Test It
Again
(Tempo Magazine, 1947)
Test IT
“The main Japanese war trials started with the indictment on April 29 of twenty-eight political and military leaders on fifty-five counts charging crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and ‘conventional’ war crimes… The twenty-eight accused war criminals were formally arraigned before an eleven-nation tribunal presided over by Chief Justice Sir William Webb of Great Britain on May 3 and 4.
“Under the supervision of Allied occupation authorities, Japan made more substantial recovery during 1946 than any of the other defeated Axis powers.”
“In December 1945, SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) issued a sweeping directive demanding that Japanese peasants be freed from the burden of absentee landlordism, oppressive debt, discriminatory taxation, usury and other evils that had plagued the Japanese peasants for centuries.”
“On June 30, 1946 the central office of the War Relocation Authority [an arm of the Department of the Interior] closed on schedule with substantial completion of its war-time task of providing ‘relocation, maintenance, and supervision’ of the 120,313 persons of Japanese ancestry who were in its custody as a result of the War Department’s evacuation in 1942 of the West Coast. Of this number, 5,981 were born in the ten relocation centers maintained by the Authority.”
In the wake of the SCOTUS opinion, Korematsu v. U.S., some talk could be heard about the return of the Japanese Americans to the previous homes. This article examines the anti-Nisei attitudes in two Western states, California and Oregon. It was the conclusion that the former had become a bit more tolerant and the later a bit worse (sadly the last paragraphs, printed on brittle brown paper, withered away in our hand.)
Former Lord of the Admiralty (1911 – 1915), Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965) wrote the attached article sometime after the First World war and recalled the tremendous difficulties faced by the Royal Navy when this new form of warfare came to the fore:
“There followed the fourth prime feature of the war — the grand U-boat attack on the Allied shipping and the food ships and store ships which kept Great Britain alive. Here again we were exposed to a mortal risk. Not merely defeat but subjugation and final ruin confronted by our country.”
In 1943, Twentieth Century Fox released a movie that told the story of one of the earlies heroes of the war, The Sullivans. These five Iowa brothers enlisted in the U.S. Navy just three weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack. Assigned to the cruiser Juneau, three were killed that summer during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (1942), and the two others died the next day. The nation as a whole was very moved by this saga and cherished their memory.
“Five unknown actors play the Sullivan lads. And because their faces are fresh and new, they seem amazingly convincing and real.”