go home; but as the statements above indicate, GIs understood precisely what was at stake.46
More than a simple agitation to return home, the demobilization movement was part of a much wider and spontaneous anti-imperialist revolt that reverberated across the post–World War II world. During the same time, on January 24, one thousand Indian airmen of the British Royal Air Force staged a hunger strike in Cawnpore, India, against delays in demobilization and for equal pay, food, and housing conditions with British airmen. The strike lasted several days and incited a wave of similar “sit-down” strikes at British air bases in Ceylon, Egypt, and Palestine.47 While these protests were under way, a far more violent mutiny struck the British empire. On February 21, lascars of the Royal Indian Navy seized control of nine vessels off the coast of Bombay. They engaged British forces in an armed confrontation that spilled into the streets of Bombay and soon to Calcutta and Karachi, and claimed the lives of more than two hundred people. What began as strikes over equal pay and living conditions quickly turned into bolder demands, which included the withdrawal of Indian troops from Indonesia where they had been sent to help the Dutch suppress an anticolonial movement.48 These worldwide revolts told the same story: as empires scrambled to restrain the pulse of freedom in the decolonizing world, their soldiers and sailors, many of them dark-skinned colonial conscripts, refused.
Global decolonization and U.S. military expansion brought American servicemen into proximity with some of these radicalized Asian subjects, and it was the specter of their politicizing affinities that most alarmed U.S. officials. The “eyes of the world, and particularly the Japanese people, are watching with interest,” the Eighth Army’s acting commander, Lt. Gen. Charles P. Hall, warned his troops during their rebellion in Yokohama: “Subversive forces, quick to sense dissension in your ranks, will take their cue for sabotage of plans for our future action.”49 Hoyt Vandenberg had the same concern in mind when he noted in his February 1946 memo that the GI demonstrations “were not instigated on Communist Party orders emanating from the United States,” but by communists in Asia.50 These were not unfounded concerns. A year later, one counterintelligence report from the Philippines-Ryukyus Command confirmed that “there were approximately 300 American GIs, white and Negro,” who had joined ranks with the Huks in Bataan in 1946. The report went on to state that “an American GI, disguised by a long beard and dressed in old khakis, is traveling with a band of Huks” in the barrios of Tarlac Province.51
Such accounts of GI defection substantiated the worst fears of U.S. officials about the seductive dangers of international communism and illuminated a global alliance of color forged through the military. This racial menace, ironically, doubled as a military asset. During World War II, U.S. campaigns against fascism and white supremacy had demanded the inclusion of racially suspect populations into the armed services. Japanese Americans were tested for their loyalty in concentration camps to allow the “good” ones to showcase their patriotism through combat. Similarly, the Office of War Information targeted African Americans to support the war effort and to demonstrate their patriotic manhood by enlisting in the segregated military.52 After the war, the utility of racial minorities in the military would continue and expand. In September 1946, the War Department ordered the army to assign “all inductees or enlistees of Japanese ancestry” to Japan for occupation duty, where they would serve as interpreters and translators for U.S. military and civilian agencies and continue their wartime function as “ambassadors of democracy.”53 Mobilizing “race for empire” in these ways left uncertain perils for the United States in the post–World War II Pacific.
The task of monitoring these racialized subjects in the military fell to the U.S. Army’s Office of Intelligence (G-2). More than any other institution at the time, G-2 was at the forefront of producing racial knowledge about the decolonizing Pacific. Its case files of individuals, many of them rendered in great detail, hint at the complex lives of these subjects and, for some of them, even their desires to pursue a politics beyond U.S. objectives. At the same time, they also reveal the determination by U.S. military intelligence agents to diminish the very complexities of these individuals. These reports illustrate the impossible double bind in which these men and women found themselves. They were a military asset or a racial peril who invariably degenerated from one to the other.
The case of Misao Kuwaye is revealing in this sense. Kuwaye was of “Okinawan descent” from Honolulu, and had arrived in Tokyo in October 1945 as a Department of the Army Civilian Employee. She was assigned to the Press Section of the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD), in which her primary duty was to censor Japanese mail. Kuwaye was one of fourteen “Nisei” women from Hawai‘i recruited before the war to form the CCD, and they were the first Nisei linguists to arrive in Occupied Japan.54 Kuwaye was part of this exemplary cohort and valued for her Japanese-language ability, but her employment record betrayed her talents. Soon after her arrival, the CCD discovered that Kuwaye “did not meet the qualifications as a linguist” and was, in the opinion of authorities, a “troublemaker.”55 At first, what this meant exactly was unknown, but it soon became clear.
In January 1947, military intelligence confirmed that Kuwaye had been an organizer and “a regular attendant” of the Honolulu Labor Canteen, a radical alternative to the United Service Organizations formed in August 1945 that brought together leftists in Hawai‘i, including GIs, plantation workers, and labor organizers.56 This initial discovery prompted an investigation that uncovered Kuwaye’s mobility across multiple worlds of radicalism. Subsequent reports found that Kuwaye had been “closely associated” with communists and “Communist sympathizers” in Hawai‘i, and that she had used her military assignment in Japan to build connections with radicals in Japan and Okinawa, which included members of the Japanese Communist Party and the League of Okinawans. In September, when she requested approval to transfer jobs from Japan to Okinawa, authorities found in her possession a letter from one of her associates in Honolulu urging her to obtain information about military installations on the island. On November 2, upon her return to Honolulu, customs agents confiscated “a number of documents, including press releases concerning communist activities and Japanese Women’s Suffrage,” loose pages of the Confidential Training Program for Censorship, and maps of “major cities in Japan, classified as Restricted.”57
Despite all signs of Kuwaye’s “leftist inclination,” authorities did not pursue her case further due to a “lack of conclusive proof that subject was subversive,” but her case had sufficiently alarmed officials.58 Kuwaye’s associations with leftists in Hawai‘i, Japan, and Okinawa raised questions about the loyalty of Nisei subjects employed by the U.S. Army, and it illuminated the porous boundaries of the radicalizing Pacific. The agent assigned to her case had determined, “The damage inflicted by persons of this ilk upon the occupation effort is by no means limited to their activities while in this theater [the “Far East”]. As was recently demonstrated in another case, these people return to the United States as ‘experts’ on occupation policy and set about undermining Japanese policy to any group that will listen or read their leftist ‘exposé.’” In short, the military had become a vehicle for individual and collective radicalization to undermine the U.S. empire. “The solution to this situation,” the agent concluded, “appears to be more careful investigation prior to employment and more effective means for immediate removal of such persons from employment with the occupation.”59
It was precisely this fear of subversion within the U.S. Pacific empire, even in the absence of “conclusive proof” of it, that drove G-2 to locate and determine the loyalty of Asian subjects in the military. The line between “good” and “bad” Asians never had been easy to decipher, but it nonetheless became more and more important to demarcate as the United States pursued its global war against communism. Another report on Calvin Kim, for example, revealed that the Korean American officer who was ordered to the Military Intelligence Service Language School in 1945 because of his Korean-language ability was later found to have engaged in questionable political activities, including signing two petitions in 1948 to have the Independent Progressive Party placed on the California State ballot and for an equal-housing initiative, both
