Dodd Field (Fort Sam Houston) Enemy Alien Detention Station, World War II

The camps that took Dodd Field's detainees held people from across the hemisphere. Twelve Latin American countries turned Axis nationals over to the United States; about 3,000 were deported, most to Texas, 80 percent of them from Peru and about 70 percent Japanese. Seagoville, built in 1941 as a minimum-security women's reformatory, looked to visitors like a college campus, with red-brick buildings, lawns and a hospital, behind a woven-wire fence. Kenedy, a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp, held only men, more than 3,500 in all, and the army took it over in October 1944.

What the plaque says

Dodd Field (Fort Sam Houston) Enemy Alien Detention Station, World War II Shocked by the December 7, 1941, Empire of Japan attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii that propelled the U.S. into World War II, one U.S. Government response was the incarceration of more than 120,000 Issei (first generation, Japanese immigrants) and Nisei (second generation, U.S. citizens) in War Relocation Authority camps across the country. Through separate confinement programs, thousands of Japanese, German, and Italian citizens in the U.S. (and in many cases, their U.S. citizen relatives), classified as enemy aliens, were detained by the Department of Justice (DOJ) through its Enemy Alien Control Unit, and, in Latin America, by the Department of States Special War Problems Division. Enemy aliens were held until paroled or exchanged for U.S. and Allied citizens seized overseas by Axis nations. Texas hosted three DOJ confinement sites, administered by The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) at Crystal City, Kenedy, and Seagoville, as well as two U.S. Army Temporary Detention Stations at Fort Bliss (El Paso) and here. The U.S. Army held enemy aliens across the U.S. wherever the number of apprehensions was too few for the INS to operate a detention facility. Beginning in February 1942, the first detainees were held at the Old Infantry Long Barracks. By April 1942 the site was relocated here, the posts former airfield Dodd Field. The site encompassed 20 acres surrounded by a double barbed-wire fence with eight elevated guard towers overlooking two compounds of Victory Huts. Through paroles and repatriations, the population fluctuated considerably; never more than 150 at a time. In late 1942, the DOJs Special Alien Enemy Hearing Board began transferring detainees to INS camps, as the U.S. War Department prepared to house prisoners of war. Dodd Field Enemy Alien Detention Station closed in late 1942. Texas in World War II - 2013

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Alamo — 4.9 mi
  Mission San Antonio de Valero before it was a fort: a church its builders never finished, a thirteen-day siege in 1836, and the Army gable of 1850-52 that became its emblem.
• La Villita Historic Arts Village — 5.2 mi
  The little village across the river from the presidio, where Cos surrendered San Antonio in 1835, rebuilt by Depression-era youth crews as a working crafts village.
• San Antonio River Walk — 5.2 mi
  A Depression-era park one level below downtown, built because San Antonio refused to pave its river after the 1921 flood, and designed by an architect the project later fired.
• San Fernando Cathedral — 5.3 mi
  The Canary Islanders' parish church on Main Plaza, where Bowie married and Santa Anna raised a red flag, rebuilt in Gothic Revival around the walls of the 1750s church.

More markers nearby

• The Battle of the Salado — 1.0 mi
• Gen. Jonathan M. Wainwright — 1.3 mi
• The Dawson Massacre — 1.5 mi
• Incarnate Word College — 2.2 mi