In early December Hitler sent to the Italian front a fanatical Prussian colonel named Sep Seigl, unusual in that he combined a heritage of Prussian tradition and a loyalty to Naziism. Hitler told him simply, "Destroy the Japanese." And when he studied his maps he decided, "I shall do it at Monte Cassino." Colonel Seigl was a bullet-headed young man of thirty-seven whose promotion had been speeded because of his dedication to Hitler, and on three different battlefronts he had proved his capacities. At Monte Cassino he was determined to repeat his earlier performances. The Japanese would be humiliated.
So as December waned and as the Two-Two-Two slogged steadfastly up the leg of Italy toward Rome, they picked up many signs that their critical battle was going to be engaged somewhere near the old monastery of Monte Cassino, and belts tightened as they approached it. At the same time, from the north Colonel Sep Seigl was moving down to Cassino some of the ablest German units in Italy, but he did not intend to engage the Japanese on the slopes of the mountain. His troops were not permitted to construct their forward positions on that formidable pile of rock; they were kept down below along the banks of the Rapido River that here ran in a north-south direction, with the Japanese approaching from the east and the Germans dug in along the west. Surveying the German might he now had lined up along the Rapido, Colonel Seigl said, "We'll stop them at the river."
On January 22, 1944, Colonel Mark Whipple halted his Japanese troops along a line one mile east of the Rapido and told them, "Our orders are clear and simple. Cross the river ... so that troops behind us can assault that pile of rocks up there. The Germans claim a rabbit can't get across the approaches without being shot at from six angles. But we're going across."
He dispatched a scouting party consisting of Sergeant Goro Sakagawa, his brother Tadao, who was good at sketching and four riflemen, and at dusk on the twenty-second of January they crawled out of their hiding places and started on their bellies across the most difficult single battle terrain the Americans were to face in World War II. With meticulous care, Tadao Sakagawa drew maps of the route. Two hundred yards west of their present positions the Two-Two-Two would come upon an irrigation ditch three feet wide and four feet deep. As they crawled out of it, they would be facing German machine guns and a marsh some thirty yards wide, beyond which lay another ditch. Thirty yards beyond hid a third ditch, twice as deep, twice as wide. As the men climbed out of this one, they would face a solid wall of machine-gun fire.
When they got this far in the darkness Goro Sakagawa licked his dry lips and asked his men, "What's that ahead?"
"Looks like a stone wall."
"Jesus," Goro whispered. "You can't expect our boys to negotiate those three ditches and then climb a wall. How high is it?"
"Looks about twelve feet high."
"This is impossible," Goro replied. "You fellows split up. You go that way, we'll go this. Let's see if there's a break in the wall."
In the darkness they found none, only a stout, murderous stone wall, twelve feet high and with a jagged top. When they reassembled, Goro said in a rasping whisper, "Christ, how can anybody get over that damned thing? With machine guns everywhere. Sssssh."
There was a sudden chatter of German guns, but the men firing them must have heard a sound in some other direction, for the firing did not come close to Goro and his men. "Well," he said when it ceased, "over we go."
Patiently and with skill, in the darkness of night, the six Japanese boys helped one another over the terrifying wall, and from it they dropped into the eastern half of the dry river bed of the Rapido. It was about seventy-five feet across, about fifteen feet deep, and every spot of its entire cross section was monitored by German machine guns. On their bellies, the six soldiers crept across the dry river and trusted that no searchlights would be turned on. In the cold night they were perspiring with fear.
But when they got to the other side of the Rapido they discovered what fear really was, for both machine guns and searchlights opened up, but the young Japanese managed to secrete themselves in crevices at the foot of the western bank; but what terrified them was not the imperative staccato of the guns or the probing fingers of lights, but the monstrous nature of the river's west bank. It rose fairly straight up from the river bed, sixteen feet high, and was topped by a stout double fence of barbed wire which could be expected to contain mines at two-foot intervals.
"Are you getting this on paper?" Goro whispered to Tadao. "Cause when they see this, no general living would dare send men across this river." A passing light illuminated the wild and terrible tangles of barbed wire and then passed on. "You got it?" Goro asked. "Good. Hoist me up. I'm going through it."
Tadao grabbed his older brother's hand. "I have enough maps," he cautioned.
"Somebody's got to see what's over there."
His men hoisted him onto the top of the west bank of the river, where he spent fifteen perilous minutes picking his way inch by inch through the tangled barbed wire. He knew that at any moment he might explode a mine and not only kill himself but doom his five companions as well. He was no longer sweating. He was no longer afraid. He had passed into some extraordinary state known only by soldiers at night or in the heat of unbearable battle. He was a crop-headed, tense-bellied Japanese boy from Kakaako in Honolulu, and the courage he was displaying in those fateful minutes no one in Hawaii would have believed.
He penetrated the wire, leaving on the barbs tiny shreds of cloth which would guide him safely back, and in the darkness he found himself on the eastern edge of a dusty road that led past the foot of Monte Cassino. Hiding himself in the ditch that ran alongside the road, he breathed deeply, trying to become a man again and not a nerveless automaton, and as he lay there, face up, a searchlight played across the countryside, hunting for him perhaps, and it passed on and suddenly illuminated the terrain that rose above him, and although he had seen it from a distance and knew its proportions, he now cried with pain: "Oh, Jesus Christ, no!"
For above him rose an unassailable rocky height, far, far into the sky, and at its crest clung an ancient monastery, and from where he lay Goro realized that he and his men were expected to cross all that he had seen tonight, and that when they got to this road in which he now huddled, other fellows from Hawaii were expected to forge ahead and climb those overpowering rocks that hung above him. In the lonely darkness he shivered with fright; then, as men do at such times, he effectively blocked out of his mind the realization of what Monte Cassino was like. It was not an unscalable height. It was not mined and interlaced with machine guns. It was not protected by the Rapido River defenses, and a gang of Japanese boys were not required to assault it, with casualties that would have to mount toward the fifty-per-cent mark, or even the eighty. Goro Sakagawa, a tough-minded soldier, cleansed himself of this knowledge and crept back to his men, then back to his commanding officer.
"It'll be tough," he reported. "But it can be done." As he spoke, Colonel Sep Seigl was reviewing the same terrain and he knew far more about it than Goro Sakagawa, for he had maps prepared by the famous Todt Labor Corps, which had built this ultimate defense of Rome. He could see that the first three ditches which the Japanese would have to cross were covered in every detail by mines and machine-gun fire, and he told his men, "I suppose scouting parties are out there right now, but if they miss the mines, they'll be lucky." He saw the plans for defending the river itself, which presented one of the most formidable obstacles any army could encounter, and whereas Goro a few minutes before had been guessing as to where the mines and machine guns were, Seigl knew, and he knew that even his own soldiers, the finest in the world, could not penetrate that defense. And west of the river, of course, lay the exposed road which could be cut to shreds with mortar fire, and beyond that the cliffs of Monte Cassino up which no troops could move. At midnight Colonel Seigl concluded: "They'll try, but they'll never make it. Here is where we bloody the nose of the traitor Japanese. Tomorrow we'll watch them wilt under fire."
January 24, 1944, began with a co
ld, clear midnight and it was greeted with a thundering barrage of American gunfire which illuminated the bleak river but which did not dislodge the Germans. For forty minutes the barrage continued, and a beginner at warfare might have taken heart, thinking: "No man can live through that." But the dark-skinned men of the Two-Two-Two knew better; they knew the Germans would be dug in and waiting.
At 0040 the barrage stopped and the whistles blew for advance. Goro clutched his brother by the arm and whispered, "This is the big one, kid. Take care of yourself." Progress to the first ditch was painful, for the Germans launched a counter-barrage and the first deaths at Monte Cassino occurred, but Goro and Tadao pushed stolidly ahead in the darkness, and when they had led their unit across the dangerous ditch and onto the edge of the marsh, they told their captain, "We'll take care of the mines," and they set out on their bellies, two brothers who could have been engaged in a tricky football play, and they crawled across the marsh, adroitly cutting the trip wires that would otherwise have detonated mines and killed their companions, and when they reached the second ditch Goro stood up in the night and yelled, "Mo bettah you come. All mines pau!" But as he sent the news his younger brother Tadao, one of the finest boys ever to graduate from Punahou, stepped upon a magnesium mine which exploded with a terrible light, blowing him into a thousand shreds of bone and flesh.
"Oh, Jesus!" Goro cried, burying his face in his hands. No action was required. None was possible. Tadao Sakagawa no longer existed in any conceivable form. Not even his shoes were recoverable, but where he had stood other Japanese boys swept over the marshy land and with battle cries leaped into the next ditch, and then into the next.
It took five hours of the most brutal fighting imaginable for the Japanese troops to reach the near bank of the Rapido, and when dawn broke, Colonel Sep Seigl was slightly disturbed. "They should not have been able to cross those fields. They seem rather capable, but now the fight begins."
Against the troops for which he had a special hatred he threw a wall of bombardment that was almost unbelievable, and to his relief, the advance was halted. No human being could have penetrated that first awful curtain of shrapnel which greeted the Two-Two-Two at the Rapido itself. "Well," Colonel Seigl sighed, "at least they're human. They can be stopped. Now to keep them pinned down. The Japanese cannot absorb casualties. Kill half of them, and the other half will run."
But here Colonel Seigl was wrong. Half of Goro Sakagawa had already been killed; he had loved his clever brother Tadao as only boys who have lived in the close intimacy of poverty and community rejection can love, and now Tadao was dead. Therefore, when the German shelling was at its most intense, Goro said to his captain, "Let's move across the river. I know how."
"We'll dig in," the captain countermanded.
But when Colonel Whipple arrived to inspect the battered condition of his men, Goro insisted that the river could be crossed, and Whipple said, "Go ahead and try." At this point one of the lieutenants from Baker Company, Goro's commanding officer, and a fine young officer from Kansas, said, "If my men go, I go."
"All right, Lieutenant Shelly," Whipple said. "We've got to cross the river."
So Lieutenant Shelly led forty men, with Sergeant Sakagawa as a guide, down into the bed of the Rapido, at nine o'clock on a crystal-clear morning, and they came within six yards of crossing the river, when a titanic German concentration of fire killed half the unit, including Lieutenant Shelly. The twenty who were left began to panic, but Goro commanded sternly, "Up onto that bank and through that barbed wire."
It was a completely insane thing to attempt. The Rapido River did not propose to allow any troops, led by Goro Sakagawa or otherwise, to violate it that day, and when his stubborn muddy fingers reached the barbed-wire embankment, such a furious load of fire bore down upon him that he had to drop back into the river. Three more times he endeavored vainly to penetrate the barbed wire, and each time Colonel Seigl screamed at his men, "Kill him! Kill him! Don't let them get started!" But although tons of ammunition were discharged in the general direction of Sakagawa and his determined men, somehow they were not killed. Huddling in the protection of the far bank of the river, the gallant twenty waited for their companions to catch up with them, when all together they might have a chance of crashing the barbed wire.
But the firepower of the Germans was so intense that the Japanese boys who were still on the eastern bank could not possibly advance. At times the wall of shrapnel seemed almost solid and it would have been complete suicide to move a man into it. "We've got to hold where we are," Colonel Whipple regretfully ordered. "What about those twenty out there in the river?" "Who's in charge? Lieutenant Shelly?" "He was killed. Sergeant Sakagawa." "Goro?" "Yes, sir."
"He'll get his men out," Whipple said confidently, and at dusk, after a day of hell, Goro Sakagawa did just that. He brought all of his twenty men back across the river, up the dangerous eastern bank, back through the minefields and safely to headquarters. "Colonel wants to see you," a major said. "We couldn't make it, Goro reported grimly. "No man ever tried harder, Lieutenant Sakagawa." Goro showed no surprise at his battlefield commission. He was past fear, past sorrow, and certainly past jubilation. But when the bars were pinned to his tunic by the colonel himself, the rugged sergeant broke into tears, and they splashed out of his dark eyes onto his leathery yellow-brown skin. "Tomorrow we'll cross the river," he swore.
"We'll certainly try," Colonel Whipple said. On January 26 the Japanese troops did try, but once more Colonel Sep Seigl's able gunners turned them back with dreadful casualties. On January 27 the Japanese tried for the third time, and although Lieutenant Goro Sakagawa got his men onto the road on the other side of the river, they were hit with such pulverizing fire that after forty-five minutes they had to withdraw. That night an Associated Press man wrote one of the great dispatches of the war: "If tears could be transmitted by cable, and printed by linotype, this story would be splashed with tears, for I have at last seen what they call courage beyond the call of duty. I saw a bunch of bandy-legged Japanese kids from Hawaii cross the Rapido River, and hold the opposite bank for more than forty minutes. Then they retreated in utter defeat, driven back by the full might of the German army. Never in victory have I seen any troops in the world achieve a greater glory, and if hereafter any American ever questions the loyalty of our Japanese, I am not going to argue with him. I am going to kick his teeth in."
On January 28, Lieutenant Sakagawa tried for the fourth time to cross the Rapido, and for the fourth time Colonel Sep Seigl's men mowed the Japanese down. Of the 1,300 troops with which Colonel Whipple had started four days earlier, 779 were now casualties. Dead Japanese bodies lined the fatal river, and men with arms and legs torn off were being moved to the rear. At last it became apparent that the Germans had effectively stopped the advance of the hated Two-Two-Two. That night Colonel Seigl's intelligence reported: "Victory! The Japanese have been driven back. They're in retreat and seem to be leaving the line."
The report was partially correct. Lieutenant Goro Sakagawa's company, and the unit of which it was a part, was being withdrawn. The boys were willing to try again, but they no longer had enough men to maintain a cohesive company and they had to retreat to repair their wounds. As they passed back through a unit from Minnesota coming in to replace them, the Swedes, having heard of their tremendous effort, cheered them and saluted and one man from St. Paul yelled, "We hope we can do as good as you did."
"You will," a boy from Lahaina mumbled.
So the Germans stopped the Two-Two-Two ... for a few hours, because in another part of the line other units from Hawaii were accumulating a mighty force, and on February 8 Colonel Sep Seigl's intelligence officer reported breathlessly, "The damned Japanese have crossed the river and are attacking the mountain itself!"
With a powerful surge the Japanese boys drove spearheads almost to the top of the mountain. They scaled heights that even their own officers believed impregnable, and they routed out more than two hundred separate m
achine-gun emplacements. Their heroism in this incredible drive was unsurpassed in World War II, and for a few breathless hours they caught a toehold on the summit of the mountain itself.
"Send us reinforcements!" they radioed frantically. "We've got them licked."
But reinforcements could not negotiate the cliffs, and one by one the Japanese victors were driven back from their dizzy pinnacles. As they stumbled down the steep flanks of Monte Cassino the Germans gunned them unmercifully, but at last the fragments of the force staggered back to camp and announced: "The Germans cannot be driven out." But one fact of triumph remained: the headquarters camp was now on the west bank of the Rapido. The river had been crossed. The way to Rome lay open.
It was in their bruising defeat at Monte Cassino that the Two-Two-Two became one of the most famous units of the war. "The Purple Heart Battalion" it was called, for it had suffered more casualties than any other similar-sized unit in the war. The Mo Bettahs won more honors, more decorations, more laudatory messages from the President and the generals than any other. But most of all they won throughout America a humble respect. Caucasians who fought alongside them reported back home: "They're better Americans than I am. I wouldn't have the guts to do what they do." And in Hawaii, those golden islands that the Japanese boys loved so deeply as they died in Italy, people no longer even discussed the tormenting old question: "Are the Japanese loyal?" Now men of other races wondered: "Would I be as brave?" So although the Prussian Nazi, Colonel Sep Seigl, did exactly what he had promised Hitler he would do--he crushed the Japanese at Monte Cassino--neither he nor Hitler accomplished what they had initially intended: for it was in defeat that the Japanese boys exhibited their greatest bravery and won the applause of the world.
Therefore it is strange to report that it was not at Monte Cassino that the Two-Two-Two won its greatest laurels. This happened by accident, in a remote corner of France.
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