On this day in 1942, a special Northern Pacific passenger train arrived in Bismarck from the West Coast. It was “special” because it was not a regularly scheduled train. The passengers had not planned the trip or paid the fare. It was arranged for them. When they boarded the train, they had no idea where they were going, and when they disembarked in Bismarck, they had no idea where they were. They were simply following orders given by the authorities…terse orders. The submachine guns spoke volumes.

The passengers all had two things in common—they were of Japanese ancestry, and their names were on lists prepared by the FBI over the past two years. The United States was at war with Japan, Germany, and Italy. People with ties to those countries were considered by the U. S. government to be potentially dangerous. They were labeled “enemy aliens.” Oddly, some were labeled “non-aliens,” meaning they were American citizens who happened to have a genetic link to the enemy. They were ordinary people who up to now had been living ordinary lives. Many would have been willing to help defend the U.S. from attack, if called on.

This day was just two months and two days after the Japanese Navy’s surprise attack on the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor. Americans were angry at the Japanese, and fearful of attacks within the United States. The order had come from Washington to begin rounding up Japanese Americans. They were to be imprisoned in specially prepared camps in remote locations around the country. Bismarck’s Fort Lincoln was one such place. (Not the Ft. Lincoln south of Mandan where Custer and the 7th Cavalry were quartered, but the newer Ft. Lincoln on the Bismarck side of the Missouri.)

The Bismarck Tribune echoed the prejudices and fears of Americans by labeling the prisoners “Japs” in the headline, and completely embraced the “alien” concept by calling them “little yellow men.” The newspaper reported, “Four hundred and fifteen Japanese enemy aliens arrived here Monday and were whisked out to the Fort Lincoln internment camp a mile south of the city…”

“Although officials refused to comment, it was understood most if not all of the internees came from the California area, which was borne out by the fact few had even topcoats to wear. Ringed by a cordon of federal immigration patrolmen armed with sub-machine guns, the little yellow men scrambled out of the coaches, 25 at a time, were put in guarded trucks and rushed out to the internment camp.”

“The Japanese aliens were placed in a 10-foot high wire-mesh fence enclosure, separated from that occupied by the German internees…The arrival of the Japanese occasioned surprise here as it had previously been understood only German aliens would be kept in the 2,000 capacity internment camp.”

“As each truck was loaded, it was accompanied to the camp by a squad car from the Burleigh county sheriff’s office, highway patrolmen or immigration officials. Most of the Japanese showed no emotion. A few laughed and many shivered as a sharp wind from the north cut through the thin clothing most of them wore...”

One of the Japanese internees later described the living quarters at the camp, “Divided in to groups of forty we were guided into a barracks that was twenty feet wide and one hundred feet long. There were twenty army style bunks along each wall and a partition at the far end with toilets and showers.”Over the course of the war, the barracks of Ft. Lincoln would be home to 3,850 German and Japanese internees—North Dakota’s portion of over 30,000 so-called “enemy aliens” who were imprisoned in Justice Department camps around the U.S. between 1941 and 1946.

Source:
Christgau, John. “Enemies: World War II Alien Internment” Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press 1985.
http://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/93spring/further.htm\
“415 Jap Aliens Arrive at Fort” Bismarck Tribune 9 Feb 1942, p.1
“415 Japs Are Brought To Ft. Lincoln” The Fargo Forum 10 Feb 1942, p.5

This text and audio may not be copied without securing prior permission from North Dakota Public Radio.