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American racism during WWII?

lionking

In the Peanut Gallery
lionking
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Firstly, anyone who knows my posting history understands I'm not a US basher, quite the opposite in fact. This thread has no hidden agenda.

I was reading the review of a new book called "Moral Combat: A History of World War II" by Michael Burleigh, which I think I will purchase. While the book rightly covers the atrocities of the Nazis and Japanese, it doesn't spare the allies, particularly the US. A couple of passages in the review:

Nazi and facist sympathisers were never rounded up, but all 110,000 Japanese-Americans were interned, often under terrible conditions.
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And:

While killing every German soldier was never considered a prerequisite to defeating Hitler, a US propaganda poster, published after news of the Bataan death march, exhorted Americans to "stay on the job until every murdering Jap is wiped out"
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So were there strategic military reasons for internment and calling for extermination of Japanese, or was it purely racist?
 
It was fear and anger to a great extent, with possibly some potential trouble-makers caught up in the net.

Oh, and German and Italian aliens were rounded up, it's a persistent myth that they weren't. Not wholesale like it was with the Japanese, but it happened.

Finally, in regard to racism in the US in general:


Command of Negro Troops

ENGINEER TRAINING CENTER POLICY AND REQUIREMENT

By JOHN H. SHERMAN, Lt. Col, T. C. Commanding 14th E. T. Group

Delivered November 17, 1944 to 300 new officers, many of whom were unwilling to work with Negroes and were trying to get transfers to other Services. Colonel Sherman therefore found it necessary in one session to compel obedience to assignment and to sell his officers the official War Department attitude and doctrine relative to Colored troops.

By orders of the Commanding General this address was made required reading for every officer assigned to duty with Negro troops. Until recently it was classified secret and could not be published.

Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol. XII, pp. 217-220.
 
I don't think it's really any surprise that people who may have links to The Enemy are considered security risks during wartime.
 
Probably more significant was the Australian and American habit of murdering captured or surrendered Japanese soldiers and taking trophies from Japanese dead.

Wikipedia link.

If this sort of thing is news to you, it might explain why I think I recall you expressing pro-war views in the past. Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to support its repetition.
 
Gawdzilla said:
From 20 years on the Internet, mostly. And from grading papers at Purdue. And from reading endless articles and books about how racist America was during WWII.
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Damn, those straw men sure are persecuting good, honest Americans. I wish somebody had the guts to stand up to them on the internet!
 
lionking said:
So were there strategic military reasons for internment and calling for extermination of Japanese, or was it purely racist?
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This was commented on in the movie "Midway". The son of Charlton Heston's character was dating (engaged to?) a Nisei woman whose parent were interned. He asked the rhetorical question, "Why are Japanese-Americans being interned but not German-Americans? What's the difference?" To which Heston's character replied, "Pearl Harbor, I guess."

I think it's a little racism mixed in with the fact that Japanese-Americans were easier to spot.

FYI, German-Americans were treated pretty badly during WWI, not nearly so much during WWII. Not sure what changed between the two wars, but the German immigrants may have had time to assimilate into American culture more.
 
arthwollipot said:
I don't think it's really any surprise that people who may have links to The Enemy are considered security risks during wartime.
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Some of it may have to do with unfamiliarity with Japanese culture. If you don't understand the enemy's culture, then it's hard to judge how much loyalty immigrants from that culture have to their homeland. Unfamiliarity breeds suspicion.
 
aggle-rithm said:
FYI, German-Americans were treated pretty badly during WWI, not nearly so much during WWII. Not sure what changed between the two wars, but the German immigrants may have had time to assimilate into American culture more.
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I saw a short film on that, produced in 1943, IIRC, set in WWI. The father was loyal to his homeland, but caused no trouble. He was questioned, watched, and harassed by his neighbors. The mother was a fence-sitter, but volunteered to roll bandages for the US troops (and was refused by "patriotic" ladies.) The son, in the Army before the war, was not allowed to go to France with his unit because he was "risk". The film pointed the problem with that kind of thinking. I don't know of one similar done on the Japanese-Americans.
 
aggle-rithm said:
FYI, German-Americans were treated pretty badly during WWI, not nearly so much during WWII. Not sure what changed between the two wars, but the German immigrants may have had time to assimilate into American culture more.
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It was 1 part the fact that by WW2 the ties of German-Americans to the old country had faded quite a bit. The anti-German antics had reduced German-American identity quite a bit when they were forced to stop holding church services in German, etc.

Also, there was the detail that the US needed more "reminders" of whose side they were on in WW1 since for most of the war the US wasn't really a big supporter of either side (as far as public opinion went, our munitions trades told a different story).

And the fact is that the US was genuinely ashamed of its paranoid antics vs. German-Americans during WW1.
 
Gawdzilla said:
I saw a short film on that, produced in 1943, IIRC, set in WWI. The father was loyal to his homeland, but caused no trouble. He was questioned, watched, and harassed by his neighbors. The mother was a fence-sitter, but volunteered to roll bandages for the US troops (and was refused by "patriotic" ladies.) The son, in the Army before the war, was not allowed to go to France with his unit because he was "risk". The film pointed the problem with that kind of thinking. I don't know of one similar done on the Japanese-Americans.
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Ironically, there were Nisei soldiers who fought honorably in the European theater while their families were in internment camps back home.
 
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