Medal for Moving

For the biggest moving job in U.S. history a 3 5-year-old colonel last week was awarded the Army's Distinguished Service Medal.

Colonel Karl Robin Bendetsen last March began evacuating 110,599 Japanese and Nisei from a 150-mile West Coast strip to 16 temporary assembly centers in Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona. This month he finished his seven-day-a-week job. He had placed all his charges in the care of the civilian War Relocation Authority in ten huge, permanent projects in California, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Arkansas.

Said his superior, Lieut. General John Lesesne DeWitt, Commander of the Western Defense Command and the Fourth Army: "That operation . . . was completed within the designated time, without mischance, with minimum hardship and almost without incident."

Bendetsen, with a Stanford law degree, a reserve lieutenancy and an interest in radio and aviation, was practicing law in his Aberdeen, Wash, hometown in 1939 when the Judge Advocate General's Department called him. There, as captain, he helped draft the Selective Service and Soldiers' & Sailors' Relief Acts. Promoted to major, he prepared the War Department's legal steps for taking over two striking airplane plants, organized the alien and war prisoner division of the Provost Marshal General's Office. Later, a lieutenant colonel, he prepared Franklin Roosevelt's executive order that last February provided for the establishment of military areas and started the evacuation program.

This week Colonel Bendetsen got an unexpected, embarrassing sequel to the Japanese migration: when a young Japanese-American citizen violated curfew regulations, Portland's Federal Judge James Alger Fee ruled that the curfew law covered aliens only, that General DeWitt had no power over citizens. The reason: martial law had never been declared, was merely assumed. Possible results: 1) declaration of martial law on the Pacific Coast; 2) increased difficulty in enforcing dimouts, etc.; 3) court action by citizen Japanese who may construe from Judge Fee's ruling that they are illegally kept in camps.

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