What happened the morning of December 7 reached Arroyo Grande at 11:30 a.m., when, for many townspeople, it was a quiet time: they might have been listening to classical music, interrupted by the news bulletin, while they read a Sunday paper from San Francisco or Los Angeles, and waiting for the big lunch that, for many American families, was as traditional as Sunday church services

For Juzo Ikeda’s children, that would have meant services at the Arroyo Grande First United Methodist Church where, three years earlier, in a foreshadowing of the suffering that was to come, Japanese-American members of the church had donated a painting of Christ in Gethsemane, struggling with the fear he felt as the Temple Guard was on its way to arrest him.

It is said that many Americans had to find an atlas to locate Hawaii; even the announcer in one of the initial broadcasts pronounced the island where Arizona burned, Oklahoma had capsized, and where 160 warplanes were destroyed on the ground as “Owahoo.”

Will Tarwater, whose family ranched in the Huasna Valley and who spent a career as a Border Patrol agent—a career that you learn, once you get to know him, has deepened in him an innate sense of justice and compassion—remembers being in town with his father and being “completely shocked. It was beyond our understanding. Bewildered! We went home and turned on the radio to hear more. Still could not make any sense of it.”

A little more than an hour after the first radio broadcast, San Luis Obispo Tribune photographer and archivist David Middlecamp writes, the fire siren in the county seat to the north of Arroyo Grande—affectionately called “Ferdinand”—began to wail. This was the summons for 40^th Division soldiers, in training at Camp San Luis Obispo, to return immediately to base. County Sheriff Murray Hathaway dispatched extra deputies to Union oil storage facilities on the other side of town and the company itself provided extra security for Avila Beach and Estero (Morro) Bay. The newspaper rushed a Sunday edition to print—the first, Middlecamp notes, in decades—when it became apparent that the Philippines were under attack, as well. Tarwater remembered both that Sunday edition and the size of its headlines seven decades later.

The next day, he and his classmates at Arroyo Grande Union High School gathered in their new gymnasium—a New Deal WPA work project that still serves as the Paulding Middle School gym today—to listen to Franklin Roosevelt’s brief but dramatic address asking Congress for a declaration of war. By December 8, the initial disbelief that news of the attack generated had been replaced by growing fear.

FBI agents descended on the Valley that day. They began to collect the heads of the farm families. Shigechika Kobara was an important target because of his leadership in the Japanese-American community: he would spend the following days in the county jail, then in Army custody, before being reunited with his family in the Arizona desert. Juzo Ikeda would have faced the same fate, but he’d broken his neck in a farm accident and was helpless, watched over by his son, Kaz, who would be allowed to stay behind while the rest of the Ikeda family was sent to the Central Valley. The agents somehow missed another prominent man, Yeiji Hayashi, which was a relief to his 15-year-old son, Haruo, because it would be his father’s stoic strength that would keep the family together in the months to come.

This is when the rumors began–rumors that Will Tarwater refused to believe, since one of his closest friends was classmate Ben Dohi, in a high school where 25 of the 69 members of the class of 1942 were Americans of Japanese descent.

After Pearl Harbor, rumor mills had a heyday about it.   All kinds of wild rumors about everything: a large farmhouse off Halcyon near the highway had a basement full of guns! Another house had a secret room full of short-wave radios and they were in constant contact with Tokyo…on and on. It seemed like someone was trying to turn us against our neighbors. Most of us couldn’t buy it. We had grown up with them.

Haruo Hayashi, a sophomore at the high school, had grown up with three friends who meant a lot to him:  John Loomis, Gordon Bennett and Don Gullickson.  The three would stand by him when he returned to school–he’d listened to the news of Pearl Harbor on the radio while recuperating from an appendectomy, and had to wait another week not knowing how he’d be received by his classmates.  His three friends–two would go on to fight the Japanese at Pelelieu and Okinawa, would write letttters to Haruo in his internment  not the name of a tough Italian-American kid who told Haruo “I will personally at the shit out of any kid who calls you a ‘Jap.”” would be the friends who continued to write letters to Haruo in his internment Their friendship was not uiversal:  some classmates called Haruo a “Jap.” He has forgotten their

But beyond the little high school on Crown Hill, the fear hardened two weeks after the attack. The war arrived offshore. One story I heard growing up, though I’ve never been able to confirm it, has a housewife in the lovely seaside community of Shell Beach, about five minutes north of Arroyo Grande, looking out her picture window for a picture-postcard view of the Pacific, then freezing in horror when a the shaft of a submarine’s periscope appeared where she might have preferred the spout of an migrating grey whale instead.

It is a plausible story: The Imperial Japanese navy had positioned nine submarines, or I-boats, all along the West Coast. One of them, I-21 had, on the morning of December 22, fired a torpedo that missed its target, an oil tanker, off Point Arguello, about 45 miles south of Arroyo Grande, and her captain, Kenji Matsumura, headed north in search of targets of opportunity. He would have passed Shell Beach on his way to another frustrating encounter, when his boat failed to sink the tanker Larry Doheny off the north coast of the county, despite an attack in which he fired another torpedo and opened fire with I-21’s deck gun.

Matsumura found a third target in the little tanker Montebello off another coastal town, Cambria, farther north, but this time, the result was more satisfying for him: at 5:45 a.m. on December 23, he fired two torpedoes and this time one hit; I-21 surfaced and opened fire with her gun—its report could be heard inland by residents of Atascadero, 26 miles away—and although her crew escaped, Montebello went under 45 minutes after the attack had begun.

Within weeks, I-21 was patrolling the coast of Australia, would later shell Sydney Harbor, and would be lost with all hands near Tarawa in 1943: Matsumura and his crew are ample demonstration of why this is called a “world” war.

Three days later, the Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder reported that a 22-year-old sailor, Wayne Morgan, had been killed at Pearl Harbor. Arroyo Grande residents would find out much later that Morgan, who went to grammar school and graduated from the high school here, had died, like Jack Scruggs, on the U.S.S. Arizona.

So he surreal shock of Pearl Harbor, followed by the I-21’s attacks just off the coast, generated the kind of fear seen at its most extreme in “The Battle of Los Angeles” the following February, where anti-aircraft batteries, aided by an array of searchlights, opened fire on an air attack that never existed.

Californians’ fears far outweighed reason: in 1942, Japanese I-boats would sink four ships off the West Coast, while German U-boats sank 70 ships off North Carolina’s Outer Banks alone, when Americans from Fire Island to Miami Beach could watch as doomed American merchantmen—and their crews– burned offshore.

It was time, some began to say, to get the Japanese out—away, at least, from the coast, where they were suspected of Fifth Column activities like those in the wild rumors Will Tarwater had sense enough to doubt. When a Mutual Broadcasting commentator named John B. Hughes advocated the removal of the Japanese in a January 1942 broadcast, he was flooded with letters of support.

One came from a woman in Guadalupe, a little town just south of Arroyo Grande:

Today’s (broadcast) really came close to home.We live near this small town where nearly one half are Japs. They farm all the best land and pay outrageous prices per acre, such as $45 or $50, and live in a shack to do it. Besides [they] own the theatre, half the garages and just about run this town…really, this is no country for such people.

A woman from San Luis Obispo, north of Arroyo Grande, agrees.

…We want to congratulate you on the stand you are taking towards the Japs.  We wish there were more like you. We have lived in and around San Luis Obispo all our lives and have seen enough of the Japs to know that our races can never mix.

A local businessman:

I have talked to many people around the Arroyo Grande Valley…and the Japs farm two thirds of the best valley land and own 10% of it now, and every one of them are of the same opinion that now is the time to put the screws to the Japs before it is too late.

None of the letters, brimming with envy, cited the Japanese as a threat to national defense. But it would not be long until, indeed, the screws were put to them.

They would be applied by the President of the United States on February 19, 1942. Even before Pearl Harbor, as the superb historian Lynne Olson notes in her book about the president’s struggle with isolationists, Those Angry Days, the fall o2f France, Britain’s struggle under the Blitz, the efforts of lobbyists for Britain and, finally, the wiretaps he had authorized J. Edgar Hoover to place had all had a cumulative effect: on the President’s personality.  He no longer saw shades of gray.

Committed to defending the country, wounded by the devastation of his beloved Navy’s Pacific Fleet, and bolstered by public opinion that seemed to support those who wrote letters to John B. Hughes, he overrode his own Justice Department, which disputed Executive Order 9066’s constitutionality, and ordered the Western Defense Command and General John deWitt to begin removing “persons of Japanese ancestry” from their homes near the Pacific and into distant internment camps.

FDR and his Secretary of War, Henry Stimson,  had picked the right man. DeWitt accepted his assignment—although any general might have preferred a combat command—with a sense of mission, and this is how he justified it:

 In the war in which we are now engaged racial affinities are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United State soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become “Americanized,” the racial strains are undiluted.

DeWitt now took control of the lives of 120,000 Pacific Coast residents–the Issei, first-generation immigrants who were not allowed to become citizens under the Naturalization Act of 1790, and reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in 1922, which restricted that privilege to whites, and 70,000 Nisei, the second generation, by birth American citizens.

When the evacuation order came to San Luis Obispo County, the Defense Command gave San Luis Obispo County residents, according to Pat Nagano, a resident of the county’s north coast, ten days to put their affairs in order, dispose of their property—Nagano describes what we would call “yard sales” today—it was a buyer’s market: he remembers desperate families parting, for pennies, with the belongings symbolic of a lifetime of hard work, and each teapot, dinner table or easy chair taken away by triumphant buyers—they were like carrion birds—meant the memories attached to them were taken away, as well.

They tried to find homes for their pets, to say goodbye to those friends who were willing to talk to them, and some of Nagano’s one-time friends were not, and, finally, pack what remaining belongings the evacuation orders allowed.

The buses came for them in the high school parking lot on Crown Hill in Arroyo Grande, and there was a poignant moment when the local Women’s Club brought box lunches for their neighbors as they waited to board. Will Tarwater remembered, too, a long line of farmer’s trucks that followed the buses inland; they must have looked almost exactly like the trucks that had brought farmers stricken by the Dust Bowl to California. So Tarwater lost his friend, Ben Dohi–a man whose family still farms the Lower Arroyo Grande Valley–on a day important to every local boy: it was the day before trout season opened.

Not all Californians would be as charitable as the Arroyo Grande Women’s Club: some would soon begin to loot now-vacant farms and farmhouses, and sometimes, in little farm towns throughout California, they would burn the houses, tractor sheds and barns after they had taken everything of the remotest value.

The parents of one young Nisei, George Nakamura, would be among the families who would lose their farms, and, like the others, the Nakamuras would lose also almost everything else they owned. Now, in April 1942, the remains of their lives were packed in the suitcase stowed in the belly of the bus or under tarpaulins in the trucks that followed the buses. On their suitcases the families had painted their names–‘S KOBARA 14440″– in white letters that remind you of the abandoned luggage on display at Auschwitz.

Some two hundred residents boarded the buses for the long ride away from the coast and the land some of them had been farming for forty years. The convoy of buses pulled out of the Arroyo Grande Union High School parking lot and took them to Tulare, California.

Tulare was among several temporary camps throughout California. One of the most notorious was at the Santa Anita racetrack, where the people who were now essentially refugees slept in horse stalls. One memorable photograph at the Santa Anita center shows a young Nisei woman posing, cheerfully and almost defiantly, beside the statue of the champion of underdogs like herself, Seabiscuit.

The Nakamuras and their neighbors would endure a long, dispiriting bus ride over the hills of the Coast Range and into the vast, flat, and sometimes colorless interior of California where, they would be among the first arrivals as the camp opened on April 27—at its largest, 5,000 internees lived here—on a site that had been used for the county fair before the war.

What happened there in the space of five months is extraordinary The Tulare camp produced a newspaper that buzzes with news from the schools established there, features advice columns and an extended sports section, including many stories written by George Nakamura, who had been a reporter on his Arroyo Grande high school paper, the Hi-Chatter, about men’s baseball and women’s softball leagues (Arroyo Grande’s teams were in first place in both), played in the oppressive summer heat typical of the Valley—complete with box scores and league standings.

The farewell edition of the remarkable Tulare News—32 issues were published between May and August of 1942—includes a heartfelt letter of thanks from the Tulare Center’s director, Nils Aanonsen, who is remembered as a compassionate man who defied the army and tried to turn over management of the camp to leaders elected by the internees. It paints an optimistic picture, thanks to an article from a travel magazine, about their ultimate destination.

That was a camp on reservation land at Gila River, Arizona. When Nakumura and his family arrived and he saw what a desolate place it was, the first thing he did was to get the hell out. He was in a group of 32 young men were the first to leave Gila River for the comparative comfort of the United States Army. By the war’s end, 22 young men from the Gila River camp would be killed in action. while their families endured overcrowding—until additional barracks were added, some had to sleep in mess halls and even latrines—dust storms, rattlesnakes, and more: an internee learned to rap her shoe on the barracks floor in the morning before putting it on, to induce the scorpion inside to leave.

George Nakumura’s Army aptitude tests immediately impressed the Brass. He was brilliant and

he was fluent in Japanese, so he became an Army Intelligence officer. He was assigned, as its youngest member, to what the Army called “The Dixie Mission:” Nakamura was one of a group of officers who, in 1944, were inserted into the hills of Yenan, where they would assist the Chinese in intelligence gathering as they resisted the Imperial Japanese Army and their brutal counterintelligence arm, the military police, the Kempeitai.

From his base with a group of Chinese resistance fighters, Nakumura and his fellow Americans

joined on intelligence-gathering missions: Nakamura would act as translator in the interrogation of Japanese soldiers captured on some of them, but on one mission, he went alone. He would win the Bronze Star for the daring rescue of a downed American pilot.

His Chinese hosts in their remote camp grew to like this Arroyo Grande soldier so much that, on his 21^st birthday, they threw him a party. There were toasts and even a little dancing.

At the Chinese soldier-leader’s insistence, his young wife, named Jiang, took a turn dancing with Nakamura: they tried, perhaps, a fox-trot. She had been an actress before the War, and so was a woman of culture.

The young American officer would, after the war, get his Master’s Degree in International Relations from Columbia University, which suggests he might not have been such a bad dance partner for the boss’s wife

She would be reviled someday—in fact, in the many twists and turns that twentieth-century Chinese history took. the last two decades turned against Jiang. In 1981, the Communist government would put her on trial for her life, a trial where she was repeatedly mocked and insulted. In the peculiar Chinese dialect that is the language of the Party, she became “The White-Boned Demon.”

Jiang, in return, was defiant and supremely contemptuous of her accusers. She was fully aware that she was the star of a televised version of what was essentially a Stalinist show trial, and she was determined to do a star turn.

Her fiery defense was irrelevant, of course, and so Jiang was sentenced to be executed but, because of her husband’s influence, still potent even after his death, she would not be shot. The court instead handed down a life sentence for her membership in the “Gang of Four,” those accused of helping to conceive and carry out the disastrous 1968 Cultural Revolution. She would commit suicide in prison in 1991.

For almost forty years before that ignominious end to her long life, Jiang would become known universally by what was essentially her stage name in a role she relished more than any, for it was easily the role of a lifetime:

George Nakamura’s dance partner on his 21^st birthday was Madame Mao.

Nakamura would live a long life, too, but his would be a happier one. He would finish his army career in Japan, where he served, after the war, as an interpreter for MacArthur’s occupation—some call it the vainglorious general’s shogunate, after the 300-year military dictatorship of the Tokugawa clan, ended in 1867 by the restoration of the Meiji Emperor. It would be the Meiji government that would dispatch American labor contractors to hard-pressed farmers in Kyushu, and it was those contractors and their persuasive powers that would bring families like Nakamura’s to the Arroyo Grande Valley.

The course of Nakamura’s life would, ironically, take him in the opposite direction. After finishing Columbia, he would return to Japan, where he lived for thirty years in Tokyo as the East Asian manager of a large American electronics firm and as the head of a management consulting company. He and his wife retired to Hawaii, then moved to Texas to be closer to their grandchildren

He died there at 90, in early 2014, and his obituary justifiably praises him—in his last years, President Barack Obama would sign a bill that would add the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the many honors George Nakamura earned in a long, productive and cosmopolitan lifetime. After it had ended, Gary Nakamura would visit the Arroyo Grande cemetery with his father’s ashes. It was in April, the same month when, in 1942, the buses had stood waiting in the high school parking lot, and now his Dad had come home.

 

 

It is difficult to imagine Normandy in 1944; it is a beautiful place today, as are its people: a simple bonjour earns an American tourist a  smile of appreciation, and the little villages are lovely, separated by pastures and farm fields, each with its distinctive little parish church. During the Middle Ages, as the skilled writer and Francophile Graham Robb notes, few villagers ever went beyond the sound of their parish church’s bells. The world beyond was like the ends of the earth.

It is not the ends of the earth, but the D-Day beaches are 5,500 miles away from the Arroyo Grande Valley. Three local men, killed in the campaign to capture and then and break free from Normandy, are buried at the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, an almost impossibly beautiful place above Omaha Beach.

Below the cemetery, just offshore, a visitor today can see young men as they should be—exuberant and free– as they race tiny sailboats, their sails bright oranges and reds, just beyond the surf line, where on June 6, young men floated like dead leaves on the water’s surface. The invasion of Hitler’s Europe nearly failed here. It didn’t, but only because of an American generation that includes those who still hold the high ground at Colleville-sur-Mer.

 

 

Up there, on the immaculate cemetery grounds, and not far from a famous American—the ebullient and popular Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., felled by a massive heart attack soon after the invasion– lies a soldier as far removed from the Roosevelts’ patrician (if rambunctious) Oyster Bay home as a human being can be, in terms of both distance and social class.

He was a farm worker, Pvt. Domingo Martinez: Plot C, Row 13, Grave 38. Martinez is the soldier who more than likely knew the bean-stakes and the smell of sweet peas of prewar Arroyo Grande. The best that can be said is “more than likely:” the Arroyo Grande Valley is where a farm worker, as he’s listed in his 1943 Army enlistment records, would have found a job, or a series of jobs, following different harvests, and migrant farm workers are elusive for both historians and for census-takers.

Domingo may even have been double-counted in the 1940 Census; there are two “Domingo R. Martinez” entries, both from New Mexico; one is living in San Miguel County, hit hard and recovering from the Dust Bowl; he is living with his father, Fulgencio; his mother is deceased. But a second Domingo R. Martinez, also originally from New Mexico, is counted in the same census, and in California. He is living in Redlands, picking oranges, with a man named Thomas listed as his father, and Thomas is married to Aliga Martinez.

 

 

They must be different men. But “Aliga” Martinez is listed as “Aleja” in a postwar Redlands City Directory, and it is Aleja who will file the 1946 request for the marble cross that marks Domingo’s grave at Colleville-sur-Mer. The form lists Redlands as her hometown.

It is the measure of a poor man’s life: researchers can’t be certain of where he lived when the war broke out. They know exactly where he died.

Two more soldiers, city boys compared to Martinez, are honored here at the American Cemetery, both from the county seat just to the north, An artillery officer. 2nd Lt. Claude Newlin, from San Luis Obispo, is buried here. Ironically, Newlin’s battalion, attached to the 35th Infantry Division, had spent a year training at the camp just north of his home town. Newlin had survived some of the costliest fighting of the campaign, near St. Lo, only to die hours before the 35th broke out of Normandy to join George Patton’s breath-taking race across France to Metz and the German frontier.

 

 

For another San Luis Obispo soldier, an airman, there is a memorial, but no grave. On June 22, 2nd Lt. Jack Langston was flying his P-38 in a low-level attack on Cherbourg with his 367th Fighter Squadron when that city demonstrated the folly of ordering low-level attacks. Langston died that day with four other 367^th pilots. His body was never found.

The farm worker, Pvt. Martinez, 26 years old, born and raised in New Mexico, now a Californian, found himself  in the streets of Cherbourg in June 1944, far below the speeding fighter planes. Martinez was fighting with the 313th Regiment of the 79th Infantry Division, the “Cross of Lorraine Division”–their unit symbol had been St. Joan’s–and the 79th had seen hard fighting in France before, in 1918.

They were sent into action near Cherbourg soon after landing on Utah Beach, and they fought their way into the heart of the port city–a port the Allies would need, because a capricious Channel storm destroyed the “Mulberry,” the artificial harbor built off Omaha. The Allied armies in France therefore faced an enormous supply problem. They needed a port to help feed, arm, and fuel the growing numbers of Allied solders in France. For the Allied command, SHAEF, Cherbourg was critical.

It was also difficult to take. Its bristling anti-aircraft defenses would claim Jack Langston. Massive coastal batteries could keep naval support for the Americans at bay, and the city’s Wehrmacht defenders, though not elite troops (20% of them were non-German conscripts) were securely dug in and they had nowhere to go, for they were backed into a corner of France, and so isolated that the only alternative to fighting was to leap into the sea.

Once they’d gotten inside Cherbourg, G.I.’s learned to hate street fighting almost instantly. Death came instantly from illusory shadows that a fallen G.I.’s comrades never saw, and from gunfire they sometimes never heard. In peacetime, a French city block can be melodious with the sounds of cafe music or the singing of children at play. In combat, the same block, seemingly empty, can muffle the report of a sniper’s rifle or generate echoes that make soldiers look anxiously in every direction at once.

 

 

It would be the 79^th that would capture the fortress that dominated the city on June 26. Its commander surrendered three days later. Military historian John C . McManus notes that the men of the 79th that day were filthy, exhausted, and bearded, “like burlesque tramps,’ as one soldier said.  They got little rest. The division quickly shifted from urban combat to a drive through the farms and villages of the Cotentin Peninsula.

Now, American ground forces in Normandy faced a new, even more difficult challenge. Three weeks after D-Day, they had fallen far short of the objectives set for them by Allied planners and the staff officers working furiously over maps in Gen. Omar Bradley’s custom command trailer. The offensive in the Cotentin stalled in great part because the Germans had the advantage of fighting defensively, in the bocage, the Norman hedgerows, and they winnowed units like the 79th down.

 

 

The hedgerows enclosed fields plowed since Agincourt, or pasturage for fat Norman cows, and were a hopscotch of natural fortresses—roots and compacted earth had formed defensible walls.  The G.I.’s had to assault them, one by one, to try to root the defenders out.

When G.I.’s broke through a hedge and entered a field, the superb German machine gun, the MG42, hidden in the next hedge beyond, or positioned on the Americans’ flanks, annihilated entire rifle squads. It fired so rapidly that a burst sounded like canvas ripping.  Army films had incorporated the sound to try to desensitize trainees.

 

 

So the Americans could hear, but never see, in the tangle of the hedges, who was killing them so efficiently. The bocage quickly transformed G.I.s, with supreme indifference, into either hardened veterans or into statistics.

American soldiers, adaptive and imaginative, eventually would develop the tactics to overcome the kind of war the Germans fought in the bocage. For the 79th, in early July, what was beyond the hedgerows may have been worse. The Germans would not wait for them this time.  They would attack.  This came soon after the 79th, along with the 82nd Airborne and the 90th Infantry Divisions, seized, at great cost, several hills around a key crossroads, Le Haye du Puits.

This should have compelled the enemy to abandon the town. They didn’t. They attacked instead, on July 7, intent on destroying the 79th in their positions on a ridge above the town.  The German soldiers, including SS-Panzer units, attacked with great ferocity and with great courage. These were not garrison troops, but hardened and determined professionals. In a day of fighting that ended only at nightfall, the 79^th stopped them. This was the turning point. On the next day, another day of street fighting, the Americans would capture Le Haye du Puits.

 

 

Afterward, Signal Corps photographers attached to the 79th captured the images of some soldiers, like patrons arrived for their dinner reservation, enjoying a bottle of wine, sitting around a restaurant table set up on the street outside a partly-destroyed building; other photos reveal the faces of men as blank as those of sleepwalkers.  They are utterly worn out, used up,  by a month of ceaseless combat.

 

 

Ironically, Domingo Martinez survived all this and was killed days later, after the division, including his 313th Regiment, had taken up defensive positions to regather itself. He died on July 12, near a village named Bolleville, and so would not experience the energy and the jubilation of the breakout from the bocage.

With the breakout at month’s end, the Americans would inexorably roll up the Germans, uncover Paris, and liberate the city in August, standing aside to let Free French units and their prickly commander, Gen. Leclerc, enter first. Leclerc would have been furious to learn that Ernest Hemingway and some of his camp followers had preceded him and they were, with great offensive spirit, but also with deteriorating unit cohesion, busy liberating the bar at the Ritz Hotel.

 

 

It’s hard not to wish that Pvt. Martinez had been granted at least time enough to celebrate, as well.  And maybe, for a migrant farm worker and Dust Bowl refugee, even more time than that.

It is hard not to wish Domingo Martinez the time for a quiet talk with a little granddaughter. She is wearing a crisp white dress–it might be her First Communion– and wide-eyed and attentive, she is looking up at him while they are sitting, nestled together–she is feeling the wonderful safety that a grandfather’s love can provide– on the sofa. They are waiting together for the Sunday lunch his daughters are preparing after Mass, and he is telling the little girl about the five-day leave granted him that summer of 1944.

 

 

He decided to visit Notre Dame. Once he’d entered the great church, he took his garrison cap off, crossed himself with holy water, and walked slowly down the nave, the silence pressing on his ears, past the clutter of the pews. There, delighted, he stopped and stood on a spot near the transept where he was suddenly bathed in brilliant, colored sunlight. This is the Rose Window’s gift to men and women of good faith.

 

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pOy2c6BOKPM

 

From a letter to a University of Oregon alumni magazine that ran an article on the internment of World War II:

“In 1942, U.S. Marines were battling the Japanese in the Guadalcanal jungles. American aircraft carriers were sunk by Japanese warplanes. So many ships were sunk in the Solomon Islands ‘slot’ that it was nicknamed Iron Bottom Sound. The fighting was a match of equals that could have gone either way. The American public was frightened of a West Coast invasion. We cannot condemn 1942 policy using our 2013 mores and sensibilities. The prospect of a ready made collaborationist population, following a Japanese invasion, impelled the internments of Japanese Americans.”

This, of course, excuses the irrational. Consider the other coast of the United States:

–In 1941, German U-boats were already attacking American warships: the destroyers Greer and Kearny came under fire before a torpedo took the Reuben James and 115 of her 159-man crew in October, five weeks before Pearl Harbor. Even before then, with the fall of France in June 1940, war hysteria in America had been intense. With FDR’s blessing, J. Edgar Hoover would compile voluminous lists, aided by wiretaps, of suspected German Fifth Columnists living in the United States; the agency included more lists of any American who subscribed to periodicals written in German or Italian, and until FDR ordered the registration and monitoring of all aliens, there were isolated but frightening cases of Germans or German-Americans who were attacked–one was murdered–by wrongheaded “Patriots,” deprived of our 2013 mores and sensibilities.

–By 1942, American troops were fighting Rommel’s Afrika Korps—and getting routed, at Kasserine Pass. In general, the war was going against the Allies on both the Western Front—the disastrous Dieppe Raid is a notable example–and Eastern Front, with Gen. von Paulus’s Sixth Army, which would eventually surrender at Stalingrad, defeating Soviet forces in combat around Kharkov.

In the Pacific war, we had lost the Philippines, just as the War Department knew we would, and our Pacific possessions, but we’d taken the war to Japan with the Doolittle Raid in April and achieved a much more substantive victory–the first American turning point–at Midway in June with destruction of four of the six carriers that had begun the war against us at Pearl Harbor, along with the cadre of the Japanese naval air forces.

–German U-boats sank 82 American ships in all waters in December 1941 alone; In 1942, they sank 121 American ships off the East Coast and 42 along the Gulf Coast out of a total of 500 American merchant marine ships sunk by German submarines that year. Americans on holiday, from Coney Island to Miami, could see our ships glowing at night as they burned,, with their crews.  A U-boat also delivered a team of Abwehr saboteurs  onshore near Jacksonville, Florida. We were bleeding ships and English children were beginning to go hungry: they were allowed one small egg every four weeks.

During the same period, Japanese submarines sank a total of four ships off the West Coast.

–120,000 Japanese-Americans were interned under Executive Order 9066. Fewer than 3,000 Italian-Americans or Italian aliens and 11,000 German-Americans or German aliens were interned.