Bella Vista

In the months after Pearl Harbor, the Justice Department converted Fort Missoula from an Army garrison into an alien detention center, and between nineteen forty-one and nineteen forty-four, close to two thousand men passed through its gates.

The first arrivals, in the spring of nineteen forty-one, were Italian nationals who had been in the United States when war came: merchant seamen, World's Fair workers, and the crew of an Italian luxury liner the government had seized in the Panama Canal. More than twelve hundred Italian men were eventually held at the fort. They named it Camp Bella Vista, which means Beautiful View, a reference to the ring of mountains visible from the parade ground. They worked on local farms, fought forest fires, and were by most accounts treated relatively well by the standards of the era.

Following Pearl Harbor, the FBI arrested more than a thousand prominent Japanese men from communities along the Pacific Coast: community leaders, newspaper editors, Buddhist priests, language teachers. All were resident aliens, barred by existing law from becoming American citizens regardless of how long they had lived in the United States. About six hundred fifty were transferred to Fort Missoula for hearings that were meant to evaluate their loyalty. None of the men held at Fort Missoula was ever charged with an act of disloyalty or sabotage. All remained in custody, at Missoula or at other camps, for the duration of the war.

The two groups were housed in separate fenced compounds and had minimal contact with each other. After the war, the Italian detainees scattered: some returned to Italy, some joined the American military, some married and stayed. The Japanese detainees were released into a country that had simultaneously stripped them of their rights and then declined to find anything wrong with them. The University of Montana holds an oral history collection of interviews with surviving detainees. Fort Missoula Museum maintains a permanent exhibit on the detention center.