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

12. Germans and German Americans

12 Germans and German Americans In the first six months of 1942, the United States was engaged in active warfare along the Atlantic Coast with the Germans, who had dispatched submarines to American Atlantic waters, where they patrolled outside harbors and roadsteads. Unconvoyed American ships were torpedoed and destroyed with comparative impunity before minefield defense and antisubmarine warfare became effective several months later. In the last weeks of January 1942, 13 ships were sunk totalling 95,000 gross tons, most of it strategically important tanker tonnage. In February , nearly 60 vessels went down in the North Atlantic and along the American East Coast; more than 100,000 tons were lost. At the same time, the naval war expanded to the east coast of Florida and the Caribbean. March 1942 saw 28 ships totalling more than 150,000 tons sunk along the East Coast and 15 others, more than 90,000 tons, lost in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. More than half were tankers. The destruction continued through April, May and June as American defenses developed slowly; the peak came in May, when 41 ships were lost in the Gulf. 1 This devastating warfare often came alarmingly close to shore. Sinkings could be watched from Florida resorts and, on June 15, two American ships were torpedoed in full view of bathers and picnickers at Virginia Beach.2 The damage done was described by the Navy: The massacre enjoyed by the U-boats along our Atlantic Coast in 1942 was as much a national disaster as if saboteurs had destroyed 283 284 PERSONAL JUSTICE DENIED half a dozen of our biggest war plants. . . . If a submarine sinks two 6OOO-ton ships and one 3000-ton tanker, here is a typical account ofwhat we have totally lost; 42 tanks, 8 six-inch Howitzers, 88 twenty-five-pound guns, 40 two-pound guns, 24 armored cars, 50 Bren carriers, 5210 tons of ammunition, 600 rifles, 428 tons of tank supplies, 2000 tons of stores, and 1000 tanks of gasoline. Suppose the three ships had made port and the cargoes were dispersed. In order to knock out the same amount of equipment by air bombing, the enemy would have to make three thousand successful bombing sorties.3 Japanese attacks on the West Coast were insignificant by comparison . The few shells lobbed ashore at Goleta, California, and the incendiary balloons floated over the Pacific Northwest amounted to little more than harassment. Yet the far more severe treatment which Japanese Americans as a group received at official hands, and less formally from their fellow citizens, appears to suggest the opposite. The wartime treatment of alien Germans and Italians, as well as the German American experience of the First World War, lends new perspective to the exclusion and detention of the ethnic Japanese. The less harsh controls faced by German,Americans in 1942 did not emerge simply from a more benign view oftheir intentions. Samuel Eliot Morison, the eminent historian of American naval operations in World War II, firmly believed that disloyal elements along the Atlantic Coast aided German submarine warfare: "The U-boats were undoubtedly helped by enemy agents and clandestine radio transmissions from the United States, as well as by breaking codes."4 Morison does not support this conclusion with any evidence and, given the lack of corroboration for similar beliefs on the West Coast, one must view it skeptically. Nevertheless, this view surely represents the beliefs of responsible people at the time. This destructive struggle, with its suggestions of active aid from people on shore, produced no mass exclusion of German aliens or German American citizens from the East Coast. The Justice Department interned East Coast German aliens it thought dangerous, and a small number ofGerman American citizens were individually excluded from coastal areas after review of their personal records. Exclusion or detention of some categories of German aliens was considered, but rejected. Immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, the FBI picked up Axis nationals whom they suspected, frequently on the basis of membership in suspect organizations.5 By February 16, 1942, the Justice Department had interned 2,192 Japanese; 1,393 Germans and 264 Italians.6 For enemy aliens of all nationalities, internment differed GERMANS AND GERMAN AMERICANS 285 markedly from the exclusion program on the West Coast. Hearings on loyalty were held promptly, and release was very likely despite the government's great advantages in the hearing process. Those...