[150 years ago this week, Hawaii’s King Kalākaua arrived in Washington, DC for an extended series of events, a defining part of a more than two-month state visit to the US. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that visit and other Hawaiian histories, leading up to a special post on cultural representations of the islands.]
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 fifth book, We the People: The 500-Year Battle Over Who is
American (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: Everything
Japanese Internment Got Wrong: 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 this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Hawaiian histories or stories you’d highlight?
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