One thing this illustrates is how much faster today’s immigrants are learning English, compared to a hundred or two hundred years ago. Due to mass media, universal schooling etc. Back then it was fairly common that even the first generation born in the US would never become fluent in English.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duquesne_Spy_Ring

If you are the FBI and believe that every spy ring will be compromised by at least one member (this case) then all you have to do is sit and wait for the informants to walk in.

If you think maybe you were just lucky this time, then you start thinking a wider net needs to be cast.

“More than 7,000 internees were deported, the majority to Canada, some to Australia. The liner Arandora Star left for Canada on 1 July 1940 carrying German and Italian internees. It was torpedoed and sunk with the loss of 714 lives, most of them internees. Others being taken to Australia on the Dunera, which sailed a week later, were subjected to humiliating treatment and terrible conditions on the two-month voyage. Many had their possessions stolen or thrown overboard by the British military guards.”

This seems to have been pretty standard practice in such wars by all sides, the US interned or rounded up and relocated over 100,000 Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese did the same to Brits/Americans and their allies.

I’m not saying it was right, but I did think it was relatively well known. Obviously not.

And “attack entire immigrant populations” is a really inept way to catch spies and sympathizers.  It’s guaranteed to upset some of your most fervent allies – the people who left for a reason – while also being guaranteed not to catch any actual spies or useful intelligence.  If you understood the community well enough to develop useful leads, you wouldn’t be rounding them all up in the first place.  So yes, throwing your net as wide as possible is a crazy overreaction.  It’s not just inhumane, it’s also bad intel work.

(For the record, after the war – when there was no fear of spies as an excuse – Britain continued to be brutal and stupid towards Jewish refugees.  A number survived the war, the death camps and rescue only to die in a British internment camp in Israel.)

I prefer to hope my country can set a higher standard for itself than “repeat the most cowardly and stupid mistakes of the past.”

democracy – faced a war for its very survival.

And there’s no better way to save something than to destroy it by violating its core principles! It’s a deep, deep game.

I’m actually finding it hard to work up any outrage over this.

You know who else wouldn’t be outraged by it?

The only way the British could continue fighting was to control the Atlantic, something that might have been much harder if the French fleet fell into Nazi hands. (Something the Nazis tried when they took over Vichy France later in the war).

As for internment, there was no way the British could perform security screening of the hundreds of thousands of refugees that had flooded into the country in the previous few years. Internment reduced the risk that Nazi agents had slipped into the country amongst genuine refugees.

Trying to put modern sensibilities on the events of 1940 is almost impossible. Britain, and by extension – democracy – faced a war for its very survival. There’s been nothing like it since. Some horrible short-term decisions were made, but the price was worth it.

Also, if you think ’round up all the French’ wasn’t a feature in historical wars against France you are nuts. And the French involved probably wished they ended up in camps.

Those refugees must have been miserable…

It was only during and after WW1 that the British state developed its own spy agencies and others soon followed. Hence the general feeling of paranoia. They had to justify their existence somehow.

It wasn’t one of our finer decisions.

We probably lost more than we gained.

Sure, most spies are going to be native turncoats, but it’s hard to arrest your entire population…

If I was worried about infiltrators and sympathizers from a specific country one of the first places I would look was people who had immigrated from that country along with people directly associated with them such as their children.

And in a life-and-death world war with said other countries, throwing your net as wide as possible isn’t some crazy overreaction.

And while the treatment wasn’t perfect, the seizing of property from people of Japanese and other Asian ancestry in Canada being an excellent example, it was pretty good compaired to what others were doing at the time. Yes it sucked, but unlike the other side in the war we were not lining up suspects and just shooting them.

And the bit calling out treating Jewish refugees like everyone else as being somehow particularly shameful shows a lack of thought. They would be the biggest group to be careful of. After all, you KNOW the other side is holding large numbers of their family and relations.

And finally, it’s all well and good to wag our fingers and feel morally superior to the past but if tomorrow the USA was in a shooting war with China (that somehow did not go nuclear) how do you think all the Chinese students and kids of Chinese students currently residing in the USA would be treated? They would probably find a more acceptable term than ‘camps’ but the rounding up would happen just the same and for most of the same reasons.

The main problems were boredom and the food, the latter being typical British Army fare. Both issues were solved by the inmates. They had daily lectures and since the camp contained a diaspora of European social strata, these could range from “the rebuilding of a Mercedes carburetor” to “Etruscan pottery of the Archaic period.”

Upon discovering that one of the interned was a sous chef at Vienna’s most famous hotel, he was pressed into service in the camp kitchens. Apparently, his creations around cabbage and corned beef were enjoyed by inmates, guards and officers alike!

The British eventually realized that these refugees were no threat to the Empire and the camps were dissolved within a year or so. My grandfather returned home, still eternally grateful to his new country for his home and protection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Mers-el-K%C3%A9bir