Relocation Center in Hunt, Idaho.

Minidoka was one of the ten concentration camps

that the federal War Relocation Authority

("WRA") set up in 1942 to house the nearly

120,000 Nikkeipeople of Japanese descent

that the government had deported from the west

coast on suspicion of disloyalty in the wake of the

Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Minidoka

draftees were all "Nisei"American citizens born

along the west coast in the 1920's to the generation

called the "Issei." The Issei were immigrants who

had come to the United States from Japan around

the turn of the century but had been forbidden by

American law to apply for American citizenship

because of their Asian origin.

Military service had been promoted to the Nisei as

a precious opportunity to prove the loyalty and

patriotism of all Japanese Americans

qualitiesthat the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had

sharply, even if unfairly, called into question. And

Nisei loyalty was what the induction ceremony at

Minidoka was designed to emphasize and

celebrate. The chairman of the internees'

community council pursued this theme in his

welcoming comments to the draftees and the four

About the book

During World War II the United States

government conscripted Japanese

American internees into the army after

forcing them into internment camps on

suspicion of disloyalty. Most were more

than willing to fight or even die for their

country, but they wanted their country to

first treat them as citizens, to grant them

their rights, as it insisted on their duties.

Free to Die for Their Country by EricMuller tells, for the first time, the story of

their resistance, trial, and imprisonment.

About the author

Eric Muller teaches constitutional and

criminal law at the University of North

Carolina at Chapel Hill. He first learned

of the Japanese American draft resisters

while on the faculty of the University of

Wyoming College of Law. The story

holds special interest for him both

because of his own experience as a

federal prosecutor and because of his

family's own experiences during World


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hundred other internees in attendance. "We are

mightily proud of you boys," said the Issei leader.

"We know you will make good and we, and

others, will point to your records; and weall of

us hereIssei and Nisei alike, will benefit by your

records." After these opening remarks, thepresident of the Minidoka Parent-Soldiers

Association presented each of the inductees with a

Bible and a shiny metal cigarette case as good luck

presents.

Then it was time for the swearing of the military

oath. Lieutenant B. M. Harrington, a member of

the army's Traveling Examining and Induction

Board, rose to swear the boys in, and to offer a

few inspirational comments to the boys and their

families about the task they were undertaking."We in the American armed forces," the lieutenant

said to the new troops, "are happy to welcome you

Japanese among our ranks, even though your

country, Japan, is at war with the United States."

The crowd stirred uncomfortably: Did the

lieutenant not know that the draftees were all

American citizens, not Japanese?

Harrington continued. "The fact that you young

Japanese are willing to fight against your country,"

he stressed, "should prove to all that there are a

few Japanese who are good Americans." The

lieutenant expressed his hope that at the end of the

war, "all nationalities could live in peace in

America," and then blundered to his conclusion,

congratulating "you Japanese" for "making a

splendid record in our Army, where you are

welcomed and given all of the rights and

privileges of any other citizen who is brought into

the service."

Harrington's comments visibly sapped the crowd

of its enthusiasm. "Doesn't he know we were born

here and are citizens of the United States, not

Japan?" muttered one young man. Exclaimed

another: "Why doesn't that guy get next to himself

and discover to what country we belong? We are

War II as German-Jewish immigrants.


10/17

no Japs."

A Minidoka administrator took Harrington aside

after his speech and pointed out the lieutenant's

errors: the Nisei draftees were Americans, not

Japanese; they were leaving the camp to fightfor

their country, not againstit; and the U.S. Army

was as much theirs as it was Lieutenant

Harrington's. Harrington accepted the suggestions

and "agreed in good spirit to leave out such

references in future induction ceremonies." But for

the Minidoka internees, the insult had registered.

One of the sixty-six young men turned his back on

the assembly and walked away just before the oath

was administered, joining in defiance the tiny

handful of other young men from Minidoka who

had decided to resist the draft rather than complywith it.

In the scheme of things, Lieutenant Harrington's

words were actually a petty indignity. The men and

women in his audience, and their fellow internees at

the nine other WRA internment camps, had suffered

far more painful wounds by June of 1944 thanHarrington's insensitive speech. Indeed, it would be

safe to say that by this point in the war, the United

States government had placed almost impossible

burdens on them. About two years earlier, in March of

1942, the government had confined them to their

homes from dusk to dawn as suspected subversives.

Then the government rounded them up and

warehoused them for the summer of 1942 in so-called

"assembly centers"filthy sheds hastily thrown up at

local fairgrounds and race tracks. That fall, the

government loaded them onto trains and shipped them

off for indefinite detention behind barbed wire in

desolate camps such as Minidoka, the Heart Mountain

Relocation Center in Wyoming, and the Tule Lake

Relocation Center in California. Their crime was their

ethnicity, and the government had made them pay for

it with their livelihoods, their possessions, their

Georg

e

Noza

wa

(right)

, one

of the

Heart

Moun

tain

draft

resiste

rs,and Frank Emi (left), one of the leaders

of the Fair Play Committee, outside a

barrack at the Heart Mountain

Relocation Center in the summer of

1944. (courtesy of George Nozawa)


11/17

liberty, and their dignity.

In January of 1944 the government demanded still

more. It announced that it would begin drafting the

very same Japanese American men it was jailing on

suspicion of disloyalty. By early February, young men

at the ten relocation centers began receiving notices

directing them to report to their local draft boards for

their preinduction physical examinations. They were

to join the same army that had been guarding them for

years, and that continued to aim weapons and

searchlights at their parents and siblings.

This extraordinary government demand left these

young men with no good choices. On the one hand,

they could swallow their outrage at years of

mistreatment and leave captivity to fight for someoneelse's freedom. To do this would mean more than

risking their own lives; it would also mean leaving

their families behind to uncertain futures as wards of a

hostile government. On the other hand, they could

give voice to their outrage and resist the draft. To do

this was to risk prosecution, many more years of

incarceration, and the lifelong stigma of a felony

conviction.

Most of the young men in the camps, like the sixty-

five Minidokans who were sworn in that June day byLieutenant Harrington, choked back their resentments

and chose to accept the draft as just another unwanted

test of their patriotism. Many served bravely in

Europe with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the

racially segregated battalion for Japanese Americans

that the army created for them. Some lost limbs,

others their lives.

Some of the internees, however, made the other

choice and refused to comply with their draft orders.

Usually these were solitary acts of disobedience. AtMinidoka, for example, nearly forty young men

ignored their draft notices, each unaware that others

were doing the same. At the Heart Mountain

Relocation Center, on the other hand, draft resistance

became a noisy and well-publicized political

movement that led nearly ninety to resist. In all, more


12/17

than three hundred Japanese Americans from the ten

WRA camps refused to show up for their physical

exams or for induction. They pressed a simple moral

question: If we are loyal enough to serve in the army,

what are we doing behind barbed wire?

Not only did the government decline to answer this

question, but it punished the resisters brutally for

asking it. Through the spring and summer of 1944,

agents of the U.S. Marshals Service came to their

tarpaper barracks and arrested them on charges of

draft evasion, carting them off to local jails to await

trial. Their cases came to trial in federal courtrooms

across the western United States in the summer and

fall of 1944.

Many of the defendants were at

least guardedly optimistic; they

knew that if there was one

branch of the federal

government that might protect

them, it was the federal courts.

Their optimism was guarded

because they knew it waswartime and they knew that

they looked like the enemy.

While the Japanese threat to the

U.S. mainland had vanished by

the summer of 1944, most of

the country still shared the view

of Japanese Americans that the

military official responsible for

their evacuation and internment

had publicly voiced: "A Jap's a

Jap." As long as the war was

still on, the resisters understood

that they would have a hard

time finding a sympathetic ear

for their claim. But they viewed

the federal courts as their best

hope.

The sixty-three resisters from the Heart Mountain Relocation Center

on the first day of their trial in federal district court in Cheyenne,Wyoming, 12 June 1944. (courtesy of George Nozawa)


13/17

This was not entirely unrealistic. Franklin Delano

Roosevelt had had twelve years to load the federal

bench with New Deal liberals. This is not to say

that the federal courts in 1944 were the institution

we now recognize them to be; the Warren Court

had not yet been born, and the activist era in the

area of individual rights that it would usher in was

still in the offing. But it was not far in the offing.

Brown v. Board of Education, the most daring

defense of individual freedom ever undertaken by

any branch of the American government, was just

a decade down the road. Already on the Supreme

Court, beginning to find their judicial voices, wereseveral of the eventual leaders of the Warren Court

revolution. Decisions protecting the rights of

Communists, blacks, labor unions, and unpopular

religious groups were starting to appear with some

frequency. The federal courts that would hear the

prosecutions of the Japanese American draft

resisters were in flux, moving from earlier, more

timid times on matters of civil rights to the bolder

ones that lay ahead.

The federal courts, however, failed the resisters

dismally. With but one exception, the federal

udges hearing the cases waved aside the resisters'

attacks on the legality of drafting internees and ran

shoddy trials that produced across-the-board

convictions. This disappointing group of federal

udges then sentenced the resisters to lengthy terms

of imprisonmentmost commonly two to three

years, but sometimes as long as fivein federal

penitentiaries such as Leavenworth and McNeil

Island. The resisters traded in their years ofdetention as pariahs in relocation centers for years

of incarceration as felons in federal prisons.

Only one federal judge saw the cases differently.

Judge Louis E. Goodman of the Northern District

of California dismissed the government's charges

against the twenty-six draft resisters from the Tule

More about the history

Read historical documents and

background information for a

documentary film,"Conscience and the

Constitution,"about the draft resisters at

Heart Mountain Relocation Center,

Wyoming.

TheHeart Mountain Digital Preservation

Projectfeatures documents and

photographs from the Heart Mountain

Relocation Center Collection at the John

Taggart Hinckley Library.

Website of theTule Lake Committeehas

photos and information about the Tule

Lake camp.

Thehistorysection of the JapaneseAmerican Network includes links to

information about WWII internment

camps and Japanese American veterans.

Links to statutes, the legal cases, and

scholarly articles are included on the

websiteInternment of Japanese

Americansmaintained by Vernellia R.

Randall, Professor of Law at the

University of Dayton School of Law.

C. John Yu has awebsite on Japanese

American internmentwhich includes

stories contributed by internees, as well

as many other resources.
http://www.pbs.org/consciencehttp://www.pbs.org/consciencehttp://www.pbs.org/consciencehttp://www.pbs.org/consciencehttp://chem.nwc.cc.wy.us/HMDP/homepage.htmhttp://chem.nwc.cc.wy.us/HMDP/homepage.htmhttp://chem.nwc.cc.wy.us/HMDP/homepage.htmhttp://chem.nwc.cc.wy.us/HMDP/homepage.htmhttp://www.tulelake.org/http://www.tulelake.org/http://www.tulelake.org/http://www.janet.org/janet_history/ja_history.htmlhttp://www.janet.org/janet_history/ja_history.htmlhttp://www.janet.org/janet_history/ja_history.htmlhttp://www.udayton.edu/~race/02rights/intern00.htmhttp://www.udayton.edu/~race/02rights/intern00.htmhttp://www.udayton.edu/~race/02rights/intern00.htmhttp://www.udayton.edu/~race/02rights/intern00.htmhttp://www.geocities.com/Athens/8420/main.htmlhttp://www.geocities.com/Athens/8420/main.htmlhttp://www.geocities.com/Athens/8420/main.htmlhttp://www.geocities.com/Athens/8420/main.htmlhttp://www.geocities.com/Athens/8420/main.htmlhttp://www.geocities.com/Athens/8420/main.htmlhttp://www.udayton.edu/~race/02rights/intern00.htmhttp://www.udayton.edu/~race/02rights/intern00.htmhttp://www.janet.org/janet_history/ja_history.htmlhttp://www.tulelake.org/http://chem.nwc.cc.wy.us/HMDP/homepage.htmhttp://chem.nwc.cc.wy.us/HMDP/homepage.htmhttp://www.pbs.org/consciencehttp://www.pbs.org/conscience


14/17

Lake Relocation Center, saying that the decision to

prosecute them was "shocking to [his] conscience"

and a violation of due process. The government did

not appeal his decision, and so it might be said that

the Tule Lake resisters won. But even these

twenty-six winners ultimately lost: their prize forbeating the draft evasion charges was a trip back to

the barbed wire confines of their concentration

camp.

This story is an untold chapter in the history of the

American justice system. With the exception of

Judge Goodman, the chapter is a bleak tale of

callous judges and overzealous prosecutors. But

the chapter is a depressing one in a larger sense as

well, because it is far from clear that the law would

have enabled the courts to reach more satisfyingresults. Judge Goodman's decision was a good deal

longer on courage than on careful legal analysis,

and what little analysis there was pushed due

process doctrine into unchartedpossibly

unchartableterrain. The cases of the Nisei draft

resisters thus illustrated with unusual poignancy

how law can deviate from justice.

The resisters' story, however, is not just a story

about a failed judicial process. It is also a story of

failure in the most elemental process of American

lifethe process of assimilation. The America that

entered the Second World War was a nation that

had long cherished the image of the patriotic

resister: a colonist heaving tea into the waters of

Boston Harbor, Patrick Henry rising to demand his

freedom or his death, Thomas Jefferson penning

the list of the Crown's offenses in the Declaration

of Independence. This was part of what set

America apart from the totalitarian regimes it was

battling: good citizenship was not the sole preserveof the obedient. To the children of its Japanese

immigrants, however, America would not extend

the option of loyal protest. Through the force of

the criminal sanction, it demanded that these

young Japanese Americans prove their patriotism

through unquestioning obedience to authority,


15/17

ironically a trait more Japanese than American.

Ultimately it was not only the federal government

that demanded this of the draft resisters; much of

the Japanese American community did too. And

herein lies the greatest and most painful irony of

the resisters' experience. Notwithstanding its

wartime demands, the federal government soon

made amends with the Japanese American

internees who resisted the draft. President Truman

granted them a Christmas Eve pardon in 1947,

removing from their records the stigma of their

felony convictions for draft evasion. To this day,

however, the resisters have not been pardoned by

some members of their own community who see

their wartime defiance as an act of disloyalty and

betrayal. So powerful was the condemnationwithin the Japanese American community for

years after the war that many of the resisters did

not share their story of oppression even with their

own children. Even today, fifty-seven years after

the resisters' federal court trials, the oldest and

most prominent Japanese American civil rights

organization has only just begun to overcome years

of bitter internal conflict over apologizing to the

resisters. And the sizable literature on Japanese

America's wartime exile and incarceration almost

completely omits the resisters' tale, focusing

instead on those, like the sixty-five Minidokans

"welcomed" into the army by Lieutenant

Harrington, who said "yes" to the draft rather than

"no."

What follows is, in a double sense, a story of

untold patriotism.


16/17

A group of Heart Mountain resisters poses in

prison-issued suits on July 14, 1946, the day of

their release from McNeil Island. Yosh Kuromiya

stands in the back row, second from the left.

(courtesy of Yosh Kuromiya)

Top illustration credit: Partial image of lithograph, courtesy of Roger Shimomura.

Copyright notice: Excerpted from Free to Die for Their Country: The Japanese American Draft

Resisters of World War IIby Eric Muller, published by the University of Chicago Press. 2001 by the

University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the

fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form,provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the

University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or

republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of

Chicago Press.

Eric Muller

Free to Die for Their Country: The Japanese American Draft Resisters of World War II

With a Foreword by Senator Daniel K. Inouye

2001, 250 pages, 16 halftonesCloth $27.50 ISBN: 0-226-54822-8

Paper $15.00 ISBN: 0-226-54823-6

For information on purchasing the bookfrom bookstores or here onlineplease go to the webpage

forFree to Die for Their Country.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3618779.htmlhttp://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3618779.htmlhttp://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3618779.htmlhttp://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3618779.htmlhttp://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3618779.htmlhttp://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3618779.htmlhttp://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3618779.html


17/17

Documents

America's World War II Prison Camps