Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor During World War II by Stephanie D. Hinnershitz

Author:Stephanie D. Hinnershitz [Hinnershitz, Stephanie D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Military, World War II, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9780812253368
Google: 0dE4EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2021-10-15T00:11:26.360541+00:00

Figure 8. Members of the Colorado River tribes at the Colorado River Indian Reservation unload beds for Japanese Americans before their arrival at the Poston prison camp. Photo by Fred Clark, April 1942. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library.

Eisenhower did not find even “flimsy” barracks for the housing of Japanese Americans let alone any of the resources that would be necessary for the prisoners to irrigate and subjugate the land. The lack of any discernable progress at Poston horrified the director. Looking around at the desolate landscape, Eisenhower wearily took in the scene: “The tar paper is blowing off of the roofs about as fast as it can be put on. The sand is blowing through wide cracks in the floor. The walls at the back of the stoves in the Mess Halls have not been insulated. The roads are of course in very bad shape. The water is bad, so much so that a chlorinator must be rushed over for installation.”29 “General Dewitt gave instructions on all of these points; correctives should have been underway weeks ago,” an exasperated Eisenhower recounted.30 Eisenhower was puzzled by went wrong at Poston (and, in fact, Leighton would issue a report the following year titled “What Went Wrong at Poston”), but the struggles of Poston to even get off the ground were similar to the problems faced in the establishment of the other camps.

Although Eisenhower was sorely disappointed with the lack of progress at the camp, by April the site was “a scene of great activity” where “speed was the keynote.” The US Army Corps of Engineers supervised WRA-hired contractors, who hastily erected barracks to accommodate ten thousand Japanese Americans on arid land after clearing the few trees that provided shade within the complex. The newly constructed living quarters were organized by blocks, which consisted of fourteen barracks as well as a recreation hall, mess hall for meals, male and female pit latrines, and laundry facilities. While crude forms of these structures existed, hospital facilities, warehouses, water towers, wells, sewage disposal systems, and offices and housing quarters for the administrative personnel were still under construction. Poston would eventually consist of three separate camps or units (Poston I, II, and III)—jokingly referred to as “Dustin,” “Roasten,” and “Toasten” by the prisoners for their desert locale, all separated by approximately three miles—two of which were not yet completed in even the most rudimentary sense in April 1942. On completion, Poston would become one of the largest “cities” in Arizona as well as the most populated prison camp (approximately seventeen thousand at peak in September 1942) before Tule Lake became a segregation center in 1943.31

Leighton and other administrators would look back in amazement that Poston did not immediately collapse before it opened as “the constant threat that within a few days thousands of men, women, and children, including infants and invalids, would begin flowing into the center at the rate of 500 a day.” Leighton credited the administrators for doing what needed to be done to ensure that Poston opened on time and was ready to accommodate the thousands of prisoners soon to arrive.

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