Internment Camps During WWII

This book gives a better understanding of the Holocaust and helps people understand what concentration camps were

In February of 1942, during World War II, President Roosevelt yielded to the favored judgment of the people. Roosevelt would sign the executive order to relocate all Americans of Japanese ancestry to concentration camps, which would be persistent for two and a half years. The government’s point of view and Mrs. Yoshiko Uchida’s point of view concerning the Japanese American internment camps are immensely dissimilar. Uchida was a Japanese American writer who experienced that of an internment camp during World War II. The government had expected the interns to make the camps rather self-sustainable with no help from them whatsoever.

There were ten relocation camps located across America that were open for three to four years. With a top population of about 19,000, the center located in Tule Lake, California held prisoners mostly from Sacramento, Oregon, and Washington. The lowest population count was around 7,000 in the camp in Colorado, holding prisoners from all around California and Colorado. The other camps were located in Arizona, Wyoming, Arkansas, Idaho, and Utah.

In conclusion, concentration camps and Internment camps are very different to each other when you compare the two. The reasons behind why the people were put into camps were different, the death statistics and the conditions that the camps

On December 7th, 1941, Pearl Harbor was destroyed. The Japanese attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii during World War II. 2,300 Americans were killed in this bombing. After two months of the bombing, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Executive order 9066. The Executive order 9066 demanded all Japanese Americans to leave the West coast. Many believed that the Japanese Americans were suspicious of a crime that they did not commit. This was a nightmare to not only Japanese Americans, but also to many Americans. In the Executive Order 9066, Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “Whereas the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material national-defense premises, and national-defense utilities.”

Imagine being taken out of you home to place of the unknown. There is a lot of chaos and horror. You don’t know who the trust. The government is coming to your neighborhoods and taking you and your family to internment camps just because the government does not trust anyone of your ethnicity. That sounds horrible, right? Well, during World War 2 the United States of America sent Japanese- Americans to internment camps because the government could not trust people of the Japanese decent. They were told that the Japanese- Americans will tell the enemy, Japan, all of secrets about war, that America will do to defeat the Japanese. But, by sending these innocent Americans to these camps is just unjustified, cruel and horrible. This essay will talk about why sending these people to these internment camps were dreadful and unacceptable.

The topic that has been chosen for the term paper in the pro seminar course is Japanese Internment Camps. During World War II, a significant number of American citizens of Japanese descent were forced into American internment camps, strictly because of their ethnic background. Having committed no crime, the Japanese forced into the internment camps were treated similarly to that of Japanese prisoners of war that had been captured by the Allies. The forced relocation and eventual internment of Japanese Americans was brought about by the event that occurred on December 7, 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor. December 7, 1941 began as any typical Sunday on the Hawaiian Islands. Then at 7:55 am, the fateful Sunday on the island of Oahu would be forever remembered in the history books. At 7:55 am, three hundred and fifty three Japanese planes that were launched from Japan’s six biggest and best aircraft carriers, located only two hundred miles off the coast of the Hawaiian Islands, bombed the U.S. Naval Base. The attack by the Japanese was a complete surprise to everyone, and as a result American casualties were heavy. After the attack, fifteen American ships had been sunk including four battleships. In addition, one American ship was capsized, and one had run aground. Also, one hundred and eighty eight American planes were destroyed, and nearly two thousand four hundred men lost their lives. Prior to September 11, 2001, the attack on Pearl Harbor was the worst attack on U.S. soil

In 1941, the Japanese military bombed Pearl Harbor, which made many Americans dislike Japan and the people that are from Japan. Also, President Roosevelt created the Executive Order 9066. The Executive Order stated that all people of Japanese ancestry would be relocated to internment camps, but there weren’t that many that got interned in Hawaii. From 1942-1945, there were about 120,000 “aliens” of Japanese descent that had to live in these internment camps. The government tried to portray life in these camps as happy and nice, but in reality, it wasn’t like that. They had to live in small spaces with many other people, leave most of their belongings at their house, and use what was given to them in the camps. The government didn’t do the right thing when they put the Japanese and Japanese Americans into internment camps during WWII. They only did it because of how they looked, because the United States was at war with Japan, and because of fear and anger towards Japan.

The Japanese Internment Camps were unfair to majority of the Japanese that did not participate in spying for Japan during the war, but it was somewhat necessary to limit the few who would harm the U.S. The Japanese were subjected to imprisonment because of rumors and fear. They were forced to live in poor living conditions. Even though their everyday life was normal there were still watch towers to remind them that they had their life stolen from them.

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, at 7:55 am the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor twice, both lasting 45 minutes. This caused suspicion and cautiousness towards Japanese American citizens. Once we had entered World War II, the president (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) decided to take extra precautions and made internment camps to house the Japanese Americans until the war ended. We saw them as dangerous and didn’t want to risk another chance for the Japanese to attack American soil and to sabotage us in war.

Ten Japanese internment camps were created and located in California, Idaho, Utah,Arizona,Wyoming,Colorado,and Arkansas. Each one looking exactly like the rest, frugal housing consisting of tarpaper barracks surrounded by barbed fencing. They ate in mess halls as a family but the food resembled pig slop. Children went to school and the adults could work for a small sum of $5 a day. The U.S government wanted the camps to be self sufficient, having the prisoners farm produce. This was hard to do as the soil was dry and unfertile.

The attack on Pearl Harbor is a day that neither Americans nor Japanese Americans will ever forget. Hours after the attack, FBI Agents were sent into Japanese American homes to search for anything that could have aided the Japanese in attacking Pearl Harbor on that fateful day. Soon after, the Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps, the two most prominent camps being in Rohwer and Jerome, Arkansas. Through the years of the Japanese Internment in America, the Japanese Americans need to help their children through their mantra, the desire to show that they were Americans by signing up for World War II, and the bond that the citizens of the camp formed while running the camps kept the morale alive and showed that these people were prepared

After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941, Americans became extremely fearful of people that were of Japanese descent. Congress barred almost all immigrants from Asia. Japanese Americans were forced to leave their jobs and sell their homes and almost all they owned. They were put onto buses and taken to internment camps where they lived under guard behind fences and barbed wire. In these camps, each family was assigned to live together in one room.

In the month of March 1933, one of the first camps, Dachau, was opened. Dachau was a concentration camp, or a prison camp maintained by the Third Reich, [the name for Germany when the government was controlled by Adolf Hitler]. Aside these concentration camps was two other types of camps; labor camps, and death camps. A main concentration camp was Theresienstadt. Theresienstadt was located in what is now known as the Czech Republic. More than 150,000 were kept there for months until being sent to their deaths in Treblinka and Auschwitz death camps. The people in

The internment of Japanese Americans in the United States during World War II was the forced relocation and incarceration in camps in the western interior of the country of between 110,000 and 120,000[5] people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom lived on the Pacific coast. 62 percent of the internees were United States citizens.[6][7] These actions were ordered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt shortly after Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.[8]