Honor Before Glory

by Scott McGaugh

  SOME MEN IN THE 1/141 KNEW THE 442ND HAD BEEN COMMITTED to reaching them. Many had heard about the 442nd in Italy, as its reputation for extraordinary courage had spread among the troops via the grapevine, in articles in the military’s Stars and Stripes, and in newspapers at home. “I’ll bet the 442 is the first to get to us. I’d give $1,000 to see a Jap come through these woods,” Blonder told Lieutenant Gordon Nelson. “Yea, and I’ll bet you’re the first man in the American Army [who] ever said he wanted to see that,” replied Nelson.15

  By midday it was clear to Dahlquist that the 1/141 may not be reached for a third day. At 1400 he told Lundquist that in three hours, American 105mm and 155mm artillery shells filled with medical supplies would be targeted on the 1/141. Lundquist passed the plan on to Higgins a few minutes later. Higgins had to know it was a daring and potentially deadly plan. More than two hundred men would be crouching or lying in perhaps one hundred foxholes, some of them uncovered.

  Dahlquist’s plan called for seventy shells packed with medical supplies to be fired at Higgins’s men, based on coordinates provided by Blonder.e Artillery crews wrapped medical supplies, water-purification tablets, and D rations (vitamin-laden chocolate bars) in a thin cloth before inserting the bundle into the base of each shell.

  The shells would carry enough explosive to break apart in the forest’s canopy, spilling the supplies onto the ground. It was a risky ploy. Jack Wilson and his machine-gun assistant, Burt McQueen, had been building a foxhole roof of stout logs, so they were in good shape. But men like Eason Bond, who had nothing more than an open-air trench, would be at extreme risk. If any of those shells scored a direct hit on a foxhole, Higgins’s medics would have more casualties—and possibly dead soldiers—on their hands. The 1/141 would have only about thirty minutes’ final warning before they were to endure the friendly artillery fire.

  Adding to the danger, the attempt would take place only about thirty minutes before “official” sunset. However, darkness crept into the dense forests of the Vosges Mountains much earlier. The artillery would be hitting Higgins’s position through the clouds at nightfall. Somehow Higgins’s artillery observers would have to spot where the initial shells landed and then have Blonder radio corrections in course and distance in the fading light. The observers and artillery crews would have to be very accurate, very fast.

  Meanwhile, back at Dole, at least a dozen P-47 crews waited for the call announcing a second attempt to bomb the 1/141 with food before dark. They had been waiting all afternoon after the earlier flight had returned to base. The aircraft had been refueled, and pilots had been asked if they had any issues with the aircraft. The supply tanks remained attached to the wings. They waited as the light faded first in the east and then watched the cloud cover darken across France.

  But nightfall had sabotaged everything. Although it’s not clear how many shells were fired at the 1/141, at 1825 Blonder radioed the 141st’s operations Officer, saying, “Cannot continue [artillery] adjustment for supplies; will continue in the morning.” It had become too dark to adjust artillery and too dark for aircraft to spot the location arrow. With desperate hope, Blonder continued, “Will aircraft be used in the morning? Give pos[ition] of friendly troops. Morale high.”16 Another day had ended with no resupply.

  A message two hours later made it clear how desperate the 1/141 had become, and it tempered the “morale high” message sent earlier: “Need halizone [sic]. Men weak. 9 litter cases. 53 MIA [missing in action] from patrol.f (Whereabouts of) 1st and 2nd platoons of Company A not known. 4 killed.”17

  THE 100TH and 3RD BATTALIONS HAD ADVANCED ONLY A FEW hundred yards and been bloodied. Various historical reports indicate the Americans took between forty-three and seventy prisoners, including a battalion adjutant. For the first time, the Germans had focused their poorly trained, inadequately supplied, and significantly depleted battalions on stopping the 442nd rather than attacking the 1/141. Lawrence Ishikawa in Company I never forgot that night in battle and how close he was to the enemy. “We could hear the German soldiers. You know some of these German soldiers were probably not even graduated from high school. Young kids! In the night you could hear them saying, calling for their mother, crying for their mother, so that . . . I guess they knew the next day was going to be a battle, battle royal.”18

  Lundquist may have anticipated the same for the following day, but it must have been clear to him that he was being pushed out of the action and onto the bench. Dahlquist was now making tactical decisions, and near the end of the day Lundquist’s 141st had been temporarily attached to Colonel Charles Pence’s 442nd. In the span of about twenty-four hours, impulsive Dahlquist had moved from attaching a battalion of the 442nd to the 141st to attaching the entire 141st to the 442nd, “for the time being.”

  In what could become Lundquist’s last daily summary report, at midnight he acknowledged the 141st’s combat efficiency was “poor,” due to fatigue, terrain, “and approximately a 60% reduction in rifle company strength on position.”19

  He made no mention that Higgins’s men had now been stranded more than three days after jumping off on their patrol with only one day’s worth of supplies. And he couldn’t know how much longer Blonder could nurse his radio’s batteries in order to stay in contact with battalion headquarters.

  a One member of the 1/141 likened the forest to a giant’s scalp, with huge follicles nearly identical in size every few feet as far as he could see.

  b Coolidge was awarded the Medal of Honor for his bravery over the course of the four-day standoff in the Vosges.

  c Amakawa was posthumously awarded the Silver Star five months later.

  d Ammunition-and-pioneer platoons consisted of a pool of men available for a variety of manual tasks.

  e Some division documents indicate that as many as one hundred shells were packed with supplies.

  f Earlier, Higgins had reported he had sent a forty-eight-man patrol on the attempt to flank the Germans’ roadblock. Fifty-three men missing in action may have included the portions of other patrols he had sent to probe the Germans’ positions.

  CHAPTER 5

  KEEP THEM COMING

  RELENTLESS COLD HAD STIFFENED GEORGE SAKATO AND THE REST of the 2/442 on the second night of their rescue mission. It was a far cry from the brutal Arizona summers when he had picked cantaloupes as his family evaded the internment camps. It had insidiously sapped their energy and left a dull ache that was as impossible to ignore as a hangover. Knees had tightened overnight, and bruises had taken root in bones. Shoulders had grown raw under the strain of thirty or forty pounds of gear strapped to the backs of some men.

  The cold threatened to erode the inner strength that each man needed to face a third day of fighting and the resolve to press ahead into enemy fire as buddies fell around them. Worse, cold never lost in combat. The Vosges cold before dawn on October 28 was as omnipresent as the Germans. It was just as invisible, invasive, and deadly.

  A few hundred yards to the south, Barney Hajiro and the 3/442’s Companies I and K woke to enemy artillery pounding the forest floor and shattering the trees above their trenches. Most had lain in their trenches all night for fear of the tree bursts. Some had used their helmets as a urinal and then poured it out at arm’s length away from the trench. Modesty could become lethal on the battlefield. If their canteens were low on water, they didn’t bother rinsing their helmet. Personal hygiene had become a luxury.

  The day before, medic Jim Okubo had dragged bleeding men to safety behind splintered trees and into muddy craters. The wounded were always relieved to see the medic known for his friendly, engaging manner. He had patched them with wet bandages and left them for stretcher bearers who carried them back to aid stations in ravines, carved out of saturated hillsides, and in timber so dense no sunlight reached the ground. Then he had dug in for the night, almost in view of the Germans.

  When Company K cautiously got to its feet that morning, the men knew there would be no element of surprise. Company K
advanced less than one hundred yards when gunfire erupted. Within minutes soldiers on both sides were firing from the hip as the two forces blended into a cacophony of gunfire, ricochets, and explosions.

  “Medic!”

  Okubo ran toward the plea and dropped down into the mud. His corpsman training surfaced in staccato: Where is he hit? Any of them life-threatening? Breathing okay? Sounds pretty good. No chest wounds. I need the supplies on my left hip. Damn mud. Find the safety pins and get that belly wound closed a bit. Do I have any more dressings? There. Get one on that gash. That one, too. How many more dressings do I have? Put a sulfa tablet in his mouth.

  “You’ll be okay,” said the easygoing medic.

  Another cry for help, much too far ahead of Company K’s covering fire. Now what? Okubo began crawling on his belly through the mud and over tree trunks that vibrated from enemy gunfire. He kept crawling. Directly toward enemy machine guns. Mud danced around him as mortar shrapnel barely missed. He crawled 150 yards until he reached the wounded man, only 40 yards from the enemy. Okubo shimmied to the enemy side of the wounded soldier to shield him from gunfire.

  Once he had applied basic battle dressings, Okubo faced an even more horrifying prospect. There was no one to carry the wounded man back to where Company K could protect him. There was only one way to do that. Okubo picked him up and carried the wounded soldier, who probably weighed 150 pounds, across the battlefield. Okubo carried him across the equivalent of one and a half football fields while ignoring his burning lungs, aching legs, and flying shrapnel as two German grenades barely missed him. Miraculously, Okubo made it, laid the soldier down, and looked around. There were more men to be saved.

  Through the smoke and mist, the Americans could see another roadblock on the trail ahead. The interlaced stacks of logs held snipers, riflemen, and machine-gun emplacements. Their cross fire seemed insurmountable. Another member of Company K, Sergeant Gordon Yamashiro, decided to take a chance. He set up his squad to cover him, and then Yamashiro advanced alone. Fifty, 75, then 100 yards, killing a sniper and then three more in a machine-gun nest. But another nest remained deadly. Yamashiro pressed ahead, believing his men would cover him. As bullets whipped through the air, he killed two more Germans in the second machine-gun foxhole. A few minutes later, a remaining German sniper spotted Yamashiro and took careful aim. The former carpenter in Hawaii fell dead onto the forest floor, only two days after celebrating his twenty-third birthday near Belmont.a

  IT BEGAN AS A FAINT, FAR-OFF RUMBLE ABOUT TWO HOURS AFTER daybreak. Unidentifiable at first, it grew into a grinding growl. Approaching aircraft above the clouds. They seemed to be heading straight toward the 1/141 on the ridge’s crest. American? German? Bound for the 1/141 or on their way somewhere else? How many? The far-off explosions sounded like antiaircraft fire. So did that mean American aircraft were in the air despite the cloud cover?

  Eason Bond could only wonder. Martin Higgins and a few others knew they were Americans. If the clouds thinned a little at the right moment, the pilots might spot the twenty-five-foot arrow his men had cobbled together. If so, the 1/141 would be bombed with food, water, ammunition, medical supplies, and batteries.

  At about 0915, Wilson, Estes, McQueen, and others spotted them crashing through the forest. Six-foot auxiliary fuel tanks dropped nose down through the clouds and plummeted through the canopy. The Thunderbolts had flown through heavy antiaircraft flak from German artillery batteries at La Houssière at the foot of the ridge and near Vanemont. Their white, yellow, orange, and red silk parachutes only marginally slowed their descent. Some hit the ridge at an angle, bounced, flipped, and then rolled away from the 1/141. Some landed one hundred yards away, down on the south side of the ridge and well inside enemy-held territory. The Americans were resupplying the Germans.

  Cunningham and two others left their foxholes and chased some of the Germans who began collecting supplies from tanks that had broken apart on impact. They opened fire to force the Germans back into the forest. But it was too late. The enemy had already collected most of the supplies meant for Cunningham and the others. Cunningham could find only three untouched C rations. The three men collected them and returned to the 1/141’s perimeter. Frustration and anger mixed with hunger as sounds of the aircraft drifted away into nothing. The forest fell silent as they canvassed a few handfuls of graham crackers, canned meat, biscuits, bouillon, fruit bars, chewing gum, cigarettes, toilet paper, and sugar tablets. Enough for one man.

  For the second time, resupply by air had failed. Although Higgins radioed at 0959 that “our pals did all right last time, get this word to them in a hurry,” subsequent radio traffic indicated that the 1/141 could see many of the auxiliary tanks, but they were too far down the hill in enemy territory from the 1/141’s position. While the 131st’s artillery’s liaison officer reported no tanks reached the 1/141, division operations staff believed at least some of the medical supplies had been secured by Higgins’s men. Meanwhile, they were already planning a series of subsequent drops, this time by pairs of aircraft that would be aided by a spotter aircraft.

  Eason Bond was elated. They’re gonna try again, he thought to himself. It had been a brutal four days, surrounded by the enemy, waiting, wondering, and fearing an all-out attack. Would unit discipline ward off the enemy when the assault finally came? Would everyone stay at his post and follow orders? Basic training had recast the individual survival instinct into a group survival instinct. Few men, though, were prepared for four days of hunger, almost no sleep, and the relentless threat of attack.

  At one point, Bond had thought maybe he could find a way out of this mess. Maybe he could find a soft spot in the Germans’ position and identify a route that reinforcements and supply personnel could exploit. Without telling anyone, he had gotten to his feet and started walking away from Higgins’s position, beyond the listening outposts, and into the forest. Fifty, one hundred, almost two hundred yards into German territory. Germans had to be all around him. Waiting? Why? What the hell am I doing out here? Bond stopped and then returned to his foxhole. Whether his one-man breakout attempt had been a heroic deed for the greater good or simply one man’s desperate escape attempt, Bond couldn’t be sure. But there would be no more such decisions. Bond knew resupply was on the way. He would stand his post for as long as it took for the Americans to rescue him. If they failed, the Germans would probably kill him, either next to his slit trench or in a prison camp.

  “ON THE WAY!” SUSUMO ITO, A FORWARD OBSERVER FROM THE 522nd Field Artillery Battalion now on the front line, grew more frustrated as the fighting intensified along the 442nd’s position late in the morning. It seemed the deafening artillery was coming from every direction and detonating closer and closer to the 442nd’s frontline battalions. The 522nd’s gun-battery personnel radioed “On the way!” to let him know it had fired. Based on where the shell landed, his job was to reply with range-and-direction adjustments. Given the cloud cover and the dense forest, sometimes he couldn’t see where a shell landed. Under these conditions, he was blind, sending instructions based only what he heard in battle.

  But other American and German units were firing their artillery simultaneously. Which shell detonation came from which gun battery? American or German? Had the most recent explosion come from a shell fired from his battery, or had it come from another battery? Was Ito adjusting the firing range of the wrong battery?

  By 1030 the 3rd and 100th Battalions had hit heavy resistance. Tanks were called forward to support the 100th, but they were of little use. Ito was trying to put artillery onto the enemy positions, but the distance between the Germans and his guns was so short that his batteries had to shoot nearly straight up and then “drop” the shells on the enemy’s position. That created a very narrow margin of error and a significant number of wasted shells.

  A few hundred yards away, Sergeant Jack Wakamatsu’s frustration focused on his feet. Trench foot was becoming a serious problem for the 442nd. Men trapped in waterlogged slit trenche
s all night didn’t dare take off their shoes to change into dry socks, if they had them. The last thing anyone wanted was to confront an enemy attack in bare feet. So their boots stayed on their soaked feet. For many, a burning sensation was developing. Soon the swelling would begin. After a few days, wicked pain would erupt as toes swelled and the bottom of their feet turned blue. In some areas of the forest, the 442nd’s advance slowed because walking brought excruciating pain. Some men, like Wakamatsu, were running a serious risk of skin blisters, ulcers, and ultimately amputation if they didn’t get medical attention soon.

  As a near stalemate developed, some squads advanced a few yards only when a single soldier chose to step out from behind a tree and into enemy fire, only when something deep within him compelled action that might otherwise be impossible to justify and compassion overruled intellect. Several Company K soldiers lay in the open, broken and bleeding. Some were perfectly still and perhaps dead. Others tried to keep from squirming, desperate not to draw the attention of enemy machine gunners and riflemen. There were more wounded than Okubo and a handful of other medics could treat.

  Kenji Takubo and his company were already pinned down by enemy fire. But wounded brothers could not be left alone in the field of fire. Takubo left his protected position and crawled fifty yards to a wounded man. Somehow he wrestled him onto his back and crawled thirty yards through ricochets and near misses to a slightly more protected position where a litter team could reach the wounded soldier. Private Takubo moved on, encouraging his squad forward. A few hours later he fell dead in a blizzard of tree-burst shards.b

  As the casualties mounted and the 442nd’s advance stalled, Dahlquist grew furious with the 442nd’s Colonel Pence. Pence had told Dahlquist that he was holding one of his units in reserve, waiting for support from the remainder of the 141st. Dahlquist didn’t buy it. “I don’t want a holding attack. That’s the trouble. Get the men out of there crawling and get the Krauts out of their holes. . . . I want you to go up to Company C and see if they are in foxholes. If they are, get them out and fix a boundary.”1 An hour earlier, the 2/442’s Lieutenant Colonel James Hanley had received similarly daunting orders by radio: