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"Go For Broke"
FRANCE, OCTOBER 1944. The rain and chill which precedes winter in the Vosges mountains had started. The 442d Regimental Combat Team was weary and battle-scarred after fighting in Italy. Most of its members were Americans of Japanese ancestry. Men with names like Sumida, Miyamoto, Takemoto and Tanaka would write a bright page in the history of the U.S. Army.
On 27 October, the 442d was called on to rescue a surrounded U.S. battalion. They attacked the heavily fortified defenses of a superior German force. Fighting was desperate, often hand-to-hand. By 30 October, nearly half the regiment had become casualties.
Then, something happened in the 442d. By ones and twos, almost spontaneously and without orders, the men got to their feet and, with a kind of universal anger, moved toward the enemy positions. Bitter hand-to-hand combat ensued as the Americans fought from one fortified position to the next. Finally, the enemy broke in disorder.
"Go For Broke" was more than a motto for the 442d Regimental Combat Team. At a special ceremony to honor the 442d, seeing only a few hundred men, the Division Commander asked why the whole regiment was not present. Colonel Charles W. Pence is said to have replied. "Sir ... this is the entire regiment."
Thursday, June 22, 2000, 12:00 a.m. Pacific
Close-Up
Valor in a time of injustice
by Bruce Dunford
The Associated Press
HONOLULU - Dive bombers, torpedo planes and fighters bearing the "rising sun" emblem of the Japanese military were hammering Oahu's Army and Navy bases that Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941.
High-school senior Daniel Inouye was racing his bicycle through the streets of the Makiki neighborhood, heading to the Red Cross station where he volunteered as a first-aid trainer. He remembers cursing skyward at the Japanese.
As the great columns of black smoke rose from the wrecked Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Inouye knew that there would be trouble for him and other Japanese Americans - people who, he said, "had wanted so desperately to be accepted, to be good Americans."
Barney Hajiro, working for 10 cents an hour in the sugar-cane fields of Maui, quickly found his ancestry made him a target for other Americans after the attack that dragged the United States into World War II.
"When the war started, they thought we were the enemy," Hajiro, now 83, said recently. "I didn't like that."
Soon he and Inouye were in U.S. Army uniforms - among thousands of Nisei, or second-generation Japanese, who joined up and proved themselves on the battlefields of Europe. Some, including Hajiro and Inouye, stood out with single-handed acts of conspicuous bravery in the face of enemy fire that left them badly wounded.
But their heroism never was recognized fully - until now.
The Medal of Honor was established by Congress after the Civil War and is the nation's highest military decoration. It usually is granted within three years of the time of service, but an amendment to the 1996 Defense Authorization Act provided for delayed presentation to Asian-American World War II veterans who had won the Distinguished Service Cross.
Inouye, Hajiro and five other living Asian-American World War II veterans received the Medal of Honor in a White House ceremony yesterday.
Fifteen other Medals of Honor went to the surviving families of dead Asian-American heroes.
"They rose above any sense of personal injustice to sacrifice all that they held dear in order to keep our country strong," Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera said yesterday, describing the veterans.
"They proved for all time their loyalty and that they were willing to die for our country."
Most decorated, yet slighted
Those being honored mostly served in the segregated Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Infantry Battalion, which together became the most decorated combat unit for its size in the nation's history.
The men emerged from seven major campaigns in France and Italy with eight presidential unit citations, 9,486 Purple Hearts and 18,143 individual decorations. The latter included 52 Distinguished Service Crosses, the second-highest award for valor.
As outstanding as these achievements were - especially for units that had a total of 25,000 men during the war - some felt the recognition was incomplete. Only one soldier received the highest award.
"The fact that the 100th/442nd saw such fierce and heavy combat, yet received only one Medal of Honor award, and then only posthumously and due to congressional intervention, raised serious questions about the fairness of the award process at the time," said Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii.
He decided to re-examine the process and concluded that wartime "bias, discrimination and hysteria" were partly to blame for the withholding of Medals of Honor.
Volunteers `Go for Broke'
Distrust and even hatred of the traditionally clannish Japanese were almost immediate after the Pearl Harbor attack. Most islanders, and especially the military, believed an invasion was imminent and local Japanese might aid those invaders.
All Japanese Americans were reclassified as "4C-enemy aliens." Japanese Americans in the Army were disarmed and assigned to labor battalions; the Hawaii Territorial Guard and ROTC discharged 1,400 Japanese Americans.
On the U.S. mainland, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered 120,000 alien Japanese and Japanese Americans rounded up and placed in relocation camps "for their own safety."
Meanwhile, when the Army allowed it in 1942, about 1,500 Hawaii Nisei joined the 100th Infantry Battalion being formed in the islands.
Their "Go for Broke" training at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin so impressed the Army brass that the 442nd Regimental Combat Team was formed, taking thousands more Japanese-American volunteers from Hawaii and across the country for training at Camp Shelby, Miss.
By war's end, 25,000 Japanese Americans had served, including several hundred in Pacific intelligence units as spies, interrogators and interpreters.
In 1996, Akaka persuaded Congress to direct the Pentagon to review the actions of 104 soldiers of Asian and Pacific ancestry who were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
That effort was patterned on a 1993 law that led to the upgrading of Distinguished Service Crosses and Navy Crosses won by seven black veterans to the Medal of Honor.
After a three-year review, the Army last month recommended that 21 soldiers - 19 Japanese Americans, one Filipino American and one Chinese American - be awarded the Medal of Honor. A recommendation for the late James Okubo was granted later.
A suicidal charge
Hajiro earned his at a place the GIs called "Suicide Hill" in France's Vosges Mountains.
PFC Hajiro's platoon in the 100th was under heavy fire from German machine guns, which had killed eight GIs and wounded 21.
Hajiro picked up his Browning automatic and charged. He wiped out two machine-gun nests and killed two snipers before he was hit by a third machine gun, receiving wounds to the body, arm and face.
His action came in the third and final push in the 442nd's breakthrough to rescue the "Lost Battalion," a former Texas National Guard unit cut off by the Germans.
"It was 1 a.m., and we took a lot of heavy hits. Some of the guys were only 18 or so, and they were getting hit and were dying," Hajiro said. ". . . I was lucky to survive." Six months later, Inouye's turn for heroism came as his platoon in the 442nd came under fire from a German bunker.
Wounded in the stomach, 1st Lt. Inouye crawled up the exposed hillside, tossed a hand grenade into a machine-gun emplacement, then took aim at the fleeing defenders.
He staggered farther up the hill, threw two more grenades at a second machine gun and advanced to a third position with a grenade ready to throw.
At that moment, an enemy grenade exploded near his right elbow. Inouye threw his grenade with his left hand. He then was shot in his right leg and fell down the hill.
He lost his right arm and hopes for a medical career. Instead, he went to law school and into politics; Inouye has represented Hawaii in the U.S. Senate since 1962.
The previous lone recipient
Until now, the only Japanese-American World War II veteran awarded the Medal of Honor had been PFC Sadao Munemori, a Los Angeles native who signed up for the 442nd after he and his family were sent to the Manzanar internment camp in California.
After making a one-man attack on a German stronghold in the Po Valley in Italy, Munemori sacrificed his life by falling on an enemy grenade, smothering its blast to save two nearby comrades. For each man receiving a Medal of Honor this week, the hell of war took a different form.
Shizuya Hayashi was cited for charging a machine-gun position and killing 20 enemy soldiers while taking four prisoner at Cerasuolo, Italy, in November 1943. At one point, Hayashi recalls facing an armed boy, "12 or 13, I think."
"He was crying," Hayashi said. "He was holding the burp gun, and the one in the back told him it was his responsibility to stop us. But I couldn't shoot him."
Instead, Hayashi said he yelled, " `Get up,' and they all came up and surrendered. One of them had the Iron Cross, and that swastika. I took that away from him, I was so mad."
Tech. Sgt. Yeiki Kobashigawa led his platoon in wiping out four German machine-gun positions.
" `Give me all the pineapples (grenades),' " he recalled telling his lieutenant. ". . . I was in a good position."
He was wounded in the knee and chest in fighting two days later.
Tech. Sgt. Yukio Okutsu was leading a platoon that was caught in crossfire from three German machine guns.
After using grenades to knock out two gun emplacements, he moved through heavy fire toward the third. A bullet glanced off his helmet, stunning him. He then charged with his submachine gun, capturing the position and its four gunners.
"I was one of the lucky guys in the infantry. I got scratched, but no heavy wounds. I didn't even get a Purple Heart," he said.
Pvt. George Sakato of the 442nd killed five Germans and captured four in his platoon's assault on two enemy defensive lines before the unit was pinned down by heavy fire.
At his Colorado home, Sakato, now 79, spoke in a wavering voice as he recalled how a friend was killed by a German soldier after he tried to warn him. "Why?" he remembers crying out before picking up his gun and running toward the shooter.
"I was just so mad, I lost control and charged that hill," said Sakato, a retired postal clerk.
Staff Sgt. Rudolph Davila's 7th Infantry artillery unit, moving in from the Anzio beachhead, came upon a U.S. rifle company of 130 men caught in the open by heavy German fire.
He sprayed his machine gun at the Germans in the foothills and ordered his men to bring other machine guns into action. He then directed the fire to silence several German positions.
Davila, despite a wounded leg, took cover behind a burned tank and continued firing on the German positions before crawling toward an enemy-held house, where he used a hand grenade and rifle to wipe out two machine guns there.
"To this day, I can't tell you I killed," he said. "I don't want to think that I killed. I think I scared them away."
Davila, of Spanish-Filipino descent, said his wife, Harriet, prodded the Army for years to recommend him for the Medal of Honor. She died Christmas Day 1999.
"The experience has a lot of meaning to me, but not as much as if she were here," he said. "She wanted me to have it so badly."
Information from the Los Angeles Times is included in this report.
Copyright 2000 The Seattle Times Company
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