Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (132 page)

Henry Stimson was torn. “The second generation Japanese can only be evacuated either as part of a total evacuation, giving access to the areas only by permits,” the war secretary wrote in his diary, “or by frankly trying to put them out on the ground that their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese. This latter is the fact but I am afraid it will make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system to apply it.” Yet Stimson, as head of the War Department, had to consider the alternatives. “It is quite within the bounds of possibility that if the Japanese should get naval dominance in the Pacific, they would try an invasion of this country; and if they did, we would have a tough job meeting them.” He added, “The people of the United States have made an enormous mistake in underestimating the Japanese.” Stimson was determined that this mistake not be repeated, and so he recommended to Roosevelt that DeWitt’s evacuation request be approved.

Roosevelt, of course, had the final decision. The president could have overridden Stimson, and perhaps his conscience urged him to. But its urgings were neither loud nor strong, and they had to compete with his political sensibilities. Even less than DeWitt or Stimson could Roosevelt afford another Pearl Harbor, and at a moment of ignorance as to Japan’s capabilities, he couldn’t say with confidence that the Japanese community in California did
not
harbor spies and saboteurs. During peacetime he was as staunch an advocate as the next person of the principle that individuals should be treated as individuals and not as part of a suspect class, but during wartime he thought this principle might be modified in the larger national interest.

Roosevelt chose not to inquire too deeply into the War Department’s reasoning. Stimson sought an interview with Roosevelt to discuss relocation, but the president declined, saying he was busy. This was true enough, given the unprecedented demands on his time, but it also reflected his wish to avoid a face-to-face airing of the issues involved. Stimson had to settle for speaking to Roosevelt by telephone. The president told the war secretary to do what he thought best. John McCloy, Stimson’s assistant, recalled Roosevelt saying, “There will probably be some repercussions, but it has got to be dictated by military necessity.” Roosevelt added, “Be as reasonable as you can.”

On February 19, the president issued Executive Order 9066 asserting that “the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises, and national-defense utilities” and authorizing the secretary of war “to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate military commanders may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded.” The order did not single out either the West Coast or the Japanese, but it was universally understood to apply peculiarly to that region and those people.

And it was widely applauded, especially when, just four days later, the Japanese submarine shelled the California coast near Santa Barbara. The evacuation began within weeks; ultimately some 110,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent were removed to internment camps in the desert regions east of the Sierra Nevada and Cascades. Seventy percent of the internees were American citizens. By most evidence, the great majority of those removed had been enthusiastic about living in America before the war began. Some, not surprisingly, had second thoughts in their bleak new homes.

A
MONG THE BASE
motives that inspired the internment of the Japanese Americans was the most basic human motive of all: fear. During the five months after Pearl Harbor—the period when the relocation policy was formulated, approved, and implemented—the armies and navy of imperial Japan appeared invincible. Tokyo’s strategy of stunning the Americans and British with lightning blows against Hawaii, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Malaya and of then driving south to seize the oil of the Dutch East Indies unfolded to perfection. The crippling of the American Pacific fleet prevented Washington from reinforcing General MacArthur in the Philippines. This was just as well, given MacArthur’s hopeless condition by the end of the first day of fighting there. Despite his several hours’ warning after Pearl Harbor, MacArthur inexplicably allowed his air force to be blasted on the ground by Japanese attackers, leaving Luzon, the main Philippine island, open to invasion by Japanese land forces. The combined American and Philippine army was forced to retreat to the Bataan Peninsula, while MacArthur and his staff holed up on Corregidor, a rock at the entrance to Manila Bay.

MacArthur demanded reinforcements. “The Philippine theater is the locus of victory or defeat,” he declared. For the United States to fail to defend the Philippines with every resource at its disposal would be a “fatal mistake.”

Roosevelt agreed rhetorically. “The people of the United States will never forget what the people of the Philippine Islands are doing this day and will do in the days to come,” he promised. “I give to the people of the Philippines my solemn pledge that their freedom will be redeemed and their independence established and protected. The entire resources, in men and in material, of the United States stand behind that pledge.”

But there was something disconcerting to Filipinos about the president’s use of the word “redeem,” which suggested that Philippine freedom had already been lost. And there was something even more unsettling about the emerging Europe-first strategy, which clearly contradicted Roosevelt’s pledge to devote the “entire resources” of the United States to the defense of the Philippines.

Not for the last time, global strategy forced a deferral of promises. MacArthur did not receive his reinforcements, and four decades of short-changing Philippine defense culminated in four months of misery for the islands’ defenders. “Our troops have been subsisted on one-half to one-third rations for so long a period that they do not possess the physical strength to endure the strain placed upon the individual in an attack,” the American commander on Bataan, Jonathan Wainwright, asserted. In early April the Bataan garrison was compelled to surrender—only to suffer even more grievously on the forced march to prisoner camps and in the camps themselves.

Roosevelt meanwhile ordered MacArthur to leave Corregidor for Australia, to fight another day. MacArthur resisted. “These people are depending on me now,” he informed the president. “Any idea that I was being withdrawn for any other purpose than to bring them immediate relief could not be explained.” Roosevelt repeated his order, more emphatically than before. MacArthur complied this time, departing in the dead of night by PT boat and dodging Japanese patrols till he reached the southern island of Mindanao, from which he flew to Darwin, Australia. “The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan,” he told reporters on his arrival. “A primary purpose of this is relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return.”

As disappointing as the loss of the Philippines was to Americans, it was not nearly as devastating as the loss of Singapore was to the British. For decades British imperial planners had based their strategy for Southeast Asia on the island fortress at the tip of the Malay Peninsula. But like the Americans regarding the Philippines, the British had been distracted by other demands on their resources. The outbreak of the war in Europe additionally deprived Singapore, which by December 1941 possessed but a fraction of its projected strength. The dispatch of the
Repulse
and
Prince of Wales
was supposed to improve the situation; their destruction sank Singapore’s hopes with them. Japanese troops drove down the peninsula during January 1942 and captured Singapore and its garrison of seventy thousand in early February.

The fall of Singapore shocked the British like no event of the war thus far. “When I reflect how I have longed and prayed for the entry of the United States into the war, I find it difficult to realize how gravely our British affairs have deteriorated by what has happened since December seven,” Churchill wrote Roosevelt. “We have suffered the greatest disaster in our history at Singapore, and other misfortunes will come thick and fast upon us.”

He was right. The collapse of Singapore opened Burma and the East Indies to Japanese invasion. Rangoon fell within weeks, enabling Japanese forces to close the Lend-Lease supply line to the beleaguered Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek. Japanese troops landed on Java and soon controlled that most populous island of the East Indies. Japanese troops occupied the northeastern coast of New Guinea and seized key positions in the various island groups of the southwestern Pacific.

By April 1942 the Japanese empire covered an enormous swath of the earth’s surface, from the International Date Line in the east almost to India in the west, and from the North Pacific nearly to Australia. To be sure, much of this was empty ocean—but it was ocean commanded by the Japanese fleet. The Anglo-American strategy had been to contain Japan in the Pacific while concentrating on Germany in Europe. How well the Americans and British would do against Germany remained to be seen. Against Japan they were failing miserably.

P
ART OF THE
problem, Roosevelt thought, was Britain’s backward policy in Asia. Indian nationalists had been agitating to eject Britain from India for generations. Their efforts—like the efforts of nationalists in other countries over the decades—took heart from America’s traditional and continuing anti-imperialism. Wilson’s call for self-determination resonated with Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and other leaders of the nationalist Indian Congress party, who drew on America’s Declaration of Independence in writing a similar declaration for India in 1930. Nehru appealed explicitly to Americans for support in articles in
Foreign Affairs
and
Atlantic Monthly,
published as the tide of war was rising a decade later. Britain’s declaration of war against Germany in 1939 triggered an outbreak of nonviolent noncooperation in India, partly from resentment that the British imperial government had included India in the war declaration without consulting Indian leaders and partly from hope that Britain’s distress would compel London to offer independence—perhaps deliverable at war’s end—in exchange for India’s assistance against the Axis. The British government was pondering the situation when Churchill took power in the spring of 1940.

Churchill’s India problem became Roosevelt’s India problem at the time of the Atlantic Conference. The Atlantic Charter’s affirmation of the “right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” seemed to support the position of the Indian nationalists, and Roosevelt’s silence in response to Churchill’s denials that the charter applied to the British empire encouraged allegations of American hypocrisy. Such allegations were most potent in Asia, where the Japanese had been saying for years that nothing really distinguished American imperialism from the British, French, and Dutch versions.

Roosevelt broached the India issue in his conversations with Churchill in Washington during December 1941 and January 1942. But Churchill rebuffed the president’s overtures. “I reacted so strongly and at such length that he never raised it verbally again,” Churchill recalled with satisfaction.

Yet the issue didn’t disappear. If anything, it grew more pressing after the surrender of Singapore made a Japanese invasion of India suddenly possible. Japan’s theater commanders capitalized on their momentum and their country’s prestige among Asians by calling on Indian nationalists to embrace the Axis as a means of expelling the British. The Japanese enlisted thousands of Indian troops taken prisoner at Singapore in what would become the pro-Japanese Indian National Army.