The white men of Hood River were also traveling the state and appearing at mass meetings organized by the Oregon Property Owners’ Protective League. On March 13, a meeting in the town of Gresham was advertised by posters reading, “How Will We Rid the Coast of Japs? Get the answer to this problem that vitally affects you and every Oregon resident at the patriotic MASS MEETING at Union High School—$100 in Door Prizes Given Away.”
While the ads were running in Hood River, Sergeant Frank Hachiya, the local boy working as an interpreter in the Philippines, was killed in action. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin told that story under the headline, “Sergeant Hachiya, Spurned by Legion Post, Dies Hero’s Death in P.I.”
Anti-Japanese racism was not only in Hood River, of course. Lieutenant Colonel James Hanley, an officer from another small town, Mandan, North Dakota, was a commander of one of the three battalions in the 442nd, and he happened to read a short commentary in his hometown newspaper, the Mandan Daily Pioneer, saying, “There are some good Jap Americans but it [doesn’t] say where they’re buried.” Hanley, a friend of the editor, Charles Pierce, wrote home:
Yes, Charlie, I know where there are some GOOD Japanese Americans—there are 5,000 in this unit. They are American soldiers and I know where they are buried. I wish I could show you some of them, Charlie. I remember one Japanese-American. He was walking ahead of me in a forest in France. A German shell took off the right side of his face.
Hanley went on to describe other incidents of heroism and self-sacrifice by Nisei, and then wrote:
I wish the boys of the “Lost Battalion” could tell you what they think of Japanese Americans.… The marvel is, Charlie, that these boys fight at all—they are good soldiers in spite of the racial prejudice shown by your paragraph. I know it makes a good joke—but it is the kind of joke that prejudice thrives upon. Our system is supposed to make good Americans out of anyone—it certainly has done in the case of these boys. You, the Hearst newspapers, and a few others make one wonder what we are fighting for. I hope it isn’t racial prejudice.
But it was Hood River and its American Legionnaires that became a national symbol of intolerance. Post 22 continued to refuse to recognize the service of Japanese Americans for four more months, even after the national commander of the more than 12,245 American Legion posts in the country, Edward Schieberling, who had himself urged that Nikkei not try to return to their homes and property on the West Coast, reversed himself and told Post leaders that their actions were hurting the Legion and “the war effort.”
Post 22 responded that Japanese could not be assimilated in American society. Its members maintained that position into April, finally restoring the names of the sixteen Nisei on April 29, 1945. By then, national grocery chains were reporting local boycotts of Hood River’s famous apples, and bankers in Portland were refusing to lend money to some Hood River farmers. There were also reports, which proved to be untrue, that the post’s charter might be revoked by officials of Oregon’s state organization.
* * *
Stanley Hayami’s first letter home from Europe was dated February 7, 1945, from “Somewhere in France.” He wrote that France felt in some ways like the United States, though there were some differences: the houses looked older, and some were destroyed by bombs. He also noticed that the French, at least the ones he had seen so far, seemed very poor, wearing tattered clothes and scavenging for scraps.
We were having “chow” near the railroad tracks, and being a wasteful people, we threw some of the food we didn’t feel like eating on the ground. Pretty soon some old Frenchmen came by and picked up the scraps of bread and baloney. One of them saw me watching and so he pointed at the baloney and said “Woof.” I guess he had a little pride and wanted me to think that he was picking it up to feed to his dog, but I don’t think poor Frenchmen like him spend a great deal of their time looking for scraps just so they can feed it to their dogs.
His older brother, Frank, was also in France during the “champagne campaign” on the French Riviera. He wrote home to report the day when by chance he happened to see Stanley and reported that his brother was gaining weight and strength since leaving the camps. Frank was in his jeep just behind the lines when he saw Stanley. They spent a couple of hours talking that afternoon. He told his parents that Stanley was “looking very fine—and sure has gained much weight since I saw him back in Heart Mountain—nice and husky now. Big hands and big body. And still smiling his nice big smile.” He added: “We’re O.K. Everything’s nice and peaceful here.”
Stanley’ s next letter was sent on February 27, saying that he had seen Marseille and Paris—from the back of a truck moving troops around France. Now, back in Southern France, he added:
Right now I’m up front here, living on top of a mountain. The Jerries are on the next mountain. It’s nice and warm up here, get enough to eat, don’t do much, and the Germans aren’t giving us too much trouble (not now, anyway).… I would just about forget the war if it wasn’t for the artillery lobbing shells over us and if I couldn’t see the dead Jerries lying around below. (They were killed before I got here when they tried to attack.) I didn’t feel so good when I first saw the dead Jerries, but no one pays much attention to them when we go working around them—they’re just part of the landscape now. So the dead ones don’t bother me anymore—they say it’s the live ones I should worry about.
He wrote again on March 19, using his middling Japanese, with an update on friends he had seen in the 442nd.
When Murata came last year the 442 was in a very big battle. Murata wa boku ni uimasu “senso wa tottemo kuwai desu” [Murata tells me “war is very scary”]. Remember David Ito? He got a bronze star medal the other day. Remember Yo and Mas Tsuruda that lived near us in Pomona? Well their brother is in my company and he won a silver star!
How are you folks at home? Frank says you may go home to California about May.… You oughta have a lot of fun if you go back to Calif.
In late March of 1945, the 442nd was ordered back into combat again as part of the Fifth Army near Pisa, Italy, under the command of General Mark Clark, the same General Clark who had argued against Japanese internment in 1942. He had asked General Eisenhower if the 442nd could be brought back from France. “They are the best goddamned fighters in the U.S. Army,” he told Ike. General Clark wanted the 442nd to lead the final attacks on the Gothic Line, a line along the Apennine mountains and ridges between Italy and Austria, the line Hitler called the last barrier between Allied forces and the German homeland. It was guarded by more than twenty-seven hundred German machine-gun nests and bunkers, constructed over a year by slave laborers. With Americans at the bottom of the ridges, the two sides had been deadlocked for the six months since the 442nd had withdrawn and been sent to guard the French-Italian border in comfort.
At 5:00 a.m. on April 5, 1945, the 100th/442nd charged into the no-man’s-land between the two armies. The heroism of the next few days became a part of American legend. Private First Class Sadao S. Munemori, a twenty-two-year-old Kibei auto mechanic from Los Angeles and Manzanar, rushed forward under heavy enemy fire when his platoon leader was badly wounded, lobbing grenade after grenade into two German positions, silencing both. As he worked his way back to join his squad, an enemy grenade fell into a shell crater where two of his squad members had taken cover. He threw himself on top of the grenade, saving his two buddies at the cost of his own life. Private First Class Munemori was the first Nisei awarded the highest combat decoration the United States could give, the Medal of Honor.
Two weeks after that, the 442nd was attacking Colle Musatello, the last of the ridges marking the Gothic Line. Daniel Inouye, the Hawaiian who quit his medical studies to enlist and who won a battlefield commission as a lieutenant, had been shot in the chest in an earlier engagement, but the bullet was stopped by two silver dollars he kept for luck in a shirt pocket. On April 20, he was commanding a rifle platoon that charged up Musatello in the early morning hours. He was yards in front of his men, forty yards fro
m the last German strongpoint on the ridge. He grabbed a grenade and as he wound up to throw it he felt a heavy pain in his side. When his men caught up with him, they saw that he was gushing blood from his side. Inouye kept advancing and then his legs gave out and he collapsed. The attack faltered. But Inouye got up and tried to throw his last grenade. He was stopped by a German rocket grenade that ripped off his right arm. He pulled the grenade from his dead hand and then threw it. Somehow he stood up and charged, firing a machine gun. He was hit again and began rolling down the hill. He was bleeding from his right side, with wounds in his stomach and in his right leg. “Get up that hill,” he screamed to his men. And they did.
* * *
On April 22, only two days after the Nisei’s heroic fight at Colle Musatello on the Gothic Line, three “kotonks” serving in the 522nd Artillery Battalion, Sus Ito, Yul Minaga, and George Oiye, came upon what looked at first to be lumps in the snow. They were bodies, some of the three hundred prisoners in one of 139 satellite concentration camps clustered around Dachau, the first of Hitler’s concentration camps.
When Private Shiro Kashino, who joined the army from Minidoka, first saw the row of huts behind barbed wire at Dachau, he said, “This is exactly what they had built for us in Idaho.”
One of the survivors, Solly Ganor, a sixteen-year-old inmate, was both amazed and terrified by his encounter with Japanese American soldiers, remembering later:
I thought, oh, now the Japanese are going to kill us. And I didn’t care anymore. I said, “Just kill us, get it over with.” The soldier tried to convince me that he was an American and wouldn’t kill me. I said, “Oh, no, you are a Japanese and you’re going to kill us.” We went back and forth, and finally he landed on his knees, crying, with his hands over his face, and he said, “You are free. We are American Japanese. You are free.”
The American soldier was named Clarence Matsumura, from the island of Maui in Hawaii. He remembered finding more survivors along the roadside. “Almost all of them were wearing black and white striped uniforms. I don’t know how any of them could stand on their feet. They were nothing. They couldn’t speak. Most of them were lying on the ground, many of them unconscious.”
Matsumura began putting the survivors in barns, covering them with blankets, and giving them water and broth. Solly Ganor and the others could not swallow solid food. Some tried and some died, right there. Then the Americans started going into villages along the road, putting the German civilians out in the cold and putting the freed prisoners in their beds and on their couches and rugs.
Fifty years later, Ganor, who immigrated to Israel, received a telephone call from a hotel in Jerusalem, where a group of men, Nisei veterans, were staying on a reunion tour. He agreed to come to the hotel. “Solly,” said an American guide, introducing the men, “this is Clarence Matsumura. We think he is the man who saved you.”
Ganor remembered him. The two old men fell into each other’s arms.
* * *
On April 23, Inouye’s platoon, led now by Sergeant Gordon Takasaki, was ordered to take a Tuscan village, San Terenzo, a well-fortified outpost of the Gothic Line. One of the men who had served earlier in the battle where Inouye had lost his arm was a new replacement, Private Stanley Hayami. He wrote home before the battle for San Terenzo, “Well, doggone, here I am in Italy now! After studying all that French, I gotta learn Italian! Fooey! Yesterday was Easter and I went to the services. Reminded me of all the other Easters I’ve had. Guess I’ll remember this one for a long time.”
The Germans retreating north in Italy began surrendering in the hundreds, then the thousands. Army historians later reconstructed what happened in San Terenzo.
Through heavy German mortar, machine gun and artillery fire, Sgt. Takasaki advanced exposing himself to heavy fire in his attempt to surround and disorganize the enemy. Wounded in the chest by machine gun fire, he continued to direct his men in battle.… His men cut the enemy escape road and brilliantly accomplished their mission. Sgt. Takasaki died in the last major campaign of the 442nd. Five other Nisei were killed in the engagement.
One of them was Stanley Hayami.
Stanley, whose brother Frank was wounded in the same engagement, was posthumously awarded a Bronze Star. The citation reported that during the battle he had left his covered position and approached to help the men who had been wounded. Despite the shots directed at him from the hostile machine gun and sniper, he reached the first casualty, kneeled, and administered first aid. Still exposed to heavy enemy fire, he continued on to help another man. While aiding these men, he was mortally wounded.
Stanley was one of seven hundred Nisei killed in Europe. Sixty-seven more were missing in action. More than nine thousand were wounded.
That spring, the war in Europe was over. At Heart Mountain, the Hayami family celebrated V-E (Victory in Europe) Day on May 8, not knowing what had happened to their son Stanley. The telegram sent to Heart Mountain arrived the next day: “The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your son Pvt. Hayami Stanley K. was killed in Action in Italy 23 Apr 45. Confirming letter follows. J.A. Ulio the Adjutant General.”
Talking later, Grace and her mother discovered that they both had the same dream on the same night in April. It was April 23, the day Stanley died. Both of them dreamed that Stanley had come to them asking for a glass of water.
Guy Robertson, WRA director of Heart Mountain, paid tribute to Hayami and five other young men from Heart Mountain who had given their lives in battle. The Boy Scouts Drum and Bugle Corps opened the ceremony with an overture. Wreaths were laid before the Gold Star Flag by Camp Fire Girls and Girl Scouts, while the Boy Scouts band played “Nearer My God to Thee.”
10
GOING “HOME”
V-J DAY: AUGUST 15, 1945
Sergeant Ben Kuroki flew twenty-eight B-29 missions over Japan—that made his total fifty-eight bombing missions over Germany, Italy, and Japan—but his nerves were beginning to fray. He found himself thinking and dreaming of innocent women and children burning to death in the firestorms caused by the incendiaries his plane was dropping over the frail wooden and paper-screen houses of the Japanese capital.
Then the war was over.
On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped its bomb on Hiroshima; another B-29, the Bockscar, dropped one on Nagasaki. Two weeks later, Ben Kuroki’s own war was ended by another American soldier, a drunken American, who stabbed him in the head while they were playing cards and arguing about which of them was “a better American.” He lost a lot of blood; it took twenty-four stitches to close the wound. He was in a hospital on Tinian Island and could not go home with the rest of his crew.
The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the Japanese American “Go for Broke” unit, earned more than eighteen thousand individual decorations, the highest number per capita of any unit in the army—including one Medal of Honor, fifty-three Distinguished Service Crosses, 588 Silver Stars, fifty-two hundred Bronze Star Medals, 9,486 Purple Hearts, and eight Presidential Unit Citations, the nation’s top award for combat units. More than fifty years later, in June of 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded twenty additional Medals of Honor to members of the One Hundredth Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the result of a reexamination of the files of dozens of Japanese American soldiers to see if any of them might have been denied awards because of possible prejudice by superior officers.
* * *
Months earlier, on December 15, 1944, Governor Earl Warren had received a letter from Major General Robert R. Lewis stating that “military necessity” should no longer be applied to the evacuation of California’s Japanese and Japanese American population. “It is my hope,” wrote Lewis, “that the return of those Japanese-Americans who choose to return may be accomplished without serious incidents.… I am confident that the fine Americans of your state will realize that among the American citizens of Japanese ancestry who are being permitted to return there are many families with sons or daughters now serving in
our Armed Forces.”
General Lewis and Governor Warren were more than a bit overconfident in assessing the attitudes of people in the three states of the West Coast. Four days after Lewis wrote to Warren, an army intelligence report stated: “There are still 100 Salinas boys in Japanese prison camps and the Salinas’ mothers of those sons are somewhat bitter against the order permitting Japanese to return [to California] and have stated that the Japanese knew what happened on Bataan and won’t want to face us any more than we will be able to stand meeting them.” Like fellow Legionnaires in Oregon, the commander of the Salinas American Legion Post No. 31 told a local newspaper, “We don’t want Japanese here.”
When Governor Warren was interviewed in 1971 as part of an oral history for the Bancroft Library at the University of California, he recalled how he was contacted by the secretary of the army early in 1945 and he said that he had immediately agreed to the return of the Japanese and Japanese Americans to their homes in his state.
“It was a Saturday morning and I was in Los Angeles,” Warren said. “He told me that Monday at noon they were going to start letting the Japanese come back and asked me if I would help them do it. Well, I told him that I would. The war was all over and everything was—we had no need to fear anything.”
Warren told Amelia R. Fry in his contribution to the Berkeley Oral History Project:
I was on the telephone, I’ll bet nine-tenths of the time between then and Monday noon when it was finally announced … telling [people] that it was going to be done, and telling them that when we advocated the relocation of the Japanese we did it because we thought it was in the interest of the war, and the war’s over. The worst thing that could happen to the state of California would be to have us maintain a feeling of antagonism toward the Japanese who had lived in our state and who hadn’t done anything wrong, and that I hoped they would cooperate with the federal government and with me in bringing them back to California so they could be happy here.
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