Chapter Fourteen

World War II and America’s Ethnic Problem

World War II began in Europe in 1939 and later spread to the Pacific Ocean. The United States did not join the fighting until after Japan bombed the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. Then the nation mobilized for war. Soon, US troops were seeing combat around the world.

The war pitted two groups of countries, the Allies and the Axis, against each other. The Allies were the United Kingdom, France, and many other countries, including the United States. The three main Axis powers were Germany (controlled by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party) and Italy in Europe, and Japan in Asia and the Pacific.

The Nazis claimed that white people of Germanic descent were a “master race.” They were superior to others, including Jews, who were targeted for Nazi persecution, along with Gypsies, Catholics, homosexuals, and other groups whom the Nazis considered inferior. Nazi beliefs were a form of fascism, a political viewpoint that defines nationhood in terms of a unified, dominant, shared culture and ancestry. Fascism sees the world in terms of “us” and “them”—with “them” as inferiors, outsiders, or weaklings.

The racist underpinnings of Nazism and fascism led some people to question how the United States could battle these repulsive ideas in other countries while racism remained alive in America. World War II forced Americans to take a critical look at the racial and ethnic divisions within their own society. Minorities experienced the war differently, but their experiences, taken together, showed that World War II was not just a fight for equality and democracy abroad. It was also the beginning of new stage in the struggle at home.

Japanese Americans: A Hole
in the Constitution

One result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was fear and suspicion directed at Japanese people living in Hawaii and on the U.S. mainland—including Japanese Americans who were US citizens.

In the days immediately after the bombing, federal authorities arrested a total of fewer than 2,100 Japanese, German, and Italian people in the United States who were believed to be dangerous to US security. But when the military and President Franklin D. Roosevelt debated rounding up everyone in the country who was of German, Italian, or Japanese descent, the president decided that the Germans and Italians were not a problem. What about the Japanese?

The secretary of the Navy wanted people of Japanese descent living in Hawaii to be interned, or rounded up and confined under guard. Lt. General Delos Emmons, the military governor of Hawaii, disagreed. “There is no intention or desire on the part of the federal authorities to operate mass concentration camps,” he told the people of Hawaii. “While we have been subjected to a serious attack by a ruthless and treacherous enemy, we must remember that this is America and we must do things the American Way.” For Emmons, the “American Way” meant respecting and enforcing the US Constitution.

Although Roosevelt approved a plan to remove twenty thousand “dangerous” Japanese from Hawaii, Emmons ordered the internment of only 1,444 people who posed a possible threat. Emmons also pointed out that no known acts of sabotage had been committed in Hawaii.

The fate of the 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast was far different. J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said that there was no security reason to intern them. Francis Biddle, the attorney general of the United States, declared that interning them would be racist and would “make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system.” In spite of these arguments, Lt. General John L. DeWitt, the military commander of the West Coast, had no confidence that people of Japanese ancestry would be loyal to the United States, even if they were US citizens. The president left the decision up to the military, and DeWitt ordered all people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast to be forcibly relocated to guarded camps.

Japanese and Japanese American residents, taking only what they could carry of clothing and household supplies, had to abandon their homes, possessions, and businesses, many of which were snapped up at bargain prices by white buyers. The Japanese were loaded into trains and sent off to unknown destinations: hastily built camps, mostly located in remote desert areas. There the internees were crowded into barracks, with whole families sharing a single room. Barbed-wire fences and guard towers became the horizons of their strange and humiliating new life.

The few Japanese who resisted being interned were arrested and convicted. Although they fought their convictions all the way to the US Supreme Court, they were told that the singling out of the Japanese was a military necessity, although there was no evidence that this was true.

American-born Japanese men were, however, allowed out of the camps in order to enlist in the US armed services. Thirty-three thousand of them enlisted. They believed that helping to defend their country was the best way to prove their loyalty and fulfill their duties as citizens.

Several thousand Japanese Americans served as translators and interpreters in the Pacific. To carry out their missions, they sometimes crawled close enough to Japanese officers in the middle of battle to hear commands so that they could translate for their American comrades. One high-ranking intelligence officer estimated that these contributions by Japanese Americans shortened the war by two years.

Japanese Americans also served in Europe. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, made up of Japanese Americans from the mainland and Hawaii, won great distinction in a series of bloody battles in Italy and France. Members of the 442nd earned more than 18,000 decorations, including more than 3,600 Purple Hearts.

Yet upon returning from the war with missing limbs and chests covered with military medals for heroism, Japanese American soldiers could still be turned away from barbershops with the words, “We don’t serve Japs here.” And when the internment camps closed and families traveled by train back to the cities where they had lived before the war, they were greeted with signs saying, “No Japs allowed, no Japs welcome.” For many of the internees, release from the camps meant starting over, for their homes and livelihoods had been lost.

African Americans: Racism
in the Armed Forces

Some nine hundred thousand African Americans enlisted in the US armed services during World War II. They served, however, in a segregated military. They were confined to black-only regiments and training camps. They were prevented from using the churches and clubs on military bases. Often they were given the lowliest assignments, such as cooking and cleaning, or the most dangerous ones, such as handling explosives and munitions.

When given the chance, African Americans seized opportunities to prove themselves in combat. The nation’s first black military aircraft pilots, trained at Tuskegee Air Force Base, earned respect in the bullet-torn skies over France and Germany, where they served as protectors of white pilots. The African American 761st Tank Battalion stood its ground in the Battle of the Bulge, one of the fiercest campaigns in the European theater of war. Black women served in the Women’s Army Corps in Europe, processing mail and working side by side with white WACs.

Blacks across America were stunned and angered by President Roosevelt’s refusal to end racial segregation in the armed services. Many accused the government of hypocrisy, saying one thing but doing the opposite. The United States claimed to be fighting for freedom and democracy—but it did so with a “Jim Crow army,” one that was officially segregated by race.

African Americans did, however, win one victory during the war. In the summer of 1941 Roosevelt signed an executive order that banned racial or ethnic discrimination in employment for government or defense jobs.

Threats of a large African American protest march may have influenced Roosevelt. The real pressure for integration in the defense industries, though, came from the need for labor in the steel mills, shipbuilding yards, aircraft plants, and munitions factories that built America’s war machines. With manpower pulled into the armed services, these industries desperately needed labor. They began to hire more black men, and they also hired women, both white and black. A million African Americans were employed in defense industries during the war. More than half were women.

But as African Americans followed defense jobs into the cities, they often found themselves targeted by hate crimes and violence. Competition between blacks and whites existed in the workplace. Conflict also arose over living space in the crowded city, because blacks had to live in segregated ghettos. In 1943, in the middle of the war, racial tensions in Detroit grew so extreme that fierce rioting broke out and lasted for three days, leaving twenty-five blacks and nine whites dead.

President Roosevelt did not speak out against the racial violence in Detroit, but a group of wounded American soldiers did. They wrote from their hospital to a newspaper in their home city of Detroit, saying that the riot made them ask what they were fighting for. They declared they were fighting, and were willing to die, for the “principles that gave birth to the United States of America.” They signed the letter: “Jim Stanley, Negro; Joe Wakamatsu, Japanese; Eng Yu, Chinese; John Brennan, Irish; Paul Colosi, Italian; Don Holzheimer, German; Joe Wojiechowski, Polish; and Mike Cohen, Jewish.”

Their names with their ethnic identities said it all: the war for freedom still needed to be won at home.

Chinese Americans:
An Explosion of Patriotism

America’s entry into the war set off patriotic outbursts in Chinatowns across the country. In New York City’s Chinatown, excited crowds cheered themselves hoarse when the first men drafted into the army were Chinese American.

Chinese Americans wanted to enlist in the armed forces in order to gain respect. “To men of my generation,” explained Charlie Leong of San Francisco, “World War II was the most important historic event of our times. For the first time we felt we could make it in American society.”

The war gave Chinese American men the opportunity to get out of Chinatown, wear army uniforms, and be sent overseas, where they felt they were part of a great patriotic American force. One soldier recalled, “In the 1940s for the first time Chinese were accepted by Americans as being friends, because at that time, Chinese and Americans were fighting against the Japanese and the Germans and the Nazis. Therefore, all of a sudden, we became part of an American dream.”

A total of 13,499 Chinese Americans—more than one-fifth of the adult Chinese American men in the country—were drafted or enlisted in the armed forces during World War II. In civilian life, meanwhile, Chinese American workers found new opportunities. For decades they had been limited to an ethnic labor market with most jobs in restaurants and laundries, but the wartime need for labor opened up higher-paying jobs, especially in defense industries. In Los Angeles, for example, three hundred laundry workers closed their shops to help build the ship China Victory. Chinese American workers also found employment in aircraft plants.

Women moved into new areas of employment along with the men. Many held office jobs, but in 1943 a Chinese American newspaper reported on Alice Yick, a mechanic trainee in the Boston Navy Yard, as well as on the first Chinese American women to work in California’s aircraft industry, building B-24 bombers.

World War II also brought changes to government policies toward Chinese immigration. Anti-American radio broadcasts from Japan highlighted racist treatment of Chinese people in the United States and the US laws that limited Chinese immigration and prevented Asian immigrants from becoming citizens. This led Congress to repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act that had kept Chinese people from entering the country. Instead, Congress set a quota for Chinese immigration. It was a tiny trickle—just 105 people a year—but Chinese Americans had won an important victory. Under the new law, they could also become naturalized citizens.

Mexican Americans: Up from
the Barrio

A twenty-seven-year-old Mexican American named Alex Romandia was working as a stuntman in Hollywood when he heard the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Together with several Jewish friends, Romandia volunteered for the army. “All of us had to prove ourselves,” he said, “to show that we were more American than the Anglos.”

Half a million Mexican Americans enlisted in the armed services—almost one-fifth of the group’s total population of 2,690,000. Many saw their service as a way to show that although they held strong ties to their Mexican heritage, the United States was their country.

Mexican Americans suffered high casualty rates and won many distinctions. One of them, Guy Louis Gabaldon, received a military award for a unique achievement. Growing up in the barrio of East Los Angeles, he had become friendly with a Japanese family, from whom he learned Japanese. When the war started, the family was sent to an internment camp.

Gabaldon, seventeen years old, joined the marines and was sent to the Pacific. During his first day of combat on the island of Saipan, he killed thirty-three soldiers. Filled with remorse, he decided he would try to persuade the remaining Japanese to surrender, because they were surrounded and cut off from the Japanese navy. Working alone, he captured six Japanese soldiers, then told them that he would shoot three of them if the other three did not bring more soldiers back to him. Within seven hours, Gabaldon had eight hundred prisoners.

Mexicans also made important contributions on the home front. To meet the need for farm labor, the federal government started a program in which guest workers, called braceros, could enter the country from Mexico to work for a specific period of time. By 1947 about two hundred thousand braceros had worked in the United States.

Like blacks, many urban Mexican Americans—both men and women—worked in defense industries. Between 1941 and 1944 the number of Mexican Americans employed in the Los Angeles shipyards rose from zero to 17,000. Thousands of Mexican American women became riveters, learning how to drill and assemble aircraft parts.

For many Mexican Americans, defense jobs were both an expression of patriotism and a chance for personal growth. On the job, people learned work skills and social skills. They gained confidence and broadened their horizons. Antonia Molina, who worked at a defense plant, recalled a lesson in tolerance:

I remember one day when some new Black workers came to our factory. From the start, some white workers absolutely refused to even say hello. The next day, some of us Mexican women invited the Black women over to our table for lunch. We did so because we knew what it was like to be discriminated against. By the end of the week, several white workers also joined us for lunch. We soon realized that we had to set aside our differences in order to win the war.

Native Americans: Why Fight the White Man’s War?

When war came, young Indians wondered why they should fight in “the white man’s war.” Why enlist in the US armed services, when Native Americans had been losing their land ever since the first English colonizers landed at Jamestown in 1607?

Yet many Native Americans did join the fight. Enlistment was especially high among the Navajo people. Almost one-fifth of all the Indians who came from reservations to enlist in World War II were Navajo.

Patriotism and pride led Indians to enlist. When asked why Navajo joined the services, Raymond Nakai replied, “Our answer is that we are proud to be American. We’re proud to be American Indians. We always stand ready when our country needs us.”

Another reason was poverty. By the time of World War II, the federal government’s program to reduce the number of livestock on the Navajo reservation had made the Indians poor and dependent on wages. The Navajo had an average annual income of $128, two-fifths of which came from wages, mostly from temporary government work. Young men saw military service as a way of improving their lives.

More important, the Navajo possessed a unique skill that made them desirable to the military. “The marines recruited Navajo for our language,” said Cozy Stanley Brown. “They like to use our language in war to carry messages.”

Navajo who were fluent in both English and their tribal language could be trained as “code talkers.” The Japanese military could not understand or mimic the Navajo language, because the sounds of many words could be heard only by native speakers, and verb forms were so complex that only someone who had grown up with the language could use them properly. The US military admiringly called the Navajo language an “unbreakable code.”

In February 1945 the Navajo code talkers took part in one of the most important Pacific battles: the fight for the island of Iwo Jima. During the first two days of the US invasion of Iwo Jima the code talkers worked around the clock, sending more than eight hundred messages without error. Four code talkers were killed in the fighting. Major Howard Conner declared, “Without the Navajos, the marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”

After the war, however, Navajo and other Native Americans returned to their reservations bearing physical and psychological scars from their war experiences. They also found that economic conditions there had not improved. A year after the war, the average man on the Navajo reservation was earning less than $100 a year.

Many Navajo saw the irony of being valued for their tribal language—a language that the government had tried to keep them from using. “When I was going to boarding school,” said Teddy Draper Sr., “the U.S. government told us not to speak Navajo, but during the war, they wanted us to speak it!”

Jewish Americans: Facing Genocide

When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, four and a half million Jews were living in the United States. They were safe from Nazism, but they faced an agonizing problem. How should they respond to events in Europe? Germany’s anti-Semitism and persecution of Jews became, during World War II, genocide—an organized plan to destroy a particular people.

During the 1930s, as the situation for German Jews steadily worsened, the majority of Americans opposed relaxing the immigration quota so that more German Jews could immigrate into the United States. According to one poll, 66 percent of Americans did not want the government to let in even Jewish children who were at risk in their home country.

After President Roosevelt and the US government turned away the St. Louis, a ship carrying more than nine hundred German Jews who had fled from Nazi Germany, American Jews felt a deep sense of frustration. They had been loyal citizens. Many of them, as well as prominent Jewish American organizations, had said at first that the United States should not make exceptions to the immigration laws. But once it became clear that a ghastly fate awaited Jews in Germany, calls to admit them into the United States as refugees grew louder.

In 1942, the year after the United States entered the war, news of Hitler’s concentration camps, massacres, and plans to eliminate the “Jewish problem” through mass murder reached the US government and Jewish American leaders. Even then, the president declared that the only way to aid the Jews of Europe was to win the war. He was unwilling to admit them to the country as refugees.

Finally, in 1944, Roosevelt appointed a War Refugee Board to plan the rescue of victims of the Axis powers. The rescued victims were to be housed in North Africa. Only one thousand could come to the United States. Meanwhile, at Auschwitz, one of the major Nazi death camps, twelve thousand were being killed each day. By the time Allied forces defeated Germany in June 1945 and liberated the camps, six million Jews had been exterminated in a genocide that has come to be known as the Holocaust.

One result of the Holocaust was that Jewish Americans became more strongly committed to Zionism, a movement to give the Jewish people their own homeland. Membership in the Zionist Organization of America jumped from 18,000 in 1929 to 52,000 in 1939, and then to 136,000 in 1945.

In 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations voted on a plan to divide the Middle Eastern nation of Palestine into two states, one Arab and the other Jewish. The Jewish state, Israel, would be the Jews’ new homeland. The following year President Harry Truman signed a document recognizing the new country of Israel.

A Holocaust Called Hiroshima

Truman had been Roosevelt’s vice president. He became president in 1945, when Roosevelt died suddenly. He was the leader of the United States when World War II ended a few months later.

Like many Americans, Truman had been swept into a revenge-seeking rage by the treacherous attack on Pearl Harbor. The violent conflict in the Pacific was a war of racial hatreds. The American military and media portrayed the Japanese enemy as subhuman and bestial. Truman shared this view. In diary entries written in 1945, the president expressed hatred for the “Japs—savages, ruthless and fanatic.” He was determined that the only acceptable outcome of the Pacific war was Japan’s complete and unconditional surrender.

In 1945 Truman gained a tool powerful enough to bring about that surrender. The Manhattan Project, a scientific and military mission to develop an atomic bomb, had been successfully completed. When Japan refused Truman’s order for unconditional surrender, the United States dropped two bombs— the only two atomic bombs ever used in warfare—on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and of Nagasaki.

After two cities and hundreds of thousands of people had been instantly incinerated, Japan agreed to surrender, on one condition—that it is allowed to keep its emperor. Truman, who did not want to drop a third bomb, agreed. The war was finally over.

World War II ended in victory for the United States and its allies. For minorities in America, however, the fight against prejudice still had to be won. In the words of African American historian W. E. B. Du Bois, the war was a struggle “for democracy not only for white folks but for yellow, brown, and black.”