Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians

7. Loyalty: Leave and Segregation

7 Loyalty: Leave and Segregation By October 1942, the government was holding over 100,000 evacuees in relocation centers. Evacuation had been an emergency measure, but politics and the chimera of a threat to military security had sentenced the evacuees to indefinite confinement. They were still detained although no individual charges had been. or could have been, made against them. Supported by neither statute nor explicit executive order, the legal basis for confining evacuees was plainly suspect. The human toll the camps were taking was enormous-physical hardship, growing anger toward the United States and deteriorating morale. The tide of war turned with the American victory at the battle of Midway in June 1942 and as the possibility of Japanese attack grew more remote, the military necessity for detention and exclusion became increasingly difficult to defend. Nevertheless, other than the WRA's ineffective leave program, the government had no plans to remedy the situation and no means of distinguishing the loyal from the disloyal-if it were inclined to do so. Total control ofthese civilians in the presumed interest of state security was rapidly becoming the accepted norm. How would the government deal with this new status quo in the fall of 1942? Having bowed to political pressure in deciding to control and detain the ethnic Japanese, what standard or test or presumption was to be established to return the evacuees to liberty? Or would the government embrace the proposition that, in wartime, total control of suspect groups of civilians is justified and legally permissible? 185 186 PERSONAL JUSTICE DENIED Commentators have characterized the exclusion and detention of the ethnic Japanese as a triumph of military over civilian authority.l As our account of the decisions to evacuate and detain makes clear, this view is accurate to a limited degree since the military was carrying out a program largely conceived and promoted by civilian groups and politicians. The friction between military and civilian interests is more clearly seen in the decision of whether and how to end the detention. Some in the Western Defense Command argued that there was a military interest in restricting the release of the evacuees to those who posed no conceivable military threat and, ultimately, that the Army should prepare through planning and intelligence work to control large groups of suspect civilians in any future war. The security of the state should be paramount. The civilians at the top of the War Department understood their responsibility differently; returning the loyal evacuees to normal life outside a detention camp should be the touchstone of government policy and, since exclusion and detention rested on a military justification, the War Department had to play an active role in that effort. The WRA shared this view and had more liberal opinions on the indicia of loyalty. It is a bitter irony that the loyalty review program, which the WRA and the War Department established as the predicate for release from the camps-the first major governmental decision in which the interests of the evacuees preVailed-was carried out without sufficient sensitivity or knowledge of the evacuees. Designed to hasten their release, the program instead became one of the most divisive, wrenching episodes of the captivity. McCLOY AND THE NISEI COMBAT TEAM The government decision makers closest to the evacuees increasingly believed that wholesale confinement was not justified or acceptable. Dillon. Myer strongly held this view and was already looking for ways to achieve large-scale resettlement. Milton Eisenhower had never been comfortable with the program. Now in the fall of 1942 John J. McCloy also adopted this view as the matter was raised with him in the context of whether evacuees should be permitted to serve in the Army. Once the decision to evacuate was made and the WRA had taken custody of the evacuees, Stimson and McCloy had largely left the treatment of Japanese Americans to others. The Nisei in the Army, their only immediate concern, were few because the Selective Service LOYALTY: LEAVE AND SEGREGATION 187 had stopped induction at about the time of the evacuation.2 In February , making the decision to evacuate, Stimson and McCloy had relied heavily on DeWitt, ignoring the contrary views of the FBI and failing to seek other opinions. Since then McCloy had begun to study the matter and to hear that most evacuees were loyal, that they wanted to get out of the camps and prove their loyalty, and...