Department of War's Justification for Japanese American Exclusion Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast 1942

John L. DeWitt

Book

The War Department’s official account of Japanese American exclusion from the Pacific Coast gives the Army’s own administrative rationale for the forced removal carried out under Executive Order 9066. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson’s foreword states that wartime security required “the same treatment for all persons of Japanese ancestry, regardless of their individual loyalty to the United States,” and credits Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt and the Army for the “efficient manner” in which the program was conducted. DeWitt’s report builds that case through military geography, population statistics, assembly center maps, relocation center plans, repatriation data, and a long pictorial summary of registration, transport, policing, food distribution, and camp labor. The volume preserves the federal government’s contemporary language for a program that removed more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, including U.S. citizens, and confined them in temporary assembly centers and inland War Relocation Authority camps.

DeWitt, John L. Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast 1942. Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1943. Original black cloth, gilt title to front board and spine, 4to, 618 pages, illustrated with maps, charts, tables, diagrams, color maps, and photographic plates. Interior contents include the “Western Defense Command Area” map, a “Phase and Functional Distribution Chart” dividing the program into voluntary evacuation, designation and execution of evacuation areas, induction into assembly centers, reception centers, and relocation and resettlement, and statistical graphics including “Geographical Distribution Japanese Population United States: 1940.” Color cartographic material includes assembly center site maps and geographic distribution plates, while diagrams record the planned layout of war relocation centers for 10,000 residents and a “Typical Housing Block.” Later sections include tables and charts on repatriation requests by Nisei, Kibei, and Issei, followed by a pictorial summary with captioned federal images of registration stations, control stations, rail departure, assembly center police and fire units, mess halls, food storage, butchering, and camp service work.

The report was issued after the main phase of West Coast exclusion and before the wartime incarceration system had fully closed, giving it the character of both administrative record and official defense. This publication records the military assertions used to justify mass exclusion before later federal inquiries and redress efforts rejected those claims as products of wartime fear, racial prejudice, and failed political leadership. The volume’s maps and charts translate civil rights deprivation into routes, districts, deadlines, center capacities, and barrack plans, making it a central record of how the federal government organized removal as a logistical operation. Some wear to boards and fraying to head of spine; minor toning throughout and original owner's inscription to front free end paper; generally clean, with maps, charts, and plates sharp. Overall very good condition.

Item #23420

Price: $750.00