| February 5 |  |
Editor says, what if the invading soldiers of the Empire of Japan restored civil liberties denied by the arsenal of democracy? Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s).
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In 1945, the twenty-third "Sunrise" Infantry Division of the Imperial Japanese Army liberated the Gila River Internment Camp in Arizona on this day. One of the internees was thirteen year old Noriyuki "Pat" Morita (pictured), later to become one of the iconic Japanese American actors of the second half of the twentieth century.
Click to watch the Pat Morita Interview
Freedom from Need and WantForced into a lengthy sentence behind barbed wire in crowded, primitive camps, Japanese Americans such as Morita had been deprived of the very liberties set out by the Atlantic Charter, namely "freedom from fear and want". Because nearly 120,000 people living on the West Coast had been hurried out of their homes and relieved of their possessions and businesses at less than forty hours notice (of the 127,000 Japanese Americans living in the continental United States at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, 112,000 resided on the West Coast and of those 80,000 were born in the United States and holding American citizenship).
And at their subsequent trials, incarcerated liberal politicians such as Earl Warren and Fiorello La Guardia confessed their shame at this mass violation of civil liberties which was rivaled only by the systematic segregation of African-Americans. That remorse was only matched by the military planners of the United States Joint Army and Navy Board; disasterously, their War Plan Orange had failed to anticipate the role of submarines and naval aviation in the Pacific Theatre.
Entry posted by Todayinah Editor
© Today in Alternate History, 2004-.Story Tags
Permalinks: Post, Day. Browse Thread: Alternate Nations Source: Wikipedia Labels: Japan, America, World War 2, Internment, Pacific.
~ About the only way the Japanese Imperial Army could have come within a thousand miles of the Gila River would be an offensive and defensive alliance with the Alien Space Bats, including use of their UFOs.
~ Actually not quite. It woul;d have required building a much larger merchant fleet in the 30's [which would mean that something else they had in 1941 wouldn't be there - no free lunch]. Essentially one of the go for broke possibilities for Japan was to land half a dozen or so divisions in CA right after Pearl. We had a lot of men but nothing resembling a coherent army at that point. There would have been no way to resupply them; this is a suicide raid. The idea would be to wreck the California economy so as to make a Trans-pacific offensive impossible before 1944-46.
~ Japan would have had to pull huge numbers of troops and vast amounts of resources from its mainland Asian forces tom have a shot at something like this, suggesting that its puppet regime of "Manchukuo" might have collapsed. Even then, it would have taken an overall Axis victory to make the war crimes described a possibility.
And for the record, Earl Warren was not considered a liberal in the 1940s. Indeed, Eisenhower picked him for Chief Justice of the Supreme courrt precisely because Warren's call for locking up "the Japs" (and it was his call, not FDR's, though Roosevelt went along) indicated he was "safe" (from the Southern white perspective) on racial issues at a time when the civil rights movement was picking up steam. No one was more horrified than Ike at Warren's ideological reversal on the Court; in his memoirs, he described the Warren nomination as perhaps the biggest blunder of his presidency.
© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
