Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865
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AMERICAN STORIES
158
What They Heard on the Radio
Until 1937 the New Deal seemed to be working. Millions of men and women
were put to work through New Deal agencies. Sleeping in military-style camps
at night and swinging axes by day, Civilian Conservation Corps crews in
jeans and white T-shirts landscaped parks and blazed trails through national
forests. At the tops of mountains in the Cascade Range of the Northwest, fire
lookouts were built where the likes of Jack Kerouac would spend summers
in later decades scanning tinder-dry Douglas firs for sparks, watching griz-
zlies
lumber through the brush, going nutty with boredom, and thinking up
new books to define new generations. The Works Progress Administration
(WPA) put artists to work creating tour books for the states and writing and
producing plays. WPA photographers toured the nation taking black-and-
white stills of Okie families crawling westward or camping in lean-tos—like
Dorothea Lange’s haunting picture of a weary mother and her brood under
a canvas awning in the middle of nowhere. WPA researchers recorded inter-
views
with elderly former slaves who recounted plantation memories, and
painters brushed lead-paint murals of industry and folklife on the outsides
and insides of buildings. Billions of dollars were paid out in work relief, and
though the financial hardships did not end, they did soften. People young and
old who would have been otherwise idled by unemployment got the satisfac-
tion
of participating in civic-use projects, with the added bonus of a weekly
check—most of which got sent home, if there was a home at all.
T
hen in 1937, unemployment began to rise again: where 7.7 million Ameri-
c
ans had been without a job in early 1937, there were 10 million without work
by late 1939—almost 18 percent unemployment. Franklin Roosevelt’s New
Deal seemed not to be the pure cure for what ailed the nation. The incidence
of
fathers slipping out the door and disappearing into the brotherhood of ho-
boes
continued, as did new and depressing rounds of layoffs and stock dips.
Americans with a quarter for admission or an outlet for electricity continued
to turn to the distractions of film and radio.
Some radio programs were meant to be pure entertainment. Amos ’n’ Andy
featured
a comic duo of white actors mock-imitating black men in the vein of
blackface minstrelsy—it was one of the most popular programs of the 1930s.
By the late 1930s, fully 50 percent of the daytime shows on the airwaves were
soap operas, named after the commercial soap companies that sponsored
them, in particular Procter and Gamble, manufacturers of the Ivory brand.
Housewives scrounging for food with skimpy paychecks could tune in to the
stories of struggling radio heroines who were able to manage in spite of their
jobless husbands. This was commercial commiseration.
At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum from commiseration was
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OUT OF THE DEPRESSION AND INTO WAR
“The War of the Worlds,” radio history’s most notorious moment. On October
30, 1938, the night before Halloween, Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater troupe
dramatized British novelist H.G. Wells’s novel in the form of an emergency
news piece so convincingly that, much to the delight of journalists, listeners
were sure that Martians had invaded. As the New York Times had fun explaining
in its morning edition the next day, “A wave of mass hysteria seized thousands
of radio listeners throughout the nation.” People got treated for “shock and
hysteria” after the broadcast “disrupted households, interrupted church ser-
vices,
created traffic jams, and clogged communications systems.” Afflicted
listeners evidently missed the usual introduction announcing the on-air play as
a Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and Mercury Theater extravaganza:
twenty families on one city block rushed into the streets covering their faces
with wet handkerchiefs, trying to protect themselves from what they thought
was a Martian “gas raid.” Similar scenes occurred from east to west as bug-
eyed middle Americans scanned the skies for green bug-men to descend and
zap away with “death rays.”
1
In the ensuing days, the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) and the general public forgave Welles and CBS for scaring
them silly, and people got back to enjoying Welles’s better-known series, The
S
hadow, about an invisible, mysterious crime fighter with the ability to “cloud
men’s minds” so they could not see him. As the show promised, “Who knows
what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Only the Shadow knows!”
2
Other radio programs had a decidedly social-political message. The premier
example was the broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin, a Detroit-based priest
who seized the example set by evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. But
where McPherson demonstrated acceptance of difference, Coughlin preached
an anti-Jewish, anti-communist, anti–New Deal message that attracted more
listeners than some of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats. Echoing
the prejudiced sentiment of many Americans at the time, Coughlin mistakenly
blamed the worldwide depression on an international Jewish conspiracy, a
cabal of Zionists bent on dominating the world—the same claim that Nazi
chancellor Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, were
making. Father Coughlin was popular, but in the end, his moral outrage could
not unseat Roosevelt when he ran for an unprecedented third term in 1940
and won. The Depression was unbeatable and so was Roosevelt.
Ultimately, events overseas put Americans back to work—and back into
uniform. In 1931, a Japanese army occupied Manchuria, a northern province
of China, and set up a puppet government, partly to keep the Soviets out and
partly to maintain control over a key railroad. In 1935, Italy’s fascist dictator
Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, one of the last African nations free from
colonial control. One year later, Spain convulsed with a civil war wherein the
fascist insurgent Francisco Franco (the ultimate victor in 1939) got support
AMERICAN STORIES
160
from Hitler while communist partisans nominally behind the democratically
elected government received aid from Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union—this
was multiparty human chess played by distant dictators eager to try out their
latest weapons. In 1937, Japan’s military directly invaded mainland China
and brutalized the citizens of Nanking, killing more than 200,000 prisoners
of war and civilians and raping at least 80,000 women and girls. That was the
start of the Japanese policy of forcing Asian women into prostitution, victims
casually referred to as “comfort women.” Meanwhile, since 1933, Adolf Hitler
had been hypnotizing Germans with a poisonous mixture of hatred for Jews,
military pageantry, pathological nationalism, and demands for the “return” to
the Third Reich of all adjacent territories containing large concentrations of
ethnic Germans. At the Munich Conference in 1938, prime ministers Neville
Chamberlain of Britain and Édouard Daladier of France applied the flimsy
doctrine of “appeasement” to Adolf Hitler’s demands for the incorporation
into Germany of the resource-rich Sudetenland portion of Czechoslovakia.
After plucking the Czech’s military resources, Nazi Germany invaded Po-
land,
and on the first day of September 1939, the European chapter of World
War II was on. Great Britain and France upheld their commitments to Polish
independence by declaring war on Germany.
With the rest of the world going mad, from 1935 to 1939 the U.S. Congress
passed four Neutrality Acts, which were legal attempts to prevent the United
States from being dragged yet again into someone else’s war. The laws were
supposed to stop the United States and its citizens from lending money to,
sailing on the ships of, or trading with belligerent nations. By the middle of the
Depression, a majority of Americans believed that U.S. participation in World
War I had been a mistake, largely caused by extensive trade with Great Britain
and the billions of dollars that the United States had lent to its allies.
As
battlefield smoke choked newspaper headlines, Gallup polls revealed
that most Americans feverishly supported staying out of the war, even though
their sympathies were heavily tilted against Japan and Germany. A vast ma-
jority in the United States supported Great Britain and China;
however, fear
of antagonizing Japan, the complexity of China’s politics, its distance, and
a vast cultural gap meant that by July 1940, Americans knew less about the
Asian war than they did about the dire circumstances faced by the British.
And circumstances were dire.
B
y July 1940, with few exceptions, the Nazis owned Europe from the edge
of the Atlantic Ocean to the border of the Soviet Union. In June, France had
fallen like a pastry puff, and a joint Belgian-French-British army had barely
escaped from the beaches of Dunkirk under cover of squadrons of nimble
Spitfires, the only real aeronautical match at that point for the German Mess-
erschmidt
109s, the terror of the air. From July through the end of October
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OUT OF THE DEPRESSION AND INTO WAR
1940, the German air force, the Luftwaffe, bombarded the airfields and cities
of England, especially London, in the Battle of Britain. Hitler intended either
to force a British surrender or to prepare the islands for a full invasion. For
months, resolute Brits huddled in bomb shelters and slept in subway tunnels,
air raid sirens moaning above, churches and office buildings crumbling to
rubble under the incessant pounding of up to 1,000 German planes a day.
Britain’s smaller Royal Air Force (RAF), with the aid of a new invention called
radar, sawed into the waves of German planes in aerial dogfights that finally
lifted the full-scale siege on October 31. Pilots from twenty-seven nations flew
British fighter planes, including ten from the United States, three of whom
died. Nighttime bombing raids on London continued, however, through May
1941—direct attacks on a civilian population, which infuriated the British,
who retaliated by bombing German cities. This targeting of civilian centers
became a horrifying hallmark of World War II, culminating with the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
In 1941, a British painter and poet, Mervyn Peake, described the ruins of
London as though the city itself were a woman battered by the recent ordeal:
Half masonry, half pain; her head
From which the plaster breaks away
Like flesh from the rough bone, is turned
Upon a neck of stones; her eyes
Are lid-less windows of smashed glass.
3
By the time the Battle of Britain ended, Hitler’s scheme to invade
Britain—first by terrorizing its civilians into near-submission, then by boat-
ing
his troops the short distance across the English Channel—was no longer
possible, British defenses having been much improved despite the attacks.
His plans for immediate domination thwarted by undaunted flyboys, Hitler
turned to the seas, where wolf packs of Nazi U-boats stalked British supply
ships. If he could not invade the British, he would starve them. Foolishly and
contrary to the advice he received, Hitler also ordered a wasteful invasion
of the Soviet Union beginning in June 1941. Deluded by hallucinations of a
perfect future for his Aryan “master race,” Hitler rushed his armies eastward
to secure lebensraum—living space—for the thousand-year Reich in spite of
a nonaggression pact he had signed with the Soviets in 1939. The invasion ne-
c
essitated reallocation of forces, including most of the Luftwaffe and 3 million
German troops. To survive, both Stalin and Prime Minister Winston Churchill
of Britain knew they would need the full support of the United States.
And
the United States showed its support through the manufacture and
distribution of guns, ammunition, naval destroyers, airplanes, and other equip-
AMERICAN STORIES
162
ment essential for stopping Germany. President Roosevelt and like-minded
legislators found clever ways of altering, circumventing, or simply voiding
the Neutrality Acts, ways of getting needed materiel to international friends.
In 1937, Congress allowed Britain and France to buy supplies on a cash-
and-carry basis: the United States would sell war materials for payments in
cash as long as the purchasing nation used its own vessels for transport. But
Great Britain ran out of gold by 1941, so there was no cash to precede the
carry. On December 29, 1940, knowing that the British were almost broke,
Roosevelt spoke into a microphone perched on his desk to tell the citizens of
America that he would not take them into war as warriors but that “we must
be the great arsenal of democracy.” If the Nazi scourge had its way in the
world, Roosevelt cautioned, there would be “no liberty, no religion, no hope.”
4
He therefore issued orders for a new program called Lend-Lease, in which
Britain, China, and the Soviet Union received military necessities “on loan.”
Obviously, the United States would not want back used uniforms or dented
guns. The idea of loaning bombs and bullets was a sly lie that officials and
civilians could pretend to believe in together. Factories in the United States
stepped up production to meet the needs of soon-to-be allies struggling for
existence. A bullet fired by a British soldier against a Nazi was a job for an
American. By 1942, there was no measurable unemployment in the United
States. By 1942, the United States was also at war.
Pearl Harbor
On December 7, 1941, any remaining pretense of American neutrality in the
war was shattered and sunk. For nine years, U.S. officials had watched from
a distant perch as the imperial armies of Japan invaded first Manchuria, then
China proper, and finally the southeastern coast of Asia, including Vietnam,
Cambodia, and Laos. The United States wanted to believe that Japan’s mili-
tary
would stop short of attacking direct U.S. interests or possessions (for
instance, the Philippines or Hawaii). Even when Japan sank the USS Panay,
a
gunboat operating on the Yangtze River, and gunned down its fleeing crew-
m
en on December 12, 1937, the United States accepted the unbelievable
explanation that the Japanese pilots thought the Panay was a Chinese vessel,
unlikely given the U.S. flag painted on the topside. In July 1940, U.S. leaders
shifted from soft criticism to an embargo on items essential to the Japanese
war effort—namely oil, gasoline, and metal, all precious to an island empire
lacking in most natural resources. Two months later, Japan entered into the
Tripartite agreement with Italy and Germany, forming the Axis powers. With
the embargo stiffened in July 1941, Japanese leaders decided that an assault
on the U.S. Pacific fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, would be worth
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OUT OF THE DEPRESSION AND INTO WAR
the risk. If it was successful, Japan hoped to buy itself two years to finish its
mainland and island conquests, including the erection of enough fortifications
to dissuade the United States from retaliating. Japan miscalculated.
A
lmost 3,000 miles from the west coast of the United States sat Hawaii, still
officially a territory. These islands were central to U.S. security and regional
interests. Tucked into a sheltered inlet on the southern edge of the island of
Oahu, Pearl Harbor offered safe berths for the Pacific fleet, an assemblage of
new and old destroyers, battleships, and aircraft carriers. Thin clouds floated
over Oahu early on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. As it happened,
the fleet’s two operational aircraft carriers were out on errands—delivering
airplanes and marines to Wake and Midway islands. All the destroyers and
battleships were docked, some crewman aboard, others in town sleeping off
the previous evening’s fun.
In many ways, the island’s army and navy bases were at a level of readiness
typical for peacetime, not war. At airfields surrounding the naval base, U.S.
Army Air Corps planes sat lined up in neat rows, wingtip to wingtip: easy to
guard, easy to bomb. A skimpy total of three planes, out of more than 100,
were in the air on patrol duty. Most of the other pilots were still asleep, though
two of them, Lieutenants George Welch and Ken Taylor, “survivors of an all-
night poker game,” were “awake and arguing about going for a swim” at six
that Sunday morning.
5
Senior civilian administrators—including President
Roosevelt—and military leaders knew a Japanese attack would be coming
somewhere soon: the Japanese consulate in London had been ordered to de-
stroy
its paperwork and close up shop; on November 22, an intercepted mes-
sage
to the Japanese consul in Washington had stated that if Roosevelt would
not accept Japanese plans in Asia by November 29, “things are automatically
going to happen.”
6
But poor coordination of gathered intelligence, mistaken
assumptions about where Japan would strike, and dangerous overconfidence
in American readiness made Pearl Harbor a giant, sleeping target.
In rough waters 220 miles out at sea, an undetected Japanese flotilla—
i
ncluding six aircraft carriers—stopped. At 6:10 am, with sailors holding
onto
railings as water sloshed over the decks, a first wave of 183 planes lifted
into the sky, a mixture of high-altitude bombers, fighters, and dive-bombers
equipped with modified torpedoes appropriate to the shallow waters of Pearl
Harbor. Without advanced navigation systems or radar of their own, the Japa-
nese
pilots honed in on their destination by following an unlikely beacon:
music from a Honolulu radio station.
F
or two weeks U.S. Naval Intelligence had not heard a peep from this particu-
l
ar squadron of the Imperial Japanese Navy, which was worrisome since chatter
was normal and the Japanese diplomatic and certain military codes had been
broken so that their relays were decipherable. Secretary of State Cordell Hull
AMERICAN STORIES
164
had been negotiating with special Japanese envoys on and off for weeks, trying
to reach an acceptable settlement (concerning Japan’s role in the Pacific) with
Emperor Hirohito and Prime Minister Hideki Tojo. On Saturday, December 6,
Roosevelt, certain that Japan was preparing an attack somewhere in the Pacific,
sent an urgent peace note to Hirohito, concluding, “I am confident that both of us
. . . have a sacred duty to restore traditional amity and prevent further death and
destruction in the world.”
7
But it was too late. On November 26, Roosevelt had
issued a plan spelling out the ten things necessary for the U.S. oil and gasoline
embargo to end. The demands, like ceasing military operations on the Asian
mainland, were unacceptable to Japan’s leaders. So on November 29, with no
slackening of the embargo in sight, Japan had initiated military plans for twin
attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines. The only remaining security for
American forces in Hawaii was the month-old early warning radar sites, one
of which, the Opana station, perched at Oahu’s northern edge.
Twelve B-17 Flying Fortress bombers en route from California to the
Philippines were due to land at Pearl Harbor at any time. That was the most
that American military personnel expected to see dropping out of the sky.
At 7:06 am, a radar operator at Opana station called the Fighter Information
Center
to report what looked like at least fifty blips on his screen. Private
Joseph McDonald, already on shift for thirteen hours, took the call and in-
formed
Lieutenant Kermit Tyler about a “large number of planes” incoming.
Unimpressed, the lieutenant suggested that these must be the expected Flying
Fortresses. McDonald thought otherwise, especially after talking again to the
Opana operator, who indicated that the blips on the screen were closing in fast
on Oahu. McDonald relayed this message to Tyler, who, remaining nonchalant,
picked up the phone and told the radar man, “Well, don’t worry about it.”
8
Half an hour later a single-file line of planes droned overhead. The U.S.
Navy and Army installations were clear targets now that the morning’s clouds
had parted—pushed out of the way, perhaps, by a kamikaze, a “divine wind.”
Private McDonald watched fellow servicemen throw rocks at the Japanese
planes as they zoomed south toward their final destination.
9
What happened next wrenched Americans out of their collective illusion
that peace would last. The Pacific Ocean was no longer a barrier to hide behind;
technology had turned it into a puddle that veteran Japanese pilots—trained to
despise Americans as impatient and weak—had easily crossed. Attack com-
m
ander Mitsuo Fuchida’s planes screamed over Opana radar station. Minutes
later, at 7:49 am, Fuchida saw that his primary objective, the American aircraft
carriers, were nowhere in sight, and he told his telegraph operator to type out
“To, T
o, To”—“charge, charge, charge.” His telegrapher did as ordered, and
four minutes later, Fuchida radioed a more inspiring message, “To-ra, T
o-ra,
To-ra”—surprise attack had been achieved.
10
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OUT OF THE DEPRESSION AND INTO WAR
At 7:55 am, December 7, 1941, the first wave of Japanese planes slammed
their payloads into the fleet moored at Battleship Row. George Hunter, a gun-
n
ery officer aboard the USS West Virginia, remembered, “those yellow bastards
were bombing with hairline accuracy.”
11
In teams of five, the Japanese dive-
bombers zeroed in on one ship after another, their movements precise, their
choreography smooth from practice. Within minutes, the USS Nevada had
sustained one torpedo hole and two bomb blasts, but her gunners held steady
and shot three Zero planes from the sky. Great clouds of oily smoke billowed
from the flaming hulls and decks. Fifteen minutes into the attack, the USS
Arizona exploded when a high-altitude bomb sliced down to her lower decks
and
ignited 1 million pounds of gunpowder. Japanese flyers 10,000 feet high
felt the shock wave. Nine minutes later, the Arizona was resting at the bottom
o
f the sea with 1,177 sailors lying dead in its maze of rooms and passageways.
(Neither the Arizona nor its sailors have ever been raised; the ship became
their
grave.) At 8:20 am, the first wave of Japanese attackers regrouped and
began
their return flight to the waiting carriers. At 8:54, the second wave of
213 planes arrived, strafing and bombing.
During the lull, the shocked and wounded on the ground did what they
could to recover and prepare for another onslaught. One seventeen-year-old
Japanese-American youth named Daniel Inouye (a future U.S. senator), along
with other Red Cross volunteers, rushed to the harbor to tend the wounded.
After watching dive-bombers blast Wheeler Field, the two sleepless, poker-
playing lieutenants, Taylor and Welch, leaped into a car and sped to their
airplanes at nearby Haleiwa airfield. Agile Zero planes, metallic gray with a
telltale red dot painted on their wings and fuselage, strafed the two lieutenants
along their way to the airstrip. As the second wave of attackers arrived, Taylor
and Welch were already airborne and met a pack of dive-bombers midair,
gunning down seven planes. Despite heavy antiaircraft fire, the 213 Japanese
planes still managed to inflict great damage, sinking one more destroyer and
forcing the Nevada to intentionally run ashore rather than going to the bottom.
At 10 am, two hours into the mayhem, the second wave of Japanese planes
headed back, and the fight was over, for the time being.
The Japanese victory at Pearl Harbor was a great mistake because it filled
Americans with a resolution to exact vengeance. In those two hours, 2,403
Americans died at Pearl Harbor, sixty-eight of them civilians. Another 1,178
were wounded. But the oil farms on Oahu and the aircraft carriers escaped
unscathed, so the turnaround American response could be relatively swift. All
but three of the sunken and damaged vessels would ultimately be raised and
repaired. The West Virginia was part of the victory fleet at Japan in September
1945 when the treaty was signed ending the last phase of World War II.
The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt addressed a
AMERICAN STORIES
166
united Congress, pointing out that the attacks were planned and premeditated,
even though the United States and Japan had been at peace. Simultaneous
with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had struck the Philippines.
Saying that December 7 was a “date which will live in infamy,” Roosevelt
asked that “the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly act
by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between
the United States and the Japanese Empire.”
12
Congress answered with a
storm of applause, and all but one member voted for war: 388 to 1. The one
peace vote belonged to Jeanette Rankin, who had also voted against U.S.
entry into the First World War some twenty-four years earlier—Rankin was
an unwavering pacifist. On December 11, Adolf Hitler, contrary to the advice
of his advisers, and Benito Mussolini issued declarations of war on the United
States, unnecessary extensions of the treaty they had with Japan, which only
required mutual assistance. World War II had begun.
Sacrifice
The American mind remembers World War II as a just and necessary war.
Given the Nazi genocide of homosexuals, gypsies, and Jews (at least 6 mil-
lion
gassed, starved, and shot) and Japan’s record of atrocities, including its
policy of enforced prostitution and the beheading of numerous U.S. GIs taken
hostage, Americans’ sacrifices seemed well justified. But the United States
did not go to war to end genocide or to free Vietnamese girls from brothels.
For example, the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938, when Nazi goons
destroyed Jewish-owned businesses and 460 synagogues, killed about 100
Jews, and sent another 30,000 to death camps, were widely reported in U.S.
newspapers. Only months later, 907 German-Jewish refugees crowded onto
the ship St. Louis and steamed for Cuba, seeking asylum. But both Cuba
and the United States refused the passengers entry, and eventually the U.S.
Coast Guard “escorted” the St. Louis and its desperate human cargo back into
international waters. Having seen the safe lights of Miami, these Jews were
sent back to Europe’s darkness, where they “would again face the threat of
Nazi extermination.”
13
News about Hitler’s storm troopers massacring Jews
reached major U.S. newspapers in 1941 when Germany invaded Russia: “Fol-
lowing
the advancing German army, Nazi execution squads, known as the
Einsatzgruppen, had begun murdering Jews by the hundreds of thousands.”
14
However, news of these events induced little more official response in the
United States than verbal denunciations.
Instead,
the United States went to war to preserve a modified world order:
a balance of power, security from invasion, and free trade on the seas. High-
minded rhetoric was employed to bolster America’s commitment to combating
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OUT OF THE DEPRESSION AND INTO WAR
fascism, and the rhetoric soon became part of the cause. On January 6, 1941,
Roosevelt addressed Congress to outline his vision of “future days.” Roosevelt
imagined “four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech and expression,
freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Finally, the
United States went to war to avenge itself for the terror of Pearl Harbor.
Americans of every color, creed, and sex made great sacrifices and noble
contributions during the war years. Nearly 500,000 Mexican-Americans en-
listed
to fight, about one-sixth of the total Mexican population in the United
States, even though, in historian Stephen Ambrose’s words, “Mexican-Americans
were treated like scum.”
15
About 550,000 American Jews served in the mili-
tary. And 1.5 million African-Americans wore a uniform—the most famous
being the Tuskegee Airmen, who flew with valor and skill in campaigns in
Italy and Germany, although they and all other black troops in the U.S. Armed
Forces were segregated. Uniformed black soldiers were forced to sit in the
backs of buses in the South even while German prisoners of war were riding
in the front; in Georgia under the governor’s orders, bus drivers were armed
with pistols to maintain segregated seating. Some 50,000 Native Americans
served in the military, including 4,400 from the Navajo Nation. In the Pacific
theater, 420 Navajos served as Marine Corps code talkers, instrumental in the
awful battles at Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. The Japanese never discovered
that the unbreakable American code was simply Navajo. Jay-sho or “buz-
zard”
became “bomber”; the bombs that fell from the buzzards were called
a-ye-shi, “eggs.”
T
he most decorated unit of its size in U.S. history was the 442nd Regimental
Combat Team, composed entirely of Japanese-American men. Though many
were drawn from Hawaii’s large Japanese population of 158,000, hundreds
of the 442nd enlisted at tables set up in barbed-wired, machine-gun–turreted
internment camps where they and their families had been placed by General
John DeWitt and President Roosevelt. In February 1942, Roosevelt signed
Executive Order 9066 authorizing the secretary of war to designate restricted
domestic “military areas” from which “any or all persons may be excluded.”
As it turned out, the people excluded from western Washington, Oregon, Ari-
z
ona, and California were more than 77,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry
and more than 30,000 of their immigrant parents and grandparents who had
legally been denied U.S. citizenship by the Naturalization Act of 1790, which
restricted citizenship to “free white” people. Thanks to a “deteriorating military
situation” that “created the opportunity for American racists to get their views
accepted by the national leadership,”
16
more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans
passed through relocation centers from 1942 through 1946, and most then
went into what Roosevelt himself called “concentration camps.”
D
uring the 1910s and 1920s, Oregon, Washington, and California had