I have one small addition to Roger D. McGrath’s excellent piece, “You Have to Commit” (Views, April).

The kibei (American-born Japanese educated in Japan before World War II) and other Japanese-Americans involved in the Hokoku Seinen Dan not only regularly demonstrated at the Tule Lake Segregation Center in support of the emperor and the empire but actively petitioned the U.S. government to allow them to return to Japan with the explicit intent of joining the fight against the United States.

As John L. Burling stated in a January 10, 1945, letter replying to these petitions on behalf of the attorney general: “In the first place, the members of the Hokoku Seinen Dan are almost all American Citizens. . . . Yet in time of war these young men, who were born in this country, have betrayed it and have demonstrated their loyalty to the enemy.  They are not patriots, but traitors. . . .  [T]hey are a disgrace and a shame to their brother Japanese-Americans who have proved with their blood that they understand what it means to be loyal to the country of one’s birth.”

It is hard to imagine the chaos that would have reigned on the West Coast had several thousand fanatics been allowed to run loose while the United States was taking tens of thousands of casualties in the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.  The evacuation was ordered largely to allow for the separation of the loyal from the disloyal, and, generally, it served that purpose.

To date, the thousands of disloyals have not apologized for putting loyal Japanese-Americans through their evacuation experience, but their disgrace and shame were ameliorated with a $20,000 check and an apology from the United States government.  What a country!

        —Lt. Col Lee Allen (Ret.)
Provo, UT

Dr. McGrath Replies:

Only being a captain, I’ll have to defer to the colonel.  Actually, Colonel Allen has it absolutely right.  I might also add that his Athena Press is the publisher of David D. Lowman’s MAGIC: The Untold Story of U.S. Intelligence and the Evacuation of Japanese Residents From the West Coast During WW II.  The book should be required reading for all those who think they know something about the evacuation.  There have been more lies spread about this event than any other in American history.  In 1983, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians presented a report to Congress that included no references to MAGIC, the top-secret decryptions of Japanese transmissions that revealed widespread espionage activities by resident Japanese (both aliens and American citizens) on the West Coast.  This was something akin to omitting Japanese tactics on Iwo Jima and Okinawa (including kamikaze attacks) in a discussion of Truman’s decision to drop the bomb.  The Commission never intended to investigate the evacuation honestly.  Only at the last minute did it bother to hear testimony from John J. McCloy, one of only two men alive who were intimately involved at the highest levels with the evacuation.  The assistant secretary of war during World War II, McCloy reported to Secretary of War Henry Stimson on the evacuation and relocation.  During McCloy’s testimony, spectators hissed and booed and stamped their feet and shouted, almost drowning out the octogenarian.  “From my personal appearance at the hearings of the Commission,” said McCloy in a letter to Sen. Charles Grassley, “I believe its conduct was a horrendous affront to our tradition for fair and objective hearings. . . . [I]t became clear from the outset of my testimony that the Commission was not at all disposed to conduct an objective investigation.”  The other man still living was Col. Karl R. Bendetsen, who was in charge of the evacuation in 1942.  When he appeared before the Commission, the spectators made so much noise that he was unable to complete his testimony.  “I knew it would be fruitless,” said Bendetsen.  “Every commissioner had made up his mind before he was appointed.”  The Commission’s report was a rewrite of history in the tradition of Oceania in Orwell’s 1984.  Somewhere, Winston Smith quietly recorded the event in his diary.