Honor Before Glory

by Scott McGaugh

  The 3rd Battalion’s Companies I and K were at the forefront of the Americans’ assault. They had been ordered to drive a wedge in the middle of the German defense. Company L was slightly to the rear in reserve, and the 100th Battalion was fighting on the right flank. Jim Yamashita and Nobuo Amakawa of Company I faced some of the most deadly fire.

  When a man fell wounded in the firefight, Yamashita called for a medic. Sometimes it was obvious to Yamashita the man was already dead. When the fighting intensified, no one could reach the dead soldier. He simply lay there, within sight of his buddies, perfectly still, as shouts, weapons fire, explosions, and ricochets filled the air. As Yamashita, Amakawa, and others slowly advanced, they left bodies where they fell. It was important that someone remember their locations, so the grave-registration crews could find them later when the forest had been cleared of Germans. If the rain turned to snow in the days ahead, a soldier’s body could become very difficult to find. In the weeks ahead, a family might be notified a loved one was missing from the day’s fighting, assume he had been captured, and then learn perhaps months later that his body had been found where he had been killed that day. Direct artillery hits obliterated some bodies, leaving only a hand or leg hidden among the patches of barren, waist-high blueberry bushes.

  Much of the fighting was coordinated at the squad level. Nobuo Amakawa worked one side of the fighting, guarding against a flank attack. When he discovered an enemy machine-gun emplacement only twenty yards away, he yelled to his squad to take cover. He then advanced to within ten yards of the enemy, so brazenly that the Germans abandoned their position. His squad was saved from devastating fire. A few minutes later, a German sniper drew a bead on Ama kawa and shot him dead.c

  Other young soldiers faced a different threat, an alien creature different from anything they had known as boys. James Oura had grown up poor in Hawaii. Both parents had worked on a sugar plantation, and the family raised chickens and rabbits and fished in order to put food on the table. He had volunteered without his parents’ permission shortly after his eighteenth birthday. He had never left the Hawaiian Islands. Now, half a world away, Oura spotted what many infantrymen feared most: a German tank sat hidden in the trees, its turret turned toward the Japanese Americans. Despite their bulk, stationary enemy tanks sometimes were difficult to spot through the dense forest. Their first deadly shot revealed their position.

  “Bazooka!” Rifleman Oura crouched as his bazooka man crawled forward, stopped, and took aim. There were only a few places on a Ger man Mark IV tank that were vulnerable to an American bazooka. One was the engine. A single shot started a fire in the engine compartment. Panic and fumes swamped the crew. Seconds later, the tank’s top hatch swung open, releasing smoke and men. It was an awkward and agonizingly slow escape for the Germans as they fled a burning fire into direct gunfire. Each man had to stand upright on an interior step, his upper body exposed to Oura, before he could swing his legs free of the tank. One man at a time. Each an easy target. Perhaps too easy.

  When Oura watched a wounded German struggle to climb out and then fall to the ground, Oura raised his rifle. He paused. Would you like to be picked off like that? he asked himself. It was the first time he realized that his conscience could surface in combat. He decided not to shoot that German. Oura wondered if he would again freeze in battle in the months ahead. But it happened only once. He didn’t hesitate to shoot the enemy after that. Shrapnel had shredded too many friends. Too many young replacements had been shot dead in their first few hours of combat.

  War had also hardened Al Takahashi, a few hundred yards to the south, where the 100th was trying to connect with the 3rd Battalion. Like many others, he had developed a kind of scar tissue that separated conscience from reality and the threat of immediate death. “It just got to the point where you got to shoot first before they shoot you. That’s the only thing you had in mind because, you figure, if you don’t shoot, he’s gonna get you, and you’d be dead. We’re just pushing through, and we’re really pushing, so that’s part of war. And after they start shooting at you, you forget all about shooting at the other guy.”11

  Another soldier in the 36th Division recalled why men in war developed a callousness that was inconceivable to civilians. “In war you learn everything fast; you have to. At first you assume that death is for others and it won’t come to you. Later, you realize that everyone will ‘get it’ if he is there long enough. There is no time for grief, for mourning, or for wasted emotion of any kind. I resolved never to really look at a dead body. They were ‘noticed’ hundreds of times, but never really ‘seen.’ In twenty-one months in Italy, France, Germany, and Austria I never saw anyone shed a tear.”12

  BY MIDAFTERNOON COMPANY K’S JAMES OURA, JIM OKUBO, AND Jim Tazoi were exhausted. Along with the 100th Battalion, the 3rd Battalion had jumped off long before dawn, climbed onto the ridge, and fought Germans for hundreds of yards, slowly pushing them back and then having to fall back. They had scaled mossy rocks, climbed over tangled webs of downed tree trunks, and slogged through boggy mud. But the 1/141 remained more than one and a half miles to the east. To the north, the 2nd Battalion had fought all day at the base of Hill 617 but gained almost no ground. Only the casualties mounted. The primitive logging road had become clogged with two-way traffic, as jeeps ferried the wounded off the ridge and down to a field hospital in the valley.

  As the fighting continued, the most seriously wounded were triaged by forward medics like Okubo before they were extricated from one battle to another kind of war. It was a war that medics fought at collecting stations, a wounded man’s first stop on the way to a hospital. Convenience and efficiency dictated the location of most of the stations. A few hundred yards behind the fighting, a stand of trees alongside the logging road that had become a quagmire was designated an aid station. Medics waited for a field telephone or radio message that patients were inbound from the front. Everything was soaked—medics, the wounded, and the bandages that Okubo and other medics had applied on the battlefield. “I never felt so damn mad at weather than at that time, because there was nothing we could do about it. The rain just made everything impossible to do, but worst of all the casualties had rain in their faces. We couldn’t strip them to take care of their wounds adequately and it beat down on their faces and added to the cold and the misery,” medic Minoru Masuda later wrote to his wife.13

  Not far away, other aid stations were carved out of the forest floor by ammunition-and-pioneer platoons assigned to dig, carry, and construct just about anything needed in combat.d Now they were digging dugouts in the forest as the fighting intensified. A dugout was little more than a man-made crater in the mud, about eight feet wide and fifteen feet long, just large enough for two litters and a medic or two, about three feet below ground level. Once it was dug, logs were cut and laid over the top, leaving an entrance at one end. Then the medics took over. They used one or two shelter halves to shield the entrance before crawling into the three-foot-high cave to treat two wounded men. A candle or two provided the only light. Gaping wounds were marginally cleaned, and junks of barely attached flesh were secured. A kind word was passed to a wounded man desperate for any assurance in the dim, damp light that he would make it back to a hospital, where the cots were clean and dry and bright lights hung over surgeons’ heads. Artillery boomed far off in the distance, adding to the gloom both wounded and medics endured.

  Medic Kelly Kuwayama, near Hill 617, had treated and sent more casualties to aid stations than he could count. As usual, it was the replacement troops that now outnumbered the remaining battle veterans who suffered the most. Kuwayama had raced to several who had fallen in the field of fire. He knew that some had been desperate enough to earn the respect of the veterans that they had taken unnecessary risks in battle. Kuwayama had treated those still alive but couldn’t save others who had arrived only the day before.

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL JAMES HANLEY HAD TO GET HIS 2ND Battalion moving. After nearly two days of fighting, it had not
captured Hill 617. The Germans still held the high ground and likely outnumbered Hanley’s force. The former state’s attorney general who had once chased Pancho Villa in Mexico with his father’s reserve unit had to change his strategy. He decided to split his battalion, leading Sakato, Kuwayama, and the rest of Companies E and F on a flanking move to the north. He ordered Matayoshi and the rest of Company G to spread out in front of the Germans to give the impression of full battalion strength. Would the Germans fall for it, enabling Hanley to attack from two directions? Hanley would find out the next morning.

  THEN THE GERMANS COUNTERATTACKED AT THE HEART OF THE 442nd’s advance, attacking the 3rd Battalion’s Companies K and I north of the logging road. It came at midafternoon and only a few minutes after Colonel Pursall had waved off artillery support. The battlefield had become so intimate, so blended, that it was impossible to target enemy positions without jeopardizing American troops. The fighting had compressed into sight lines of perhaps seventy-five yards and firefights of less than fifty yards. German Mark IV tanks blasted 3rd Battalion positions. On the Americans’ side, the 3rd Battalion had been reinforced with a tank battalion company and a mortar company. The 100th had received a company each from a tank battalion, tank destroyer battalion, and chemical weapons (mortar) battalion.

  Moss, dirt, rocks, and chunks of wood, mixed with the metal shrapnel, slammed into the foxholes where Okubo, Oura, and Ichiyama crouched. Tanks, mortars, and artillery on both sides pounded almost the same location. The ground shuddered, trees exploded, and men cried out in pain as shrapnel split the air in every direction.

  Private Matsuichi Yogi balanced a bazooka on his shoulder as enemy fire intensified. Yogi had a decision to make. He could take advantage of available cover and not have a good shot at an enemy tank. Or he could step out into the open, risk getting shot, and get a good angle on one of the tanks attacking the Americans’ position. As enemy fire frothed the air around him, Yogi stood and fired. A second later, the enemy tank groaned to a stop. Smoke appeared, and its hatch flipped open. As far as Yogi was concerned, the tank was dead. He looked for more enemy targets. He fired again, killing a German firing a bazooka. Then Yogi picked up a rifle, spotted another enemy bazooka man, shot, and killed that German, too. His decisions and extraordinary nerve and marksmanship helped thwart a German counter attack. Company K held firm.

  Meanwhile, confusion between the front line and the rear command posts surfaced as a new enemy. Radio traffic between Hanley and 442nd artillery crews dissolved into a debate. At one point, an artillery officer radioed Hanley’s battalion headquarters to explain that his unit’s firing had been ordered by Colonel Hanley and his forward artillery observer. He insisted his artillery crew would not fire without a specific request from the front line. Hanley’s radioman didn’t buy it, as Hanley and his forward observer stood near the radio. “They are both here and say they didn’t call for it.”14 The last thing Hanley needed was friendly artillery on top of his men.

  Meanwhile, good communication between foxholes and a command post was as essential as a direct hit on the enemy as the Americans’ advance ground to a standstill. Communication, or lack of it, could shift the tide of the day’s assault in an instant. Messengers assigned to each battalion raced on foot between the 442’s regimental, battalion, and company command posts. They avoided enemy fire and navigated slick moss, sucking mud, crazily stacked logs, rocks, creeks, and enemy mines. They had to know where company command posts were at the edge of enemy fire and then return to Singles’s, Hanley’s, and Pursall’s positions.

  Radios, of course, were far more effective when circumstances allowed. Company I’s Shuji Taketomo led a four-man radio communications crew. They carried the same 300 radio that Blonder was using, miles ahead in the forest. The son of a prosperous agricultural businessman made sure his unit laid telephone wire through the trees as his company advanced. He had to remember frequently changing codes in order keep his reports secure. On some days, additional rations might be called “moonlight,” or a company commander would be called “Sunray.”

  Radio crews in the 100th Battalion had an additional advantage. The Hawaii Japanese Americans used pidgin English. Their distinctive lexicon—they called it “Nihongo”—had once been derided by the American-born Japanese Americans. But it was indecipherable in battle. An order to get the troops moving would be “hele on” in pidgin. To investigate would be “spark.” Destroy became “all buss up,” and alarm became “fo real.” That gave Singles additional security when he sent reports to Pence on what his 100th Battalion was facing throughout the day.

  The German counterattack threatened to split the rescue mission in two. If the Germans could drive a wedge within the rescue force, it would be easier to stop. Intense enemy fire and mounting casualties forced the 3/442 to withdraw several hundred yards along the logging road, giving back a significant portion of the ground it had gained in nearly a day’s fighting. Pursall now needed to confirm the position of the 100th relative to his 3rd Battalion. When he sent a platoon out to contact the 100th, he learned the 100th was more than one thousand yards away. Pursall had no way of knowing whether the Germans had spotted the gap as night fell in the forest.

  The entire 442nd had now been committed to the mission, but after a full day’s fighting the Germans had held firm. Only a few hundred yards had been ceded to the Americans, and a bloody toll had been extracted from them. The 2nd Battalion was stalled in place, and it was unclear whether the 3rd and 100th could sustain a coordinated attack into the gap between them. That would have to be resolved through the night if the 442nd was to resume its assault the following morning.

  A FEW FEET FROM HIS FOXHOLE AND MORE THAN A MILE FROM the Japanese Americans trying to reach him, Eason Bond stared at a thicket of trees only a few yards away. The nineteen-year-old had grown up near Thomaston, Georgia, a company town of about six thousand residents at the start of the war. The B. F. Goodrich cotton mill had dominated life there. His father had worked in the mill before buying a small farm outside of town. As a boy he favored pranks such as putting a bag of rocks on a sidewalk where passersby were sure to kick them. He and some of his seven brothers and sisters went to church on Sundays, mostly to play with friends before and after church services. He had no plans in life and not much education. Bond was “plowin’ a mule” in cotton, corn, and sugar-cane fields in the sweltering Georgia summer heat for one dollar a day when he was drafted in 1943.

  Now, for the third consecutive day, he stared at a small stretch of forest directly in front of what he called his “trench.” Unlike others in the 1/141, he didn’t spend every free minute deepening what could have become his foxhole. He favored a trench, the shelter a soldier typically dug at sunset, knowing it would be his shelter only until dawn. Eason had quit digging when his trench was shoulder width, long enough for his six-foot frame and about two feet deep. Good ‘nough, he figured. The Georgia native preferred to sleep on bare dirt next to his trench, close enough that he could roll into it when enemy fire arrived.

  Sleep had become only a fond memory for Bond, Estes, Comstock, Cunningham, and the others. Most had been in near-constant combat since the 36th had stormed ashore in mid-August. They had learned how to rest—not really sleep—on the ground, in trenches, and in the rain. Newcomers had learned to cope with a single hot meal every few days when it was too dangerous for cooks to drive up to the front line. Exhaustion had taken root in every man, a constant companion that drained energy, resolve, and hope.

  There were no shifts of on-duty and off-duty when a man was surrounded by Germans. Bond and the others took catnaps through the day and night, trusting the men on either side of them to keep a sharp lookout. For three days Bond had kept watch and not seen a single German. What the hell are they waiting for? he asked himself. Bond and the rest had a lot of time to think. They might wonder about loved ones back home. Or imagine how it would be if this was the forest where they would die. When they fell, would they feel the wet forest fl
oor a split second before they died? Would their family freeze at the knock on the door, fearing a telegram waited on the other side? They couldn’t tell if the echo of machine guns far off in the distance was a sign of relief or disaster.

  Bond was part of Company C, commanded by Lieutenant Joseph Kimble. Most of his men didn’t think much of Kimble, some calling him “a smart ass who thought he was too good looking.” Instead, Bond looked to his section sergeant, C. J. Barby, and the four or five men he had bonded with on the battlefield for camaraderie and support. Like many, Bond’s family was his platoon. He knew most by name, but recognized the rest of the men in his company only well enough to nod a greeting. Now Bond’s war had shrunk to a single trench and the forest directly in front of it.

  Bond scanned the dirt near his trench. There it is. Two days earlier, he had finished his C ration, battlefield food in a can that was despised by most soldiers. He had tossed the rock-hard crackers on the ground. They were nearly inedible unless soaked in water or coffee. Some men joked that their shelf life would probably last until World War III. But by now the hunger in his gut had become an ever-present ache. It had become a deep pain that never lessened and now felt as if it were spreading throughout his body.

  While most soldiers found K rations passably edible, most despised C rations. But after two days without food, Bond found the dirty crackers, now swollen by the rain, and ate them. Who knew when the men of the 1/141 would see any kind of food again?