FDR - Jean Edward Smith [347]
Japanese evacuees were forced to liquidate their property at fire-sale prices. White scavengers went through Japanese-American neighborhoods buying refrigerators for one dollar and washing machines for a quarter.45 The U.S. government made no effort to secure fair prices, guarantee land values, or ensure the safety of goods placed in storage. “I am not concerned about that,” FDR told Morgenthau on March 5, 1942.46 Estimates of Japanese property losses exceeded $400 million in 1942 dollars—the current equivalent of almost $5 billion. After the war Congress provided a meager $37 million in reparations. Forty years later another Congress awarded each surviving detainee an additional $20,000.
Though Roosevelt said he later regretted “the burdens of evacuation and detention which military necessity imposed on these people,” he showed no concern when he signed the measure on February 19.47 “I do not think he was much concerned with the gravity or implications of this step,” wrote Biddle. “He was never theoretical about things. What must be done to defend the country must be done. The military might be wrong. But they were fighting the war. Nor do I think that the constitutional difficulty plagued him—the Constitution has never greatly bothered any wartime President.”48*
The news from the Pacific was all bad and getting worse, and Roosevelt recognized American morale needed a pickup. Could the Army bomb Tokyo? he asked General Hap Arnold shortly after Pearl Harbor. Air planners in the War Department went to work but found no Allied airfield within range. The president turned to Admiral King: Could medium-range bombers, B-25s, take off from a Navy carrier? It sounded like a harebrained stunt, but King and Arnold put their staffs to work and by mid-January concluded that it might be possible. Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle was selected to lead the mission with a force of sixteen B-25s and an all-volunteer crew of airmen.† The B-25s were converted to carry extra fuel, and the pilots were trained to take off at short distances with heavy loads. But it was a gamble—so risky that neither the Army Air Corps nor the Navy dared attempt a practice carrier takeoff beforehand.
In early April the B-25s were lashed to the flight deck of the carrier Hornet, which rendezvoused with Vice Admiral William Halsey’s Task Force 16 a dozen miles north of Midway Island, some 1,100 miles from Honolulu. The task force, which included the carrier Enterprise, four cruisers, eight destroyers, and two tankers, steamed westward through heavy seas to a point 800 miles east of Tokyo, where the Enterprise’s radar picked up a Japanese patrol vessel much further from shore than anticipated. Doolittle had set 650 miles as the outside limit for the launch, but rather than risk discovery by continuing on, he ordered the takeoff immediately. With a forty-knot gale splashing water over the bow of Hornet and only 467 feet of deck in front of him, Doolittle led his planes into the air without mishap. The squadron arrived over Tokyo shortly after noon, dropped its bombs, and flew on toward prearranged landing fields in China. Because of the premature takeoff, none of the planes made it to its scheduled destination. Pilots flew until they were out of fuel and parachuted into Chinese territory. Some were captured by the Japanese. One died in prison, and three were executed after a show trial in which they were charged with attacking civilian targets. But of the eighty men who had volunteered for the mission, seventy-one survived.49
The damage in Tokyo was minimal. But the psychological impact was enormous. FDR was at Hyde Park working on his next fireside chat on April 18 when he received an urgent phone call from Washington. An intercepted Japanese radio broadcast had just reported in a tone of near hysteria that American planes were bombing Tokyo. A grin crossed Roosevelt’s face as he put in a call to White House press secretary Steve Early. Anticipating the questions that would be asked and savoring