I would like to commend the recent two letters here blasting Bob Thomas and the internment 58 years ago of the Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. I would like to, but of course the truth of that situation forbids me to do so.
The internment certainly was not "atrocious." Those people were not mistreated in the camps. Their internment was necessary. Those of us who lived through that time, especially on the West Coast, remember the mood of the people then against any Japanese, for good reasons or not.
Pearl Harbor and many military losses of of life in those early months of the war left the people so angry that those who were interned were done so partly for their own safety. Also, the statement that there were no spies among those interned is ludicrous. No Japanese spies out of tens of thousands? The fact is, it was discovered that spies had given military information to the Japanese military during those months prior to internment.
Trusty-Murphy played the old liberal racist card, but she is just another of those revisionists of history. Racism had nothing to do with it. We did what was necessary then (unlike Korea and Vietnam) to win the war. It was a matter of the very survival of our Republic. That was the bottom line.
Those people interned made a necessary sacrifice to the war effort. Some even lost their homes. Well, so did many other Americans then. Several million left their homes in middle America and other rural areas to work in defense plants. Some lost their homes during those five years. Almost all of us made tremendous sacrifices. In fact, many times a number of those not interned were wounded or lost their lives in war while those interned were safe. Almost everyone lost a friend or relative to the enemy.
Most Americans today were not alive then. You need to know that the internment was necessary. We all then did what was necessary for survival. The internment of those was absolutely necessary, period.
