Eastward Ho

They were U.S. citizens who had spent their lives on U.S. soil -farmers who tilled the rich brown loam in the Sama Clara Valley, fishermen riding the slow swells off San Diego, humble shopkeepers in the little stores of San Francisco. But they learned last week that, in a nation's hour of peril, having been born a citizen is not enough. So they began to pack their keepsakes, lift their slant-eyed children on their arms, and start on the long migration east across the Sierra Nevadas, to dreary inland country far from the blue sea. They were some of the West Coast's 70,000-odd Nisei. Their honorable ancestors were Japanese.

This was martial law, in effect. Lieut. General John Lesesne DeWitt, chief of the Western Defense Command, marked off a strip of land curving some 2,000 miles along the Pacific, along the Mexican border, from Canada to New Mexico. Out of this coastal region all the thousands on thousands of enemy aliens and all Nisei must go.

From strategic military areas all racial Japanese including Nisei, must go first. From less important zones, evacuation will be gradual, and voluntary - for a while. About April 15, the screw will probably be turned: slow-moving Japs will be sped eastward. Impractical, said General DeWitt, were immediate mass evacuations. Germans and Italians over 70 years of age, or any who have sons or brothers serving in the U.S. armed forces, will not be required to move unless suspicion touches them. But all Japs, no matter how old, must leave the Coast-even if they have sons in the Army or Navy.

The area they say good-by to is almost as big as the island empire of Japan. It includes some of the West's most fertile lands. What furrowed DeWitt's brow was where to lead his mass migration.

Back of the military zone in which Japs and aliens are forbidden to set foot at all (see map) is a second zone where they must tread lightly. The General hinted that Japs who settled in this region "in all probability will not again be disturbed"-provided they do not stumble on one of the 97 special areas (around dams and reservoirs, power plants and armories) which are also out of bounds. (Not one of the Governors of nine inland Western States wanted them).

But U.S. citizens, even if their ancestors were Japanese, could not be herded into concentration camps. One answer was an Army "reception center" going up in Owens Valley, a desolate tract of land on the east side of the Sierra Nevadas, in Southern California. The Owens Valley settlement may eventually hold some 50,000 Japs. General DeWitt has plans for another center on the Colorado River near Blythe. But that was a dreary prospect for the Nisei outcasts, who remembered their rich lands and the smell of the sea.

Sober citizens felt they had good reason to be harsh. In Los Angeles, District Attorney John Dockweiler produced a map showing that Japs (or Nisei relatives) hold leases on lands adjoining nearly every strategic spot in Los Angeles County -including highways, railways, power lines, airports, aircraft plants, oil fields, refineries, aqueducts. Japs hold a flat, mile-square tract of semidesert land near Los Angeles which could be turned into a landing field for bombers in an hour or two. Japanese farmers cultivate most of the foggy shoreline of Palos Verdes (next door to vital San Pedro harbor), where landing parties could sneak in undetected, under the shadow of towering cliffs, on to a number of good beaches. Other sound reasons were suggested by the case of Alien George Makamura, in whose seaside home at Santa Cruz FBI men found 69 great crates of signal rockets and colored flares.

In Los Angeles, 19-year-old Nisei Shigeki (Arthur) Kaihatsu reflected on the problem of his people. A former freshman star on the basketball team at U.C.L.A., young Arthur now works in a vegetable market. Said he: "Most of us Nisei are completely loyal. ... I guess there are some spies among us. I don't know. But the answer seems to be to take the whole bunch of us and dump us in one spot. The spies can't do any damage, and we won't be suspected. . . ."

That was exactly what General DeWitt thought.

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