Know Your Enemy
Americans who fought in U.S. wars often held complicated relationships with the enemy, and veteran life histories put these complexities in full relief. Service personnel from immigrant populations might find themselves fighting against a country where loved ones still resided and in the difficult situation of seeing any personal ties to home countries tested. Likewise, given their immigrant roots, second- and third-generation Americans faced assumptions of suspicious connections with enemy home countries in wartime, at times with disastrous consequences. During the Second World War, individuals of German and Italian ancestry in the United States faced increased heightened suspicion and prejudice, and some experienced wartime confinement. Moreover, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, heightened wartime anxieties and long-standing anti-Asian prejudice led the U.S. government to remove forcibly nearly 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans from the West Coast, incarcerating adults and children, immigrants and U.S. citizens, in prison camps throughout the U.S. West. And as civil rights movements of the late twentieth century highlighted connections between oppressed “Third World” peoples, and those experiencing racism and discrimination in the United States, some American-born service members from historically underrepresented groups found themselves identifying more with oppressed populations in foreign lands than their fellow Americans, largely given the second-class treatment they experienced daily in the United States. The biographies highlighted here help us to understand the nuances and complexities of “knowing your enemy.”
