Japanese who have failed to follow the Army’s advice to leave the coastal military area voluntarily learned today that unless they are out by Sunday they must stay until the Army tells them where to go.

Lieut. Gen. John L. DeWitt signed an order “freezing” Japanese aliens and citizens in the area. In addition to being forbidden to leave the area after Sunday, all Japanese will come under a curfew regulation, effective tomorrow, ordering them to remain in their homes from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. The curfew applies also to German and Italian aliens.

Army authorities were to be asked by John F. Shelley of the Labor Council, to grant exemptions to some aliens employed nights. The Army announced previously that “there will be no exemptions.”

The “freezing” order, according to Colonel Karl R. Bendetsen, assistant chief of staff for civil affairs and head of the Wartime Civil Control Administration, is designed to insure an orderly evacuation and to protect Japanese aliens and citizens alike.

Colonel Bendetsen also announced the Army had taken over county fairgrounds at Merced, Tulare and Marysville and a recently completed mill community at Pinedale, near Fresno, and will establish assembly centers to aid in the evacuation.

The Santa Anita race track at Arcadia already has been leased as an assembly center, and reception camps are being set up at Manzanar, in the Owens Valley; on the Colorado River Indian Reservation, near Parker, Ariz., and near Blythe, Cal.

The Pinedale and Merced assembly centers will care for 5000 persons each; Tulare and Marysville are designed to house 3000 each. Additional sites are being acquired, Colonel Bendetsen said.

Colonel Bendetsen and other WCCA officials renewed suggestions to Japanese to wind up their affairs quickly, and warned that any damage to or deliberate neglect of growing crops would be punishable.

Meanwhile, a mass meeting of citizens at Independence, near the Manzanar reception camp, assured evacuation officials they were anxious to co-operate “in a patriotic move to help the war effort.”

From Nat J.L. Pieper, FBI agent in charge of Northern California, came information that 772 aliens have been taken into custody in his district since the start of the war.

He also revealed contraband seized included 13 motion picture projectors, five motion picture cameras, 114 still cameras, 61 short wave radio receives, a code book, nine signal flares and 245 other swords, bayonets and knives, 57 binoculars, three telescopes, 69 cases of fireworks, 84,030 rounds of ammunition, 72 guns and three aerial bomb cases.

Mr. Pieper announced a series of meeting with local peace officers to co-ordinate enforcement of new regulations imposed upon enemy aliens and person of Japanese ancestry. The first two meetings were held in Redding yesterday and Sacramento today.

A third conference was scheduled in Modesto tonight. Other meetings will be held Friday at 2 p.m. in Santa Rosa, Monday at 1 p.m. in Palo Alto, Tuesday at 10 a.m. in Eureka, next Thursday at 7 p.m. in Oakland, next Friday at 2 p.m. in Watsonville.

The San Francisco News
March 26, 1942