THE FURY OF NON-COMBATANTS
The Fury Of Non-combatants THERE is on old aphorism among American servicemen which expresses their feeling about the bloodthirstiness of civilians : "Hell hath no fury like a non-combatant." Turn...
...They told him that they had met with surprisingly little intolerance or even much curiosity since their return...
...The Bataan hero, who was leaving for his home in Tennessee, promised to write...
...They were staying in the same hotel where a soldier, one of the heroes of Bataan recently freed by Gen...
...The next day the Monitor reporter, who had witnessed the incident, encountered the Japanese-Americans and struck up a conversation...
...Everyone around expected an explosion...
...When the 3 had finished comparing experiences they exchanged addresses...
...The Christian Science Monitor recently carried a story dealing with the attitude of the men who have come back from the blood sheds of the Pacific toward the Nisei...
...Turn to the editorial page of this issue of The Progressive for comment on a recent, incident which illustrates the essential wisdom of this GI observation...
...The explosion came all right, but not as the spectators anticipated...
...For the soldier, upon being informed that he was talking to Japanese, said: "Well, can't we have a visit...
...It's a story that will raise your hopes for decent and humanitarian postwar readjustment and underscores again the fundamental faith of the real Americans in the democratic way...
...MaeArthur's Rangers, was living...
...The calamity howlers and the racists in our midst have warned that if the Japanese-Americans returned to the West Coast the returning veterans would tear them apart...
...One day the soldier came face to face with the two Nisei...
...Walking up to them the soldier inquired if they were Japanese...
...The soldier told them of the treatment he and his comrades had received at the hands of the Japanese in the prison camp in the Philippines...
...They did...
...Maybe it's because people think we are Chinese," one of them remarked...
...Then rather than launching into bitter recriminations he began to ask the two Nisei about their treatment in the relocation camp...
...Two Japanese-Americans, the Monitor relates, returned to San Francisco from a relocation camp in Colorado...
...His greatest interest was in knowing whether the America he had come back to had forgotten its duty to play fair, to stick to the principles for which he and his buddies had fought and suffered regardless of what provocation there was to seek revenge for the atrocities committed by the enemy...
...The remarkable thing about it, they both agreed, was that men in uniform were always the most friendly, always eager to talk...
...What they don't realize is that the men who have been face to face with the death, suffering, and brutality of the war do not share the hunger for horror that characterizes some of those who have followed the peaceful pursuits of the home-front...
...They were exuberant in describing their "wonderful experience" with the soldier from Bataan...
...Fortunately we can report that this is not typical of American treatment of American citizens of Japanese descent...
...The comment is about a recent, brutal attack on unarmed, Japanese-American war veterans on the West Coast by bloodthirsty homefront warriors...
Vol. 9 • April 1945 • No. 16
