Conscientious Objectors and the Second World War
From Chapter 6: The Challenge of World War II:
In gaining an adequate picture of World War II pacifism, it is imperative to know how COs understand the events that convince non-pacifists that war is the only answer, and to find out why COs feel these events are insufficient to justify war. The pertinent events in the World War II context can be reduced to three interlocking challenges to pacifism: the attack on Pearl Harbor (often seen by non-pacifists as an unprovoked foreign invasion in American soil), the threat of fascism to democratic freedoms (interpreted as the need to secure certain social values), and the Holocaust (understood as the obligation to protect innocents). Generally speaking, the greatest challenge to pacifism in the minds of non-pacifists during World War Ii was the attack on Pearl Harbor, since it was most effective at galvanizing American public opinion behind the war. fascism was probably the great threat to pacifists from their own point of view, since pacifism was essentially a liberal democratic movement prior to the war. In retrospect, however, the Holocaust is unquestionably the prime threat to pacifism posed by World War II, in the minds of pacifists and non-pacifists alike. It is the Holocaust that puts the bite into the challenge "What about Hitler?"
When COs seek to interpret the events of World War II and determine the appropriate pacifist response to them, they give specific arguments very like those discussed earlier in general terms. First, they examine the roots of World War II, and find them in the same unsavory places as they do in all wars. Emphasis is placed on how the United States (or more generally, the Allies) bears responsibility for exacerbating the conflicts that led Germany and Japan to war, and on U.S. violations of the conventions of war. Atrocities on the enemy's side are interpreted as a feature of war rather than a reason to go to war. At any rate, COs argue, war is ill-suited to preventing atrocity. Next, COs maintain that World War II is an example of the general truth that "bad means produce bad ends," because World War II failed to achieve its goals; and on the other hand, that pacifism (and its good means) provide an opportunity for good ends, even in the difficult circumstances of World War II. Some more unusual arguments also surfaced, including those offered by COs who favored the Allies in World War II, although they felt unable to actively participate in the fighting, and also some that illustrate why particular COs may not have responded to the challenge of World War II as did most Americans. Finally, COs reflect on how and to what degree their pacifism was threatened by World War II, and how they have either answered or ignored this threat in the intervening years.
The conscientious objector's first line of defense against the challenge raised by World War II is to point out areas of U.S. complicity in the war. This corresponds to the tendency noted earlier among COs to insist that in any conflict there is guilt on both sides and to draw special attention to the guilt on one's own side. COs repeatedly made the argument that the conventional interpretation of the origins of World War II is a self-serving one invented by the winners of that war, and that in reality the Allies were not innocent parties roused to wrath by the abuses of the Axis powers, but equal partners with them in creating the crime of war.
This revisionist history begins with the attack on Pearl Harbor. COs suggest that it was not the infamous sneak attack so beloved by the American press, but an attack that was provoked, even invited, by the United States. as Cal Edinger says, "Any serious student knew that things were coming to a head [with Japan]. All kinds of crazy things were happening. And there was a price to be paid for what we had done . . . for our world politics. They were not proving out."[1] A number of COs cited specific misdeeds of the United States in relation to Japan, particularly that the United States had been exploiting the war between Japan and China by selling scrap iron to Japan for their weaponry.[2] Others claimed that the United States had taken an aggressive posture toward Japan, that “the U.S. had been sinking Japanese ships in the Pacific, on sight and without warning, and firing on Japanese aircraft,” and that the reason the United States naval fleet was stationed in Pearl Harbor was in preparation for an attack on Japan. As Paul Delp put it, “The Japanese just beat us to the punch . . . and bombed us before we bombed them.”[3] In a letter to friends in 1945, Gordon and Gale Nutson took this form of reasoning a step further, giving this litany of American political and economic abuses of Japanese sovereignty dating back nearly a hundred years:
Just when did the United States and Japan start fighting? Was it on December 7, 1941 when Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor, or on December 5, 1941 when newspapers headlined “U.S. TELLS JAPAN, ‘BACK DOWN OR FIGHT’?” Have we been at war since July 1941 when we finally shut off the supplies we were sending to Japan and completely froze all her assets in this country? Or did the war begin in 1924 when we passed the Oriental Exclusion acts, refusing the yellow people the right to become U.S. citizens? Or did it begin when U.S. forced Japan to agree to free trade in China but did not force the British to give free trade in Hong Kong or Singapore, and did not give anyone free trade in the Philippines or the United States? Or did the war begin in 1931 when Japanese industrialists and army officers decided they wanted some closed door colonies like the United States, British and Dutch already had, and attached Manchuria? Or did it begin with our first official contact with Japan, when Admiral Perry sailed into Yedo Bay in 1853 with a navy that Japan couldn’t match and demanded a past for America’s use, and free trade in Japan?[4]
The pacifist reinterpretation of the attack on Pearl Harbor goes beyond the ways in which the United States provoked the attack to argue that the attack was actually welcomed by the Roosevelt administration as an excuse for breaking down American isolationist sentiment and persuading the United States to intervene in the war. A few COs suspected that the attack was actually invited by the United States as a propaganda device to promote American intervention. For example, Gordon Kaufman remembers being convinced at the time by pacifist literature that came out immediately after the attack that argued that “Roosevelt was making all kinds of moves to try to set up an episode that could be an excuse to get us into the war. . . . [This] was part of the American attempt to justify getting into a war that was unjustified.”[5] Much more common was the view that Roosevelt did not purposely invite the attack, but he did know when and where it was coming several days in advance because the government had cracked the Japanese military code and intercepted its signals. According to this interpretation, Roosevelt did nothing to prevent the attack, but rather ensured that it would be as devastating as possible so that there would be no choice but for the United States to declare war. Several COs described Pearl Harbor as “the perfect excuse” or “a godsend” as far as Roosevelt was concerned, and one CO mentioned that his brother, who had been in the army at the time, knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor in advance, along with most of the rest of the military.[6] Other COs were more reluctant to accuse the government of malice and foreknowledge with regard to the attack on Pearl Harbor, but they retained a degree of suspicion, making comments such as, “I think the public at large never gets the explanation as to what’s going on on the telephone and behind the scenes,” and “I think that they [politicians] have a lot to cover up, and they do their best to do it.”[7]
Pacifist revisionist history begins with Hitler in the same way that it began with Pearl Harbor: by telling a different story about the origin of the conflicts that led to war. Repeatedly, COs I interviewed stressed U.S. complicity in the rise of Hitler, assisting that Hitler never could have come to power if not for the Allies, and could have been stopped far earlier and without the expedient of war had the Allies chosen to make this their goal. COs constantly referred to the events that made the atmosphere ripe for Hitler’s rise to power, particularly emphasizing the unjust settlement of World War I in the Treaty of Versailles, and the World War I food blockades that left Germany a shambles both economically and psychologically. One CO quoted Kirby Page favorably and expressed a sentiment many COs would echo: “Hitler caused the war, but the Allies caused Hitler.”[8] Some COs referred specifically to provocative actions on the part of the United States when it was still technically neutral to the conflict in Europe (such as relaying position reports on German submarines to the Allies) and saw these as part of the continuing animosity that finally exploded into world war.[9]
COs offered a number of reasons for why and how the United States encouraged the rise of Hitler, and these were in keeping with the general pacifist diagnosis of the causes of war. First, the United States saw an economic advantage to be gained in the war, an advantage that was tremendously important in an era of economic depression. They financed the re-arming of Germany not only up to the start of hostilities, but even for some time afterward. As Gordon Nutson explains:
Of course they [Germany] didn’t have any money, so what had to happen is that you had to have investments from the United States and England. And so actually this is where the money came from to support the war machine in terms of the manufacturing to produce the equipment for war, to assist in the war effort as far as Germany was concerned. Well, as late as the Germans were coming into Paris, dividends were being paid to the British and to investors in England, and investors in the United States.[10]
The desire of the United States for economic advantages cut another way as well: not only did the United States see increased wealth as an effect of war, the United States also helped to cause the war through its economic imperialism. After World War I, the Allies relegated Germany (as well as Japan) to a position of second-class power, and kindled its desire for a larger piece of the economic pie, something Germany could only hope to gain through war since the Allies had no intention of magnanimously sharing the wealth.[11] In addition to economic advantage, COs argue that the United States (and the other Allies) saw a political advantage in encouraging Hitler. Concerned about the communist revolution in Russia, the Western powers hoped that Hitler’s Germany would go to war against the Soviet Union and that in the process they would destroy each other and give all of Europe over to Allied hegemony.[12]
Evidence of Allied complicity in the rise of Hitler is the purported fact that the Allies made no attempt to stop Hitler in the early 1930s when it could still be done relatively easily. As Arthur Bryant argues, “If we were going to get concerned about Hitler, the time to get concerned about him really was when he was beginning to get a foothold, and there were many in this country who were supportive of his role.”[13]
COs also accused the United States of falsely representing its reasons for fighting World War II. At the time of the war, the government justified its actions as part of a commitment to preserving democracy and preventing tyranny and oppression. This justification was challenged by COs who saw the United States undermining democracy and oppressing minorities within its own borders, or gladly tolerating tyranny in some countries while insisting on war to prevent it in others. Wally Nelson recalls the treatment of blacks in the 1930s and 1940s, and discounts the veracity of wartime propaganda which claimed to be fighting a war for freedom:
If there ever was a holy war, a good war, World War II was supposed to have been that for people in this country and the Allies. However, the thing that I thought about immediately, the same government that were the good guys was the same government that was carrying on oppression all over the world. . . . so I could not be convinced that such a government was interested in and for freedom. Matter of fact, I knew this, that most of them was not interested in and for freedom, I knew this. They couldn’t have been. Here I’m sitting on top of you, oppressing you, and I’m telling people I’m interested in freedom for people, and I’m sitting right on top of you. It doesn’t make sense.[14]
Another CO, Roy Mast, asked why the United States made no attempt to stop the persecution of Russians by their own government, suggesting that if the United States really cared about protecting minorities, it would do so wherever there was oppression, and not just in Nazi Germany.[15]
Whatever the stated war aims of the United States were at the time of the war, in retrospect much of the popular justification of World War Ii has rested on interpreting the war as a mission to save the Jews. The CO objection to this argument is that this is a fanciful reconstruction of history (and a very convenient one for those who wish to proclaim Allied righteousness). As Dwight Hanawalt explains, “I don’t think we went into the war because of what was happening to the Jews. I think that ended up to be a real neat package. . . . That’s something that has given us a good rationale now, but I don’t think it was a very good one at the time.”[16] COs support this contention by pointing out how the United States turned away Jewish refugees before and during the war, and how the Allies as a group turned a blind eye to the Holocaust until it was far too late. Several COs related a story about a boatload of Jewish refugees who were not allowed ashore in the United States (and several other countries they tried) and who finally turned around to head back to Germany, only to be sunk by Nazi submarines in the middle of the ocean.[17] Some COs intimated that the Allies were as anti-Semitic as the Germans, and quite happy to let Hitler carry on his persecutions.[18] David Koven, interviewed for Against the Tide states the revisionist history most succinctly: “The truth is that the capitalist countries even at the height of the oppression of the Jews cared less about the Jews than they cared about using Jews for propagandistic purposes.”[19]
[1] Cal Edinger, interview with author, 25 February 1987, San Gabriel, California.
[2] Gordon Nutson, interview with author, 25 September 1986, Modesto, California; Carl Paulson, interview with author, 23 April 1987, Upton, Massachusetts.
[3] Dave Dellinger, “Introduction,” in Against the Tide: Pacifist Resistance in the Second World War, an Oral History, Deena Hurwitz and Craig Simpson, eds. (New York: War Resisters League, 1984); Paul Delp, interview with author, 3 March 1987, Orange, Callifornia. It would appear that Dellinger has the Pacific and Atlantic wars confused: the United States was involved prior to Pearl Harbor in attacks on the German fleet, but not on the Japanese fleet.
[4] Gordon and Gale Nutson, letter to friends, 5 February 1945, privately held.
[5] Gordon Kaufman, interview with author, 29 April 1987, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
[6] Herman Wilkinson, interview with author, 23 February 1987, Whittier, California.
[7] Harry Prochaska, interview with author, 1 October 1986, San Francisco, California.
[8] Joe Dell, interview with author, 27 September 1986, Modesto, California.
[9] Howard Bogen, interview with author, 9 September 1986, Pasadena, California.
[10] Gordon Nutson, interview with author, 25 September 1986, Modesto, California.
[11] Howard Ten Brink, interview with author, 24 September 1986, Modesto, California; Jim Peck, We Who Would Not Kill (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1958), 64.
[12] George Reeves, quoted in Against the Tide, Hurwitz and Simpson, eds.
[13] Arthur Bryant, self-interview answering author’s questions, May 1987.
[14] Wallace Nelson, interviewed by Deena Hurwitz for Against the Tide, privately held.
[15] Roy Mast, self-interview answering author’s questions, May 1987.
[16] Dwight Hanawalt, interview with author, 10 September 1986, La Verne, California.
[17] Dave Dellinger, “Introduction,” in Against the Tide, Hurwitz and Simpson, eds.
[18] See, for example, Dwight Hanawalt, interview with author, 10 September 1986.
[19] David Koven, quoted in Against the Tide, Hurwitz and Simpson, eds.
From Chapter 6: The Challenge of World War II:
In gaining an adequate picture of World War II pacifism, it is imperative to know how COs understand the events that convince non-pacifists that war is the only answer, and to find out why COs feel these events are insufficient to justify war. The pertinent events in the World War II context can be reduced to three interlocking challenges to pacifism: the attack on Pearl Harbor (often seen by non-pacifists as an unprovoked foreign invasion in American soil), the threat of fascism to democratic freedoms (interpreted as the need to secure certain social values), and the Holocaust (understood as the obligation to protect innocents). Generally speaking, the greatest challenge to pacifism in the minds of non-pacifists during World War Ii was the attack on Pearl Harbor, since it was most effective at galvanizing American public opinion behind the war. fascism was probably the great threat to pacifists from their own point of view, since pacifism was essentially a liberal democratic movement prior to the war. In retrospect, however, the Holocaust is unquestionably the prime threat to pacifism posed by World War II, in the minds of pacifists and non-pacifists alike. It is the Holocaust that puts the bite into the challenge "What about Hitler?"
When COs seek to interpret the events of World War II and determine the appropriate pacifist response to them, they give specific arguments very like those discussed earlier in general terms. First, they examine the roots of World War II, and find them in the same unsavory places as they do in all wars. Emphasis is placed on how the United States (or more generally, the Allies) bears responsibility for exacerbating the conflicts that led Germany and Japan to war, and on U.S. violations of the conventions of war. Atrocities on the enemy's side are interpreted as a feature of war rather than a reason to go to war. At any rate, COs argue, war is ill-suited to preventing atrocity. Next, COs maintain that World War II is an example of the general truth that "bad means produce bad ends," because World War II failed to achieve its goals; and on the other hand, that pacifism (and its good means) provide an opportunity for good ends, even in the difficult circumstances of World War II. Some more unusual arguments also surfaced, including those offered by COs who favored the Allies in World War II, although they felt unable to actively participate in the fighting, and also some that illustrate why particular COs may not have responded to the challenge of World War II as did most Americans. Finally, COs reflect on how and to what degree their pacifism was threatened by World War II, and how they have either answered or ignored this threat in the intervening years.
The conscientious objector's first line of defense against the challenge raised by World War II is to point out areas of U.S. complicity in the war. This corresponds to the tendency noted earlier among COs to insist that in any conflict there is guilt on both sides and to draw special attention to the guilt on one's own side. COs repeatedly made the argument that the conventional interpretation of the origins of World War II is a self-serving one invented by the winners of that war, and that in reality the Allies were not innocent parties roused to wrath by the abuses of the Axis powers, but equal partners with them in creating the crime of war.
This revisionist history begins with the attack on Pearl Harbor. COs suggest that it was not the infamous sneak attack so beloved by the American press, but an attack that was provoked, even invited, by the United States. as Cal Edinger says, "Any serious student knew that things were coming to a head [with Japan]. All kinds of crazy things were happening. And there was a price to be paid for what we had done . . . for our world politics. They were not proving out."[1] A number of COs cited specific misdeeds of the United States in relation to Japan, particularly that the United States had been exploiting the war between Japan and China by selling scrap iron to Japan for their weaponry.[2] Others claimed that the United States had taken an aggressive posture toward Japan, that “the U.S. had been sinking Japanese ships in the Pacific, on sight and without warning, and firing on Japanese aircraft,” and that the reason the United States naval fleet was stationed in Pearl Harbor was in preparation for an attack on Japan. As Paul Delp put it, “The Japanese just beat us to the punch . . . and bombed us before we bombed them.”[3] In a letter to friends in 1945, Gordon and Gale Nutson took this form of reasoning a step further, giving this litany of American political and economic abuses of Japanese sovereignty dating back nearly a hundred years:
Just when did the United States and Japan start fighting? Was it on December 7, 1941 when Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor, or on December 5, 1941 when newspapers headlined “U.S. TELLS JAPAN, ‘BACK DOWN OR FIGHT’?” Have we been at war since July 1941 when we finally shut off the supplies we were sending to Japan and completely froze all her assets in this country? Or did the war begin in 1924 when we passed the Oriental Exclusion acts, refusing the yellow people the right to become U.S. citizens? Or did it begin when U.S. forced Japan to agree to free trade in China but did not force the British to give free trade in Hong Kong or Singapore, and did not give anyone free trade in the Philippines or the United States? Or did the war begin in 1931 when Japanese industrialists and army officers decided they wanted some closed door colonies like the United States, British and Dutch already had, and attached Manchuria? Or did it begin with our first official contact with Japan, when Admiral Perry sailed into Yedo Bay in 1853 with a navy that Japan couldn’t match and demanded a past for America’s use, and free trade in Japan?[4]
The pacifist reinterpretation of the attack on Pearl Harbor goes beyond the ways in which the United States provoked the attack to argue that the attack was actually welcomed by the Roosevelt administration as an excuse for breaking down American isolationist sentiment and persuading the United States to intervene in the war. A few COs suspected that the attack was actually invited by the United States as a propaganda device to promote American intervention. For example, Gordon Kaufman remembers being convinced at the time by pacifist literature that came out immediately after the attack that argued that “Roosevelt was making all kinds of moves to try to set up an episode that could be an excuse to get us into the war. . . . [This] was part of the American attempt to justify getting into a war that was unjustified.”[5] Much more common was the view that Roosevelt did not purposely invite the attack, but he did know when and where it was coming several days in advance because the government had cracked the Japanese military code and intercepted its signals. According to this interpretation, Roosevelt did nothing to prevent the attack, but rather ensured that it would be as devastating as possible so that there would be no choice but for the United States to declare war. Several COs described Pearl Harbor as “the perfect excuse” or “a godsend” as far as Roosevelt was concerned, and one CO mentioned that his brother, who had been in the army at the time, knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor in advance, along with most of the rest of the military.[6] Other COs were more reluctant to accuse the government of malice and foreknowledge with regard to the attack on Pearl Harbor, but they retained a degree of suspicion, making comments such as, “I think the public at large never gets the explanation as to what’s going on on the telephone and behind the scenes,” and “I think that they [politicians] have a lot to cover up, and they do their best to do it.”[7]
Pacifist revisionist history begins with Hitler in the same way that it began with Pearl Harbor: by telling a different story about the origin of the conflicts that led to war. Repeatedly, COs I interviewed stressed U.S. complicity in the rise of Hitler, assisting that Hitler never could have come to power if not for the Allies, and could have been stopped far earlier and without the expedient of war had the Allies chosen to make this their goal. COs constantly referred to the events that made the atmosphere ripe for Hitler’s rise to power, particularly emphasizing the unjust settlement of World War I in the Treaty of Versailles, and the World War I food blockades that left Germany a shambles both economically and psychologically. One CO quoted Kirby Page favorably and expressed a sentiment many COs would echo: “Hitler caused the war, but the Allies caused Hitler.”[8] Some COs referred specifically to provocative actions on the part of the United States when it was still technically neutral to the conflict in Europe (such as relaying position reports on German submarines to the Allies) and saw these as part of the continuing animosity that finally exploded into world war.[9]
COs offered a number of reasons for why and how the United States encouraged the rise of Hitler, and these were in keeping with the general pacifist diagnosis of the causes of war. First, the United States saw an economic advantage to be gained in the war, an advantage that was tremendously important in an era of economic depression. They financed the re-arming of Germany not only up to the start of hostilities, but even for some time afterward. As Gordon Nutson explains:
Of course they [Germany] didn’t have any money, so what had to happen is that you had to have investments from the United States and England. And so actually this is where the money came from to support the war machine in terms of the manufacturing to produce the equipment for war, to assist in the war effort as far as Germany was concerned. Well, as late as the Germans were coming into Paris, dividends were being paid to the British and to investors in England, and investors in the United States.[10]
The desire of the United States for economic advantages cut another way as well: not only did the United States see increased wealth as an effect of war, the United States also helped to cause the war through its economic imperialism. After World War I, the Allies relegated Germany (as well as Japan) to a position of second-class power, and kindled its desire for a larger piece of the economic pie, something Germany could only hope to gain through war since the Allies had no intention of magnanimously sharing the wealth.[11] In addition to economic advantage, COs argue that the United States (and the other Allies) saw a political advantage in encouraging Hitler. Concerned about the communist revolution in Russia, the Western powers hoped that Hitler’s Germany would go to war against the Soviet Union and that in the process they would destroy each other and give all of Europe over to Allied hegemony.[12]
Evidence of Allied complicity in the rise of Hitler is the purported fact that the Allies made no attempt to stop Hitler in the early 1930s when it could still be done relatively easily. As Arthur Bryant argues, “If we were going to get concerned about Hitler, the time to get concerned about him really was when he was beginning to get a foothold, and there were many in this country who were supportive of his role.”[13]
COs also accused the United States of falsely representing its reasons for fighting World War II. At the time of the war, the government justified its actions as part of a commitment to preserving democracy and preventing tyranny and oppression. This justification was challenged by COs who saw the United States undermining democracy and oppressing minorities within its own borders, or gladly tolerating tyranny in some countries while insisting on war to prevent it in others. Wally Nelson recalls the treatment of blacks in the 1930s and 1940s, and discounts the veracity of wartime propaganda which claimed to be fighting a war for freedom:
If there ever was a holy war, a good war, World War II was supposed to have been that for people in this country and the Allies. However, the thing that I thought about immediately, the same government that were the good guys was the same government that was carrying on oppression all over the world. . . . so I could not be convinced that such a government was interested in and for freedom. Matter of fact, I knew this, that most of them was not interested in and for freedom, I knew this. They couldn’t have been. Here I’m sitting on top of you, oppressing you, and I’m telling people I’m interested in freedom for people, and I’m sitting right on top of you. It doesn’t make sense.[14]
Another CO, Roy Mast, asked why the United States made no attempt to stop the persecution of Russians by their own government, suggesting that if the United States really cared about protecting minorities, it would do so wherever there was oppression, and not just in Nazi Germany.[15]
Whatever the stated war aims of the United States were at the time of the war, in retrospect much of the popular justification of World War Ii has rested on interpreting the war as a mission to save the Jews. The CO objection to this argument is that this is a fanciful reconstruction of history (and a very convenient one for those who wish to proclaim Allied righteousness). As Dwight Hanawalt explains, “I don’t think we went into the war because of what was happening to the Jews. I think that ended up to be a real neat package. . . . That’s something that has given us a good rationale now, but I don’t think it was a very good one at the time.”[16] COs support this contention by pointing out how the United States turned away Jewish refugees before and during the war, and how the Allies as a group turned a blind eye to the Holocaust until it was far too late. Several COs related a story about a boatload of Jewish refugees who were not allowed ashore in the United States (and several other countries they tried) and who finally turned around to head back to Germany, only to be sunk by Nazi submarines in the middle of the ocean.[17] Some COs intimated that the Allies were as anti-Semitic as the Germans, and quite happy to let Hitler carry on his persecutions.[18] David Koven, interviewed for Against the Tide states the revisionist history most succinctly: “The truth is that the capitalist countries even at the height of the oppression of the Jews cared less about the Jews than they cared about using Jews for propagandistic purposes.”[19]
[1] Cal Edinger, interview with author, 25 February 1987, San Gabriel, California.
[2] Gordon Nutson, interview with author, 25 September 1986, Modesto, California; Carl Paulson, interview with author, 23 April 1987, Upton, Massachusetts.
[3] Dave Dellinger, “Introduction,” in Against the Tide: Pacifist Resistance in the Second World War, an Oral History, Deena Hurwitz and Craig Simpson, eds. (New York: War Resisters League, 1984); Paul Delp, interview with author, 3 March 1987, Orange, Callifornia. It would appear that Dellinger has the Pacific and Atlantic wars confused: the United States was involved prior to Pearl Harbor in attacks on the German fleet, but not on the Japanese fleet.
[4] Gordon and Gale Nutson, letter to friends, 5 February 1945, privately held.
[5] Gordon Kaufman, interview with author, 29 April 1987, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
[6] Herman Wilkinson, interview with author, 23 February 1987, Whittier, California.
[7] Harry Prochaska, interview with author, 1 October 1986, San Francisco, California.
[8] Joe Dell, interview with author, 27 September 1986, Modesto, California.
[9] Howard Bogen, interview with author, 9 September 1986, Pasadena, California.
[10] Gordon Nutson, interview with author, 25 September 1986, Modesto, California.
[11] Howard Ten Brink, interview with author, 24 September 1986, Modesto, California; Jim Peck, We Who Would Not Kill (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1958), 64.
[12] George Reeves, quoted in Against the Tide, Hurwitz and Simpson, eds.
[13] Arthur Bryant, self-interview answering author’s questions, May 1987.
[14] Wallace Nelson, interviewed by Deena Hurwitz for Against the Tide, privately held.
[15] Roy Mast, self-interview answering author’s questions, May 1987.
[16] Dwight Hanawalt, interview with author, 10 September 1986, La Verne, California.
[17] Dave Dellinger, “Introduction,” in Against the Tide, Hurwitz and Simpson, eds.
[18] See, for example, Dwight Hanawalt, interview with author, 10 September 1986.
[19] David Koven, quoted in Against the Tide, Hurwitz and Simpson, eds.
