Infamy by Richard Reeves Read Free Book Online

his brother had been dropped by the Air Corps and assigned to an infantry unit. After a month of pleading, begging really, with officers, he was assigned to a combat unit, the 409th Squadron of the Ninety-Third Bomb Group. It took three months in the Ninety-Third, but more and more of the white guys were nodding when they passed by and a few began talking with him. Still, many of them were soon on their way overseas and Ben was still begging officers to send him with those groups. Then it happened, and the boy from Nebraska was on the Queen Elizabeth with nineteen thousand other soldiers passing the Statue of Liberty on their way to England. Soon enough about eighteen thousand of them, including Kuroki, were pale and vomiting for five rough days.
    At the same time, back in Washington, D.C., there was confusion, contradiction, and debate about what to do about young Japanese Americans already in the military or trying to join. Corporal Akiji Yoshimura, an army medic at Crissy Field in San Francisco, was taken to jail by two FBI agents for interrogation.
    “Will you fight against Japan if you are called upon to do so?” asked one agent.
    “Of course, I would. Anytime, anywhere,” said Yoshimura.
    “You sonofabitch,” said the interrogator. “I expect you to say that you will shoot down the Emperor and tear down the Jap flag and stomp it into the ground.”
    Yoshimura, like many of the more than three thousand Japanese Americans serving in the military, draftees and men who had enlisted before Pearl Harbor, was discharged from the army. Later he volunteered for the Military Intelligence Service, a secret unit of Japanese-speaking Nisei training to serve as interpreters in the Pacific Theater, winning a battlefield commission as a lieutenant.
    In Nebraska, the Kuroki boys were accepted for enlistment after Pearl Harbor, but, in California, Nisei were routinely being turned away. Most of the Nisei in military service before Pearl Harbor were summarily discharged by March of 1942, especially those in California. “We don’t want any Japs in our Army, you guys are no damn good. So get out of here,” an army recruiting officer in San Jose told one Nisei, Yasuko Morimoto.
    But at the same time, there were others still in uniform in many states and young reservists were being called to active duty in Hawaii. The new Military Intelligence Service was based at the Presidio, close to DeWitt’s headquarters. Sixty-five Nisei and Kibei were secretly studying military Japanese before being sent to army units in the Pacific. After Pearl Harbor, General DeWitt demanded that the military move the MIS, and so the handful of teachers and the sixty-five trainees were sent to Camp Savage in Minnesota.
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    On December 12, a small newspaper published north of Los Angeles, the San Luis Obispo Independent , was the first on the West Coast to call for the evacuation of all Japanese, citizens or not, from Pacific coastal areas. The New York Times reported a rumor that the Japanese had a secret air base in Baja California, the Mexican state south of San Diego. Its source was Earl Warren, California’s attorney general. The paper quoted General DeWitt as saying that anyone who disbelieved these reports was “inane, idiotic, and foolish.” On December 15, after a visit to Hawaii, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, a former publisher of the Chicago Daily News and the Republican nominee for vice president of the United States in 1936, held a press conference in Washington. Knox portrayed the tens of thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the islands as a gigantic spy nest and claimed that “the most effective ‘Fifth Column’ work of the war was done there.”
    Untrue, every word. If Knox had a reason to say that, it was to shift blame for the devastation at Pearl Harbor from the navy, which had been unprepared for sneak attack, even though, for weeks, there had been military intelligence predicting some sort of