7. The scare over espionage and sabotage
During the Second World War espionage activities on the American mainland were investigated by the War Department and the FBI. Several German nationals conducted espionage activities, and a sabotage campaign by German agents, landed on the mainland by U-boats, was thwarted before any damage could be done. The captured agents were tried and executed as spies. Other German spies were captured and turned into double agents by American security personnel. Throughout the course of the war not a single Japanese American, on the mainland, in the territory of Alaska, or in the Hawaiian Islands, was convicted of espionage. Nor were any convicted of sabotage. Evidence of Japanese spies in Hawaii prior to the Pearl Harbor attacks emerged following the war, but they were planted Japanese officers or recruited Americans, not members of the Japanese American community.
Nonetheless, the fear of Japanese American espionage and sabotage was a justifying factor in ordering the West Coast to be an exclusion area, with the Japanese denied access, and those living within ordered to be relocated. Under Roosevelt’s order, the exclusion areas could be used to deny any person of any race or ethnicity. The Commanding Officer of the Western Defense Command, General John DeWitt, used the authority granted by the President and reinforced by Congress to order only the exclusion of Japanese within the areas under his jurisdiction. More than 100 separate orders were issued, which authorized the forced removal and detention of between 110 -120 thousand persons of Japanese descent, without legal due process. The fact that many of these were Nisei, born in the United States and thus US citizens, was considered immaterial under the process.