[December 7th
marks National
Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ll remember and AmericanStudy
some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to a special post on how
we remember such infamous days.]
On a post-Pearl
Harbor group who embody the best of the war, Hawai’i, and America.
I learned a
great deal while researching and writing my next book, We the People: The Battle to Define Who is an American, from Columbus
to Trump (forthcoming from Rowman and Littlefield’s American Ways series in
2019!). I had a general sense of the exclusionary and inclusive histories I
wanted to highlight in each chapter, having talked
about most of them in a number
of settings over the last
couple years; but in the course of working on each chapter I discovered new
histories related to those central threads, stories that surprised me yet also
and especially exemplified my topics and themes. So it went with Chapter 7:
Japanese Internment and Challenges: I knew that I wanted to focus in that
chapter on Japanese American World War II soldiers as a central, inclusive
challenge to the exclusionary histories and narratives of the internment policy
and camps; but it was only when researching those respective World War II communities
further that I learned about the amazing, inspiring, foundational story of the Varsity
Victory Volunteers (VVV).
There were quite
simply too many Japanese Americans in Hawai’i (and they were too integral to
the community’s economy and society) for internment camps to be possible. But
the island featured its own forms of World War II
anti-Japanese discrimination to be sure, and it was out of one such
discriminatory moment that the VVV was born. The day of the Pearl Harbor
attacks, all of the island’s ROTC students were called up for active duty as
the newly constituted Hawaii
Territorial Guard (HTG). But when federal officials learned that Japanese
American students were among those numbers, they dismissed those students from
service, deeming them 4C (“enemy aliens”) and thus ineligible to serve. Frustrated
by this treatment, many of the students met with Hung Wai Ching, a
Chinese Hawaiian community leader who had become an ally to the group. On his
advice they drafted a letter to
the territory’s military governor, Delos Emmons, which read in part: “We joined the Guard voluntarily with the
hope that this was one way to serve our country in her time of need. Needless
to say, we were deeply disappointed when we were told that our services in the
Guard were no longer needed. Hawaii
is our home; the United States, our country. We know but one loyalty and that
is to the Stars and Stripes. We wish to do our part as loyal Americans in every
way possible and we hereby offer ourselves for whatever service you may see fit
to use us.”
Emmons accepted
the VVV’s offer, and in February 1942 they were constituted as a labor
battalion (attached to the 34th Combat Engineers) and assigned to Schofield
Barracks. Over the next year they would contribute both their labor and
their presence to the community there, becoming such an integral part of its
operations and society that when Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy visited
in December 1942 (escorted by none other than Hung Wai Ching), he was
struck by the VVV in particular. Not at all coincidentally, in January 1943 the
War Department reversed its policy and allowed Japanese Americans to serve in
the armed forces; the VVV requested permission to disband so they could volunteer,
and nearly all of the VVV members ended up in the 442nd
Regimental Combat Team, the all-Japanese unit that would become the most
decorated in American military history. I knew about the 442nd
before I wrote the chapter and book, but I had never heard of the VVV—and I
know of few stories that exemplify the best of American military, social, and
cultural history more fully than does this post-Pearl Harbor, volunteer
Japanese American student community.
Special post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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