"Blood & Guts" Patton's Plan To Take Ethnic Japanese Hostages in the Hawaiian Colony
Pre-WWII planning went to dark, indefensible places
(No. 19, a ±06 minute read)
It’s important to consider the full picture of our national heroes on this Day of Remembrance.
Sometimes reporters are handed surprises, that's the nature of the work. I was reporting an episode of PRX's 'Monumental' podcast at the archives of the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i and speaking with Jane Kurahara and Betsy Young, the two women who in 2002 rediscovered Hawai‘i's largest World War II Japanese incarceration facility—the Honouliuli Detention Camp—when I was handed a shocker. I asked Kurahara, a retired public school library administrator, if the archive held a copy of the FBI's pre-war detention list; the list J. Edgar Hoover's FBI compiled without statutory authority in 1939 with the cooperation of Naval and Army intelligence units. The list identified Americans of Japanese descent and Japanese resident aliens who would be detained in Hawai‘i in the event of what appeared to be imminent war with Japan.
Jane disappeared into the stacks and returned with the detention list, or so she thought. The document Kurahara unwittingly handed me was a more chilling roll of names than I'd asked for. Titled, "Plan Initial Seizure of Orange Nationals A General Staff Study" it was authored by Lt. Colonel George Patton in his capacity as an Army Intelligence officer stationed in the Army’s Hawaiian Department, his second second out-to-pasture assignment to Hawai‘i between the wars. Patton's assignment to Hawai‘i was intended as a comfortable a dead-end to his military career, had there not been a second world war he may well have experienced it as such.
Stationed on O‘ahu Patton sailed his yacht, played polo with local plantation agriculturalists, and suffered poorly his wife Beatrice's interest in the Indigenous Hawaiian friends she cultivated to teach her about the ways of old Hawai‘i. The Pattons’ daughter Ruth Ellen recalled her father referring to Beatrice's Hawaiian friends as her mother’s "[n-word] friends" in her account of the family’s time on O‘ahu. Colonial Hawai‘i in the 1930’s was an anomalous place in the U.S. of the day; securely multiracial, with a white minority, it was nonetheless hierarchical, and those at the top of the hierarchy were largely white agriculturalists, colonial administrators (the two groups hopelessly related by blood or marriage and tracing their lineage to the Protestant missionaries who began to arrive in the 1830s), and military men.
Unsurprisingly in the 1930s, many at the top of Hawai‘i’s social, political, and economic hierarchies held deeply racist attitudes about the majority population in the islands. The “noble savage” and “inscrutable Oriental” capable only of labor were ideas far from extinguished.
It is hard to determine amidst his socialite Hawaiian lifestyle when exactly when Patton wrote up his detailed plan to detain so-called "Orange Nationals"—certainly between 1934 and 1937, during annual revisions of 1924's "Joint Basic War Plan - Orange" (a plan for war against Japan; the nations of the world were given color code-names by the era's war planners). These revisions were coincident with his second colonial deployment to Hawai‘i. We do know that on May 9, 1940 his original copy of this plan was placed in the Army's Hawaiian Division archive and all "duplicate thereof destroyed;" the original to remain available to "those of higher command."
In the first paragraph of the plan's first page Patton gets to the incendiary meat of his program, "To arrest and intern certain persons of the Orange race who are considered most inimical to American interests, or those whom, due to their position in the Orange community, it is desirable to retain as hostages." Michael Slackman, the historian who worked to declassify Patton's plan in 1983 wrote, in 1984, "The twentieth-century record of military hostage taking, though, suggests that Patton was thinking of executions in the event of a serious threat against the isolated U.S. garrison in Hawaii." Patton's use of "hostage" rather than "prisoner" or "detainee" is telling; a well-read man, he had authored many policy documents in the service of the Army, including a frightening document in the aftermath of the Bonus Rebellion in which he advocated the shooting of any "agitator" freed by Writ of Habeas Corpus—as soon as they might be freed, and fall out of ranks. Patton knew a hostage from a prisoner, of that there is no doubt.
By 1940 the Army likely understood that it had on its hands an inflammatory document, authored by a man who cared little for civil rights or people in Hawai‘i other than white colonialists. But, for anywhere from three to six years, Patton’s plan was national policy should war with Japan have come to pass sooner than it did: take Japanese-Americans (and two white U.S. citizens), as well as Japanese resident aliens in Hawai‘i as hostages—to be killed as required—to compel 35-40% of the Hawaiian colony's population (by race) to subservience should the Japanese Empire attack Hawai‘i and local Japanese rise to the disloyalty he expected.
The Army's awareness of Patton’s menacing plan was likely focused due to the assignment of Lt. Colonel Thomas H. Green to the post of Judge Advocate of the Hawaiian Department. Immediately upon his arrival in Honolulu he began reviewing the Hawaiian Department's plans and documents to ensure their legality, and prevent the Army engaging in actions with unsavory political consequences with much of the world already at war. Thomas went on to push-back cannily, and successfully, against the demand for widespread, even total, incarceration of Japanese in Hawai‘i throughout the war; a demand that originated in the Army’s top command structures and at the highest level of Washington’s political elite.
So what are we left with upon understanding this dark, mostly forgotten history, eighty-two years after the attack on Pearl Harbor that led to the indefensible incarceration of Japanese in America under Executive Order 9066? We have a plan so comprehensive even detaining MPs had scripted lines—soldiers were detailed to ensure relatives of those being picked up "that no immediate harm will befall those whom you take." [Italics mine.] We have an American hero: George S. Patton, savior of the Battle of the Bulge, inspiration to his troops, lionized, played by the beloved actor George C. Scott. We have the colonial racism of the era. We have the understanding that in one of its plantation colonies the United States was prepared to hold hostage—and execute—its own citizens in the event of war, to quiet a population it perceived as a threat for unfounded, racist reasons.
One of my interviews for the 'Monumental' project was with Carole Hayashino, one of the principal architects of the national apology and redress made to WWII Japanese incarcerees during the Reagan administration. Hayashino described reparations to me as an act to, "Create some kind of insurance policy for the nation, that it would not happen again, that people would think twice before rounding up innocent Americans."
What does this mean when the leading Republican candidate for president is planning to implement massive immigration sweeps that will disregard due process? When that candidate speaks openly about surpassing the deportations of 1954's cruel "Operation Wetback?" When he talks of intending to "root out the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country," and speaks aloud a Second World War echo of Japanese incarceration that, "the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within."
When the idea of immigrants "poisoning the blood of our country" comes from the mouth of the forty-fifth president of these United States, and who is the likely Republican nominee for President in this year’s election, we can presume that Hayashino's insurance policy stands closer than ever to being revoked.
It is at times like this that a foul surprise delivered to a reporter arrives with a heavy chill. We avoided Patton's scheme for possible Army executions of American hostages in order to pacify a domestic population—which needed no such pacification—and still we incarcerated at least 125,000 people of Japanese descent; a wrong that forever haunts us. Terrible historical documents like Patton's "Plan Initial Seizure of Orange Nationals A General Staff Study" give us insight into how bad our specters could be should we not be able to control those who would unleash them.
I don’t do this often I guess, not as often as I should maybe? But I’m going to recommend an essay, Lydia Polygreen’s latest in the NY Times. It’s an important consideration of the ways forward in a place, Palestine, where, just as we in the U.S. spoke of ethnically Japanese American residents as “irredeemable” and “animals” in the 1930’s and through the war (and beyond) an ethnic group is again being dehumanized in response to the reprehensible actions of members of that group. I don’t know that we need another example of what comes of demonizing and dehumanizing groups of people but we’ve got one. Read Polygreen’s essay, they are one of the best essayists working in my estimation. The future, it is ahead of us—take heed of Carole Hayashino’s lifelong devotion to our not scapegoating people.