Bill Manbo's Images of Japanese-Americans in Detention On Feb. 19, 1942, two months after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order that the United States military used to remove every person of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. Among the 120,000 people rounded up - two-thirds of them citizens - was Bill Manbo, an auto mechanic from Riverside, Calif., who dabbled in photography and model airplanes. He and his wife, Mary; their baby son, Billy; and her mother and younger siblings were detained at a racetrack near Los Angeles. Mary's father, who had been interned as an "enemy alien," soon joined them after he was determined not to be a threat. In September, the family of seven was transferred to Heart Mountain, in northwestern Wyoming - one of 10 permanent "relocation centers" set up in desolate parts of the Mountain West and in southeastern Arkansas. They lived in sparse barracks. Food, laundry and latrines were communal. With his camera and Kodachrome film, Bill Manbo captured scenes of beauty, action and pleasure: the splash of a diver at a swimming hole, the smiles of ice skaters, the concentration of little boys shooting marbles, the bustle of a scout parade, the clash of sumo wrestlers. In the light of day, he snapped a rainbow that seemed to end at the roof of a latrine, tumultuous efforts to fight a barrack fire, teenagers playing a game of pickup baseball and inmates lined up for an afternoon showing of the movie "How Green Was My Valley." But a sense of his displeasure with incarceration lurks beneath the surface, as in an image of his little boy, grasping barbed wire. In 1943, the government administered mass loyalty tests to the internees, partly in an effort to enlist second-generation Japanese-Americans for the European theater. The questionnaires mostly produced dissension and protest. In 1944, Mr. Manbo left for a factory job in Cleveland, where his wife and son joined him. Eventually, they returned to California, settling in Hollywood. Mr. Manbo searched in his surroundings for beauty and excitement, a refuge from the pressure and monotony of confinement. He used his camera to draw his family together, to document some semblance of an ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances and to create for his young son a visual legacy of a normal childhood. Bill Manbo (1908-92) was an amateur photographer. Eric L. Muller, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, has written two books on World War II and Japanese-Americans.