Thanks for the link, Jeff. As was her custom, Dorothea did wonderful work with those photographs.
It's interesting stuff about an event in our history we'd rather forget. I was twelve when Manzanar opened, and I remember (vaguely) what things were like then. There was no national outcry about Manzanar. The very effective tactical strike on Pearl Harbor was dubbed by Roosevelt a "sneak attack," and we were losing ground rapidly in the Pacific. The Japanese were being made to appear monsters. Even in my seventh-grade school there were cartoons showing Japanese as slobbering murderers. Of course some of the stuff the Japanese had done in China (see the rape of Nanking) and now were doing in the Pacific made those cartoons seem reasonable.
We look back on Manzanar now and shake our heads, but it's hard to judge history from a remote remove in time. I can't condone what we did at Manzanar, but I can tell you that people were angry. It wasn't fear, Paul, it was fury. Men were rushing to join the military and women were rushing into defense jobs. We were united in our anger and we were eager to strike back, but we didn't have the means to strike back effectively. Anger at the Japanese was what quickly brought our industrial giant out of its slumber and gave us the tools ultimately to fight WW II. So when you're ready to vent your regret over what we did at Manzanar, back away a bit and look at what the world was like then. You probably can't, because you weren't around then, but It ain't as simple as it sounds.
And Jeff, I think Slobodan may have jumped in too quickly, but I got the same implication from your post. Reading carefully it's clear that you didn't intend the implication, but it slipped in nonetheless.
And Stamper, I joined the military not all that long after WW II. As Rob says, there were no "gays" in those days. There was a guy in one unit I was in who, it turned out, was homosexual, though nobody knew that. One day a couple feds -- I'm not sure what agency, but I suspect FBI -- dropped in and had a long, secret chat with the guy in a closed room. He left with them and was never seen around the outfit again, but he didn't go to a stockade.