Infamy (29 page)

When Secretary of War Stimson ruled in early 1943 that “loyal” Nisei could serve in the military, army statisticians had estimated that 2,900 to 3,000 Nisei in the mainland camps would volunteer for the combat team. Questions 27 and 28 of the army’s loyalty tests, distributed in February, destroyed that calculation. Only 1,208 Nisei volunteered from the camps where their families were living under the shadows of guard towers. Knowing nothing of this, more than ten thousand Hawaiians volunteered for combat. The army took three thousand of them, disappointing the thousands of others in crowds of young men listening outside recruiting offices as each name was called. All over the islands, men had run through the streets to the offices of their draft boards. For the men who were selected, there were parties everywhere, girls placed flower leis around the boys’ necks, and relatives and strangers pushed $5 bills into their pockets as they marched through Honolulu on March 28, 1943, to board the ships that would take them to San Francisco. After arriving in California, they were loaded on sealed trains and sent on their way to training and war.

One of the men chosen for service was nineteen-year-old Daniel Inouye. He was a premed student at the University of Hawaii who had quit school along with dozens of his classmates when they learned medical students were exempt from the draft. They wanted to fight. They were desperate to fight.

Inouye recalled that when he was leaving for the service his father told him, “America has been good to us.… It has given you and your sisters and brothers education. We all love this country. Whatever you do, do not dishonor your country.” He stressed to his son, “Remember: Never dishonor your family. And if you must give your life, do so with honor.”

Not surprisingly, the white officers who ran Camp Shelby in Mississippi, where the new Hawaiian recruits and men from the relocation camps began their basic training, did not trust the Japanese Americans. For one thing, they couldn’t get over how small they were; the average height was five foot three and their average weight was 125 pounds. Their average shoe size was 3½ and the Hawaiians went barefoot whenever they could get away with it. They were issued toy wooden guns. Their mail home to the internment camps was secretly opened and read at Shelby. It was the tone of those letters, the passionate patriotism, that convinced the commanders that trust in the Nisei was warranted, and real guns and ammunition were issued to them. By August of 1943, the One Hundredth was on its way to North Africa.

Commanding officers training both the Hawaiians and the mainlanders were surprised, though, by one thing: the two groups of Japanese American trainees did not like each other. The Hawaiians were dark-skinned and spoke a rapid pidgin language, a mix of English, Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiian, and Filipino.
Puka
meant “hole” or “zero,”
S’koshi
meant “little bit,” “’Ass why” meant “That’s the reason.” To the Hawaiians, the better-educated mainlanders sounded like white men. The Islanders were a carefree bunch who loved to drink and gamble away free time. They had money, including the envelopes of cash handed them by islanders bidding them “Aloha!” Dan Inouye ran a crap game and claimed he was making as much as $1,500 a month. “Go for Broke!” which became the motto of the 442nd, came from those crap games. It was also part of the fight song the Hawaiians sang to drumbeats.

One-Puka-Puka … We’re the boys from Hawaii nei.… We’ll fight for you and the Red White and Blue … And go to the front … And back to Honolulu–lulu. Fighting for Dear Old Uncle Sam. Go for broke! Hooh! We don’t give a damn! We’ll round up the Huns at the point of our guns, and victory will be ours! Go for broke!

The motto of the One Hundredth when it was a separate (and segregated) unit was “Remember Pearl Harbor.”

The mainlanders had lighter skin and were better educated, a more restrained bunch. They spoke good English and sent all their money back to their families in the relocation camps. The Hawaiians called themselves Buddhaheads, a slang term referring to pumpkins, and they called the mainlanders Kotonks, mimicking the sound of a coconut falling from a tree and hitting the ground.
Buddhahead
had a double meaning.
Buta
was the Japanese word for “pig,” so
butahead
could mean “pigheaded.” Fistfights and beatings became a major problem. In Washington, there was serious debate about breaking up the Nisei units.

At Shelby, Colonel Charles Pence got an idea for a way to help ease the tensions between the islanders and mainlanders. He decided to take busloads of Hawaiian officers and sergeants from the Mississippi army base to the Arkansas relocation camps, Camp Jerome and Camp Rohwer. One of the Hawaiians who saw the Arkansas camps, Sergeant Inouye, was one of the men who took the first trip on July 4, 1943, for what was called a “social weekend” at the Arkansas camps. He remembered it this way:

Arriving, we saw formations of barracks, then turned in and saw high barbed wire, machine guns and bayonets, towers. We thought it must be a secret base. Then we saw people who looked like us. It didn’t take long to figure out what was going on.…When we got back, I assembled my squad. I told them it was beyond imagination out there. This was where these mainlanders had come from, they were brave men.

Up until that point I had no idea that these men had come from these camps. But on our way back from there, something haunted me and it’s haunted me forever. Would I have volunteered if I were from that camp?

Sergeant Inouye, the young man who as a teenager had run through the streets of Honolulu to enlist, admitted he didn’t know if he would have joined up if he had been interned or evacuated. “When we got back, they became our brothers. Blood brothers. You know, these guys, the mainlanders, were special, that even under these extreme circumstances they would volunteer. They were better than us.”

As the mainland volunteers from the camps trained as the 442nd, elements of the One Hundredth were already in North Africa to prepare for the Allied invasion of Italy. They were then shipped to Salerno ten days after the Allies invaded the Italian port city. Within six weeks they took 25 percent casualties, with 3 officers and 25 enlisted men killed in action; 239 more were wounded.

The 442nd left Shelby and shipped out from Hampton Roads, Virginia, for the invasion at Anzio in southern Italy, landing there on May 1, 1944. The One Hundredth had already suffered almost a thousand casualties before the two Japanese American units, still segregated, were combined in Italy. The First Battalion of the 442nd had stayed at Fort Shelby to train new Nisei draftees as replacements. The One Hundredth, which kept its separate designation, took the place of the 442nd’s First Battalion.

On June 6, 1944, as Allied troops landed on the Normandy coast of France, the all-Nisei One Hundredth Battalion was the American unit closest to Rome, just six miles south of the city. They were ordered to stop there by General John Harmony. They camped and then stood by for more than a day on the side of the main route to the city, Highway 7, as the Caucasians of the First Armored Division caught up and marched triumphantly past them into the first Axis capital captured by the Allies.

Then the men of the One Hundredth were loaded on trucks and moved to an area north of the city. A week after that, farther north, the One Hundredth, mostly Hawaiians, was officially merged into the 442nd Combat Unit, most of them mainlanders from the West Coast. Three weeks later, on June 26, 1944, with the One Hundredth Battalion veterans in the lead, the combined 442nd went into battle for the first time, surrounding the German-held town of Belvedere di Spinello. It was a bloody fight and the Americans suffered nine hundred casualties, winning a Presidential Unit Citation, which read:

All three companies went into action boldly facing murderous fire from all types of weapons and tanks and, at times, fighting without artillery support.… The stubborn desire of the men to close with a numerically superior enemy and the rapidity with which they fought allowed the 100th Battalion to destroy completely the flank positions of the German Army.… The fortitude and intrepidity of the officers and men of the 100th reflects the finest traditions of the Army of the United States.

The 442nd Combat Regiment was designed as a self-contained battle force of 3,800 men, backed up by its own artillery, medical, and engineering units. The regiment spent the rest of the summer engaged in bitter battle after battle as they made their way through northern Italy. By mid-July, the 442nd, under constant attack from dug-in German units in Cecina and Castellina, would, according to United States military records, report 1,100 enemy kills and 331 captures. The campaign continued until the 442nd reached the Arno River on August 31, 1944. The combat team by then had lost 239 men, killed or missing, and another 972 wounded.

On July 11, 1944, George Saito of the 442nd wrote to his father about his brother Calvin: “I believe the War Department has notified you of our loss of Calvin … it happened so soon, on the 12th day of combat.… He happened to be one of the unlucky ones—his passing was instantaneous.”

George Saito continued, as he wanted to be sure that his father understood his and his brother’s decision to join the 442nd, “Dad, this is not the time to be preaching to you but I have something on my chest that I want you to hear—In spite of Cal’s supreme sacrifice don’t let anyone tell you that he was foolish or made a mistake to volunteer. Of what I’ve seen in my travels on our mission I am more than convinced that we’ve done the right thing in spite of what has happened in the past—America is a damned good country and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

Three months later, George Saito was killed in action.

In September of 1944, the 442nd was moved by ship to France, landing at Marseille and then traveling five hundred miles by train and foot through the Rhône Valley for an assault on the German-held French town of Bruyères, a German stronghold in the Vosges Mountains. The battle in the black forests of northeastern France began on October 15. The terrain and weather were the worst the men of the 442nd had seen so far. Many of them still wearing summer gear, they crawled up steep and muddy slopes and were battered by cold winds and soaking rain. The Germans fought well, as if they were defending their own homeland. The fighting raged for nine days with heavy casualties on both sides. The people of the town had lived underground in cellars, with little food and water. When the firing ended and villagers emerged in the daylight, they were stunned to see what one of them called “little men with yellow skin and slanted eyes.” Some guessed the men in strange uniforms were “Hindus” of some kind. Private First Class Stanley Akita remembered, “They didn’t believe we were American soldiers. I don’t think they knew what a Japanese looked like.”

It was not over, though. The Germans counterattacked over a hill east of the town. At one point, they fired on medics wearing Red Cross armbands, killing a wounded American, Sergeant Abraham Ohama, on a stretcher. Enraged soldiers of the 442nd charged up the hill yelling “Banzai!,” fighting hand to hand for a half hour. They killed fifty Germans and captured seven more.

Next the Nisei units were ordered to take Biffontaine, a few miles away, another German strongpoint, guarded by four hills. They captured the town after taking the hills and then engaging in eight days of door-to-door fighting. Stanley Akita was captured by the Germans during that fight. A German interrogator said, “You’re supposed to be fighting with us, not against us. What makes you think you’re an American?”

*   *   *

After the Bruyères and Biffontaine battles, the 442nd was pulled back for two weeks of rest and recreation in a secured town called Belmont, where the attractions included hot showers, hot food, and dry socks. That lasted for two days. They were called back for one of the most difficult jobs of the French campaign: rescuing the First Battalion of the 141st Regiment of the Thirty-Sixth Infantry Division, the “Alamo Regiment,” originally a Texas National Guard unit, which was cut off and surrounded. That was “The Lost Battalion,” soon to be famous across the United States.

They actually were never lost; they had just outrun other units on their flanks. American commanders knew exactly where they were, on a hilltop east of Biffontaine, behind German lines in a grim pine forest that was foggy during the day, pitch-dark at night. They were 275 men with no food, and their only water was scooped from muddy foxholes. They were running out of ammunition, and they were surrounded by at least seven hundred Germans with tanks and heavy armor. The battalion was now led by a lieutenant from Jersey City, New Jersey, Marty Higgins, the highest-ranking officer still alive. Each day they sent out radio messages, but only twice a day in order to conserve battery power for their only link to the world beyond their small hilltop: “Send us medical supplies,” “We need rations,” “Please we need fresh water,” “I need radio batteries. My wounded need plasma.” Army Air Corps P-47 fighter-bombers attempted to drop supplies, but most of them ended up in German hands. A rocket with its nose cone filled with chocolate buried itself so deeply in the mud that it could not be pulled free.

Several rescue missions had already failed, including a breakout attempt by the Lost Battalion itself that left fifty men missing in action. To the 442nd, which was never told the nature of the mission, this was just taking another hill for no particular reason. They moved out at 3:00 a.m. on October 27. In fog, rain, and snow, they moved up muddy forest slopes, each man holding the pack of the man in front of him. Again, neither the “T-patchers,” as the Texans were called, nor the Nisei knew of each other—nor of the fact of the rescue mission. The 442nd began to move up the hills two kilometers from the T-patchers. After taking heavy casualties in savage fighting for five days, the Nisei units were blocked and under heavy fire from German artillery units on a ridge above them. It was only then, five days into hell, that the 442nd was told what the mission actually was: the Germans were about to capture a depleted American battalion—and it was their job to rescue their comrades.