HONOLULU -- President Franklin Roosevelt told military authorities to lay the groundwork for interning Japanese-Americans in a 'concentration camp' more than five years before the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, an author of a book on the attack charged Saturday.
Roosevelt wrote the Chief of Naval Operations in 1936 that persons who had contact with Japanese merchant ships in Honolulu should be 'secretly but definitely identified' so they could be sent to a camp 'in the event of trouble,' according to a memo released by author Tony Hodges.
Hodges said he obtained the memo, which was declassified in 1973, from the National Archives in Washington after coming across references to it during his research.
'The government has led Americans to believe that the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese ancestory was due to the excitment and panic after Pearl Harbor,' Hodges said. He called the memo 'the smoking gun' which indicates Roosevelt had 'ordered the military to secretly spy on a certain group of American citizens and to set them up' to be sent to the camps.
Almost 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestory were interned during the war, including nearly 900 from Hawaii.
'One obvious thought occurs to me -- that every Japanese citizen or non-citizen on the island of Oahu who meets these Japanese ships or has any connection with their officers or men should be secretly but definitely identified and his or her name placed on a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp in the event of trouble,' the memo read.
The one-page memo, dated Aug. 10, 1936, was unsigned but had 'F.D.R.' typed at the bottom.
Hodges has no direct documentation of what actions were taken in response to the memo, but noted that martial law commander Col. Frank Steer said a 'crap list' of persons to be arrested in the event of war existed at the time of the attack.
But Steer, Provost Marshall of the Pacific during World War II, said military intelligence authorities were responsible for deciding who was on the list, and he was responsible only for keeping the internees imprisoned.
'I know naval intelligence had instructions to watch certain people, but where they got those instructions I don't know,' he told UPI.
Congress has established a commission to investigate the internment and determine whether Japanese-Americans should be monetarily compensated. The commission, called the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, is expected to issue a report soon.
'The case has been made for FDR that he was too busy with other things. This would indicate considerable premeditation and forethought,' Minoru Yasui, Chairman of the Japanese-American Citizens League Redress Committee, told television station KITV. He called the information in the memo 'quite damning.'
Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, told KITV he was 'saddened' by the memo. He said it was 'the first time I've learned of anything this serious' to indicate the internment was pre-planned.
