More than 120,000 people, most of them native-born American citizens, were forced by military order into concentration camps -- the government called them "relocation centers"--After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Inmates of these camps, hidden in deserts and swamps from California to Arkansas, spent an average of three years behind barbed wire fences. Not one of the Japanese Americans sentenced to years of barren exile had been charged with any crime, given the right of legal counsel, or offered even the rudiments of due process under the Constitution. - p. ix.