There were definitely some Japanese-Americans spying for Japan. It was hard to figure our which ones. So they went with wide brush.
“There were definitely some Japanese-Americans spying for Japan. It was hard to figure our which ones. So they went with wide brush.”
I’ve read about a few cases of German spy rings operating here during the war, but have never read much about similar Japanese operations.
Are there any interesting ones folk know about?
See my prior post. We KNEW a lot were - but how do you arrest just the ones you know about, without blowing the fact that you’d broken their codes?
You are the first person so far to even touch on the truth. Something I found out last year made the whole thing a lot more understandable.
We did in fact know exactly which Japanese-Americans were working as spies and saboteurs for the Japanese government. We knew who they were because we had deciphered the Japanese diplomatic code and we could have rounded them up.
Here is the problem that was presented to Roosevelt.
If we round up just the spies, the Japanese government will realize immediately that we must have broken their code and then they will change it. If we round up *EVERYBODY* and lead them to believe that it's simply racism, they will believe that because they want to believe that anyway.
So that's what we did. We rounded up everyone, the Japanese government chalked it up to racism, and they went about their business as before. We continued to read their code messages and this helped us greatly in the prosecution of the war.
By rounding up everyone, we got all the spies and saboteurs, and we continued to be able to decode Japanese communications using that code system.
Again, I did not know this until just last year when someone was pointing out this was exactly what happened and why.