The Morality of the Bomb

“There is a rank due to the United States, among nations, which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.” — George Washington, Fifth Annual Message, 1793.

On August 6, 1945 I was a 9-year old boy studying the clarinet. On that day my father, who at the time was working nights at a defense plant, took me to a matinee performance of the Benny Goodman band at the Palace Theater in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. We sat in the darkened theater listening to the great band leader and clarinetist play both pop and classical selections with his band. It was a great experience for me as I was with my dad in one of the best theaters in town listening to one of the best band in the United States.

As we walked out to the theater we saw crowds of people milling about the newspaper racks looking at the banner headline that read “A-BOMB.” The headline completely filled the width of the paper and its height covered the entire portion of the paper above the fold. In other words it was big.

Not only was the headline big, the news was big. At the time I did not know if the “A” was an indefinite article or an abbreviation for the word “Atomic.” I also recall sitting at the dining room table a few days later listening to my father and my uncles discussing the ramification of the use of the atomic bombs and how the world would change. I would soon learn what all of this meant.

Thousands of miles away on the island of Saipan in the Pacific Ocean was a young 18-year old Marine. At the time I did not know this Marine and it was many years later I heard his story. Bill was a client of mine and one day at lunch he was relating a few of his experiences as a young Marine and how the war affected him. When the subject of the A-Bomb came up he told me he had no reservations about of use of it against the Japanese. Bill had experienced some of the most brutal fighting in the Second World War and his division was preparing for the eventual invasion of the Japanese homeland where he was sure he would die. To Bill the news of the dropping of the atomic bomb was his Easter Sunday. He knew he would now go home rather than die on Japanese soil.

On this day in 1945, at 8:16 a.m. Japanese time, an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped the world's first atom bomb, over the city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people are killed as a direct result of the blast, and another 35,000 are injured. At least another 60,000 would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the fallout.

U.S. President Harry S. Truman, discouraged by the Japanese response to the Potsdam Conference's demand for unconditional surrender, made the decision to use the atom bomb to end the war in order to prevent what he predicted would be a much greater loss of life were the United States to invade the Japanese mainland. And so on August 5, while a "conventional" bombing of Japan was underway, "Little Boy," (the nickname for one of two atom bombs available for use against Japan), was loaded onto Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets' plane on Tinian Island in the Marianas. Tibbets' B-29, named the Enola Gay after his mother, left the island at 2:45 a.m. on August 6. Five and a half hours later, "Little Boy" was dropped, exploding 1,900 feet over a “T” bridge intersection unleashing the equivalent of 12,500 tons of TNT. The bomb had several inscriptions scribbled on its shell, one of which read "Greetings to the Emperor from the men of the Indianapolis" (the ship that transported the bomb to the Marianas).

There were 90,000 buildings in Hiroshima before the bomb was dropped; only 28,000 remained after the bombing. Of the city's 200 doctors before the explosion; only 20 were left alive or capable of working. There were 1,780 nurses before-only 150 remained who were able to tend to the sick and dying.

According to John Hersey's classic work Hiroshima, the Hiroshima city government had put hundreds of schoolgirls to work clearing fire lanes in the event of incendiary bomb attacks. They were out in the open when the Enola Gay dropped its load.

"War is hell," summarized Civil War Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, whose scorched earth policy during his march through Georgia is credited with further weakening the Confederate army, ultimately shortening the war and saving lives.

Eighty years later, during World War ll, the sentiments, tactics and strategy were still valid as President Harry S. Truman (D) authorized the first use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, 68 years ago today and another one on Nagasaki three days later. The Japanese surrendered a week later.

For those who still argue that this action wasn't necessary, mentioning the horrible deaths of the Japanese, (make no mistake, they were horrible) or the number of American troops saved (and they were) doesn't justify killing so many Japanese civilians, (the responsibility of a commander is to protect those under him as much as possible) or the Japanese were so weakened they were ready to surrender, (they weren't; they were the jihadis, suicide bombers, of their day) or other objections, Duncan Anderson of the British Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, which trains all British Army officers, offers another strong opposing opinion..

Utilizing "discoveries made upon the opening of hitherto restricted archives, and the work of British- and American-educated Japanese historians" and newly available information after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Anderson writes:

“Also thanks to the work of Japanese historians, we now know much more about Japanese plans in the summer of 1945. Japan had no intention of surrendering. It had husbanded over 8,000 aircraft, many of them Kamikazes, hundreds of explosive-packed suicide boats, and over two million well equipped regular soldiers, backed by a huge citizen's militia. When the Americans landed, the Japanese intended to hit them with everything they had, to impose on them casualties that might break their will. If this did not do it, then the remnants of the army and the militias would fight on as guerrillas, protected by the mountains and by the civilian population.”

But what about the passive, helpless Emperor Hirohito? According to Anderson, he was not passive or helpless but the core of the Japanese military system:

“Japanese and American historians have also shown that at the centre of the military system was the Emperor Hirohito, not the hapless prisoner of militarist generals, the version promulgated by MacArthur in 1945 to save him from a war crimes trial, but an all-powerful warlord, who had guided Japan’s aggressive expansion at every turn. Hirohito’s will had not been broken by defeats at land or sea, it had not been broken by the firestorms or by the effects of the blockade, and it would certainly not have been broken by the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, something the Japanese had anticipated for months.

What broke Hirohito’s will was the terrible new weapon, a single bomb which could kill a hundred thousand at a time. Suddenly Japan was no longer fighting other men, but the very forces of the universe. The most important target the bombs hit was Hirohito’s mind - it shocked him into acknowledging that he could not win the final, climatic battle.”

To this day, Harry Truman is viewed by ardent critics and revisionist historians as a war criminal and the United States is deemed as being stained by a sin as indelible as slavery. In fact, last November, a "documentary" on Hiroshima and its aftermath produced by Oliver Stone was shown on television and, as might be expected, it presented the standard apologist's take on the history surrounding Truman's decision to use nuclear bombs. To quote Stone from an interview he gave to the Stanford Daily earlier this year, his production was intended to "cause Americans to rethink your history. because you're not the indispensable, benevolent nation that we pretend to be." He might have gotten his facts straight before making such an arrogant and ignorant comment, but as we know from his past works, facts seem to get in the way of his agenda.

To begin with, the Japanese military knew long before atomic bombs were used that the war was lost. Why else resort to kamikazes in a last-ditch effort to dissuade the Allies from invading and to force a resolution short of absolute surrender? They could have surrendered long before they did but that was never a serious consideration, if it was a consideration at all. Even at the end, after Hirohito broke the deadlock in his cabinet, some military officers attempted a coup, to place him under house arrest and prevent the nationwide broadcast of his prerecorded statement advising his subjects that the Japanese nation had no choice but to "endure the unendurable." One key reason Hirohito's cabinet had deadlocked in the first place was because some of its members from the military considered the effects of the two bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as being no worse than that of conventional incendiary bombing on other Japanese cities, including Tokyo. And there was a genuine fear that, if the Japanese people found out that their government was negotiating the terms of surrender with the Allies, the government might face a popular uprising. One only has to consider the nation's history to understand why this was a real concern.

From its emergence as a powerful Asian state in the eighth century, Japan had never been successfully invaded or lost a war. The word "kamikaze" means "divine wind" and became part of the Japanese language after typhoons fortuitously prevented a Mongolian fleet from invading the mainland centuries ago. The Japanese people simply did not know the meaning of surrender, and in World War II and after the nation's surrender, not a few elected to commit suicide rather than face what they saw as humiliation. Then, of course, there were those soldiers stationed on remote islands who, for months and even decades after the surrender, refused to abandon their posts.

In the middle ages, a warrior class of strongmen, the samurai, took control of the country and the shogunate, a hereditary office of military dictatorship, was established in 1192. Although imperial rule was reestablished in 1867 in name, a militaristic mindset was entrenched in the thinking of the citizenry, and the people devoted themselves to the welfare of the nation as a whole, the Western concept of individuality being largely unknown. It took the postwar Allied occupation to put an end to that.

Before that, however, the world witnessed one of the most pernicious consequences of Japan's insularity and its historical embrace of a militaristic political posture, the brutality with which it suppressed foreign populations, including especially the Koreans and the Chinese. The "Rape of Nanking" is infamous, as is the Bataan Death March, but less well known is Japan's dispersion of mosquitos and fleas infected with bubonic plague and other diseases to spread terror and untold suffering among civilian populations the army intended to dominate. (Evidence exists that the Japanese Navy intended to use the same bioweapons against American West Coast targets late in 1945.) The Japanese military doctors of Unit 731 in Manchuria engaged in the very type of research and medical experimentation on live human "specimens" that made Josef Mengele a household name.

Japan also undertook its own program to develop an atomic bomb and, though as was learned after the war, it did not get very far, one can only imagine what might have transpired had it been successful. Nevertheless, that program continued up until near the bitter end, because, in the closing days of the European war, a U-boat transporting to Japan a cargo of raw uranium was intercepted by the American Navy.

After-the-fact armchair moralizers such as Stone tend to also overlook the "inconvenient truth" that Japanese scientists had figured out how to use upper air currents to direct hydrogen-filled balloons to the American West coast and that hundreds carrying incendiary charges and explosive devices actually made it here. The incendiary charges were for the purpose of starting forest and brush fires, and the bombs to spread terror by killing and maiming those unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong times. One church group picnicking in Oregon came across one such a balloon lying on the ground near their picnic site and, in the course of trying to figure out what it was, were blown to bits. American authorities saw to it that a lid was placed on publicity about these balloons, but they obviously feared that soon enough, plague, anthrax, and other horrible inflictions would become the Japanese military's weapon of choice.

Japan's indifference to the laws of war and human suffering had become infamous. Indeed, they never took great pains to hide it. There was little doubt among the Allies that, if the military had its way, unimaginable numbers of their own people would have died in an effort to avoid the shame of surrender. Truman knew all this, of course, and first and foremost put the lives of American servicemen at the forefront of his deliberations.

It is telling that it was not for a full five days after Nagasaki was bombed, during which the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria and the American air forces continued their bombing of Japanese civilian populations, before the Emperor broke the tie and announced his country's defeat. Lest there any doubt about what the effect of the atomic bombings, the Japanese prime minister acknowledged after the war that they were a key consideration that motivated him to ask Hirohito to speak to the cabinet and decide which way Japan should go. In his broadcast to his people, Hirohito himself left no doubt that the atomic bombs had had their intended effect.

Returning to Stone and his ilk, how full of themselves they must feel for rendering a moral judgment, and about the entirety of the American people no less, after the fact and without any way of proving that, if Truman had done things their way, the war would have come to an end as quickly as it did and, in their eyes, more humanely. Needless to say, it's a fool's errand to imagine how things might have been different had the bombs been left undisturbed and undeployed. But it is a certainty that within five days of the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan did surrender and the war came to an end. As it turned out, the American occupation under Douglas MacArthur, who greatly respected the Japanese people, was relatively benign, and Japan took to democracy and became a close and respected ally. And since Nagasaki, no other atomic weapon has been used in combat.

Of course, since Nagasaki, millions of innocent people have been slaughtered and maimed in the old-fashioned ways we are all familiar with. Most of this death and suffering has been the result of the coming to power of political movements of the type for which Stone and the left have so often expressed admiration. But you never know. Maybe someday he and those who think the way he does will count themselves lucky that they never had to live where people like themselves were in control.

We now know that if the bomb had not been used, the invasion of Japan would have gone ahead. The best indication we have of the casualties that might have occurred are the actual figures for the eight-week campaign on Okinawa, in which 12,500 Americans died, and 39,000 were wounded. As Anderson states:

“Fighting at the same intensity (it could not have been less) on Kyushu and Honshu, campaigns which would have lasted some 50 weeks, would have produced 80 to 100,000 American dead, and some 300 to 320,000 wounded. Are these casualties enough to justify Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

If morality is based on numbers, and in this case it must be, then perhaps not. But what is usually overlooked in this numbers game, is the number of Japanese killed on Okinawa, which amounts to a staggering 250,000 military and civilian, about 20 Japanese killed for every dead American. If we conduct the same calculation for an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands, we arrive at a figure of at least two million Japanese dead.”

Another issue to consider when it came to dropping the atomic bomb is the war weariness at home. The people of the United States were growing weary of the war. Germany had surrender in May and the losses of U.S. troops on Iwo Jima and Okinawa had greatly disturbed the American public. The thought of an invasion of the Japanese home islands was unacceptable to many Americans.

Also there was the matter of money. Even after the highly successful War Bond sales after the promotional tour by the Iwo Jima flag raisers the U.S. was running out of money to conduct the war. Another year of war in the Pacific would have demanded greater tax increases, something the public and Congress was dubious about. We needed to end this war quickly with minimum causalities or they cry for a negotiated peace would have grown louder. Remember at this time we did not know of all of the horrible atrocities committed by the Japanese. If we had not used the atomic Bomb and the public and Congress had learned of its existence and power Truman would have been impeached.

Anderson concludes:

“The losses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible, but not as terrible as the number of Japanese who would have died as the result of an invasion. The revisionist historians of the 1960s - and their disciples - are quite wrong to depict the decision to use the bombs as immoral. It would have been immoral if they had not been used.”

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Over the years revisionist historians and left-wing peaceniks like Oliver Stone have changed the narrative of the use of the bomb. The latest example of this is the film “Emperor” staring Tommy Lee Jones in the role of General Douglas MacArthur. The film is a stodgy movie that mixes dubious history with a clichéd, Madame Butterfly romance story, set in the period immediately following Japan's surrender in 1945. In watching the film I was disturbed at some of the lines criticizing the use of the bomb by the Japanese that went unchallenged.

As time passes the historians have revised the history of the Second World War. There are countless documentaries about the evils of the Nazis while there are very few about the atrocities committed by the Japanese and their desire to carry on the war no matter how many of their people would die.

Two Events on this Day in History

“We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” — Winston Churchill

Two historic events happen on this day. Both were turning points in World War Two — one in the Pacific and the other in Europe. One was a victory and the other turned a military disaster into a victory.

We’ll begin with the Pacific theater.

Six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States defeated Japan in one of the most decisive naval battles of World War II. Thanks in part to major advances in code breaking, the United States was able to preempt and counter Japan’s planned ambush of its few remaining aircraft carriers, inflicting permanent damage on the Japanese Navy. An important turning point in the Pacific campaign, the victory allowed the United States and its allies to move into an offensive position.

On this day in 1942, the Battle of Midway — one of the most decisive U.S. victories against Japan during World War II — began. During the four-day sea-and-air battle, the outnumbered U.S. Pacific Fleet succeeded in destroying four Japanese aircraft carriers while losing only one of its own, the Yorktown, to the previously invincible Japanese navy.

In six months of offensives prior to Midway, the Japanese had triumphed in lands throughout the Pacific, including Malaysia, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines and numerous island groups. The United States, however, was a growing threat, and Japanese Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto sought to destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet before it was large enough to outmatch his own.

This fleet engagement between U.S. and Japanese navies in the north-central Pacific Ocean resulted from Japan's desire to sink the American aircraft carriers that had escaped destruction at Pearl Harbor. Admiral Yamamoto, Japanese fleet commander, chose to invade a target relatively close to Pearl Harbor to draw out the American fleet, calculating that when the United States began its counterattack, the Japanese would be prepared to crush them. Instead, an American intelligence breakthrough — the solving of the Japanese fleet codes — enabled Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Chester W. Nimitz to understand the exact Japanese plans. Nimitz placed available U.S. carriers in position to surprise the Japanese moving up for their preparatory air strikes on Midway Island itself.

A thousand miles northwest of Honolulu, the strategic island of Midway became the focus of his scheme to smash U.S. resistance to Japan's imperial designs. Yamamoto's plan consisted of a feint toward Alaska followed by an invasion of Midway by a Japanese strike force. When the U.S. Pacific Fleet arrived at Midway to respond to the invasion, it would be destroyed by the superior Japanese fleet waiting unseen to the west. If successful, the plan would eliminate the U.S. Pacific Fleet and provide a forward outpost from which the Japanese could eliminate any future American threat in the Central Pacific. U.S. intelligence broke the Japanese naval JN-25b code, however, and the Americans anticipated the surprise attack.

The intelligence interplay would be critical to the outcome of the battle and began many weeks before the clash of arms. American radio nets in the Pacific picked up various orders Yamamoto had dispatched to prepare his forces for the operation. As early as May 2, messages that were intercepted began to indicate some forthcoming operation, and a key fact, the planned day-of-battle position of the Japanese carriers, would be divulged in a notice sent on May 16. By the time Nimitz had to make final decisions, the Japanese plans and order of battle had been reconstructed in considerable detail.

American combat forces took over where intelligence efforts left off. Scouts found the Japanese early in the morning of June 4. Although initial strikes by Midway-based planes were not successful, American carrier-based planes turned the tide. Torpedo bombers (Douglas TBD Devastator) became separated from the American Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bombers and were slaughtered (36 of 42 shot down), but they diverted Japanese defenses just in time for the dive-bombers to arrive — some of them had become lost, and now by luck they found the Japanese. The Japanese carriers were caught while refueling and rearming their planes, making them especially vulnerable. The Americans sank four fleet carriers — the entire strength of the task force — Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu, with 322 aircraft and over five thousand sailors. The Japanese also lost the heavy cruiser Mikuma. American losses included 147 aircraft and more than three hundred seamen.

The only Japanese carrier that initially escaped destruction, the Hiryu, loosed all its aircraft against the American task force and managed to seriously damage the U.S. carrier Yorktown, forcing its abandonment. At about 5:00 p.m., dive-bombers from the U.S. carrier Enterprise returned the favor, mortally damaging the Hiryu. It was scuttled the next morning.

Analysts often point to Japanese aircraft losses at Midway as eliminating the power of the Imperial Navy's air arm, but in fact about two-thirds of air crews survived. More devastating was the loss of trained mechanics and aircraft ground crews who went down with the ships. Some historians see Midway as the turning point in the Pacific theater of the war, after which Americans rode straight to Tokyo; others view it as a cusp in the war, after which initiative hung in the balance, to swing toward the Allies in the Guadalcanal campaign. Either way, Midway ranks as a truly decisive victory for the naval forces of the United States. Military historian John Keegan called it "the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare." It was Japan's worst naval defeat in 350 years

When the Battle of Midway ended, Japan had lost four carriers, a cruiser and 292 aircraft, and suffered an estimated 3,057 casualties. The U.S. lost the Yorktown, the destroyer USS Hammann, 145 aircraft and suffered approximately 300 casualties.

Japan's losses hobbled its naval might--bringing Japanese and American sea power to approximate parity—and marked the turning point in the Pacific theater of World War II. In August 1942, the great U.S. counteroffensive began at Guadalcanal and did not cease until Japan's surrender three years later.

Books have been written and films made about the battle. Perhaps the most authentic film about the battle was made in 1976. Midway produced by Walter Mirisch stars Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, James Coburn, Glenn Ford, and Hal Holbrook as Commander Joseph Rochefort the eccentric naval code breaker. The film, while having a fictional story line regarding a naval pilot and his Japanese girlfriend, is an accurate portrayal of the events leading to the battle and the battle itself. It is well worth watching if you are interested in naval history. The film made with he cooperation of the United States Navy is one of the best portrayals of the war in the Pacific with the exception of Tora, Tora, Tora.

On the other side of the world on this day another war changing event ended.

On June 4, 1940, the evacuation of Allied forces from Dunkirk on the Belgian coast ended as German forces captured the beach port. The nine-day evacuation, the largest of its kind in history and an unexpected success, saved 338,000 Allied troops from capture by the Nazis.

On May 10, 1940, the Germans launched their attack against the West, storming into Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg. Faced with far superior airpower, more unified command, and highly mobile armored forces, the Allied defenders were a poor match for the German Wehrmacht. In a lightning attack, the Germans raced across Western Europe. On May 12, they entered France, out-flanking the northwest corners of the Maginot Line, previously alleged by French military command to be an impregnable defense of their eastern border. On May 15, the Dutch surrendered.

The Germans advanced in an arc westward from the Ardennes in Belgium, along France's Somme River, and to the English Channel, cutting off communication between the Allies' northern and southern forces. The Allied armies in the north, which comprised the main body of Allied forces, were quickly being encircled. By May 19, Lord John Gort, the British commander, was already considering the withdrawal of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) by sea.

Reluctant to retreat so soon, the Allies fought on and launched an ineffective counterattack on May 21. By May 24, Walther von Brauchitsch, the German army commander in chief, was poised to take Dunkirk, the last port available for the withdrawal of the mass of the BEF from Europe. Fortunately for the Allies, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler suddenly intervened, halting the German advance. Hitler had been assured by Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, that his aircraft could destroy the Allied forces trapped on the beaches at Dunkirk, so Hitler ordered the forces besieging Dunkirk to pull back.

On May 26, the British finally initiated Operation Dynamo — the evacuation of Allied forces from Dunkirk. The next day, the Allies learned that King Leopold III of Belgium was surrendering, and the Germans resumed the land attack on Dunkirk. By then, the British had fortified their defenses, but the Germans would not be held for long, and the evacuation was escalated. As there were not enough ships to transport the huge masses of men stranded at Dunkirk, the British Admiralty called on all British citizens in possession of sea-worthy vessels to lend their ships to the effort. Fishing boats, pleasure yachts, lifeboats, and other civilian ships raced to Dunkirk, braving mines, bombs, and torpedoes.

During the evacuation, the Royal Air Force (RAF) successfully resisted the Luftwaffe, saving the operation from failure. Still, the German fighters bombarded the beach, destroyed numerous vessels, and pursued other ships within a few miles of the English coast. The harbor at Dunkirk was bombed out of use, and small civilian vessels had to ferry the soldiers from the beaches to the warships waiting at sea. But for nine days, the evacuation continued, a miracle to the Allied commanders who had expected disaster. By June 4, when the Germans closed in and the operation came to an end, 198,000 British and 140,000 French troops were saved. These experienced soldiers would play a crucial role in future resistance against Nazi Germany.

With Western Europe abandoned by its main defenders, the German army swept through the rest of France, and Paris fell on June 14. Eight days later, Henri Petain signed an armistice with the Nazis at Compiegne. Germany annexed half the country, leaving the other half in the hands of their puppet French rulers. On June 6, 1944, liberation of Western Europe finally began with the successful Allied landing at Normandy. Many of the British and French troops participating in that landing were veterans of Dunkirk.

Remembering Pearl Harbor

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941--a date which will live in infamy--the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” — President Franklin Roosevelt, Speech to Congress, December 8, 1941.

At 7:55 a.m. Hawaii time on a beautiful Sunday morning 71 years ago on this date, a Japanese dive bomber bearing the red symbol of the Rising Sun of Japan on its wings appeared out of the clouds above the island of Oahu. A swarm of 353 Japanese warplanes followed, descending on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in a ferocious assault. The surprise attack struck a critical blow against the U.S. Pacific fleet and drew the United States irrevocably into World War II.

With diplomatic negotiations with Japan breaking down, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his advisers knew that an imminent Japanese attack was probable, but nothing had been done to increase security at the important naval base at Pearl Harbor. It was Sunday morning, and many military personnel had been given passes to attend religious services off base. At 7:02 a.m., two radar operators spotted large groups of aircraft in flight toward the island from the north, but, with a flight of B-17s expected from the United States at the time, they were told to sound no alarm. Thus, the Japanese air assault came as a devastating surprise to the naval base.

Much of the Pacific fleet was rendered useless: Five of eight battleships, three destroyers, and seven other ships were sunk or severely damaged, and more than 200 aircraft were destroyed. A total of 2,400 Americans were killed and 1,200 were wounded, many while valiantly attempting to repulse the attack. Japan's losses were some 30 planes, five midget submarines, and fewer than 100 men. Fortunately for the United States, all three Pacific fleet carriers were out at sea on training maneuvers. These giant aircraft carriers would have their revenge against Japan six months later at the Battle of Midway, reversing the tide against the previously invincible Japanese navy in a spectacular victory.

The day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, President Roosevelt appeared before a joint session of Congress and declared, "Yesterday, December 7, 1941--a date which will live in infamy--the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan." After a brief and forceful speech, he asked Congress to approve a resolution recognizing the state of war between the United States and Japan. The Senate voted for war against Japan by 82 to 0, and the House of Representatives approved the resolution by a vote of 388 to 1. The sole dissenter was Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, a devout pacifist who had also cast a dissenting vote against the U.S. entrance into World War I. Three days later, Germany and Italy declared war against the United States, and the U.S. government responded in kind.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was intended to neutralize the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and hence protect Japan's advance into Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, where it sought access to natural resources such as oil and rubber. War between Japan and the United States had been a possibility of which each nation had been aware (and developed contingency plans for) since the 1920s, though tensions did not begin to grow seriously until Japan's 1931 invasion of Manchuria. Over the next decade, Japan continued to expand into China, leading to all-out war between those countries in 1937. Japan spent considerable effort trying to isolate China and achieve sufficient resource independence to attain victory on the mainland; the "Southern Operation" was designed to assist these efforts.

From December 1937, events such as the Japanese attack on the USS Panay and the Nanking Massacre (more than 200,000 killed in indiscriminate massacres) swung public opinion in the West sharply against Japan and increased Western fear of Japanese expansion, which prompted the United States, the United Kingdom, and France to provide loan assistance for war supply contracts to the Republic of China.

The attack had several major aims. First, it intended to destroy important American fleet units, thereby preventing the Pacific Fleet from interfering with Japanese conquest of the Dutch East Indies and Malaya. Second, it was hoped to buy time for Japan to consolidate its position and increase its naval strength before shipbuilding authorized by the 1940 Vinson-Walsh Act erased any chance of victory. Finally, it was meant to deliver a severe blow to American morale, one which would discourage Americans from committing to a war extending into the western Pacific Ocean and Dutch East Indies. To maximize the effect on morale, battleships were chosen as the main targets, since they were the prestige ships of any navy at the time. The overall intention was to enable Japan to conquer Southeast Asia without interference.

Striking the Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor carried two distinct disadvantages: the targeted ships would be in very shallow water, so it would be relatively easy to salvage and possibly repair them; and most of the crews would survive the attack, since many would be on shore leave or would be rescued from the harbor. A further important disadvantage—this of timing, and known to the Japanese — was the absence from Pearl Harbor of all three of the U.S. Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers (Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga). Ironically, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s top command was so imbued with U.S. Admiral Mahan's "decisive battle" doctrine — especially that of destroying the maximum number of battleships — that, despite these concerns, Yamamoto decided to press ahead.

Japanese confidence in their ability to achieve a short, victorious war also meant other targets in the harbor, especially the navy yard, oil tank farms, and submarine base, could safely be ignored, since — by their thinking — the war would be over before the influence of these facilities would be felt

The American contribution to the successful Allied war effort spanned four long years and cost more than 400,000 American lives. There were many naval and land battles during the ensuing years including such names as Midway, The Battan Death March, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa that saw some of the most vicious fighting of the Second World War. Finally after 1,347 days and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Japan's Emperor Hirohito announced his country's unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15, citing the devastating power of "a new and most cruel bomb."

Today I wager that not many people in the United States under the age of forty are familiar with the causes and effects of the Japanese attack on our naval base at Pearl Harbor. I am sure they are ignorant of the viciousness of the Japanese soldiers and the many atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese forces, especially to their captives — including men, women and children. They are also not aware of the horrific medical experiments carried out on civilians by Unit 731 in Manchuria to develop chemical and biological weapons — more horrific than anything the Nazis did in their concentration camps.

These younger citizens while not knowing much about the causes and atrocities of the Japanese during World War II are able to quote page and verse about the evils of our dropping the two atomic bombs to end the war. This is what they learn in our schools today. The other day while listening to a radio talk show I heard a caller state that his fourth grade daughter came home with an assignment that was based on a child’s book about a little girl who had lived through the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The caller, a former Marine, after reading the book was so incensed that he requested a meeting with the teacher to discuss what he was teaching. The caller went on to state that when he confronted the teacher on the lack of context for this atomic bomb book and the reasons we were at war with Japan and the ferociousness of the atrocities of the Japanese Imperial Forces he said the teacher had no answer. All the teacher could say is that this was the required reading according to the prescribed lesson plan. In other words the teacher was clueless about the events of the Second World War and Japan’s involvement.

We have revised and perverted history in our public school system to such an extent that our K-12 students no virtually nothing about our involvement in the Second World War — or much anything else. All they seem to learn today is about civil rights, Gay marriage, and redistribution of wealth. The latest example of this is a new animated video released by the California Federation of Teachers that shows the rich “1 percent” urinating on and stealing money from the less fortunate and middle class. The purpose of the video is to explain “economic inequality” and the need for wealthy people to pay their “fair share of taxes.”

According to the Blaze:

“Tax the rich: An animated fairy tale, is narrated by Ed Asner, with animation by award-winning artist Mike Konopacki, and written and directed by Fred Glass for the California Federation of Teachers. The 8 minute video shows how we arrived at this moment of poorly funded public services and widening economic inequality. Things go downhill in a happy and prosperous land after the rich decide they don’t want to pay taxes anymore. They tell the people that there is no alternative, but the people aren’t so sure. This land bears a startling resemblance to our land. After you watch this video, click here to share with friends, and send an email to your elected officials to let them know they need to restore higher federal tax rates on the wealthy so that we may once more enjoy properly funded public services.”

Tax the rich: An animated fairy tale, is narrated by Ed Asner

There have been several films made about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Three come to mind; Tora, Tora, Tora; Pearl Harbor, and Air Force.

Of all of the films Tora, Tora, Tora (Tiger, Tiger, Tiger) is by far and away the best and most accurate portrayal of both the Japanese and American sides of the attacks. Made in 1970 with the cooperation of the United States Navy the film details the intelligence and tactical failures of our government leading up to the attack and how the Japanese planned the attack. It also has a fantastic musical score by Jerry Goldsmith along with some terrific aerial combat scenes that are not computer generated.

Air Force, made in 1943, before all was known about the attack is based on the story of the nine B-17 bombers flying into Hickham Field during the attack. It’s basically a true story based on the crew of this B-17 Bombers.

The worst film by far is the 2001 soap opera Pearl Harbor. This film follows the story of two best friends, Rafe and Danny, and their love lives as they go off to join the war. Eventually they have a conflict over a Navy nurse (the soap opera part) and end up flying two P-40 fighter planes to take on the Japanese. The film ends with the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. If you view this film to get your history you will end up knowing nothing. Don’t waste your time on this 2001 chick flick starring Ben Affleck, it’s basically a love story with very little historical accuracy — pure Hollywood.

Over the years there have been numerous books and articles promoting a conspiracy at the highest levels of our government to drag us into a war in Europe. Most of these “theories” blame Roosevelt for pushing Japan into a corner and forcing them to attack the United States. Due to Japan’s three party agreement with Germany and Italy after we declared war on Japan the Germans and Italian would be forced to declare war on the United States (which they both did).

It is oft times easier and more comfortable to believe fiction than the truth. In 1941 there were two major bureaucracies in the United States. One was the alphabet soup of federal agencies created during the past eight years of the Roosevelt administration. These bureaucratic agencies grew out of the efforts to mitigate the effects of the Great Depression and often worked at odds with one another. The other and more entrenched bureaucracy was the United States military. Since the end of the First World War the military had been dramatically downsized. In 1941 U.S. Army ranked seventeenth among armies of the world in size and combat power, just behind Romania. It numbered 190,000 soldiers. (It would grow to 8.3 million in 1945, a 44-fold increase.) When mobilization began in 1940, the Army had only 14,000 professional officers. The average age of majors — a middling rank, between captain and lieutenant colonel — was nearly 48; in the National Guard, nearly one-quarter of first lieutenants were over 40 years old, and the senior ranks were dominated by political hacks of certifiable military incompetence. Not a single officer on duty in 1941 had commanded a unit as large as a division in World War I. At the time of Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, only one American division was on a full war footing.

There was a constant conflict over dollars and appropriations between the Army and the Navy and the services did not share intelligence easily. This was very similar to the situation prior to 9/11 with the various intelligence agencies. It should also be noted that there were two air forces; one under the control of the Army and the other belonging to the Navy. They flew different airplanes and trained their pilots differently. The Army Air Corps wanted strategic bombers while the Navy wanted carrier-based attack fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers for fighting a war at sea.

It was this military bureaucracy that created the intelligence breakdown and lack of tactical preparedness at Pearl Harbor causing both Lt. General Short (Army commander) and Admiral Kimmel (the navy commander) to be relieved of their commands after the attack for negligence and disgraced throughout history. An example of the tactical errors was General Short’s commanding that all USAAF fighters (P-40) be parked in the center of the tarmac to avoid potential sabotage thus making them a perfect target for the Japanese planes. As for the Navy it was purely by luck that Adm. Kimmel ordered his three carriers out to sea before the attack thus saving these incredibly valuable naval assets from the Japanese.

By late 1941, many observers believed that hostilities between the U.S. and Japan were imminent. A Gallup poll just before the attack on Pearl Harbor found that 52% of Americans expected war with Japan, 27% did not expect war, and 21% had no opinion. While U.S. Pacific bases and facilities had been placed on alert on multiple occasions, U.S. officials doubted Pearl Harbor would be the first target. They expected the Philippines to be attacked first. This presumption was due to the threat that the air bases throughout the country and the naval base at Manila posed to sea lanes, as well as the shipment of supplies to Japan from territory to the south. They also incorrectly believed that Japan was not capable of mounting more than one major naval operation at a time.

The U.S. government has had ten official inquiries into the attack – the inquiry by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox (1941), the Roberts Commission (1941–42), the Hart Inquiry (1944), the Army Pearl Harbor Board (1944), the Naval Court of Inquiry (1944), the Hewitt investigation, the Clarke investigation, the Congressional Inquiry (1945–46) and the top-secret inquiry by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, authorized by Congress and carried out by Henry Clausen (the Clausen Inquiry; 1946). The tenth inquiry, the Thurmond-Spence Hearing, took place in April 1995. The Dorn Report resulted from this tenth hearing. (Click here to read Vice Admiral David Charles Richardson’s critical analysis of the Dorn Report)

All ten reported incompetence, underestimation and misapprehension of Japanese capabilities and intentions, problems resulting from excessive secrecy about cryptography, division of responsibility between Army and Navy (and lack of consultation between them), and lack of adequate manpower for intelligence (analysis, collection, processing).

One perspective is given by Vice Admiral Frank E. Beatty, who at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack was an aide to the Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and was very close to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's inner circle, with perspicuous remarks as:

"Prior to December 7, it was evident even to me that we were pushing Japan into a corner. I believed that it was the desire of President Roosevelt, and Prime Minister Churchill that we get into the war, as they felt the Allies could not win without us and all our efforts to cause the Germans to declare war on us failed; the conditions we imposed upon Japan — to get out of China, for example — were so severe that we knew that nation could not accept them. We were forcing her so severely that we could have known that she would react toward the United States. All her preparations in a military way — and we knew their over-all import — pointed that way."

Another "eye witness viewpoint" akin to Beatty's is provided by Roosevelt's administrative assistant at the time of Pearl Harbor, Jonathan Daniels; it is the telling comment about FDR's reaction to the attack — "The blow was heavier than he had hoped it would necessarily be. But the risks paid off; even the loss was worth the price. "

Ten days before the attack on Pearl Harbor", Henry L. Stimson, United States Secretary of War at the time entered in his diary the famous and much-argued statement - that he had met with President Roosevelt to discuss the evidence of impending hostilities with Japan, and the question was “how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”

In the 71 years since the attack on Pearl Harbor no credible evidence has been uncovered to point to a willful conspiracy by members of the Roosevelt administration or the U.S. Military to allow the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. Sometimes as Sigmund Freud stated “a cigar is just a cigar.”

The attack on Pearl Harbor began at 7:55 am Hawaiian Island time, which equates to 12:55 pm Eastern Standard Time. If you were at the New York’s Polo Grounds you would have been watching the Brooklyn Dodgers getting ready to Kick Off against the New York Giants. At Washington D.C’s Griffith Stadium where the Washington Redskins were playing the Philadelphia Eagles you would have heard the public address announcer page high-ranking government and military personnel who were in attendance, but did not mention the attack. Reporters were told to check with their offices.

President Roosevelt did not learn of the attack until sometime that afternoon and within a few hours his Solicitor General, Charles Fahy, was in the White House recommending the detention of some 1,000 Japanese-Americans in the Hawaiian Islands on suspicion of espionage. This was the beginning of one of the greatest civil rights violations in the history of the Republic.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized military commanders to designate “military areas from which any or all persons may be excluded.” The result: More than 110,000 Japanese-Americans, plus several thousand German — and Italian-Americans, were forcibly removed from their homes and relocated to remote internment camps — “War Relocation Camps,” — Roosevelt and other officials called them where they remained until 1945.

The Roosevelt administration argued that the internment of Japanese-Americans, most of who lived on the West Coast, was a matter of military necessity. Persons of Japanese ancestry living in the United States were, the administration said, suspected of disloyalty, espionage, and otherwise aiding their fatherland, with which the United States was at war. Moreover, wrote Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Command, “it was impossible to establish the identity of the loyal and the disloyal with any degree of safety.” Therefore, the administration maintained, the government had little choice but to relocate and incarcerate them all.

Some of the wronged parties fought back through the courts. In 1943, Gordon Hirabayashi challenged a curfew the government had imposed on Japanese-Americans, while the next year Fred Korematsu took on the internment policy. Both clearly had the Constitution on their side. Roosevelt had unilaterally suspended habeas corpus for Japanese-Americans, though the Constitution — Lincoln's precedent notwithstanding — only permits Congress to undertake such a drastic action, and then only “in cases of rebellion or invasion.” The Fifth Amendment prohibits both the curfew and the relocation because both deprived individuals of their liberty (and, in the case of relocation, their property) without due process of law. The 14th Amendment mandates that all persons be afforded “the equal protection of the laws,” yet Americans of certain ethnicities were being singled out for unequal treatment.

The Roosevelt administration, never much concerned with the document FDR swore four times to “preserve, protect, and defend,” was determined to defend its policies toward Americans of Japanese descent at all costs, even to the point of lying to the highest court in the land. Solicitor General Charles Fahy defended the administration’s policies before the Supreme Court in the cases brought by Hirabayashi and Korematsu. Fahy argued that the curfew and relocation were matters of “military necessity” and “military urgency.” The court bought Fahy’s arguments and upheld Hirabayashi’s and Korematsu’s convictions, thereby declaring the administration’s policies constitutional.

Fast-forward to 2010. In the course of doing research on some immigration cases, Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal began looking into the World War II internment cases. On May 24, 2011, at a Justice Department event honoring Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Katyal revealed the following:

“By the time the cases of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu reached the Supreme Court, the Solicitor General had learned of a key intelligence report that undermined the rationale behind the internment. The Ringle Report, from the Office of Naval Intelligence, found that only a small percentage of Japanese Americans posed a potential security threat, and that the most dangerous were already known or in custody. But the Solicitor General did not inform the Court of the report, despite warnings from Department of Justice attorneys that failing to alert the Court “might approximate the suppression of evidence.” Instead, he argued that it was impossible to segregate loyal Japanese Americans from disloyal ones. Nor did he inform the Court that a key set of allegations used to justify the internment, that Japanese Americans were using radio transmitters to communicate with enemy submarines off the West Coast, had been discredited by the FBI and FCC. And to make matters worse, he relied on gross generalizations about Japanese Americans, such as that they were disloyal and motivated by “racial solidarity.”

“It seemed obvious to me that we had made a mistake,” Katyal added. “The duty of candor wasn’t met.”

The Roosevelt Justice Department had done far more than simply make a “mistake.”

“This was a deliberate, knowing lie by Fahy to the Supreme Court,” University of California at San Diego Professor Peter Irons told the Los Angeles Times. In the 1980s, wrote the paper, Irons “had found reports in old government files that showed the U.S. military did not see Japanese Americans as a threat in 1942. His research led to federal court hearings that set aside the convictions of Korematsu and Hirabayashi. Congress later voted to have the nation apologize and pay reparations to those who were wrongly held.”

This internment was simply another act of a nation on the verge of panic after the attack on Pearl Harbor. We had been through 10 years of a devastating depression, giant dust storms on the Great Plains, migrations of thousands of unemployed, and the 1938 Orson Wells radio program scare of an invasion by Martians as he dramatized H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds.” The nation was ready to take almost any action to prevent the fear of an invasion of the West Coast by the Japanese. There are many today that point fingers at the civil liberties advocates who did not speak out in 1942 against executive order 9066, but I doubt they would have done much better in the context of the times.

The final chapter of the war with Japan ended on August 6, 1945 when a B-29 bomber named the Enola Gay dropped a 20 megaton atomic bomb on Hiroshima and 3 days latter a similar bomb on Nagasaki. On August 15, six days after the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan announced its surrender to the Allies, signing the Instrument of Surrender on 2 September, officially ending World War II.

To explain to students that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was ethically and morally wrong is pure nonsense. Without a thorough explanation of the causes that led to the dropping of these bombs the teacher or writer does a tremendous disservice to the students and the nation. This is one more example of how revisionist history plagues our K-12 school system today. I wonder, with trepidation, how the attack on Pearl Harbor will be remembered on the 100^th anniversary of the attack.

You can read a more detailed account of the attack on Pearl Harbor in my December 7, 2010 blog “Remember Pearl Harbor.”

More Thoughts on Manzanar

"A nation of well-informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins." — Benjamin Franklin

Yesterday I posted an excerpt from an article about the Manzanar War Relocation Center in my newsletter. In the article I focused primarily on the facts surrounding the creation of these war location centers and Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. In this post I will address the state of fear, racial prejudice, and what other nations did regarding in WWII regarding ethnic populations they deemed as a threat, including the Japanese.

When WWII began I was five-years old and during the ensuing years of the war I grew up with a constant barrage of anti-Japanese media, including comic books, movies and radio plays. Movies like Bataan, Guadalcanal Diary, 30 Seconds over Tokyo, Objective Burma, and the Sands of Iwo Jima helped shape the view many Americans had of the Japanese. There was also a constant stream of newspaper articles and newsreels shown at the theaters depicting the brutality of the Japanese in the Pacific Theater. Some of these newsreels dated back to the Rape of Nanking in 1937.

There were returning Marines from Guadalcanal, the Philippines with horrendous accounts of the fanaticism and brutality of the Japanese soldiers, not only to the Marines, but more so to the civilian populations. The people of Manila suffered terribly under Japanese occupation where torture and executions were commonplace in the “internment” camps run by the Japanese. The British also reported similar acts of brutality in Malaysia, Singapore and Burma.

We also need to remember the treatment of the Koreans during WWII by the Japanese Imperial Forces. It was common practice to take girls as young as thirteen to be used in “pleasure houses” by the Japanese soldiers. It was also considered sport for the occupying Japanese forces to shot out of open tram windows at Korean women walking down the street. These women wearing white dresses or kimonos would display a spreading blood stain on their chests as they lay dying in the street while the Japanese soldiers would laugh and call them “rose women” due to the blood stain.

While we were at war with Germany there were not many depictions of the brutality of the NAZIs towards our soldiers let alone the civilian populations of Europe. The American public was not aware of the extermination of millions of European Jews, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, French and other Europeans. Although our government had obtained a photo static copy of the Wannsee Protocol through an agent in Switzerland the Roosevelt administration was reluctant to believe it and deemed it a Jewish propaganda. So did the Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary during WWII. The only knowledge the American people had of the Holocaust was a small article on page 28 of the New York Times. There were no photos, no films, no first hand reports of what the NAZIs were doing. There were only supposition, reports from Jewish immigrants and vague references from some reporters. Even when the Soviet Army liberated the Majdanek concentration camp in eastern Poland in July 1944 and thousands of feet of film were turned over to the Allies by Roman Karmen, a Soviet documentary film maker, his footage was mostly ignored due to his past record of producing Stalinist propaganda. Even Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times and a Jew, refused to publish accounts of the NAZI atrocities.

Most of this reluctance to publish reports of the atrocities committed by the NAZIs stemmed from two schools of thought. The first school was that they were just too horrendous to believe. Even with the obtaining a copy of the Wannsee Protocol the NAZI plan for the “Final Solution” was just too fantastic to believe. The second and more plausible reason is that the Allies did not want to create a wave of anti-German hatred in the United States and Great Britain similar to what the Wilson administration did in the First World War through his Committee on Public Information or as more commonly called the Creel Committee. (One of the pioneers in the CPI propaganda and public relations and a mentor of Josef Goebbels was Edward Bernays.) Such a wave of anti-German hatred would affect about 25% of the U.S. population and hamper the plans for the reconstruction of post war Germany.

So what we had during World War II was one enemy, the Germans, who we were handling with kid gloves and another enemy, the Japanese, who we portrayed as a brutal, sub human race — with good cause.

Something else that we must consider when talking about the Japanese in WWII is their atrocities committed in Manchuria (their puppet state of Manchukuo] by the medical experimental group Unit 731. These medical experiments were as horrendous as those carried out by the NAZIs in their concentration camps. At Unit 731 Prisoners were subjected to torturous experiments such as being hung upside down to see how long it would take for them to choke to death, having air injected into their arteries to determine the time until the onset of embolism, and having horse urine injected into their kidneys.

Other incidents included being deprived of food and water to determine the length of time until death, being placed into high-pressure chambers until death, having experiments performed upon prisoners to determine the relationship between temperature, burns, and human survival, being placed into centrifuges and spun until dead, having animal blood injected and the effects studied, being exposed to lethal doses of x-rays, having various chemical weapons tested on prisoners inside gas chambers, being injected with sea water to determine if it could be a substitute for saline and being buried alive. None of this took place at Manzanar or any other war relocation center in the United States or Canada.

Japanese Americans were by far the most widely affected group, as all persons with Japanese ancestry were removed from the West Coast and southern Arizona. As then California Attorney General Earl Warren put it, "When we are dealing with the Caucasian race we have methods that will test the loyalty of them. But when we deal with the Japanese, we are on an entirely different field." In Hawaii, where there were 140,000 Americans of Japanese Ancestry (constituting 37% of the population), only selected individuals of heightened perceived risk were interned.

While there was no doubt an element of racism and fear of the Japanese for economic reasons by the general populace the government’s reason for the Exclusion Zone on the west coast was national security. There was a great fear in Washington, D.C. (and throughout the nation) that after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the sinking of most of our battleships we had no navy to defend our west coast. This was not the case on the east coast even when German U-boats were sinking merchant ships in sight of the people on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

The fear of a follow up attack on the west coast and a possible invasion was real and severe. Our standing army ranked 16^th in the world and the troops were equipped with World War 1 rifles and other equipment. People were scared and with good reason. The racism and anti-Japanese feelings only served to give Roosevelt additional support for his 9066 Executive Order.

There was also a legitimate fear of sabotage to our water supplies, electrical grid, communication networks and transportation systems. There were also plans to move much of the aircraft industry to California where the 50,000 planes Roosevelt had requested could be built 24/7 in outdoor assembly facilities. The administration feared espionage and sabotage efforts against the ship building facilities in San Diego, San Francisco and Bremerton, Washington.

Americans of Italian and German ancestry were also targeted by these restrictions, including internment. 11,000 people of German ancestry were interned, as were 3,000 people of Italian ancestry, along with some Jewish refugees. The Jewish refugees who were interned came from Germany, and the U.S. government didn't differentiate between ethnic Jews and ethnic Germans (Jewish was defined as religious practice). Some of the internees of European descent were interned only briefly, and others were held for several years beyond the end of the war. Like the Japanese internees, these smaller groups had American-born citizens in their numbers, especially among the children. A few members of ethnicities of other Axis countries were interned, but exact numbers are unknown. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson was responsible for assisting relocated people with transport, food, shelter, and other accommodations.

Many notable liberal progressives such as Roosevelt, Justice William Douglas,  Justice Hugo Black, Justice Felix Frankfurter and Earl Warren supported the internment of these Japanese Americans as vital to the war effort. One dissenting voice was that of J. Edgar Hoover the director of the FBI. Hoover’s opposition stemmed not so much from a constitutional or civil rights position, but from a belief that the FBI could handle any security threat to the United States from citizens of foreign ancestry. He believed that the most likely spies had already been arrested by the FBI shortly after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

Korematsu v. United States (1944) was a landmark United States Supreme Court case concerning the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II. In a 6-3 decision, the Court sided with the government, ruling that the exclusion order was constitutional. The opinion, written by Supreme Court justice Hugo Black, held that the need to protect against espionage outweighed Fred Korematsu's individual rights, and the rights of Americans of Japanese descent. (The Court limited its decision to the validity of the exclusion orders, adding, "The provisions of other orders requiring persons of Japanese ancestry to report to assembly centers and providing for the detention of such persons in assembly and relocation centers were separate, and their validity is not in issue in this proceeding.")

Fred Korematsu was a Japanese-American man who decided to stay in San Leandro, California and knowingly violate Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 of the U.S. Army. Korematsu argued that the Executive Order 9066 was unconstitutional and that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. He was arrested and convicted. No question was raised as to Korematsu's loyalty to the United States. The Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction, and the Supreme Court granted certiorari.

The decision in Korematsu v. United States has been very controversial. Korematsu's conviction for evading internment was overturned on November 10, 1983, after Korematsu challenged the earlier decision by filing for a writ of coram nobis. In a ruling by Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California granted the writ (that is, it voided Korematsu's original conviction) because in Korematsu's original case, the government had knowingly submitted false information to the Supreme Court that had a material effect on the Supreme Court's decision. (Amended May 24, 2011)

The Korematsu decision has not been explicitly overturned, but remains significant both for being the first instance of the Supreme Court applying the strict scrutiny standard to racial discrimination by the government and for being one of only a handful of cases in which the Court held that the government met that standard.

The majority decision was written by Associate Justice Hugo Black, himself a staunch New Dealer supported of Roosevelt and a racist, anti-Catholic and ex Klu Klux Klan member, stated:

“Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire, because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures, because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily, and, finally, because Congress, reposing its confidence in this time of war in our military leaders — as inevitably it must — determined that they should have the power to do just this.”

Justice Frank Murphy issued a vehement dissent, saying that the exclusion of Japanese "falls into the ugly abyss of racism," and resembles "the abhorrent and despicable treatment of minority groups by the dictatorial tyrannies which this nation is now pledged to destroy". He also compared the treatment of Japanese Americans with the treatment of Americans of German and Italian ancestry, as evidence that race, and not emergency alone, led to the exclusion order which Korematsu was convicted of violating:

” I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States. All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessarily a part of the new and distinct civilization of the United States. They must, accordingly, be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment, and as entitled to all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.”

The other two dissenters were Justices Roberts and Jackson. Not being a lawyer but a person with the ability to read common English I believe Korematsu’s and the rights of the other Japanese internees were violated under not only the fourteenth amendment but also the fourth and fifth.

Justice Jackson, who would later act a prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trails, dissented on differing grounds from Murphy. By contrast, Justice Robert Jackson's dissent argued that "defense measures will not, and often should not, be held within the limits that bind civil authority in peace," and that it would perhaps be unreasonable to hold the military, who issued the exclusion order, to the same standards of constitutionality that apply to the rest of the government. "In the very nature of things," he wrote military decisions are not susceptible of intelligent judicial appraisal." He acknowledged the Court's powerlessness in that regard, writing that "courts can never have any real alternative to accepting the mere declaration of the authority that issued the order that it was reasonably necessary from a military viewpoint."

He nonetheless dissented, writing that, even if the courts should not be put in the position of second-guessing or interfering with the orders of military commanders that does not mean that they should have to ratify or enforce those orders if they are unconstitutional. Indeed, he warns that the precedent of Korematsu might last well beyond the war and the internment:

“A military order, however unconstitutional, is not apt to last longer than the military emergency. Even during that period, a succeeding commander may revoke it all. But once a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order to show that it conforms to the Constitution, or rather rationalizes the Constitution to show that the Constitution sanctions such an order, the Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens. The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need. Every repetition imbeds that principle more deeply in our law and thinking and expands it to new purposes.”

Jackson acknowledged the racial issues at hand, writing:

“Korematsu was born on our soil, of parents born in Japan. The Constitution makes him a citizen of the United States by nativity and a citizen of California by residence. No claim is made that he is not loyal to this country. There is no suggestion that apart from the matter involved here he is not law abiding and well disposed. Korematsu, however, has been convicted of an act not commonly a crime. It consists merely of being present in the state whereof he is a citizen, near the place where he was born, and where all his life he has lived. [...] [H]is crime would result, not from anything he did, said, or thought, different than they, but only in that he was born of different racial stock. Now, if any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable. Even if all of one's antecedents had been convicted of treason, the Constitution forbids its penalties to be visited upon him. But here is an attempt to make an otherwise innocent act a crime merely because this prisoner is the son of parents as to whom he had no choice, and belongs to a race from which there is no way to resign. If Congress in peace-time legislation should enact such a criminal law, I should suppose this Court would refuse to enforce it.”

Jackson was a believer in the "clear and present danger" test and is quoted to have quipped the the Constitution is not a suicide pact. To this day the Korematsu case is used in defense of the government’s actions in the War on Terror. See Rasul v. Bush.

Former Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark, who represented the U.S. Department of Justice in the "relocation," writes in the Epilogue to the book Executive Order 9066: The Internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans (written by Maisie and Richard Conrat):

“The truth is, the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, and despite the Fifth Amendment's command that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law, both of these constitutional safeguards were denied by military action under Executive Order 9066”

The United States Constitution was written in plain English for the common citizen to read and understand. You do not have to be a lawyer, legal scholar or judge to understand the meaning of the words in the Constitution. The confusion and misinterpretation that has occurred over the years comes from the lawyers, legal scholars and activist judges that have muddied the waters of the meaning of the Constitution with their decisions based on progressive, activists agendas or empathy, not logic and the understanding of the Founders who wrote the Constitution to provide protection for the citizen against the overreaching power of the government.

While here were sound reason for interning the Japanese Americans based on military and national security they were not enemy combatants captured on the field of battle, but were in most cases citizens of the United States and entitled to all the protections guaranteed under the Bill of Rights. As J. Edgar Hoover, a man hated by the progressive left, The FBI was totally competent in identifying and arresting foreign agents and enemies of the state.

There is an excellent 27 minute video on the internment of the Japanese Americans and the Korematsu Case. You can access this video by clicking here. Make sure to click on the “Watch the Video” text under the video box. This will allow the video to play in your Windows Media Player. It is well worth your time and if you are a lawyer it’s a great source for debate with your colleagues over a Makers Mark.

Korematsu v. The United States–Part 1

Korematsu v. The United States–Part 2

You can view this entire video by clicking here

It should be noted that not one case of espionage or treason was attributed to people of Japanese ancestry and the only real cases of treason or espionage were against Germans and Communists like Klaus Fuchs, Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs.

The United States did not stand alone in interning Japanese during the WWII. The Canadians and Australians had similar, if not stricter, policies towards the Japanese in their countries.

Prior to World War II, there were about 23,000 Canadians of Japanese ancestry in British Columbia, of whom 80% were Canadian nationals. While immigration from Japan to Canada had begun at the end of the 19th century the Japanese were unwelcome and were subject to racism and discrimination. They were denied the right to vote and laws barred them from various professions. Their eligibility for social assistance and permits for forestry and fishing were restricted. The intent was to force them to return to Japan. The Anti-Asiatic League, formed in Canada in 1907, was the source of much of the animosity toward Japanese Canadians. The League included rich white business owners, who used their influence to limit the number of passports given to male Japanese immigrants. This was meant to limit the number of Japanese workers in British Columbia, who by 1919 owned almost half the fisheries in the province. Japanese immigrants were seen as competitors for posts within the sectors of agriculture and fishing. The Anti-Asiatic League sought to restrict fishing licenses to white residents. This legislation was abandoned in 1925, due to strong discontent in the Japanese Canadian community. The government, however, continued to regulate the number of passports given to Japanese immigrants, in order to limit them from the working sectors of British Columbia.

The December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor spurred prominent British Columbians, including members of municipal government, local newspapers, and businesses to call for the internment of the ethnic Japanese living in Canada under the Defense of Canada Regulations. In British Columbia, there were fears that some Japanese who worked in the fishing industry were charting the coastline for the Japanese navy, acting as spies on Canada's military. British Columbia borders the Pacific Ocean and therefore believed to be easily susceptible to enemy attacks from Japan. 22,000 Japanese Canadians (14,000 of whom were born in Canada) were interned in the 1940s for political expediency. Prime Minister Mackenzie King decided to intern Japanese Canadian citizens based on speculative evidence, because both the RCMP and defense department lacked proof of any sabotage or espionage.

On February 24, 1942, an order-in-council passed under the War Measures Act gave the federal government the power to intern all "persons of Japanese racial origin." A "protected" 100-mile wide strip up the Pacific coast was created, and men of Japanese origin between the ages of 18 and 45 were removed and taken to road camps in the British Columbia interior or sugar beet projects on the Prairies, such as Taber, Alberta. Despite the 100-mile quarantine, a few Japanese Canadian men remained in McGillivray Falls, which was just outside the quarantine zone; however, they were employed at a logging operation at Devine (near D'Arcy in the Gates Valley), which was in fact inside the quarantine zone but without road access to the Coast. Japanese Canadians interned in Lillooet Country found employment within farms, stores, and the railway. Tashme, on Highway 3 just east of Hope, was notorious for the camp's harsh conditions and existed just outside the protected area. Other internment camps, including Slocan, were in the Kootenay Country in southeastern British Columbia. Leadership positions within the camps were only offered to the Nisei, or Canadian-born citizens of Japanese origin, however excluding the Issei, the older generation born in Japan.

The Liberal government also deported able-bodied Japanese Canadian laborers to camps near fields and orchards, such as the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia. The Japanese Canadian laborers were used as a solution to a shortage of farm workers. This obliterated any Japanese competition in the fishing sector. During the 1940s, the Canadian government created policies to direct Chinese, Japanese, and First Nations into farming, and other sectors of the economy that “other groups were abandoning for more lucrative employment elsewhere”.

Those living in "relocation camps" were not legally interned — they could leave, so long as they had permission — however, they were not legally allowed to work or attend school outside the camps. Since the majority of Japanese Canadians had little property aside from their (confiscated) houses, these restrictions left most with no opportunity to survive outside the camps.

Prime Minister King issued a ruling that all property would be removed from Japanese Canadian inhabitants. They were made to believe that their property would be held in trust until they had resettled elsewhere in Canada. In 1943, the Canadian "Custodian of Aliens" liquidated all possessions belonging to the “enemy aliens”. The Custodian of Aliens held auctions for these items, ranging from farm land, homes and clothing. Japanese Canadians lost their fishing boats, bank deposits, stocks and bonds; basically all items that provided them with financial security. Japanese Canadians protested that their property was sold at prices way under the fair market value at the time. Prime Minister King responded to the objections by stating that the “Government is of the opinion that the sales were made at a fair price.”

There was economic benefits to be made with the internment of the Japanese. More precisely, white fishermen directly benefited due to the impounding of all Japanese owned fishing boats. Fishing for salmon was a hotly contested issue between the white population and Japanese population. In 1919, the Japanese had received four thousand and six hundred of the salmon-gill net licenses, representing roughly half of all of the licenses the government had to distribute. In a very public move on behalf of the Department of Fisheries in British Columbia, it was recommended that in the future the Japanese never again receive more fishing licenses than they had in 1919 and also that every year thereafter that number be reduced. These were measurements taken on behalf of the provincial government to oust the Japanese from salmon fishing. The federal government also got involved. In 1926 The House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Fisheries put forward suggestions that the number of fishing licenses issued to the Japanese be systemically reduced by ten percent a year, until they were entirely removed from the industry by 1937. The fact that any Japanese people were still fishing in British Columbia at the outset of World War II is amazing due to the pressure they faced from the province, country, and other fishermen. Yet the reason the government gave for impounding the few remaining and operating Japanese fishing boats was that the government feared these boats would be used by Japan to mount a horrific coastal attack on British Columbia.

Many boats belonging to Japanese Canadians were damaged, and over one hundred sank. A few properties owned by Japanese Canadians in Richmond and Vancouver were vandalized, including the Steveston Buddhist Temple.

In April 1945, the end of the war was plausible and an official movement to remove Japanese Canadians from British Columbia commenced. Japanese Canadians were given the choice to move east of the Rockies or be repatriated to Japan. Many chose to move east to the city of Toronto where they could take part in agricultural work. By 1947, most Japanese Canadians have moved from British Columbia to the Toronto area. Several Japanese Canadians, who resettled in the east, wrote letters back to those still in British Columbia about the harsh labor conditions in the fields of Ontario and the prejudiced attitudes they would encounter. White-collar jobs were not open to them and most Japanese Canadians were reduced to “wage-earners”. I want to note here that my father’s cousin, a liberal Canadian living in Hamilton, Ontario had no problem with his government’s policy towards Japanese Canadians. Much of his attitude stemmed from the reports of the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Forces in the Pacific Theater.

Repatriation began in May 1946 and 3, 964 Japanese Canadians were deported back to Japan. The government was willing to offer free passage to those who were willing to be deported to Japan. Thousands of Japanese Canadians (born in Canada) were being sent to a country they had never known and where they would still feel quite alienated. Family members would be divided. They were being deported to a country that had been destroyed by bombs and was now hunger-stricken due to the war."

Japanese Internment in Canada during WWII–Part 1

Japanese Internment in Canada during WWII–Part 2

The first Japanese person known to have settled in Australia was a merchant who immigrated to Queensland in 1871. By the start of the Australian Federation in 1901, it was estimated that Australia had 4000 Japanese immigrants, mostly based around Townsville where the Japanese government had established its first consulate in 1896. The immigrants worked mostly in the sugar cane and maritime industries including turtle, trochus, trepang and pearl harvesting. Further immigration was effectively terminated with the Australian Immigration Restriction Act of 1902, with the imposition of a “dictation test” in a European language on prospective immigrants, and with the White Australia policy. Due to this the Townsville consulate closed in 1908.

However, economic relations continued to flourish, and by the mid-1930s, Japan had become Australia's second largest export market after the United Kingdom. However, in 1936, Britain applied political pressure on Australia to curb the import of Japanese textiles, which were damaging the British textile market in Australia. Japan reacted to the new tariffs with trade barriers of its own. After both sides realized that the trade war was unproductive, an agreement was reached in 1937 to relax restrictions.

In recognition of the importance of Japanese ties, Tokyo was the second capital (after Washington DC in the United States) where Australia established a legation separate from the British embassy.

During World War II, Australian territory was directly threatened by Japanese invasion, and Japanese forces attacked Darwin in Northern Australia and Sydney Harbor. In 1941, the ethnic Japanese population in Australia was interned, and most were deported to Japan at the end of the war. Australian forces played an active combat role in battles throughout the Southeast Asia and South West Pacific theater of World War II, and a significant role in the post-war Occupation of Japan.

During the Second World War 'enemy aliens' were interned by the Australian government. South Australia's main internment camp was at Loveday, near Barmera on the River Murray. The Loveday camp comprised of three compounds and three wood camps. The camps housed German, Italian and Japanese internees from around Australia, prisoners of war from the Middle East, Pacific Islands and Netherlands East Indies and internees from the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Pacific Islands. The first internees arrived at Loveday on June 11, 1941. In May 1943 the complex held its largest number of internees and prisoners of war, 5,382. The last internees were released from Loveday in late February 1946.

Work undertaken by the internees and prisoners of war included growing of guayule shrubs for the production of rubber, pyrethrum for making insecticide and opium poppies for morphine production, all of which were vital during wartime. The internees and prisoners also grew vegetables and many varieties of seed for both Army and civilian use. The wood chopped at the three wood camps went to fire the steam pumps used on the Riverland irrigation settlements. Pigs and poultry were also raised for meat and eggs.

While all three nations interned what they considered enemy aliens the Australians were the most consistent — they interned everyone equally.

The next time a smug Canadian wags his finger at you and accuses you of being a racist by interning Japanese Americans in WWII just remind him of what his liberal government did to their Japanese population during the same time span.

Before we get to judgmental regarding the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII you need to attempt to place yourself in 1941-42 and try to understand the feelings and fears that were present in America after Pearl Harbor, Bataan and Corregidor. Most Americans did not give too much thought to the Constitution and were more concerned with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs with safety and security ranking just above breathing, food, water and sex at level two whiles the Constitution ranks at the top of the pyramid at level five. It was at this highest level where our Founders were operating when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were authored and adopted. War tends to take us down to level two.

We must remember the words of Benjamin Franklin when he said; “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."