Incarceration and Martial Law on the World War II Home Front

Within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President declared all Japanese, Italian and German nationals in the United States enemy aliens, and the Governor of the Territory of Hawai'i declared martial law. Over the next four years the federal government confined hundreds of thousands of people — some of them citizens, none of them charged with a crime — in camps and prisons across the country. This is an overview of who was held, where, and how.

Enemy aliens

Several thousand people the FBI had already identified as allegedly dangerous were arrested at once. Hundreds of thousands more had to register as enemy aliens and carry their papers at all times, obey travel limits and curfews, and in many cases move away from their homes, especially near the coasts. Some lost property, including fishing boats that were their livelihood; all were barred from owning cameras, weapons, flashlights and short-wave radios.

The Greenbrier Historic Resort Hotel, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The US State Department used the hotel as an enemy alien detention site for diplomats and other high value detainees. Photo by Carol Highsmith, 2015. Collection of the Library of Congress (https://www.loc.gov/item/2015634494.

By the end of the war the government had held more than 31,000 suspected enemy aliens and their families, not counting those sent to War Relocation Authority centers — including more than 6,600 people brought from Latin American countries at the FBI's request under the "Good Neighbors" program. Most were German or Japanese, with a few hundred Italians. The Department of Justice ran most of the camps; the Army and the State Department, which used resort hotels to hold diplomats and other high-value detainees, ran others.

Japanese Americans

In February 1942, Executive Order 9066 created "military areas" across California and parts of Oregon, Washington and Arizona from which people — citizens included — could be excluded. It was used to justify the forced removal of everyone of Japanese descent. About 120,000 people with as little as one-sixteenth Japanese ancestry — a single great-grandparent — were sent to War Relocation Authority centers; about 70,000 of them were American citizens. None was charged, and apart from the courts there was no way to appeal removal or the seizure of property.

With only 48 hours' notice, most lost everything they could not carry, though some white Americans held possessions for them until after the war. Families were given numbers, wore number tags, and were bused or taken by train to assembly centers at fairgrounds and racetracks ringed with barbed wire, searchlights and guard towers, where some lived in converted horse stalls — for an average of 100 days.

Military police in the grandstand watchtower at the Santa Anita Park assembly center, April 6, 1942. Many people held there lived in the horse stalls at left. Credit: Clem Albers, War Relocation Authority; National Archives (NAID 537019).

In the relocation centers, four or five families shared each tar-papered barrack. Many worked in the camps or on farms beyond the fences for up to $19 a month, far below outside wages. So-called "troublemakers" were sent to the higher-security center at Tule Lake, California. Archaeology at the camps shows Japanese cultural life persisting — sumo, gardens, and illicit sake-making. The last center closed in 1948. In 1982 a federal commission found the incarceration had stemmed from "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership."

Alaska Natives

After Japan invaded the Aleutian Islands, more than 800 Alaska Natives were forcibly relocated "for their own safety," allowed a bag and a blanket each, and shipped thousands of miles to southern Alaska, where they were held in terrible conditions until 1945. Almost 120 Unangax̂ died in the U.S. camps; about half of those taken to Japan as prisoners also died. Many survivors were not allowed to go home.

Prisoners of war

The Old Bayfield County Courthouse, now headquarters of Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, housed prisoners of war. Credit: National Park Service.

The United States held more than 425,000 prisoners of war — mostly Germans, with tens of thousands of Italians and thousands of Japanese — in more than 700 camps. Unlike enemy aliens and Japanese Americans, they were protected by the Geneva Convention: well fed, clothed, and given the same medical and dental care as U.S. troops, which many Americans resented. Up to 265,000 were leased out to fill labor shortages, mostly in farming, meatpacking and canning. Farmers paid the government 45 cents an hour per prisoner (about $8 in 2023 money); the prisoners earned 80 cents a day (about $14), paid in camp scrip so they would have no cash if they escaped.

When Italy surrendered in September 1943 and declared war on Germany, Italian prisoners were freed from the Geneva Convention's limits on military work. Many volunteered for more than 200 Italian Service Units, with more freedom and part of their pay in dollars; the rest stayed prisoners until the war ended.

Americans held by the enemy

The "98 Rock" on Wake Island, carved "98 US PW 5-10-42" by an escapee near the mass grave of 98 American civilians. Credit: Tech. Sgt. Shane A. Cuomo, U.S. Air Force.

Japan sent captured American troops to prison camps in Japan, China and elsewhere, while civilians came under often brutal control. In Manila, the University of Santo Tomas became an internment camp. On Wake Island, 98 American civilian contractors were forced to rebuild the airstrip, then blindfolded, killed and buried in a mass grave; an escapee carved the date in a rock before he was caught and beheaded. On Guam, civilians suffered starvation, rape, murder and forced labor, and near the end up to 15,000 Chamorro were marched to camps such as Manenggon, with little shelter, food or care, until American forces freed them in July 1944.

Conscientious objectors

Under the Selective Service Act of 1940, objectors to combat served in noncombat military roles, and those opposed to all military service did unpaid "work of national importance under civilian direction." More than 70,000 draftees claimed objector status. About 25,000 served in noncombat duty, and 12,000 went to more than 150 Civilian Public Service camps — the first, Patapsco in Maryland, opened on May 15, 1941 — farming, building roads and staffing mental hospitals, logging over 8 million days of work. Some served as "human guinea pigs" in government experiments on starvation, cold, altitude and malaria. More than 6,000 men who refused to serve at all went to prison. The camps closed in March 1947.

Martial law in Hawai'i

Martial law suspended everyone's constitutional rights and put all legal authority in the Army's hands. The Army censored the press, long-distance calls, cables and civilian mail, imposed a curfew and blackout, and registered and fingerprinted every civilian except small children. Many residents of Japanese descent lost their jobs. Military courts replaced civilian ones, with no juries; 99 percent of an estimated 55,000 civilian cases ended in guilty verdicts. Some civil government returned in March 1943, but martial law lasted until October 1944 — "a wholesale and wanton violation of constitutional liberties," the Supreme Court said in a ruling toward the end of the war.

Sources

Based on "The American Home Front During World War II: Incarceration and Martial Law" by Megan E. Springate (University of Maryland), for the National Park Service Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education; a work of the United States government in the public domain. It is part of the series The American Home Front and World War II and draws on the report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (1982), National Archives records, and the historians and archaeologists cited in its notes. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.