Enlisting and Excluding an “Enemy Race”

2021 ◽  
pp. 59-98
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Guglielmo

Chapter 2 examines the US military’s effort to restrict Japanese Americans’ access to the nation’s fighting forces during World War II. In the navy, Japanese Americans were barred from enlisting and serving throughout the war. But the army’s restrictive policies, by contrast, changed dramatically and repeatedly over the course of the war, resulting in Japanese Americans zigging and zagging between exclusion and inclusion. At times their army access approximated that for white people; other times it was more restricted than that for black people. In the end, like African Americans, Japanese Americans were underrepresented in the military. At the same time, their enlistment barriers had their own particularities, which bespoke the variety of racisms in wartime America and its military, as well as the variety of struggles that emerged to uproot them.

Author(s):  
Michael E. Lynch

This biography examines the long career of Lt. Gen. Edward M. Almond, who was born to a family of modest means in rural Virginia. His early education at the Virginia Military Institute, steeped him in Confederate lore and nurtured his “can do” attitude, natural aggressiveness, demanding personality and sometimes self-serving nature. These qualities later earned him the sobriquet “Sic’em, Ned,” which stuck with him for the remainder of his career. Almond commanded the African-American 92nd Infantry Division during World War II. The division failed in combat and was re-organized, after which it contained one white, one black, and the Army’s only Japanese-American (Nisei) regiment. The years since that war have seen the glorification of the “Greatest Generation,” with all racist notions and ideas “whitewashed” with a veneer of honor. When war came to Korea, Almond commanded X Corps in the Inchon invasion, liberation of Seoul, race to the Yalu. When the Chinese entered the war and sent the US Army into retreat, Almond mounted one of the largest evacuations in history at Hungnam -- but not before the disaster at Chosin claimed the lives of hundreds of soldiers and marines. This book reveals Almond as a man who stubbornly held onto bigoted attitudes about race, but also exhibited an unfaltering commitment to the military profession. Often viewed as the “Army’s racist,” Almond reflected the attitudes of the Army and society. This book places Almond in a broader context and presents a more complete picture of this flawed man yet gifted officer.


1993 ◽  
Vol 61 (9) ◽  
pp. 860-861
Author(s):  
David H. DeVorkin ◽  
Frank C. Jones

Author(s):  
Amanda L. Tyler

This chapter explores the role of habeas corpus during World War II in the US and Great Britain. On the American side, the chapter details how suspension ruled in the Hawaiian Territory but the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans on the mainland followed in the absence of a suspension under Executive Order 9066. As the chapter details, this happened even though lawyers counselled President Franklin D. Roosevelt that doing so would violate the Suspension Clause. The chapter continues by contrasting the experience in Britain, where Prime Minister Winston Churchill led the push to retreat from its citizen detention program under Regulation 18B and restore a robust habeas privilege. The chapter also compares habeas decisions rendered by the high courts in both countries while asking larger questions about what can be learned from these events.


Author(s):  
Joseph T. Glatthaar

Technology alone does not transform warfare. “Technology, mechanization and the world wars” demonstrates that it needs to be paired with organization and sound doctrine. The two world wars saw advances in military aviation and naval warfare. During World War II, resources were divided between two theaters: the European and the Pacific. American society was transformed, with a booming economy and more opportunities in defense and the military. Not everyone benefited; hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans were interned. Conventional bombings and blockades diminished in effectiveness throughout World War II, which ended with the unprecedented decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan.


2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 1095-1116
Author(s):  
HANS KRABBENDAM

After World War II, American evangelicals realized that the European religious landscape had been seriously damaged, causing them to begin to include Europe in their mission programs. Their initiatives reversed the established direction of things, changing the pattern of who sent and who received missionary support. The religious aid flowing from the US fell almost entirely within the masculine framing of the American state, which had so recently exerted its influence in Europe in the military, economic, and cultural spheres. This essay explains how, as a result of practical experience and general social change, gender relations in American missions came to embrace greater inclusivity. European evangelicals, in turn, were both empowered by working with the American missionaries and impacted by the American debate over the separation of male and female roles in the mission field.


2021 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-98
Author(s):  
Jonathan van Harmelen

During World War II, Japanese American scientists and engineers imprisoned at the Manzanar War Relocation camp were engaged in an experimental project to grow guayule and process it into latex, a needed war materiel. In this way, they contributed to the American war effort, despite their race-based incarceration. The guayule research project undermines the rationale for the wartime confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans. The laboratory at Manzanar partnered with universities, private industry, and government bureaucracy as an early instance of the military-industrial complex.


Aethiopica ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 83-110
Author(s):  
Benoit Gaudin

This paper presents the apparition of modern sport in Ethiopia: in the schools, the military institutions and, as far as football is concerned, in clubs. The foundation of the first local football teams coincides with the raise of the first expressions of an Ethiopian national feeling on the occasion of confrontations against “foreign”, and later Erytrean, teams. After World War II, and through the action of Ydneqatchew Tessema, the first sport institutions of the country are founded. Athletics, which is not yet the vector of the Ethiopian sport nationalism, grows mostly after 1947 with the help of the Swedes. Yet, among the Ethiopian sports of that period, athletics remains in the backstage, restricted to the schools grounds and the military barracks. In accordance with the opinions of the time on the aptitudes of Black people, Ethiopian athletics concentrate then on sprint, and not on long distance races.


2005 ◽  
Vol 127 (07) ◽  
pp. 34-36
Author(s):  
Harry Hutchinson

This article reviews the military buildup of World War II that led to victory and, by an indirect route, to a richer world. The creation of the US armaments industry is breathtaking for the speed with which it developed. After the surprise attack at the close of 1941, it did not take much time for the country to respond. Shocked by a sneak attack, Americans were able to put their love affair with the car on hold to make war machines. The entire US automotive industry converted its plants to the war effort, and much of that industrial might was devoted to building airplanes. Technologies developed for the war were quickly given civilian uses. After years of rationing and the Great Depression before that, there was plenty of demand stored up. GPS today keeps watch on truck fleets, tracks stolen cars, and serves a multitude of other civilian uses that save lives, property, and money. The Predator and other unpiloted aerial vehicles are believed to represent the future of commercial air transportation.


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