On May 18, Gotham Books, an imprint of Penguin USA, will publish Robert Asahina's "Just Americans: How Japanese Americans Won a War at Home and Abroad." The book is a history of the most decorated unit in the American Army in World War II for its size and length of service - the 442d Regimental Combat Team, a segregated unit of Japanese Americans. About half of the regiment had come out of the "relocation camps" where their families had been confined after Pearl Harbor ...

But President Roosevelt personally insisted on continuing the "relocation," even though most of his top advisers - including Secretary of War Stimson, Assistant Secretary of War John J. Mc-Cloy, Attorney General Francis Biddle, and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes (whose department ran the "relocation camps") - thought the camps should be closed down and the Japanese Americans freed. It was not until after the November 1944 elections - but before the Supreme Court decision in Korematsu - that Roosevelt agreed to end the "relocation." And the reason Stimson cited after meeting with the president had nothing to do with the Constitution. It had to do with the record of the 442nd in battle ...more