October 20, 1942 President Roosevelt calls the "relocation centers" "concentration camps" at a press conference. The WRA had consistently denied that the term "concentration camps" accurately described the camps.
March 20, 1944 Forty-three Japanese American soldiers are arrested for refusing to participate in combat training at Fort McClellan, Alabama. Eventually, 106 are arrested for their refusal, undertaken to protest the treatment of their families in US concentration camps. Twenty-one are convicted and serve prison time before being paroled in 1946. The records of 11 are cleared by the Army Board of Corrections of Military Records in 1983. (The other 10 did not apply for clearance.)
May 7, 1945 The surrender of Germany ends the war in Europe.
August 6, 1945 The atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later, a second bomb is dropped on Nagasaki. The war would end on August 14.
March 20, 1946 Tule Lake closes, culminating "an incredible mass evacuation in reverse." In the month prior to the closing, some 5,000 internees had had to be moved, many of whom were elderly, impoverished, or mentally ill and with no place to go. Of the 554 persons left there at the beginning of the day, 450 are moved to Crystal City, 60 are released, and the rest are "relocated."
Euphemistically called "relocation centers" by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the concentration camps were hastily constructed facilities for housing Japanese Americans forcibly removed from their homes and businesses on the West Coast during WWII.
Located in isolated areas of the US on either desert or swampland, the camps were usually surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by armed sentries. Although the sentries were presumably in place to protect the inmates from hostile outsiders, their guns usually pointed into the camps instead of out of them.
Most inmates were transported to their camp by train from an "Assembly Center" between April and September 1942. In all, over 120,000 Japanese Americans served time in these camps.
camp communities that resembled normal communities to the greatest extent possible. Thus, each of the 10 camps had schools and hospitals, a newspaper, some degree of democratic self-government and such leisure activities as baseball leagues and movie showings.At the same time, however, life was anything but normal. Japanese American family dynamics were dramatically altered as parents saw their authority ebb away. There were several incidents involving guards shooting inmates. There was also the exacerbation of existing conflicts within the Japanese American community brought about by the forced confinement.
Such tensions, coupled with the choices made by WRA officials administering the camps, led to a great deal of conflict with the camps, and to explosions such as the Manzanar Incident and the Poston Strike.
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