PANAMA CITY — The Japanese planes littered the neighborhoods near Wheeler Field on the afternoon of Dec. 7, 1941. Julie Cheshire was about 10 years old then; she remembers hearing the shells falling like lead raindrops on the garbage can outside.
“Well, you knew very quickly because you could hear all these bullets going off of the garbage cans ... but I don’t think as children you realized your father was going to be in this great war,” Cheshire said. “He came home though, before he went.”
Cheshire’s father was at the time Col. Howard Davidson, who had been the commander of Hickam Field until a few months before the attack, Cheshire said. Davidson, the commander of the 7th Air Force at the time, was reassigned to Wheeler Field in Hawaii, one of the targets of the Japanese attack.
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“Daddy thought [it was] Navy something — Navy maneuvers or something — and then he looked out of the door and said, ‘My God; it’s the Japanese,’ ” said Cheshire, who has lived in Panama City with her husband John Cheshire since the 1970s.
Davidson rushed off to Wheeler Field about a mile from the family home, which was inland and elevated enough for the family to look down on the carnage in the harbor below, Cheshire said.
Cheshire huddled in a hallway with her mother and sister and waited for the attack to end. When it did, she went outside and picked up the spent Japanese shells.
“In a way, it went so quickly you didn’t even have time to be scared,” Cheshire said.
Cheshire returned to the mainland with her mother and sister. Her father, who’d been involved in the hunt for the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa after graduating from West Point, went off to fight the war, eventually earning the rank of general and commanding the 10th Air Force.
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In Los Angeles, a college junior named Joe Ikeguchi and his roommate joined the Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor. They both wanted to be pilots, and Ikeguchi’s Caucasian roommate became one.
Ikeguchi, a first-generation Japanese-American, was told he was not right for the job.
The pages of The News Herald in late November and early December 1941 struck a different tone than they do today.
Gun control was an issue then, too; in November 1941, the Florida Supreme Court decided it was not a crime to carry a pistol in the glove compartment of one’s car. One justice reportedly said the ruling would “protect ‘irresponsible characters,’ ” but Justice Rivers Buford, concurring with the majority, noted “the statute was never intended to be applied to white people.”
Another report noted that about 1,000 “negro” troops had arrived at Eglin Field. They were under the leadership of white officers, and they would be leaving when their task was complete, the report said.
On Dec. 8, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s picture was on the front page. A headline read: “Congress declares war against Jap aggressors.”
Relocated: Anti-Japanese sentiment was rampant after Pearl Harbor. FBI agents swept through a Japanese block in San Francisco’s Chinatown, questioning scores of Japanese and arresting several the day of the attack, the paper said.
Roosevelt would order people of Japanese ancestry into camps based on the suspicion that Japanese-Americans were not loyal to the U.S.
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Lt. Gen. John DeWitt was in charge of the relocations. DeWitt was deeply concerned about sabotage and espionage, but he used language that today might be associated with genocide — a word that had not even been invented at the time — when he told Congress:
“I don’t want any of them here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty. … It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen; he is still a Japanese. American citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty. … But we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.”
Joining up: Ikeguchi, 94, was the fourth of seven children born to parents who moved to America in the early 20th century. His father was living in Japan when Pearl Harbor was attacked, but his mother and siblings still leased and operated a strawberry farm in Southern California.
They had done well the season before the war started. The farm turned a profit, which the family reinvested in the business, Ikeguchi said. They improved their irrigation system and bought new trucks.
Not long after war was declared, Ikeguchi’s family was sent to Camp Rohwer in Arkansas with thousands of Japanese and Japanese-Americans who’d lived in the Los Angeles area. They were among more than 100,000 people removed from their West Coast homes during the war.
Ikeguchi might have been among them had he not joined the Army. Though English is his first language, his parents spoke both Japanese and English when he was growing up, and because Ikeguchi spoke Japanese, he was assigned to gather intelligence, first in India and Burma and eventually behind Japanese lines in China.
Many Japanese soldiers, of whom there were 20,000 or more during the war, felt pressure to prove their loyalty to America, Ikeguchi said. He personally volunteered for any mission, not because he felt pressure to prove himself — he described the camaraderie with his Caucasian war buddies as “inherent” — but because he was just young and undaunted.
Retired: After the war, Ikeguchi returned to the states and finished college, then went to U.S.-occupied Japan, where he reunited with his father. Members of his family had had little choice but to sell their farming equipment for a pittance, and they spread out and basically started their lives over from scratch. Most of his brothers and sisters went to Chicago.
Lt. Col. Ikeguchi retired after 23 years in the Army. For about the past 35 years, he has called Panama City home. He sat in his study last week under a certificate indicating he’d earned a Bronze Star, the fourth highest honor an individual in the armed services can be awarded.
“Yeah, I’ve got three of those,” he said. “It doesn’t mean much.”
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President Ronald Reagan would authorize the government to make reparation payments to the Japanese who’d been uprooted and interned during the war. Members of Ikeguchi’s family were paid $20,000. Ikeguchi said that money didn’t make up for what the family lost, but it was appreciated as a symbolic gesture.
Though history has shown and the government has recognized the internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II was an injustice, Ikeguchi said his family was never bitter about it.
“That was part of the war,” he said. “They had to accept it.”