Do you have a reference to the part I put in bold?
It was in the late 80s or 90s, qst, popcom, or 73 or similar.
I kinda remember it was the son who found the German radio comms and pointed it out to his dad and they apparently understood at least some German and broke in on the ongoing comms, whether this was allowed by the fedz or not at the time. They reported this to US officials and the officials moved quickly to begin monitoring for themselves in a nearby location. The east coast is where it all started but there were other places in the US that reported similar events.
Yes, I have read similar magazine articles going back to the 50’s. The receive side of the story is pretty well documented, however when it comes to the “transmit back” part of the story it is always fuzzy or word of mouth and as far as I know there is no documentation to support it actually happened.
It makes for a good story, but it is questionable, at best.
The German and Italian aliens and their families in the US had to disable their sets that could rx shortwave, there was a regulation for this and the US gov paid radio repairmen to do this and keep records of the work. The Japanese in the internment camps were likewise allowed ambc radios but not sw sets, the FCC even monitored the camps for transmitters, wich were verboten.
Yes, resident aliens were not allowed SW receivers, that was part of orders 2525, 2526, and 2527. But this did not apply to US citizens of enemy nation descent.
The man who got me into radio in the 1960’s was an Italian born great uncle, he came over on the same ship as my great grandmothers family in 1908 (that part of our family was Ukrainian) and eventually married my great grandmothers sister. He became a US citizen (I think by virtue of military service) however his father never did. He got his ham license in 1935. He often told me stories of radio operations before, during, and after WW II (he did not serve in WW II, he was too old by then, his service was in WW I and after). One of the things he told me about was the fact that his father (a radio listener, but not a ham) could NOT have an SW receiver during the war, but he himself, as a US citizen, could. Within the Italian community where they lived the same thing happened, some folks (not US citizens) were prohibited, while their brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, etc, that were US citizens were not as long as they had separate residences.
There were so many German and Italian descendants in the US as you stated, with many of them being drafted to fight their relatives, it was decided that it would take too many camps to hold them all.
I think there is quite a bit more to this than just it would have taken too many camps.
Less than 2,000 Italians or Italian-Americans ended up in WRA camps during the war, less than 12,000 Germans or German-Americans. In both cases the vast majority of the internees were foreign nationals, not US citizens by naturalization or by birth. Under 14,000 total interned, but between the two nationalities there were over 7 million immigrants or first generation US born Americans in the US.
Over 110,000 Japanese or Japanese-Americans were in the camps, with over 60% of them being US citizens, either naturalized or by birth in the US. And there were only about 127,000 total Japanese or US born Japanese-Americans in the continental US at the time. Why were so many of them US citizens? Because essentially no Japanese were allowed to immigrate to the US from 1924 on (Immigration Act of 1924) and few were allowed to enter the country after 1908. So on the eve of WW II every person of Japanese lineage in the US under the age of 17, and most under the age of 33, were US born US citizens.
All of the interned Italians or Germans would have fit in a single camp used to hold Japanese (the Tule Lake camp held over 18,000 Japanese), and there were 10 camps of Japanese.
The fact is the US public would not have put up with mass internment of Italian and German Americans, it would have been extremely unpopular. Everyone knew someone of those backgrounds. These were your neighbors, your friends, popular actors, sports figures, etc. Not so the Japanese, they were few in number and almost all located in a few areas along the west coast. Relatively few Americans interacted with people of Japanese descent on a regular basis.
back on topic; I want legal digital dx modes for my cb radio!
With only 40 channelized frequency selections that might be fun, but not a great idea unless specific channels were set aside by regulation for those kinds of modes.
T!
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