Honor Before Glory

by Scott McGaugh

  To the east the 36th Division and 141st Regimental headquarters had mobilized efforts to relieve the trapped battalion. A bombing mission was planned for 0900. The targets were south and east of the surrounded battalion, along routes enemy reinforcements likely would take if the Germans planned to press their advantage against Higgins’s troops. Shortly thereafter, several American units would be sent to the edge of the forest north and south of the surrounded battalion to prevent enemy troops from entering the forest from the valleys below. Dahlquist couldn’t let the Germans bring more troops into the battle. When the bombers approached the drop zone at 0830, they would receive the latest reports on the location of American troops advancing toward the 1st Battalion to make sure they didn’t bomb the relief units.

  About the time Company A returned to the other two companies, it became apparent that the relief would not reach the companies’ position anytime soon. Enemy machine-gun nests had blocked the advance of both the 2nd and the 3rd Battalions of the 141st. The 2nd Battalion reported that it was taking direct artillery hits. “It [is] believed that the enemy has an observation post along the trail as a great deal of artillery was falling in the sector,” summarized an after-action report. Supply units had also been halted by the Germans more than one thousand yards from Higgins’s men. Some units remained more than two thousand yards from the stranded men.

  At midmorning the commanding officer of the 141st, Colonel Carl Lundquist, delivered a bleak report to the 36th Division’s chief of staff, Colonel Charles Owens. Both the 2nd and the 3rd/141 were taking heavy fire. A German force of company strength had pinned down a unit of the 3rd Battalion, comprising mostly replacement soldiers, led by Technical Sergeant Charles Coolidge. He had the nerve to demand the Germans surrender. They opened fire in response and pinned Coolidge’s unit to a cluster of trees in the forest.

  The Americans brought four light and four medium tanks forward, but the Germans were pounding the American armor and other vehicles as they moved up the trail toward the battle. Owens told Lundquist to bring up the remaining seven tanks in reserve. Already the heavy and armored vehicles were destroying the one marginal logging road, just as Colonel Stovall had predicted. Two battalions, a tank company, supply units, and heavy road-building equipment committed to the rescue mission overwhelmed the primitive roads leading to Higgins’s men. They bounced from one muddy rut to another on the logging road as they avoided the litter jeeps that were ferrying wounded men back to field hospitals.

  Lundquist had been in command of the regiment in combat for less than a month when confronted with the potential loss of an entire battalion that morning. Like Dahlquist, the forty-year-old Michigan native with jet-black hair and a matching pencil-thin mustache had been a planner. He had spent the previous year as the chief of the Plans Division, G-3 in the European Theater of Operations. He had planned combat missions. Now, for the first time, he held operational combat responsibility. His most immediate decisions could determine the fate of the stranded men and whether he could demonstrate to his superior officers that he could effectively lead men in combat.

  But Lundquist couldn’t deploy all his tactical combat and support units if he couldn’t get them where they were needed. A timber-and-gravel road capable of supporting a constant stream of multiton vehicles would have to be constructed on top of the forest-floor muck if the division’s heavy assets were to join the battle. Two rocky sections of the forest were spotted, converted into gravel pits, and heavy equipment moved in to dig them up. American personnel arrived at sawmills near Bruyères and Belmont and appropriated their inventories of plank boards. Vehicles labored up the rutted roads, weighed down by stacks of planks strapped to their hoods, roofs, and beds. Crews with saws inventoried the stands of timber alongside the primitive main road and began cutting down hundreds of relatively young trees, most with trunks twelve to eighteen inches in diameter. As sections of the road inevitably would fail under the endless traffic, they would have to be rebuilt immediately with stockpiled gravel and precut timber.

  On the front line, progress by the remaining battalions of the 141st was agonizingly slow and in some cases nonexistent. The 2nd and 3rd Battalions reported stiff enemy resistance throughout the day, and by midafternoon it had already become clear that more manpower and firepower would be necessary to reach the trapped battalion.

  At 1450 the 2/442 was officially attached to the 141st, as Lundquist finalized plans for a renewed assault at 1600. He now had three combat battalions under his command to reach the 1/141st. He also wanted his tanks to attempt a breakthrough in the dense forest, loaded with supplies for the surrounded troops. Lundquist hoped the addition of the 2/442 and tanks would push the Germans back. But if the tanks couldn’t blast a path to the 1st Battalion, Company L would take the point in the infantry’s push toward Higgins’s men. Each man in the company carried an extra two bandoliers of ammunition and an additional canteen full of water for the stranded battalion. It was unclear how Company L could accomplish that, given the minimal ground that had been gained after several hours’ fighting. The 1st Battalion would soon be critically low on food, drinkable water, medical supplies, and ammunition. The Americans needed to reach them quickly, by any means possible.

  LIEUTENANT GENERAL ALEXANDER PATCH’S JEEP WOVE THROUGH the exhausted soldiers of the 442nd on the winding streets of Belmont. Some looked like they had aged years in the past week. Those on their feet trudged—almost shuffled from exhaustion—up the sloping streets, kicking dislodged bricks and stone chunks aside. Many sat shoulder-to-shoulder against scarred buildings, their legs splayed across the sidewalk, a cigarette hanging precariously from the corners of their mouths. Rifles leaned gun-barrel up on the brick buildings. A few men lay on their backs on cobblestone streets, their feet rolled outward, their bedrolls pressed against the curb as a temporary pillow. Mutt Sakumoto and others played poker and chain-smoked.

  Patch was brokenhearted as he considered sending the 442nd back into battle sooner than expected. Only a few days earlier, on October 22, his only son, Captain Alexander Patch III, had been killed in an assault against entrenched German positions. The general knew that he was about to send dozens, maybe hundreds, of men to the same fate.

  When Generals Patch and Dahlquist walked into the 442nd’s command post, Colonel Charles Pence, commanding officer of the 442nd, braced for new orders. At fifty years of age, he was literally considered “the old man” by a regiment whose average age was less than half that. Pence had commanded the 442nd from its inception. Pence had served in China on an army mission about ten years earlier when Manchuria had been occupied by the Japanese. His superior officers considered him an expert on Far East cultures. One historian noted that Pence had spent more time in Asia than nearly all of the Nisei he commanded.

  Pence had attended Depauw University in Indiana, where the 140-pounder had been the captain of the football team and senior class president. A natural athlete, nicknamed “Six Pence,” he had also played basketball and baseball before leaving college a year early to fight in World War I. He had been wounded in Europe. He still looked like a football player, with a dimpled square jaw, crewcut, and furrowed brow that deepened when his men didn’t measure up to his standards.

  His executive Officer, Virgil Miller, had joined him in June 1943. Miller was quicker to smile and more engaging, and he favored a bright-colored ascot. They were an effective leadership tandem, as neither tolerated discrimination, expected the Nisei to perform like any other soldier, and had their men’s welfare at heart.

  Pence and Miller had crafted innovative ways to build unity between the Hawaiian-born and U.S.-born recruits and volunteers. In basic training at Camp Shelby, the Hawaiian-born soldiers had a hard time understanding why young men on the mainland had volunteered for the 442nd from internment camps. Pence and Miller arranged a field trip for the men during basic training to a nearby internment camp in Arkansas to build a common bond between the two Nisei groups.

  Interned famili
es had saved a week’s rations so they could host a proper party for their uniformed visitors. Guards armed with rifles watched from their guard towers. After the Hawaiians of the 100th saw the conditions in which mainland Japanese American families lived, they returned to Camp Shelby in a bus that was eerily quiet. What they thought would be a liberty lark had instead sobered them. A newfound respect developed for the Nisei from the mainland who had volunteered potentially to die for the same country that had incarcerated their families.

  Some, including future U.S. senator Daniel Inouye, were humbled. “Would I have volunteered from that camp?” he wondered years later.3 Another Hawaiian recruit was equally humbled in a letter he wrote to his family: “These guys [mainland Japanese Americans] have been pushed around too much and they feel that no one give a dam [sic] for them. Have they anywhere to go after the war? Have they any faith in democracy and tolerance? These fellers’ spirit is broken. They might be smart, but their guiding principle is to look out for themselves.”4

  But by late 1943, Pence and Miller had begun to mold a unique fighting force within the army. Army censors reviewed more than thirty-five thousand letters written by Japanese American recruits and found relatively few complaints. Pence and Miller had overcome issues between the Hawaiian-born and mainlanders, as described by one recruit: “The mainland boys is [sic] very much different from us. There [sic] looks are more like the boys who has [sic] just come from Japan. And lots of the Hawaii boys don’t like them. But I’m just keeping cool headed and wait until better understanding. Besides that, they are many half-bread [breed].”5

  At least the Hawaiians and mainlanders had a common enemy: the South. They made that clear in their letters. “Mississippi is just about the lousiest place we could have been stationed. We hope that soon we could be transferred . . . away from the deep (and dark) south, where the broiling sun is interspersed with thunderstorms, where chiggers and wood ticks make mincemeat out of our Hawaiian suntanned flesh, where the people still fight the Civil War and where the southern belle is just a myth.”6

  PENCE KNEW THE DAY WAS NOT GOING WELL FOR THE TRAPPED 1st Battalion and those attempting to reach it. There were only about four hours of daylight left, probably less given the heavy cloud cover and persistent rain. Although his men were exhausted, he had already been told to prepare one of his battalions for immediate reengagement and to be prepared to order the other two battalions back into battle. It would be up to company commanders and platoon leaders to somehow maintain the troops’ morale when the veterans knew what would lie ahead and the replacement troops would only imagine what it would be like to confront the enemy intent on killing them.

  And he got the word from Dahlquist—order the 2nd Battalion of the 442nd to move out before dark. Its mission was to destroy German positions on the north side of the ridge and protect the left flank of the other units trying to rescue Higgins’s men. The mistake of allowing the 1/141 to advance so far without protection on its flanks would not be repeated this time. Pence was also told to notify the 100th and 3rd Battalions to prepare for deployment into enemy territory on a moment’s notice. But for now, the 2/442 alone would enter the combat zone. The rest-and-recuperation period for the 442nd had officially evaporated in a single briefing.

  “We are ordered back to the front again.” Mutt Sakumoto couldn’t believe what his acting platoon sergeant, Takahashi Senzaki, had just said. It couldn’t be true. The Hawaii native had been born on a sugar plantation. He had lived in farmworker camps with plantation workers imported from Japan. His father was something of a mystery. When Mutt was young, his father had left the family to fight for Japan in the 1930s. He later returned and shared nothing of his experience. The middle child of seven youngsters, Mutt knew only poverty. He walked a mile to school barefoot and didn’t wear shoes until they were required in the seventh grade.

  One of the smallest men in the outfit (friends said his height was anywhere between four feet ten and five feet four), he had fished on weekends as a boy and read the box scores of baseball games between sugar-plantation teams. One day his brother noticed a player was called “Mutt” and decided that was a perfect name for Matsuji. Mutt liked to imitate the great samurai Miyamoto Musashi with swords shaped by pounding soft Hawaiian wood.

  He had been a prankster as a boy and smoked his first cigarette with friends in high school. Soon he was sneaking his father’s Bull Durham tobacco and cigarette-making machine to make unfiltered cigarettes. “I smoked, smoked, smoked. I liked the taste of cigarettes. Oh boy, it was good.”7 At one point he was suspended from school for smoking.

  Sakumoto’s Company I had taken a brutal beating in the campaign to liberate Bruyères and Belmont. But the Hawaii native now had to gear up for reengagement. Soldiers began gathering their equipment, filling canteens, inventorying ammunition, and in many cases wondering why the 442nd was mobilizing. They didn’t know that other units of the 36th Division had failed to advance very far toward Higgins’s position. But they did know that the 36th Division had other regiments it could assign to this relief mission, if the first day’s attempt ultimately proved fruitless. Not nearly enough replacements had yet arrived to offset the men the 442nd had lost. Some of the veterans were still looking forward to their first hot shower in more than a week. So why was the entire 442nd mobilizing again so soon and so quickly? What happened to having at least a few days in reserve?

  No one knew at the time that the Americans closest to Higgins’s men were not part of the relief mission but prisoners of war. Jimmie Kanaya and the others who had been captured two days earlier were marched to within a few hundred yards of Higgins’s position on their way to a German camp. “I could hear them [the surrounded men] talking and somebody fired a round and I could hear them cursing,” he recalled later. “This German noncom that had taken my wristwatch when he first captured us, came running to me and gave my wristwatch back to me because he thought we were going to be get recaptured, you know, by our own side.”8 But an hour later the American prisoners reached the German line, and all hope of escape evaporated.d

  Small bands of aggressive Germans had stopped the American soldiers’ advance cold throughout most of the day. Near sunset Lundquist had moved some companies forward for the final breakthrough assault. Tanks were supposed to accompany them under the cover of noise created by friendly artillery fire. But for reasons of a “lack of coordination,” the tanks had remained in place.9 The final assault petered out as a result.

  At 2115 Higgins informed Lundquist by radio that a patrol he had dispatched earlier in the day had discovered the Germans’ roadblock and that he had suffered two casualties. Higgins’s message was clear: the 1/141 did not have the strength to break through the German line back along the same logging road it had used earlier.

  But Lundquist told Higgins to “have Company A send out strong patrol to knock out roadblock so tks [tanks] can get through with supplies; use a company if necessary. Company A to report when this is accomplished.”10 If Higgins sent an entire company on the mission, he would have risked about one-third of his men.

  Lundquist didn’t explain to Higgins why he was ordering an attack, even though Higgins had told Lundquist he was understrength. Perhaps Lundquist didn’t believe Higgins. Or maybe Lundquist thought he knew better. Lundquist may have concluded that his remaining 141st battalions were not capable of reaching the 1/141 without significant support by Higgins’s men from the rear. Or maybe Lundquist was simply passing along orders from Dahlquist.

  Regardless, Higgins faced an impossible decision. Sending a company-strength force to the rear would seriously weaken his position. What if the Germans spotted dozens of men leaving the perimeter and disappearing into the forest? Would they immediately launch an attack against the remaining men? Will I have enough firepower to repel them? Worse, Lundquist wanted Higgins’s patrol to loop around the roadblock and attack it from the west. That meant the patrol first would have to flank the roadblock to get to the other side. Higgins had alr
eady discovered he could not flank the roadblock from the north. That had proved costly earlier in the day. He would have to send his men south. They would slide down off the ridge and move west along the edge of the valley held by the Germans. Then they would have to climb back up onto the ridge to attack the west side of the roadblock.

  Higgins couldn’t know the Germans’ strength along that route, even though that area had been bombed earlier in the day. He did know his men would be climbing down and then up an extremely steep forest slope, slick with mud and moss. They would be soaked to the skin from the constant rain, exhausted from two nights in slit trenches, and dangerously low on ammunition. How many men do I send? Under whose command? With what weaponry? What will that leave me inside the perimeter? The record indicates Higgins sent the combat patrol down the ridge sometime before dawn the next morning.e

  Although Lundquist had ordered Company A to attempt the flanking move, Higgins had other ideas. He canvassed his men, asking some to make suggestions. He needed to balance the firepower he was sending out with the firepower that would remain within the perimeter. Machine gunner Jack Wilson knew exactly whom he would send, even though he only had seven men left in his weapons platoon. He told Higgins to take his three best men who had grown up in the country and could handle themselves in the woods: the man he shared his foxhole with, Burt McQueen, Tillman Warren, and Robert Camaiani.11

  By midnight it had become clear the day’s final assault to reach the 1/141 had failed and that Dahlquist wanted Higgins to fight his own way out. Knowing the high cost and the likelihood of failure, the breakout patrol prepared to move out.

  AT THE END OF EVERY DAY’S BATTLE, A SOLDIER WOULD HAVE considered it successful if he had simply survived. When the enemy fired, his entire focus was on surviving—to simply reach the next tree, boulder, or ravine. It was only when the gunfire ceased that a man’s horizon expanded. That’s when the quiet emboldened reflection, supplanting the survival instinct—when the reality of the day’s casualties swamped the noble cause of warfare. That was when discouragement, disillusionment, and depression became the enemies of many men in the 442nd. The break from battle had become an illusion. Now the 2/442 was again mobilizing, as word spread among the men of the 100th and 3rd Battalions that they might be joining the 2nd Battalion far sooner than they had anticipated. They would have to put disgust and depression aside.