Seventy-five years ago this month, an invading army descended on the U.S. West Coast. They rounded up about 110,000 Americans and, after holding them for a while at local racetracks in horse stalls that stunk of manure, shipped them under armed guard to prison camps in remote, windswept areas of the country.

There they spent the next four years behind barbed wire in bleak, black tar-paper barracks with soldiers in guard towers pointing their machine guns at them 24/7, ready to shoot anyone who tried to escape.

Ironically, the invading army was an American one, and the people they rounded up were their fellow citizens whose only crime was being of Japanese descent.

The government called it an “evacuation,” almost as if they were being rescued from a natural disaster, or a “detention,” as if they were just going be detained for a little while and then allowed to resume their lives.

In fact, it took four long years. And all too often their lives – their homes, their farms, their businesses – weren’t there waiting for them when they got back. The stables were euphemistically labeled “assembly centers,” and the camps were called “relocation camps.”

In reality, they were concentration camps. Not death camps, like the Nazis used; I mean the classic model created by the British 50 years earlier in the Boer War, when they imprisoned Afrikaner civilians in barbed wire compounds.

The invaders descended on Berkeley in the last week of April. Japanese-American citizens (or, as the government called them, “non-aliens”) were informed they had one week to sell all their property and belongings before being shipped out.

A few people acted honorably. UC President Robert Gordon Sproul spoke out forcefully against the roundup, severing his relationship with California Attorney General (and future governor and Chief Justice of the United States) Earl Warren, a close friend since they played together in the Cal Marching Band in 1911.

And First Congregational Church offered the prisoners a place to assemble that was more dignified than a stable — the church’s Pilgrim Hall, where they waited for four days with members of the congregation, who brought them food and moral support until they boarded the buses for the camps.

Berkeley will commemorate this tragedy on April 26 with a reception and exhibit at Cal’s Student Union from 5 to 7:30 p.m. — featuring a talk by Cal grad Sam Mihara, who was only 9 years old when he and his family were imprisoned at the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming — followed by a 7:30 p.m. memorial service at First Congregational Church.

Then, as now, the excuse for this abuse of power was national security. But if they were such a security risk, how come the government didn’t round up all the Japanese Americans in Hawaii too? Answer: Because there were just too many of them. They constituted one-third of the islands’ population. And how many incidents of sabotage or espionage did all those free Japanese Americans commit during the war? Zero.

Remember: The Supreme Court decision that approved the roundup, Korematsu v. United States, is still on the books, ready to be dusted off and used at any time against some other minority group. So if you hear anyone say it can’t happen here, tell them it already has.

Reach Martin Snapp at catman442@comcast.net.