"Wayne Paul" wrote:
OK, let us change that comparison. What percentage of the Germans and
Italians interned were actual threats to the security of the war effort.
If
that percentage is as low as the interned Japanese, I will concede that it
was not a matter of race.
All the west coast Japanese were interned, not just a segment of the
community. By the numbers you quoted earlier it is obvious that the
Government had a criteria for selecting specific Italians and specific
Germans for the camps. The criteria for the Japanese was simply being
Japanese.
That's pretty much what the Supreme Court found in ex parte Mitsuye Endo:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bi...=323&invol=283
This was a 1944 decision which found the internment both inherently
racist and of dubious military necessity, and that the practice exceeded
the bounds of the executive order and other acts at question here.
The Korematsu v. United States decision (also 1944) decided that it
would be constitutional to intern US citizens on the basis of ancestry,
when there was a pressing public need, but the decision has been
called into question because
The Hawaiian experience during the war makes mass internment seem
even more useless. Of the 158,000 ethnic Japanese in the Hawaiian
Territory, only some 2,500 were interned, and only one man--someone named
Harada--had any involvement in aiding the Japanese. The remaining 155,000
or so never did anything to hinder the US war effort.
Digging up the numbers on whole populations versus internees took some
doing.
I found some information at the bottom of
http://www.ww2pacific.com/relocation.html
American residents of German birth: 1,237,000
Guesstimated Americans of German ancestry: about 52,000,000
Japanese nationals and Japanese-American citizens in the continental US:
126,749
Interned: 110,000.
"Willingly" relocated from the restricted area: 10,000.
The percentage of interned Germans and German-Americans wasn't even 1%.
For those of Japanese ancestry, internment was about 84%. Add in the people
who had to leave the West Coast and southern Arizona, and 95% of them
were affected.
To stay on-topic for ABPA, here's a picture of one of Ben
Kuroki's planes. I think it's the one from the Ploesti raid.
--Bill Thompson