Charles Lofgren reviews Malkin’s travesty for the Claremont Institute:
The brunt of criticism has fallen on Malkin’s claims about the relocation as a response to a military threat perceived as real at the time. Unfortunately, she does not carefully sort out what was known at the time from what was not. One of Malkin’s blogger critics quickly observed that the Japanese submarine’s shelling of the oil field near Santa Barbara on February 23, 1942, could hardly have been a factor in the key decisions of the preceding several weeks. In response*, Malkin noted that she had linked the shelling to the speeded-up evacuation of Terminal Island on February 25. This comes about 80 pages later.
Similar difficulties are explained away less easily. After describing the shelling episode, Malkin turns to Japanese operations in the Pacific immediately after Pearl Harbor and to Secretary Stimson’s fear of raids against the American mainland. The reader then learns that Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, a Japanese naval commander, had precisely this in mind. Relegated to a footnote is Malkin’s qualification that the source from which she drew the episode “states that other Japanese officers were unenthusiastic about Yamaguchi’s plan.” She does not mention at all that Yamaguchi presented his plan at a conference on February 20-23, 1942, on board a Japanese battleship. Did Yamaguchi’s plan help shape American thinking relating to the evacuation? Could it have? One suspects not. (Malkin covers herself, perhaps, by noting that similar ideas circulated in the Japanese media.)
Another problem of sequence emerges when the reader learns “[i]n the Philippines, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and statesman Carlos Romulo described massive Japanese espionage activity in the country prior to the war.” Malkin then provides several details. The source is a book by Romulo, one written and published following his arrival in the United States in June 1942. A bit further on, as added evidence for why Americans in late 1941 and early 1942 could reasonably have worried about the enemy in their midst, the reader learns that “Japan’s surrender in 1945 came as a traumatic blow to many Hawaiian Issei,” and that Tomoya Kawakita, a Nisei who served in Japan’s army, “tortured scores of American POW’s held in a Japanese prison camp.” The torture occurred during the war, of course, and Kawakita was exposed after the war once he returned to Los Angeles.
The reviewer’s reference to “the brunt of criticism” is interesting considering that none of the debates in which Malkin was willing to engage had anything to do with the military threat. That was the issue I raised, the one that Malkin was willing to lie rather than address in any way.
And for all that Yamaguchi might have had the bright idea to engage in a stupid, risky and pointless series of raids, the USN’s post-war interviews with other Japanese admirals demonstrate very clearly that his superiors, including Admiral Yamamoto, had no intention of invading Hawaii, let alone the American West Coast. As I have demonstrated, even a successful and costless series of raids could not have slowed down the American war effort by a single day, let alone “crippled” it as Malkin ludicrously asserted.
It is a pity that the reviewer did not see fit to mention how Malkin not only demonstrates a near-complete ignorance of a) military logistics, b) American war plans, c) basic Naval details (she not only halved the number of American aircraft carriers, but didn’t know where any of them were in early 1942) and d) post-Pearl Harbor naval movements and theatre priorities, but a singular in ability to reason logically in asserting a proof of military necessity based on Secretary of War Stinson’s post-war comments. Since Stinson was arguably one of the primary players in the internment order, Malkin is simply engaging in circular reasoning.
Amusingly enough, the Malkin defender cited by Powerline in Me So’s defense follows her lead in failing to address any of these points, preferring instead to engage in what-if scenarios. But I’m quite pleased that others are finally noticing the gaping hole in Malkin’s moronic thesis, as Lofgren finally concludes:
“Indeed, Malkin never quite brings together the argument that for the decision-makers in Washington, D.C., military necessity, as inferred from sources known at the time, was the reason for the indiscriminate mass evacuation that actually occurred.”
Exactly. Although I would tend to agree with Ken Masugi in saying that “needlessly inaccurate” isn’t really fair to the book. “Wildly inaccurate and nonsensically amateurish” would be more precise, in my opinion.
*This is why I despise Malkin. She simply can’t admit that she’s wrong. Whenever she’s exposed, her immediate reaction is to lie. At least the leftist lunatics usually have the excuse of genuinely not having a clue.