From The concise untold history of the United States (Oliver Stone & Peter Kuznick, 2015) pp95-6
The war in Europe had ended close to three months before on May 7. Looming on November 1 was Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese Islands, overseen by General Douglas MacArthur. Many feared a bloodbath, as Americans confronted what some leaders considered a fanatically hostile civilian population as well as the remaining Japanese imperial armed forces.
The climate for the war on Japan was shaped by the profound hatred Americans felt toward the Japanese. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Allan Nevins wrote after the war, “Probably in all our history, no foe has been so detested as were the Japanese.”
Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, Commander of the South Pacific Force, was notorious in this regard, urging his men to kill the “yellow monkeys” and “get some more monkey meat.” Time magazine wrote: “The ordinary, unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing . . . indicates it.”
The British embassy in Washington reported back to London that the Americans viewed the Japanese as a “nameless mass of vermin.” When popular war correspondent Ernie Pyle was transferred from Europe to the Pacific in February 1945, he observed: “In Europe we felt that our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people. But out here I soon gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice.”
Some of this sentiment can be attributed certainly to racism, but American rancor toward Japan soared with the “sneak attack” at Pearl Harbor. And in early 1944, the government released information about the sadistic treatment of U.S. and Filipino prisoners during the Bataan Death March two years earlier. Reports of unspeakable Japanese cruelty – torture, crucifixion, castration, dismemberment, beheading, burning and burying alive, vivisection, nailing prisoners to trees and using them for bayonet practice -flooded the media.
President Truman’s bigotry long antedated reports of Japanese savagery. As a young man courting his future wife, he wrote: “I think one man is as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man of dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs: So do I.”
To be fair, Truman was a product of his time and place. His biographer, Merle Miller, reported, “Privately Mr. Truman always said ‘nigger’; at least he always did when I talked to him.”
This racism prevailed when President Roosevelt, in February 1942, signed an Executive Order calling for the evacuation of more than 110,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans from California, Oregon, and Washington on the grounds that they represented a threat to national security. Seventy percent of them were American citizens.
But still, with few defending these citizens’ constitutional rights, they were eventually placed in ten different camps, often referred to at the time as “concentration camps.” Conditions there were deplorable, lacking running water, bathroom facilities, decent schools, insulated cabins, and proper roofs. They worked under scorching desert sun for minuscule pay.
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