In October, President Obama declared that a major chapter in American military history was about to come to a close...
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over.
As the year comes to its end, it’s a time to reflect on what America’s involvement in Iraq has meant to this country and to the Middle East. And, today – December 7 – brings us an opportunity to consider another military milestone: the attack on Pearl Harbor.
You might think, after so many years, that we know everything there is to know about the events that unfolded after the Pearl Harbor bombing. But one group whose story has rarely been told is university students. For most of them, the biggest concern on December 6, 1941, was preparing for final exams. Two days later, the nation was at war. Many left school to join the fight. Others stayed on, working at wartime factories to pay their expense.
Sam Redman a cultural historian with UC Berkeley’s Regional Oral History Office joins me to talk about how the attack on Pearl Harbor affected Bay Area colleges.
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HOLLY KERNAN: So tell me about some of these people you have spoken with?
SAM REDMAN: As part of our larger WWII Homefront oral history project we’ve had an opportunity to speak to a number of people who were university students at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor and for these young men and woman, it really was a major turning point in their lives. Do they stay in school? Do they continue their studies? Do they leave school and join the military? Some were eventually drafted and many found work at places like the shipyards in the Bay Area.
KERNAN: And you spoke to one woman, Marian Ross, who was studying at Mills College in Oakland on the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor. And she remembered the news of the bombing and how the president of the college, Aurelia Henry Reinhardt, talked with students about it. So let’s hear from Marian Ross.
MARIAN ROSS: I first heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor when I was walking back to my hall after chapel. And there were these girls screaming down the corridors and we had a great many Hawaiian residents, and we also had a great number of Japanese Americans and a couple of Japanese students form Japan. So everyone was excited. It was a very tragic time. But we had a special college meeting on that Monday, and President Reinhardt gave a wonderful address and what I remember her saying to us is, “Japan is an enemy of the United States, but the Japanese people are not my enemy or yours.”
KERNAN: Marian Ross was kind of paraphrasing President Roosevelt about, “All we have to fear is fear itself,” but some students really did have to worry about prejudice.
REDMAN: That’s right, certainly for Japanese American students. There were new concerns about what would happen to them following Pearl Harbor, and those fears were of course founded. Within a couple of days President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which ordered the interment of Japanese into war relocation camps.
KERNAN: And so how did campuses deal with that
REDMAN: Campuses dealt with that in a variety of different ways. At the University of California, people complied with the order, but there was also a lot of resistance, a lot of administrators were deeply upset by this and Marian Ross, for instance, who was a college student at the time, had grown up with many Japanese friends, and so she was deeply heartbroken by the turn of events.
KERNAN: And you also interviewed students from UC Berkeley, you interviewed one man, Jack Rosston, who remembered the morning after when you spoke with him about Pearl Harbor.
REDMAN: That’s right, Jack’s an interesting guy, he lives in San Francisco, but at the time he was living at a university co-op in Berkeley.
KERNAN: Let’s hear form Jack:
JACK ROSSTON: Finals was just beginning and I had to get a paper in before finals and I stayed up all night the day before, on December 6th, because I was getting my paper in. And I woke up to people screaming, and that was the day we got the news of December 7th.
REDMAN: And this would have been in a co-op?
ROSSTON: I was in a co-op at the time, yeah.
REDMAN: And people were frightened?
ROSSTON: Well there were different things… but most of the kids were horrified.
KERNAN: So Sam, what I thought I heard Jack say was, there were students saying, “We are going to bomb the Japanese students club?”
REDMAN: That’s right, Jack is indicating here that there was a really wide range of reaction to the announcement of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. There was a lot of fear, there was a lot of anger, and a lot of the fear stemmed from the location, being here in the Bay Area. There were already military units guarding the Golden Gate Bridge for example, so a lot of people had fears that the next attacks would be here in the Bay Area and a lot of students reacted to this in almost violent ways.
KERNAN: So Sam, we’ve heard about people calling for violence against Japanese origin students. Who was reaching out to Japanese American students, Japanese exchange students? How were they treated?
REDMAN: It’s interesting, there’s a really terrific story that we are really just learning more about now actually. There was an administrator at the International House at the University of California named Allen Blaisdell. And he had had in mind for some time that Japanese students were experiencing racism in California and not exactly getting a fair shake on the campus. And his announcement that students would be removed from school to be brought to internment camps, would be to try and do as much as he could to try and keep students enrolled or transfer them to schools where they could continue their education.
KERNAN: So it was only on the coast where folks were forced to be interned?
REDMAN: That’s right, the evacuation order only impacted the coasts, but in particular in California, many students were told that they needed to be evacuated or moved to war relocation camps.
The Regional Oral History Office, located at UC Berkeley, is actively trying to record oral histories from a wide variety of individuals who worked in the war effort in this area. They would especially like to contact Japanese Americans who are willing to talk about their lives in those opening days of the war, or about life in the relocation camps. You can find contact information for the Oral History Office here.