Word: dewitte
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This was martial law, in effect. Lieut. General John Lesesne DeWitt, chief of the Western Defense Command, marked off a strip of land curving some 2,000 miles along the Pacific, along the Mexican border, from Canada to New Mexico. Out of this coastal region all the thousands on thousands of enemy aliens and all Nisei must...
From strategic military areas all racial Japanese including Nisei, must go first. From less important zones, evacuation will be gradual, and voluntary - for a while. About April 15, the screw will probably be turned: slow-moving Japs will be sped eastward. Impractical, said General DeWitt, were immediate mass evacuations. Germans and Italians over 70 years of age, or any who have sons or brothers serving in the U.S. armed forces, will not be required to move unless suspicion touches them. But all Japs, no matter how old, must leave the Coast-even if they have sons in the Army...
...area they say good-by to is almost as big as the island empire of Japan. It includes some of the West's most fertile lands. What furrowed DeWitt's brow was where to lead his mass migration...
...were Japanese, could not be herded into concentration camps. One answer was an Army "reception center" going up in Owens Valley, a desolate tract of land on the east side of the Sierra Nevadas, in Southern California. The Owens Valley settlement may eventually hold some 50,000 Japs. General DeWitt has plans for another center on the Colorado River near Blythe. But that was a dreary prospect for the Nisei outcasts, who remembered their rich lands and the smell...
That was exactly what General DeWitt thought...