Craig Nelson (19:08)

The United States had a tremendous love affair with China at this time.

Sharon McMahon (19:13)

This is author and historian Craig Nelson, who has written extensively about the region.

Craig Nelson (19:21)

We sort of viewed the Chinese as being little brothers to us, that they were struggling against the Japanese the way we had struggled against the English, and that they were on their way to establishing a republic like us. And part of this was because Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Delanos made their money in China. And partly it was because Henry Luce, the head of Time and Fortune and all these important magazines, had spent a childhood of missionary in China.

Sharon McMahon (19:52)

Henry Luce was an American magazine tycoon who founded Time and Life and Fortune at Sports Illustrated and was undoubtedly one of the most influential Americans of the 20th century. And Henry Luce was born in China. His parents were missionaries in the coastal province of Shandong, and Henry spent his entire childhood there. His experiences in China influenced his image of the country. And Henry Luce used his media empire to advance his agenda on a number of global issues, like US Policies towards Asia. Loose became a vocal proponent of the idea that the United States needed to do something about the Japanese occupation of China. He organized aid groups to form United China Relief, which raised millions of dollars in donations from Americans to help the Chinese fight back against the Japanese. By July of 1937, Japan had expanded its forces in China to an estimated 10 to 15,000 men and stationed most of them along the railways, which gave Japan control over the transportation of materials and resources. There had been many small skirmishes between the Japanese and Chinese along an important rail line that connected Beijing with The port of Tianjin but it had recently begun to subside until one summer evening on July 7th when a Japanese soldier was absent during military drills the soldier's commander demanded that they be allowed to search inside the nearby town of Wanping which was ringed by a wall. The townspeople and the Chinese army stationed there refused to let them inside. Tensions were high. The Chinese army sent off warning shots to the Japanese army which further escalated the situation and soon the missing Japanese soldier was found somewhere else. But the damage had been done and reinforcements began to arrive on both sides. Even when a ceasefire was declared the next day, the battle continued. The Japanese commander General ordered his forces to shell the town and while the Chinese forces held out for a few days in the end they were forced to retreat. The clash, called the Marco Polo Bridge Incident is generally regarded as the start of the military conflict that was waged between Japan and China from 1937 to 1945. Some historians even consider July 7, 1937 as the alternative starting date for World War II. We commonly use September 1, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland as the start of the war. But Japan's war on China set off many dominoes in the east and had far reaching consequences. Japan's war crimes in China were rampant and widespread.

Craig Nelson (23:28)

They had mass killings, they had concentration camps. They used living people as targets for bayonet practice. They performed medical experiments just like Mengele and the Nazi camps. They had an entire bioweapon operation going on in Nanjing, the northern part of China. They blanketed them with poison gas and it's estimated that they killed something like 10 million Chinese.

Sharon McMahon (23:57)

On December 13, 1937 the Japanese army entered what was then the Chinese capital city of Nanking. Eyewitness reports by American missionaries and military officers, diplomats and foreign correspondents describe a report range of atrocities committed by the invaders. They killed POWs, disemboweled and beheaded Chinese citizens and according to the International Military Tribunal for the Far east raped an estimated 20,000 Chinese women and girls and murdered more than 200,000 people. One Japanese Japanese veteran of the invasion later said There are really no words to describe what I was doing. I was truly a devil. The United States continued to criticize Japan but they still hesitated to move forward with any economic sanctions or other repercussions. The primary goal remained safeguarding its own national interests in China. It wasn't until Japanese forces took aim at French Indochina with the goal of capturing oil rich areas of the East Indies that the United States finally acted. Indochina currently comprises five Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. And in the spring of 1941, much of the region was controlled by France. Germany and Japan were already part of the Axis powers after they had signed a treaty in September of 1940. In 1941, Japan sent 30,000 troops into the city of Saigon and its forces to a naval base In Vietnam, about 800 miles miles from the Philippines, which was then a U.S. commonwealth, where American troops were stationed. The U.S. predicted, rightly, that Japan was setting their sights on an invasion of the Philippines. The United States finally decided it was time to take economic action against Japan. On July 26, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an executive order that froze Japanese assets in the United States and placed an embargo on scrap metal, oil and gas. An embargo is an official ban on trade or other commercial activity with a particular country.

John Daly (27:03)

This is John Daly speaking from the CBS newsroom in New York. Here is the Far east situation as reported to this moment. The Japanese have attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and our defense facilities at Manila, capital of the Philippines. The Japanese have attacked Pearl harbor from the air and all naval and military activities on the island of Oau, the principal American base in the Hawaiian Islands. A second air attack has been reported. This one has been made on the army and Navy bases in Manila. A naval engagement is in progress off Honolulu with at least one black enemy aircraft carrier in action against the Pearl harbor defenses. The planes are officially described so far as unidentified in these messages, although later reports that have come in from the press associations definitely identify at least two of these planes as carrying the emblem of the rising sun, the emblem of Japan.

Craig Nelson (28:00)

The Japanese had an idea of the United States as being people who were lazy and cowardly and only in it for money. They literally had the idea that all of us looked like Monopoly banker people, that we're all, like, sitting there. We're only engaged in the world to make money. So if they did this terrible strike, they were convinced that you could terrify the United States into giving up entirely on coming after the Japanese. The median age of the soldiers and sailors at Pearl harbor was 19, meaning that a lot of people there were 16, 17, 18 years old. All of the officers were living on the land. They all had apartments and housing on the land. And it were these little kids that were on the ships when the attack actually came. So when you hear famous stories of Pearl harbor, that one sailor tried chasing after the Zero attack planes on a bicycle and another one tried throwing kitchen utensils at them. Well, if you think it's 17 year olds make sense. It was a Sunday, so Americans didn't work on a Sunday and they did it at dawn. So no one was up yet. And it was really a harbor full.

Sharon McMahon (29:17)

Of little kids, children like Daniel Inouye.

Craig Nelson (29:24)

They were going to meet the most powerful fighters in Egypt. And no one believed it was coming. And they couldn't imagine it. And it was just devastating how much they were able to destroy so fast. In fact, the Japanese couldn't believe it. They looked at what had happened. They destroyed so many ships that they couldn't launch a third attack because so many things were on fire and there was so much smoke going up that they couldn't see it. The water was on fire. You would jump off the ship to get out of it into the water, but then come up and the oil had leaked over all the water. So the water itself was on fire. Of course, the Arizona is the most famous one that this happened to. But also there's a spectacular picture of the Shah that's exploding because the Japanese bombs had penetrated into its storage for where it stored its own munitions. The civilian casualties were pretty low, 2,400. It was pretty much all military because it was so concentrated there at that harbor.

Sharon McMahon (30:21)

President Roosevelt had just been in a meeting meeting when he received the news that Pearl harbor had been attacked. The Secretary of the Navy burst in and let him note that Japan had attacked Pearl harbor and that more than 2,000Americans were dead. FDR had been working for weeks to negotiate some kind of peace in the Pacific. And now it was clear the none of it had worked. FDR said, quote, it was just the kind of unexpected thing that the Japanese would do, end quote. And at the very time they were discussing peace in the Pacific, the Japanese were plotting to overthrow it. The White House became a flurry of activity. FDR and his advisors spent the rest of the afternoon and late into the evening gathering report from Hawaii and planning the next steps. Listen, I have four kids. 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So it was her voice that Americans heard first.

John Daly (36:06)

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'm speaking to you tonight at a very serious moment in our history. The Cabinet is convening and the leaders in Congress are meeting with the President. The State Department and Army and Navy officials have been with the President all afternoon. In fact, the Japanese ambassador was talking to the President at the very time that Japan's airships were bombing our citizens in Hawaii and the Philippines and sinking one of our transports loaded with lumber on its way to Hawaii.

Sharon McMahon (36:42)

Whatever is asked of America, she said, we shall accomplish it. We are the free and unconquerable United States of America. Members of Congress met with FDR until after midnight. As the Congressmen departed, a small crowd gathered outside the White House and began to sing, their voices raw and tearful under the dark sky. It wasn't the Star Spangled Banner that sprang to mind in the December chill. It was America the Beautiful. The next step for FDR addressing Congress and asking for a declaration of war against Japan. Roosevelt dictated his speech to his secretary, Grace Tully, and while we know it now, is one of the most famous speeches made by a US President. It did go through some draft changes. Originally, Roosevelt had grace write down the phrase a date which will live in world history, which was later amended to the more reverberating a date which will live in infamy. Shortly after noon on December 8th, FDR addressed Congress. The rest of the country was glued to their radios.

John Daly (38:53)

Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan.

Sharon McMahon (39:20)

And it concluded six minutes later, with.

John Daly (39:24)

Confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God. I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attempt by Japan ON Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.

Sharon McMahon (40:21)

Before the day was through, Congress approved a joint resolution declaring war on Japan. Roosevelt addressed the Nation again on December 9 during a radio fireside chat, saying in part, we are now in this war. We are all in it, all the way. Every single man, woman and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history. Hours after the bombing of Pearl harbor, the FBI rounded up nearly 1,300 Japanese American community and religious leaders, arresting them without charging them with a crime and freezing their assets. The FBI searched the private homes of thousands of Japanese American residents on the west coast, seizing items that were considered contraband like shortwave radios. Suspicion of Japanese Americans increased. West coast newspapers, military leaders and political figures, including then California attorney general Earl Warren, all said, quote, there was no way to distinguish loyal Japanese Americans from the potentially disloyal Japanese Americans. Away from the west coast, politicians in cities and states were also beginning to make public statements. Idaho's governor Chase Clark was particularly vicious, publicly saying, quote, a good solution to the Jap problem in Idaho and the nation would be to send them all back to Japan and then sink the island. FDR's military advisors recommended removing people of Japanese descent, Both immigrants and U.S. citizens from the west coast, as a safeguard against the potential for espionage and sabotage. Roosevelt had shown a lifelong hostility towards people of Japanese ancestry. Greg Robinson, who is the author of by order of the President, writes, fdr had a long and an unvaried history of viewing Japanese Americans in racialized terms, that is, as essentially Japanese in their identity and and emotional allegiance. The office of naval intelligence kept tabs on Japanese communities as early as 1936, and Roosevelt escalated it from there by ordering Lists of Japanese Americans in Hawaii to be recorded just in case they ever needed to be rounded up in an emergency. And in 1940, Congress enacted the Alien Registration act, which required adult resident aliens to register annually with the government. Hayataro and Daniel Inouye walked out the door of their small home and into a world that was forever changed. They saw not the white smoke of practice drills in the harbor, but the black smoke of a real attack above them. Three planes, silver with red dots on the underside of the wings. Fools. Hayataro screamed at the planes. Fools. The Red Cross called, asking for Daniel's urgent help, providing first aid. They'll kill you. His mother cried. Hayataro put his hand on his wife's arm. Let him go, he said. Daniel was 17 and it was he who picked up the first civilian dead in the Pearl harbor attack. An elderly neighbor had been mistakenly hit by US anti aircraft shrapnel. Daniel found another young woman holding a baby, both of them gone. With the courage of men twice his age, Daniel helped open a medical clinic and a morgue at an elementary school. And for the next five days he barely slept. He rescued a woman whose lower legs had been blown off, rendering her unable to walk. He sifted through the rubble of burned out buildings, recovering body parts and looking for survivors. He did his best to get all of a person's corpse into one box. For his work as part of the now activated Civil Defense Command, Daniel was paid an astounding to him sum of $125 per month. He was still attending high school, so in the months that followed the attack, he went to classes during the day, slept for two hours before dinner, and then worked overnight from 6pm to 6am at the aid station. While Daniel was manning the first aid station on Oahu in 1942, Norman Mineta was just a boy of 10. He loved baseball and Boy Scouts and his parents were deeply involved in their Methodist church in the Bay Area of California. The first generation of Japanese immigrants called themselves Issei or first generation and their children were Nisei or second generation. Both Norm and Daniel were part of this Nisei generation, born American citizens. In January of 1942, Norm's father sat his his children down and said, I don't know what's going to happen to your mother and me, but just remember, all of you are US citizens and this is your home. There is nothing anyone can do to take this away from you. A few weeks later, with a flick of his pen, FDR signed Executive Order 9066 and six weeks after that, men with guns were at the door of Norm's home. I'll see you again soon. Thank you for listening to. Here's where it gets interesting. I'm your host and executive producer, producer Sharon McMahon. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck Parks, and our audio producer is Craig Thompson. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or a review or sharing our new series 9066 on social media? All of these things help podcasters out so much. I'll see you next time.