El Paso's Homegrown: World War II
Internment-Japanese and more
Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942 with the stated intention of preventing espionage on American shores. The policy declared that people of Japanese descent, including United States citizens, would be incarcerated in isolated, guarded internment camps to protect national security. The West Coast—home to large Japanese-American populations—was specifically targeted, and approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom were American citizens, were forcibly removed from their homes. Often, they were given only a few days’ notice before being evacuated and could not make arrangements for the care of their property and belongings, leading many families to lose everything they had. Order 9066 remained in effect for the duration of the War. As the internment camps began to disperse in 1945, many of those interned elected not to return to their original communities.
Located a hundred miles southwest of San Antonio, Texas, the Crystal City Internment Camp was a site where people of Japanese, German, and Italian descent were interned during World War II. Variously described as a detention facility and a concentration camp, Crystal City Internment Camp opened in December 1943 and was officially closed on February 11, 1948. In August 1944, the camp held 2,104 people of Japanese ancestry (about half from Latin America) and 804 people of German descent, housed separately by ethnicity. By December 29, 1944, the camp held 3,374 detainees, many of whom were from Latin America and of German or Japanese descent. They were shortly deported to various countries in Latin America, including Mexico.
Today, we recognize the incarceration of Japanese Americans as one of the most heinous violations of American civil rights in the 20th century. We invite the public to reflect on the victories of the war and also on the moments where we failed our communities and allowed xenophobia cast a dark shadow on a global fight for a common good.
Code Talkers
During World War I, the United States realized that German troops were intercepting and decoding their messages, allow Central Powers to anticipate Allied attacks along the Western Front in France. Stationed along the Western Front at the time was an American regiment containing Choctaw soldiers, and—guessing that the Germans would not know Choctaw—the Choktaw soldiers were called upon to transmit information in their native tongue, a tactic that successfully avoided further communications vulnerabilities. The soldiers earned the nickname of ‘code talkers’ and became known as the Choctaw Telephone Squad.
When the Second World War broke out, the United States military began formally recruiting Native Americans (American Indian) to act as code talkers and send covert communications in their traditional tribal languages. A total of 15 Native nations were enlisted to assist with the task including Cherokee, Choctaw, Comanche, and the famous Navajo (or Diné) code talkers who used their traditional language to transmit secret Allied messages in the Pacific theater of combat during World War II. Ironically, many of the code talkers who were recruited had come from government enforced assimilation programs that removed them from their communities, forced them to attend secular and religious-run boarding schools, and punished them for speaking in their Native language.
The heroic contributions of the code talkers did not come to light for several decades, as their codes remained unbroken and their work remained classified. After the World War II code talker program was declassified in 1968, national recognition of code talkers slowly gained traction in the 1970s and subsequent decades. In 2001, Congressional Gold Medals were given to the Navajo and other code talkers. Aho!
Area:
Central / Downtown
Source:
El Paso Museum of History
Uploaded by:
El Paso Museum of History
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