Honor Before Glory

by Scott McGaugh

  Truscott and Dahlquist could not have been more different in background, temperament, and reputation. Lucian K. Truscott Jr.’s gravelly voice filled a room. He reminded some of a bantam rooster who ruled without question and could be a son of a bitch if that’s what the job required. The superstitious Texas native favored a leather jacket, his “lucky boots,” and a white scarf. The son of English parents, Truscott grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, and taught school for six years before enlisting in the army in 1917. Truscott never saw combat in World War I and held a number of cavalry posts following the war. He was a blunt, driven, and ambitious Officer, famous for his “Truscott Trot,” which was a forced march of nearly four miles per hour instead of the conventional two and a half miles per hour. The Truscott Trot covered thirty miles in eight hours instead of the standard twenty miles.

  At the start of the war, he had held a post in England. A year later he commanded a task force in North Africa and was said to have attracted the attention of General George Patton. Later in Italy, General Mark Clark had refused to release Truscott for transfer to the Third Army command, calling him too valuable to the Italian campaign.

  Dahlquist, on the other hand, had forged his career mostly sitting down. The University of Minnesota graduate had also served during World War I without seeing action and then was assigned to various posts in Germany and the Philippines. In 1937 he was attached to the Planning Branch, Personnel Division, War Department General Staff. Tall and soft, he held bureaucratic posts early in the war before being promoted to major general in 1943 and taking command in 1944 of the 36th Infantry Division, where he would face the enemy for the first time.

  Dahlquist couldn’t seem to find his way out of Truscott’s doghouse. A few days after the landing, Truscott had felt compelled to give Dahlquist written instructions on how to deploy his troops to keep three retreating German divisions from escaping farther toward Germany. Truscott was livid because Dahlquist had erroneously reported that his units, including the 141st, were in position to halt the Germans’ retreat.

  Four days later Truscott had decided to fire Dahlquist, as the German army appeared to be slipping by Dahlquist’s men in a trap set by Truscott. “John, I have come here with the full intention of relieving you from your command. You have reported to me that you held the high ground north of Montelimar and that you had blocked Highway 7. You have not done so. You have failed to carry out my orders. You have just five minutes in which to convince me that you are not at fault,” wrote Truscott in his memoirs.3

  Dahlquist explained that he had been given faulty field information when his troops had mistakenly taken a position on Hill 300 instead of a nearby hill that overlooked Highway 7.d Further, he pointed out, the enemy had cut his supply line at one point. But now he had four artillery battalions and a roadblock in place. The retreating Germans outnumbered Dahlquist’s unit, but Dahlquist now held a strategic position to inflict maximum damage on the retreating enemy. Dahlquist believed that he had done as well as he could under the circumstances. Truscott wasn’t fully convinced, but he left Dahlquist in command. In Truscott’s view, Dahlquist had allowed too much of the Germans’ Nineteenth Army to escape.

  By the middle of October, the VI Corps had pushed more than four hundred miles to the northeast and had reached the southern half of the Vosges Mountains. But now that same German army, commanded by an expert tactician, held the high ground. He had evaded Truscott’s trap earlier with enough firepower to establish a line of resistance in the Vosges.

  THE GERMANS’ GENERAL FRIEDRICH WIESE AGAIN STOOD IN THE way of Truscott, Dahlquist, Higgins, and Huberth. He had taken command of the severely undermanned Nineteenth Army only two months before the Allies came ashore on the Riviera. He had been ordered to prevent the Allies from landing along the four-hundred-mile coastline of southern France. Now his mission was to stop them in the Vosges.

  Meticulous, analytical, and an expert in American battle tactics, Wiese had fought in World War I on the Eastern Front. After leaving the army to become a police Officer, he returned to the military in 1935 to command a battalion in the 116th Infantry Regiment. Early in World War II he had been part of the Polish and then French campaigns and once again had fought on the Eastern Front. An adept battlefield tactician and enthusiastic National Socialist, his intense grayish-blue eyes, lean frame, and overall fitness made him a prototypical Aryan officer who was both feared and respected. He had risen from battalion to army commander in only five years of war.

  Wiese’s primary asset in southern France had been a well-fortified coastline. Hundreds of concrete bunkers had been carved into hillsides. Nearly every approach to landing beaches was laced with crossfire emplacements. Thousands of mines had been laid in the surf. The Germans, however, had not made the same kind of commitment in the troops they had sent to southern France. Many units had received poorly trained reinforcements. Wiese inherited either inexperienced boys or unfit veterans from the Eastern Front, many of them captured Polish, Georgian, and Ukrainian soldiers who didn’t speak German. Prisoners of war, foreigners, derelicts, and inexperience of recruits were the hallmarks of the German defense force. An exception was the 11th Panzer Division, known as the Ghost Division. It was renowned for its vicious fighting while enduring brutal losses in several battles on the Eastern Front. It had been transferred to southern France the month before Wiese arrived.

  When he had taken command of the Nineteenth Army, Wiese had an estimated eight divisions plagued by critical shortages of fuel, transport, and other supplies. Some units relied on horse-drawn carts, wagons, and bicycles. After failing to prevent the Allies’ amphibious landing, by mid-October he had ceded hundreds of miles of French territory. He had escaped with his makeshift army and was now entrenched in the Vosges Mountains.

  HIGGINS, HUBERTH, KIMBLE, AND 272 MEN PREPARED FOR THE day’s advance in bone-chilling rain early on October 24. Most carried only a day’s supply of food and ammunition. Surely, rear-echelon supply personnel and the 141st’s command post would keep up with their advance, even if it was into a forest that had little more than muddy logging roads and game trails.

  At about the same time, another regiment in the 36th Division began to assemble near Belmont. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team and Higgins’s 141st Infantry Regiment represented opposite ends of the American spectrum in 1944. The 141st held a familiar World War II lineage: a federally activated Texas National Guard unit intensely proud of its lineage. Meanwhile, the 442nd was the political creation of a segregated army and America. Commanded by Caucasian officers, it comprised almost entirely Japanese American citizens, many of whom had been incarcerated in the months following Pearl Harbor only because of their heritage. Then, about a year later, young men like Jim Okubo, Barney Hajiro, and George Sakato were given the opportunity to volunteer to fight for their country. Some left families living in internment camps. Others said good-bye to families forced to vacate their West Coast homes and move in with friends or relatives in other states.

  Less than two years earlier, Okubo had been supporting his Japanese American family by working for salmon fishermen in the Pacific Northwest before attending Western Washington University. His father operated a restaurant, and his mother sometimes assisted births in the neighborhood as a midwife. The generally reserved youngster had a quick, engaging smile that made him easily likable. He and his siblings had pledged allegiance to America every day in school. But that loyalty meant nothing to a vengeful America following Pearl Harbor.

  On December 10, 1941, Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover sent President Franklin Delano Roosevelt a detailed report, illustrating where and how 1,212 Japanese Americans had been arrested in the two days following the Pearl Harbor attack. The letter provided no information on why the Japanese Americans had been arrested. While some advisers to President Roosevelt cautioned against falling victim to racial hysteria stoked by columnists such as Walter Lippmann, a campaign to incarcerate most of the West Coast’s Japanese American
citizens had ridden on a rising groundswell of hatred and vengeance in early 1942.

  A West Seattle Herald editorial stated, “The government should initiate instant and drastic orders sweeping all aliens, foreign and native born, so far inland that we can forget about them for the duration [of the war].”4 U.S. senator Harley Kilgore agreed when he wrote to President Roosevelt, “It is my sincere belief that the Pacific coast [sic] should be declared a military area which will give authority to treat residents, either aliens or citizens, as camp followers and put them under military law, permitting their removal, regardless of their citizenship rights, to internal and less dangerous areas.”5

  On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the incarceration of more than 100,000 Japanese American citizens, mostly from the West Coast, in desolate internment camps in the wastelands of Arizona, California, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and Arkansas. Dry lake beds, deserts, wind-swept prairies, and Indian land were appropriated. Truckloads of plywood, tarpaper, and barbed wire soon arrived in a race to build prison-like barracks for American citizens convicted of no crime. Within a few months, the West Coast was virtually cleared of Japanese American citizens.e

  One morning in early April, posters had appeared on telephone poles, community bulletin boards, and storefronts in the Seattle area. Kenzo and Fuyu Okubo, along with Jim, eight brothers and sisters, and ten thousand other Japanese American citizens in Washington, had only a few weeks’ notice to liquidate their lives. Their children were pulled out of school. Every working member of the family lost his or her job. The Okubos’ possessions were reduced to a few suitcases. Everything else—personal belongings, family heirlooms, bulky valuables, clothing, even photo albums—was left behind. It was all in the custody of a sympathetic Caucasian neighbor, hastily sold at a fraction of its value, or simply abandoned.

  Nearly all of the evictees had done nothing illegal, much less having had anything to do with Pearl Harbor. But America’s simmering anti-Japanese sentiment that had festered since the turn of the century knew no bounds in early 1942. They had endured employment racism, school desegregation, and laws that prohibited real-estate ownership. At an assembly area, the Okubos learned they would be sent to a hastily constructed camp in a nearly deserted and largely barren region of Northern California, a place of such abject desolation that America could easily pretend these neighbors had disappeared, perhaps forever. Thousands of American citizens were herded into community centers and county fairground buildings, hoping their families could remain together when they reached their final destination.

  Overcrowded railroad cars carried the Okubos and hundreds of others under guard to Tule Lake, California, in May 1942. The collection of drafty wooden buildings that were twenty feet wide and one hundred feet long resembled a prison work camp. The Okubo family lived in a single five-hundred-square-foot room and was prohibited from cooking its own food. The federal government spent forty-five cents a day to feed each of them. Shortages abounded, including medical personnel. Jim Okubo learned the camp hospital was to be avoided at all costs. Keep the door closed in the family’s war against dust. Take good notes in class because schoolbooks could not be taken to the barracks. Don’t make trouble and bring shame on the Okubo family.

  As the evictees coped with an uncertain future under confinement, a new debate developed in Washington, DC. Should Japanese Americans be allowed to volunteer for the army? Secretary of War Henry Stimson had vehemently opposed the idea, and a committee of senior officers wrote that “Japanese ancestry tends to place them in a most questionable light as to their loyalty.” U.S. Army chief of staff George Marshall, however, would accept Japanese American volunteers. Others favored using Japanese Americans only to the extent that their language skills were required.

  Nearly a year later, on February 1, 1943, President Roosevelt settled the matter when he authorized creation of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. The president decreed:

  No loyal citizen of the United States should be denied the democratic right to exercise the responsibilities of his citizenship, regardless of his ancestry. The principle on which this country was founded and by which it has always been governed is that Americanism is a matter of mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race and ancestry. A good American is one who is loyal to his country and to the creed of liberty and democracy. Every loyal American citizen should be given an opportunity to serve his country wherever his skills will make the greatest contribution.6

  He made no mention of America’s incarceration of Japanese American citizens without due process. Jim Okubo and others could volunteer for a segregated combat unit open only to Japanese American soldiers that would be commanded mostly by “regular army” Caucasian officers.

  Army recruiters in Hawaii were tasked with finding fifteen hundred Japanese American volunteers among the ashes of the attack on Pearl Harbor. An estimated ten thousand young men volunteered. On the mainland, Japanese American volunteers also easily exceeded their share of what the army needed for the four-thousand-man 442nd. Some were assigned to the Military Intelligence Service to become interpreters, interrogators, and analysts in the Pacific.

  Jim Okubo had volunteered for his nation’s army on May 20, ten days shy of his twenty-third birthday. After basic training at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, he was assigned to Company K, 3rd Battalion.f Nearly a year later, on May 1, 1944, the 442nd’s 2nd and 3rd Battalions filled several transport ships at Hampton Roads, Virginia. On June 2 they arrived in Naples, and eight days later they joined the 100th Battalion near Rome. The 100th had been in battle for nine months and had earned a stellar reputation for bravery. In mid-June the 100th was attached to the 442nd as its 1st Battalion equivalent. It retained its 100th designation, however, in recognition of its outstanding combat record. That same day the 442nd was attached to the 36th Infantry Division under Dahlquist’s command.

  Throughout the summer of 1944, battles continued day after day, as the 442nd’s battalions advanced north along the Italian coast, leapfrogging one another, flanking German positions, and capturing Suvereto, Belvedere, Pastina, Luciano, Sassetta, and Leghorn. The army took notice and at its highest level decided to publicize their battle record. “I have just been advised that action has been initiated in the theater to obtain full press, still, and newsreel coverage of both Japanese American units now overseas. Several top writers have been assigned to features and stories on these units, and in addition the Army Pictorial Service now has crews at the front with these units. Files will be completed and shipped within the near future,” wrote Colonel Harrison Gerhardt in the secretary of war’s Office.7

  Soon articles appeared in military and domestic newspapers. “From a curious experiment the Army has received an unexpectedly rich reward. A group of sinewy oriental soldiers only one generation removed from a nation that was fighting fanatically against the U.S. was fighting just as fanatically for it,” wrote one reporter.8

  BETWEEN JUNE AND SEPTEMBER, JIM OKUBO HAD FOUGHT A personal war against death. As a medic he had treated his first battle wound within hours of his first firefight in Italy. Under enemy fire he had learned to instantly assess a wounded man. He could identify the sucking sound of a collapsed lung. He knew how to pack a wound with sulfa, administer morphine, and tag the man so medics in the rear would know he had been given a painkiller. Okubo had routinely raced onto the Italian battlefield under enemy fire, armed with little more than plaster adhesive, scissors, bandages, iodine swabs, a tourniquet, morphine syrettes, safety pins, and balm for burns.

  Barney Hajiro was a member of Company I in the same 3rd Battalion and was typical of some of the young men in the 442nd who had been drafted. While some had volunteered out of a sense of patriotic duty, others like Hajiro had yet to find a purpose in life. The high school dropout possessed limited job skills and dim prospects before receiving his draft notice. He had grown up in a family so poor that he drank soda only on New Year’s Day. He had spent
his childhood on a sugar plantation in Hawaii. His parents worked ten-hour days in the fields for one dollar. They saved enough money to send him to a Japanese school, but in the eighth grade he had to drop out and work to help support the family.

  At five-foot-seven, he was uncommonly tall and liked sports, especially the eight-hundred-meter run. He dreamed of running in the Olympics. But he had turned down a scholarship to high school in order to support his family. At twenty-one years of age, Hajiro had hitched an overnight ride on a cattle boat from Maui to Honolulu to find a job. Employment prospects were meager. He became a dishwasher and worked in a fish cannery during the summer. “Anything to survive,” he later recalled.9 Hajiro had watched Pearl Harbor fires burning in the hours following the attack.

  Hajiro had been drafted into the army in early 1942. He was assigned first to an engineer unit. He was prohibited from carrying a weapon due to his ethnicity and had been ordered to dig ditches at an airfield. He hated it and volunteered for the 442nd at the first opportunity, in March 1943.

  In basic training Hajiro had learned to fire the deadly but flawed Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR). Its thunderous recoil often made its operators flinch, reducing accuracy. He had discovered the BAR had a limited ammo capacity and that changing a damaged barrel was a slow, cumbersome process. Those were hardly ideal characteristics, as Hajiro had tried to imagine the difference between a training-camp firing range and perhaps a dozen unseen enemy soldiers firing back at him. In Italy Hajiro learned how to cut Germans apart with this BAR. And he saw how his German counterpart could do the same to his friends.