Yesterday marked the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor and to commemorate, MSNBC posted a slew of photographs taken that day. What’s likely to become a new iconic photo is a shot of several women fighting at fire at the scene. And now, the world wants to know who they are. Hit the jump for the full image.
A commenter on the original post, James McClelland gives us his informed take on the women in the photograph:
Remember in 1941 Hawaii was not a state it was a territory. There were many Japanese-Americans working in defense factories and as dock workers etc. For this reason unlike California and states on the west coast there were no roundups and no internment camps in Hawaii. Nisei volunteers [second generation Japanese-Americans] formed the 442nd Regimental Combat Team which was the most decorated unit in WW2. Based on the uniforms I would say these were dock workers on Ford Island in the middle of Pearl Harbor where the sea planes were and next to battleship row […] I believe they were civilian. They are wearing uniforms but their shoes are not uniform. They could have been general dock workers or parachute packers or welders or any of a hundred other jobs that were given to women to free men for military service. By the way I was wrong there were a few internment camps in Hawaii but only about 1,200 Japanese and Japanese-Americans were held in them. As opposed to around 112,000 relocated to internment camps from the west coast. Nearly 1/3rd of the population of Hawaii was of Japanese descent. They were vital to the economy of Hawaii not only working at the Naval yards and the Army and Army Air bases but also in the sugar cane and pineapple fields. The governor of the territory pointed out that to intern all of them would have crippled the war effort and the economy.
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olimay reblogged this from yfiles and added:
original post, James McClelland gives us his informed take on
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