February 16, 1943

C. P. S. #59
Elkton, Oregon
Feb. 16, 1943

Dear folks,

I got your letter yesterday, our letters are sliding back a little. But I guess that it doesn’t make any difference as long as I answer one as soon at I get it and you do the best you can.

We had a visitor here in camp over the week-end that had been teaching in a Japanese Relocation center. She was a woman some where over forty, (that’s the way I classify women) She had been fired from her job there because she refused to carry out some order. She has been a pacifist for years and told us a lot about the Japanese people. I guess she had been a missionary in Japan for quite a while. She says that Japan didn’t want to fight at all but was sort of shoved into it. Also that what we hear about the japanese people being brought up to believe in war and to hate and that sort of stuff, is pure propaganda. That seems very logical to me.

Well, this woman seemed to want to enlighten us about the Japanese which she did. Also she urged us to do all we could to help get the Japanese relocated. It seems that the Gov’t isn’t so crazy to have them scattered all over the middle west but wants to break up the families and sort of keep them in gangs and work them on jobs like the sugar ranches and things that take more brawn than brains. The Japanese people in America have done a lot of that sort of work when they first came over here but now the younger ones are rising above that. Many of them are trained in all sorts of professions. To keep them doing manual labor would only push them down and make them hate this country when they are really very loyal cicizens. All the 120,000 Japanese in relocation centers are Citizens and tho they aren’t pacifists she says they are not so far from it. If it wasn’t for the super patriots in our community you might be able to relocate some Japanese and solve your labor problems. However, knowing people around there as I do it might make matters very bad. I would probably be foolhardy enough to do it anyway tho.

I’m glad to hear that Harry got a II-C. I don’t know exactly what that means. I get the idea that he gets to stay on the farm.

I’ve fooled around with this letter and havn’t said much and now it is about time to go to bed and I’m sure sleepy. So I guess I’ll quit. We got 4 new men to day, one of them is a big fat guy, I’ll bet he weighs over 250. I noticed a couple of letters in the ‘A’ mailbox addressed to a guy that none of us have heard of and they were postmarked Oskoloosa Iowa. So I recon that we’ll have an Iowa man in this bunch. There are supposed to be 8 men coming in to-day and we have 4 already, that is a pretty good average. We never get all that are scheduled to come, I guess some of them get deffered or go to jail or something.

I got a valentine which I appreciated and also a dollar bill. Thanks a lot. I imagine you have received our camp paper by now. I got more coppies than usual and enlarged my list a little cause this paper told about the camp and project.

Well, So Long.

Yours,
Bernard

P.S. Don’t worry about me and Gov’t camp. I don’t think that there was a nickel’s worth of talk about it. I guess we are pretty well satisfied here. We have a pretty good bunch so far. The men that came here with me from Coshocton are tops(?) and we have been bringing up the new men up in the right way. There are a few that aren’t happy but they are very few. You know what I mean by “happy.” We have found(?) like the gospel Paul “what-so-ever state we are in to be content.”