End of Internment: Japanese-Americans Return Home

After nearly three years behind barbed wire, 120,000 Japanese Americans were told they could go home to lives that no longer existed. On December 17, 1944, the U.S. Army announced the rescission of its West Coast exclusion orders, effective January 2, 1945, allowing Japanese Americans to return from the internment camps where they had been confined since 1942. The announcement came one day before the Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Endo that the government could not detain loyal citizens. The internment began in February 1942, when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the military to designate "exclusion zones." In practice, the order targeted only Japanese Americans, including over 70,000 U.S. citizens. Families were given days to dispose of homes, businesses, and possessions before reporting to assembly centers, then transported to ten remote camps from the California desert to the swamps of Arkansas. Conditions were harsh. Families lived in tar-paper barracks, shared communal bathrooms, and endured temperature extremes. Armed guards patrolled perimeter fences. Despite this, internees organized schools, newspapers, and community institutions. Many young men volunteered for military service, and the all-Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team became the most decorated unit of its size in Army history. The Army's announcement was carefully timed to follow Roosevelt's re-election. The administration had known for over two years that Japanese Americans posed no security threat, as a secret Office of Naval Intelligence report concluded in 1943. Political calculations, not military necessity, prolonged the internment. Returning families found their property stolen, farms foreclosed, and communities hostile. Full redress came only in 1988, when the Civil Liberties Act apologized and authorized $20,000 payments to each surviving internee.