Question

QUESTION 1 Read the excerpt from “Survivors Relive December 7, 1941”: Bill Speer had just stepped out of his morning shower on the light cruiser USS Honolulu when the attack began. "I saw a torpedo drop and our guns were firing before they'd even sounded general quarters. I ran to my battle station and went through the rest of that day without getting fully dressed." Speer tells of the deep sorrow they felt during those first terrible hours. "We could clearly see the Arizona and all of battleship row from our post. At one point we were all just standing there with tears in our eyes watching the devastation and feeling helpless, with nothing to be done about it." For many survivors, "doing something about it" meant getting back to their posts as quickly as possible, even if they were injured. Of the hundreds of men wounded in the attack, only 10 percent stayed in their hospital beds more than a day. The rest went almost immediately back to their duties. "That gives you an idea of our patriotism," Speer said with a note of pride. Courtesy of the National Park Service Drawing on this excerpt, and the information you learned in the lesson about the Manzanar internment camp, draw two connections between the ideas in this excerpt and the lessons. Explain each of these connections using evidence from the excerpt and what you've learned in the lessons. Your response should be 3–4 paragraphs in length.

Answer 1

A great majority of Japanese Americans interned at Manzanar were American citizens by birth. President Roosevelt's executive order took freedom away from these "American citizens" just like that, without even going through a fair process. This was basically because people believed that Japanese descent had something to do with this.

Manzanar’s internees suffered from the harsh weather conditions in the desert. Temperatures were as high as 110º F in the summer and frequently dropped below freezing in the winter. Besides this, "The temporary, tar paper-covered barracks, and the guard towers" showed how badly the Japanese Americans were treated in the internment camps.  

If you look at this carefully, you will notice this is also a form of racism because they were judged because of how they looked and a false belief that they would do something wrong. They were also judged for something their "mother country" did.