WWII RELOCATION CAMP AT GRANADA REVISITED
(In response to an article in the Rocky Mountain News, 7-4-08)

      Certainly and especially by hindsight, no one can be proud of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s order at the start of World War II to evacuate everyone of Japanese descent from the west coast to inland relocation centers, one of which was built at Granada, Colorado (Amache). He was only reflecting the mood of many Americans “to do whatever is necessary to save our country.” As a 15-year-old at the time living in Calhan, Colorado, I was aware of that feeling.
      Having lost so heavily at Pearl Harbor, there was a belief that we would soon be invaded. The angst that gripped America was heightened by the shocking news that on June 21, 1942 an Imperial Japanese Navy submarine shelled the U.S. Army’s Fort Stevens coastal defenses on the Oregon side of the mouth of the Columbia River with no return of fire. (historylink.org).
     Proving that the few coastal defenses we did have in place were woefully vulnerable, coupled with the belief that the penetrating warship may have received semaphore navigation signals from shore, this first attack on mainland American soil since 1812 no doubt sped up the opening of Colorado’s relocation camp. According to the 1945 Colorado Yearbook, 192 men, 19 women and one infant arrived on August 29, 1942 from the Merced, California center. This initial group was composed of hospital attendants, mess-hall workers, clerks and skilled mechanics. Amache’s total population in 1944 was 5,892.
     The state yearbook says the Granada center--enclosed by barbed wire and guarded by 90 soldiers from Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, in compliance with War Department standards--was located on a tract of 10,960 acres with more than 200 units surrounded by irrigated agricultural land for use by the evacuees. They had their own stores, a school, a hospital, and were self-governing. Evacuees who swore their allegiance to the United States after their standing had been found satisfactory were released to locate in Colorado.
      Life was not easy for them and Gov. Ralph Carr was correct in sympathizing with these evacuees,. Still there were only two true concentration camps in Colorado during the war; one was at Trinidad where 4,000 troops from Rommel’s Afrika Corps were held, the other was at Greeley.
     The Amache experience is a blot on our country’s history but by and large the people of Colorado and the nation for that matter had no more control over creating it than our Japanese friends who were forced to live there did in creating their native country’s attack on Pearl Harbor, a blot on their history.
     Why can’t we just all forgive and forget?
P.