Late January 1942: The government releases a report about the Pearl Harbor attack, prepared by U. S. Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts. The report alleges without documentation that espionage agents in Hawaii, including Japanese-American citizens, helped the Japanese naval force that attacked Pearl Harbor.

February

February 10, 1942: Secretary of War Henry Stimson writes in his diary: "The second generation Japanese can only be evacuated either as part of a total evacuation, giving access to the areas only by permits, or by frankly trying to put them out on the ground that their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or even trust the citizen Japanese. This latter is the fact but I am afraid it will make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system to apply it."

C. February 10, 1942: Attorney General Francis Biddle is advised by agency lawyers that removal of people of Japanese descent from Pacific Coast areas would be a legal exercise of the President's war powers.

February 11, 1942: Secretary of War Henry Stimson calls President Roosevelt and recommends the mass evacuation of people of Japanese descent from the Pacific Coast area. Roosevelt tells Stimson to do whatever he believes is necessary.

February 12, 1942: Columnist Walter Lippmann publishes a nationally syndicated column in which he says, "The Pacific Coast is in imminent danger of a combined attack from within and from without". The Japanese navy has been reconnoitering the coast more or less continuously. The Pacific Coast is officially a combat zone; some part of it may at any moment be a battlefield. Nobody's constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield. And nobody ought to be on a battlefield who has no good reason for being there."

February 13, 1942: Members of Congress from the Pacific Coast send President Roosevelt a letter in which they recommend the "immediate evacuation of all persons of Japanese lineage" aliens and citizens alike from the entire strategic area of California, Washington, and Oregon.

February 14, 1942: The U. S. Army’s Western Defense Command sends a memorandum to the Secretary of War recommending the evacuation of “Japanese and other subversive persons” from the Pacific Coast area. February 19, 1942: President Franklin D. Roosevelt issues Executive Order 9066, which empowers the Secretary of War or any military commander authorized by him to designate “military areas” and exclude “any and all persons” from them. Shortly before signing the Executive Order, the President received a memorandum from his advisers which said, “In time of national peril, any reasonable doubt must be resolved in favor of action to preserve the national safety, not for the purpose of punishing those whose liberty may be temporarily affected by such action, but for the purpose of protecting the freedom of the nation, which may be long impaired, if not permanently lost, by nonaction.”

February 23, 1942: A Japanese submarine shells an oil refinery near Santa Barbara, California, causing little damage. Another Japanese submarine shelled the Oregon coast on June 21, 1942, causing little damage. A submarine launched aircraft dropped two incendiary bombs in the forest near Brookings, Oregon on September 9, 1942, and another two bombs were dropped by the same aircraft in the Oregon forest about three weeks later. Neither bombing caused significant damage. These four incidents are the only authenticated Japanese attacks on the American mainland during World War II.

March

March 2, 1942: The Western Defense Command issues a proclamation which designates the western halves of California, Oregon, and Washington, and the southern third of Arizona as a military area and states that all persons of Japanese descent are to be removed from this area. Through the month of March 1942, people affected by this proclamation are allowed to move to new homes of their own choosing outside the military area, and about 8,000 people in fact move outside the military area during the month.

March 18, 1942: President Franklin D. Roosevelt issues Executive Order 9102, which establishes the War Relocation Authority (WRA) within the Department for Emergency Management. The WRA is empowered “to provide for the removal from designated areas of persons whose removal is necessary in the interests of national security….” The WRA is further empowered to provide for evacuees’ relocation and their needs, to supervise their activities, and to provide for their useful employment. Milton S. Eisenhower is named director of the WRA.

March 21, 1942:President Roosevelt signs Public Law 77-503, which makes it a federal crime for a person ordered to leave a military area to refuse to do so.

March 22, 1942:The first removal of people of Japanese descent from the designated Pacific Coast area occurs. The people are from the Los Angeles area; they are sent to the Manzanar relocation center in northeastern California. The center comprises a 6000 acre site, enclosed by barbed wire fencing, and within that site a 560 acre residential site with guard towers, search lights, and machine gun installations. During the next eighteen months, about 120,000 people of Japanese descent are removed from the Pacific Coast area to ten relocation centers in California, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arkansas.

March 27 to 30, 1942: The Western Defense Command issues proclamations which severely restrict the movements of persons of Japanese descent in the Pacific Coast military area, and which prohibit them from leaving the military area. The Western Defense Command had decided that allowing people of Japanese descent to leave the military area and go wherever they chose was creating too much disturbance and opposition among local people.

April 7, 1942: A meeting of WRA officials with representatives of eleven western states convenes in Salt Lake City, Utah. The representatives for the most part express distrust of and dislike for the people of Japanese descent who were being evacuated to their states. The WRA concludes that, because of this hostile local opinion, the evacuees from the Pacific Coast must be housed in evacuation camps guarded by the Army. During the meeting, the governor of Wyoming told the director of the WRA, “If you bring Japanese into my state, I promise you they will be hanging from every tree.”

Spring 1942: WRA administrators divide the people of Japanese descent in the Pacific Coast military zone into three categories: (1) Issei, immigrant Japanese born in Japan (about 40,000 in the military zone); (2) Nisei, American born and educated children of Issei parents (about 63,000 in the military zone); and (3) Kibei, American born but educated wholly or partly in Japan (about 9,000 in the military zone). A fourth category was Sansei, second generation American born, the children of the Nisei (about 4,500 in the military zone).

Spring 1942: The WRA begins releasing college students, agricultural laborers, and linguists from the relocation centers on a temporary basis.

June

June 17, 1942: Dillon S. Myer is named director of the WRA, succeeding Milton S. Eisenhower. Myer served as director until the agency’s program was completed in 1946.

August

August 7, 1942: The Western Defense Command announces the completion of its removal of people of Japanese descent from the Pacific Coast military area.

September

Ca. September 1942:The WRA decides that its purpose must be to resettle the evacuees in new homes well outside the Pacific Coast military area, not to detain them indefinitely in the relocation centers. By the end of 1944, about 30,000 evacuees had been resettled in new homes, primarily in states such as Illinois, Colorado, Ohio, Utah, Idaho, Michigan, Minnesota, and New York.