Atomic Research, Pearl Harbor and Japanese Internment Eighty Years Ago

I never want to be considered an apologist for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but I ran across some interesting correlations in the histories I have read, which are relevant to this 80th anniversary of the Japanese internment. I found Heisenberg’s War by Thomas Powers to be the best single source I consulted about the German atomic bomb program. For internment discussion, Roosevelt: The Solder of Freedom by James MacGregor Burns provides a good narrative. However, I have not found a source directly linking the two issues, so the conclusion appears to be my own speculation.

Historians tell us FDR liked mystery, subterfuge, and indirect tactics for their own sake. His natural temperament embraced secret intelligence, and not even his closest associates penetrated his core being. FDR compartmentalized chief advisors such as Harry Hopkins, Henry Stimson, Henry Morgenthau, and their subordinates. They often operated without knowledge of each other’s actions, and often on the same assignment.

One great frustration for scholars is that FDR preferred talking and seldom committed anything to paper. Roosevelt forbade note taking in his presence and rarely recorded his discussions regardless of how significant the issue or important the participants. As the prospects for peace became ever more remote the supreme secret of WW II the atomic bomb, resided within his heavily camouflaged interior.

The attack on Pearl Harbor and the grievous events following hard upon meant for FDR that the most devastating attack ever on United States territory now confronted the most vital secret of WW II. Against these unforeseen occurrences, Roosevelt had to weigh the agreement he had made with Churchill in August 1941 that the allies would stay on the defensive in the Pacific and defeat Germany first. Overall Germany was viewed as a much more formidable industrial and military power than Japan, but the agreement also considered that an unimaginable catastrophe loomed in this war.

I maintain Roosevelt was consistently deliberate and pragmatic in his decisions, so his silence as defined by the absence of political actions contrary to internment had to align with an issue he considered more important. The one critical issue for him to consider in early 1942 in light of the call for Japanese internment was the German atomic bomb program.

In the 1930’s as the dictatorships and democracies became more belligerent towards each other, there was still a significant exchange of commercial, industrial, and scientific information. That exchange had promptly ended on September 1, 1939.

In its place, frightening evidence emerged concerning atomic research, which demanded evaluation. Germany had acquired Europe’s only uranium mine when subjecting Czechoslovakia. The Nazi’s had conquered Norway and placed the heavy-water plant at Rjukan under I.G. Farben’s control with the directive to vastly increase its output, which the cartel did by increasing its budget 1000%. Defeating France in June 1940 meant the Germans obtained control of Europe’s only cyclotron.

As Europe fell under Nazi and Fascist sway between 1933 through 1941 many members of the small fraternity concerned with atomic physics fled for the United States. These included Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Emilio Segre, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and Hans Bethe. Of those who stayed, the staunch German patriot and brilliant theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg was the most troubling. His brilliance was certified by award of the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for the creation of quantum mechanics. All these refugees believed that under pressure by government, Heisenberg could quickly discover the remaining insights needed to lead experimental physicists and engineers in directions enabling production of a bomb. By decree the German economy and those of occupied countries could then provide an elite team of technicians with any human and material resources they wished.

This urgency prompted Leo Szilard in 1939 to convince Albert Einstein to join him in sending a confidential letter to FDR warning that the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics had been taken over by the military, and that a nuclear chain reaction in uranium could lead to construction of a bomb of enormous power. Several sources emphasized that Germany at their departure was well on the way to developing the atomic bomb, and well ahead of the British and Americans. Fritz Reiche, who left Germany in March 1941 for a job at the New York New School for Social Research, carried a message from Fritz Houtermans that even a morally perplexed Heisenberg would be forced into a relentless commitment to build the bomb. The day before Pearl Harbor, Dr. Vannevar Bush, Dr. Lyman J. Briggs, Dr. Ernest O. Lawrence, Dr. James B. Conant, and Dr. Arthur Compton met secretly with FDR to convince him of the possibility of an atomic bomb, and of the imperative that the United States must get there first.

However, this most secret information had to withstand the universal public astonishment and horror emerging from the Pearl Harbor attack. Never before had even two carriers for any country planned and/or coordinated an attack on a naval or land target. No inkling existed in any allied Naval operational and intelligence community of a capability beyond the 21 Fairey Swordfish bi-plane torpedo bombers from a single carrier that had attacked at night the Italian Navy at Taranto. American traffic analysis intelligence reasoned that the absence of communication both to and from meant the carriers were staying in home waters to initiate counter attacks. Such a blank condition had occurred for tactical operations in February and July and the conclusion had proven correct.

Yet, for Pearl Harbor the Japanese had forged a strategic weapon of six carriers, escorts, and auxiliaries for a coordinated attack by 360 planes in two waves on a Sunday morning. The attack was not only unprecedented, but unexpected because all preparations were conducted without recourse to the diplomatic Purple Code that U.S. codebreakers were often reading in substantial portions. The U.S. had no agents in Japan and the Imperial Japanese Navy excluded their own population from observing training for this rapidly developing and essentially oral doctrine.

The American public could not have been more bewildered and incensed by the attack. They then became panic stricken as early 1942 saw an unbroken string of defeats in the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The early determination disappeared to not repeat against the Japanese the unbridled prejudice exhibited against Americans of German origin in WW I. The climate began changing in January in California until the events noted above allowed the intensification of lingering social and economic prejudices. The Nisei and their parents were loudly stigmatized to the point that notable state elected officials including Governor Culbert L. Olson and Attorney General Earl Warren demanded their evacuation. Only Roosevelt’s new Attorney General Francis Biddle remained adamant against the internment authorized in February 1942.

Did Roosevelt really allow himself to be overcome by events and to acquiesce casually to what was arguably the worst violation of civil liberties in this country’s history? When proclaiming Bill of Rights Day, the week after Pearl Harbor he said, “We Americans know that the determination of this generation of our people to preserve liberty is fixed and certain as the determination of those early generations of Americans to win it”. Notwithstanding the proclamation some historians say his silence demonstrates a lukewarm and/or disinterest in civil rights.

Shortly after the Bill of Rights proclamation he passed to cabinet members and regional politicians the decision for internment without any of the political maneuvers for which he was noted. However, FDR had convincing military and civilian intelligence that citizens of Japanese ancestry and Japanese aliens posed no wholesale threat inside this country. On the East Coast there was a different approach to civil liberties, as Americans of German extraction did not face blanket internment but were individually managed by F.B.I. investigations and often tenuous legal reasoning.

The status of atomic research intelligence would have excited his penchant for secret information leading to a secret agenda. Therefore, the more probable and reasonable explanation for his silence instead becomes a hidden anxiety behind a purposeful, brutal calculus to ignore civil rights.

The hysterical public alarm of early 1942 did subside, popular attitudes refocused on defeating all Axis enemies, and Roosevelt’s Germany first promise remained intact. Roosevelt and Churchill concentrated on first defeating the enemy, which seemed to provide the greatest threat for development of the atomic bomb.

http://www.usni.org/magazines/navalhistory/2011-12/pearl-harbors-overlooked-answer

Fritz Reiche, who left Germany in March 1941 for a job at the New York New School for Social Research, carried a message from Fritz Houtermans that even a morally perplexed Heisenberg would be forced into a relentless commitment to build the bomb.

"Herr Doktor Heisenberg -- der Fuhrer insists that your uncertainty on this matter must end."

Let’s be accurate here. The vast majority of those of Japanese descent were not interned, they were relocated. The practical effect was pretty much the same but legally they could live outside the camps if they had a place to go. Most did not. Some were released from camps to attend school or join the military.

This could be the case.

But the people working on the atomic bomb were carefully screened. People with the slightest suspected loyalties would never come close to the important stuff. That meant anyone with loyalties to a country other than the US; including our allies.

While this might have been a consideration...I think the FBI and military agencies would have had a good handle on this. It would not have required the imprisonment of run-of-the-mill Japanese men, women, and children.

I understand the reasons why it happened. I am suggesting that the atomic program would have been quite far down on the list beyond the traditional reasons given.

There are reports that, through classified code-breaking efforts, US intelligence knew that there were Japanese spies among us, including who they were. But we couldn’t arrest them, only, without compromising the fact of the code-breaking. So, under the cover of clumsy and oppressive domestic policy, *all* citizens of Japanese descent were interred, thereby both neutralizing the threat as well as concealing the fact of our ability to decrypt Japan’s codes.

http://hnn.us/articles/9289.html

Japanese Internment: Why It Was a Good Idea—And the Lessons It Offers Today

That would make, though the books I have read did not discuss that as a reason. We had a similar problem with German spies, but the source was often the British. One way J. Edgar Hoover dealt with that was by giving British intelligence a much freer hand than he should have.

That is why I used the word speculation, because in my reading about FDR and Churchill I have yet to find anxious discussions about the German atomic bomb.

I remember from another source Heisenberg and other nuclear physicists had a meeting with Speer about the bomb in 1943 and they decided not to pursue the idea. I think one key was the unresolved issue of slow or fast neutrons. Speer considered that with the war on more immediate return could be expected from other uses of people and resources.

There was also the fact experimental physicists did not particularly like theoretical physicists, because their theories could seldom be proven, but they got prizes like Heisenberg Nobel in 1932. Also, they considered the work “Jew science”.

I believe the sequence was like this:

Feb 19, 1942: FDR issued the execute order to analyze the Japanese population (both American citizens and immigrants) to see if they posed a threat, particularly on the west coast. Keep in mind that German spies during WW1 detonated Black Tom Island in New York Harbor in 1916. The EO specifically allowed areas to be designated "military areas" that required every possible precaution against espionage and sabotage.

Feb 23, 1942: A Japanese sub attacked Inglewood, California, a fuel refinery. No real damage was done, but folks freaked out. Particularly with the press (the drive by media wants you to forget the part they played in this) did reports of signal lights between people on land and the sub. THAT's when the major internments and relocations began.

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/22/us/1941-cables-boasted-of-japanese-american-spying.html

… Mr. Lowman, who in the 1970’s worked on the declassification and publication of the decoded Japanese cables, said that Roosevelt, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and a handful of other officials were on the limited distribution list of the cable traffic.

‘’Anyone reading this flow of messages during 1941 could easily conclude that thousands of resident Japanese were being organized into subversive organizations,’’ Mr. Lowman said. ‘’Today we know that the Japanese Government misjudged the loyalty of Japanese Americans completely. But at that time no one knew for certain.’’…

Great story from about 1934, about David Hilbert, the German mathematician --

From Wikipedia:

Hilbert attended a banquet and was seated next to the new Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust. Rust asked whether "the Mathematical Institute really suffered so much because of the departure of the Jews". Hilbert replied, "Suffered? It doesn't exist any longer, does it!"

If I remember correctly, they stopped working on it because they were too focused on their other super weapons.

One of the things about a German bomb is they would have had to live with the fallout—even if they won.

On the other hand, the US could drop them with impunity because Japan was an island and the radiation wouldn’t hurt anyone else.

An important source to add to your bibliography is David D. Lowman, Magic: The Untold Story of U.S. Intelligence and the Evacuation of Japanese Residents from the West Coast during WWII. To put the information there in perspective, see Tony Matthews, Shadows Dancing: Japanese Espionage Against the West, 1939-1945.

Let’s be accurate here. The vast majority of those of Japanese descent were not interned, they were relocated.

You make a very important distinction.

From one perspective, American boys and fathers were being killed in a desperate war by "relatives" of the very Japanese that were walking around on U.S. streets. Those Japanese were easily distinguished from the larger community and, while not often mentioned, faced substantial risk of physical injury.

While a comfortable relocation was warranted, IMO the real tragedy was that many Japanese suffered an enormous economic loss that could have been avoided.

I also believe the author is over the top with his assertion the internment "... was arguably the worst violation of civil liberties in this country’s history". Is he discounting our earlier use of slavery?

Thanks. I ordered the book yesterday. It was a suggestion by FreedomPoster to another person on another article I looked at.

Looks like it is going to be a longer essay next year,

A few years ago I read a book titled “The Girls Of Atomic City’’.

A fascinating read about how the great majority of the work building the atomic bomb was done by young women between the ages of 18-30.

They were under the strictest orders to keep their mouths shut or there would be serious, in some cases dire consequences if they did.

None did. They all kept their mouths shut.

Amazing.

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