“CG [Dahlquist] wants you to put on attack.”
“It is not going to be any good.”
“I know it [but] the General wants it.”2
WHAT WILL WE DO IF THE GERMANS REALLY HIT US WITH everything they’ve got? They know they’ve got us cut off. No resupply. Casualties. But they sit out there in the forest. Waiting for what? Will their goddamn artillery open up on us first? Will they bring up some tanks? Chew us up with their machine guns?
Lieutenant Huberth couldn’t be sure. He and Higgins had talked about it. They had developed various strategies for when the major assault finally came. At dawn? In the middle of the night? Every plan would depend on the resolve of those on lookout, men crouched behind their machine guns, and others who always kept their rifle within reach.
For Eason Bond, the only real question was how hard could or should the 1/141 put up a fight. Surely, they couldn’t survive on all-out attack. Do we fight to the last man? Is getting captured better than death in this godforsaken forest? Maybe my odds would be better in a German POW camp? Bond had pondered such questions in his foxhole for days. Of course, there were no easy answers, particularly in the aftermath of three failed resupply attempts.
These were questions that required a man to make hard choices between following orders and obeying the survival instinct. Bond suspected others within the perimeter had to be pondering the same. Most soldiers confronted four great fears in combat: failing their fellow soldiers, running out of ammunition, being left on the battlefield wounded, and having to choose between near-certain capture or death.
For some men, like rifleman Al Tortolano, surrendering to the Germans was never an option. When he wasn’t assisting medics, he was a runner carrying messages between foxholes. One of three boys in a close-knit Italian family in Massachusetts, he had grown up in an era of ethnically centric neighborhoods that were clearly defined and rarely crossed. His family had given him clear marching orders when he and both brothers entered the service two years earlier: “Just be the best man you can. Do what you’re told. You’re no better than the next person and the next person is no better than you.”3 So he had figured he and the rest of the battalion would fight to the last man. Tortolano wondered how his family would take the news of his death.
But Bond believed the men of the 1/141 would likely allow themselves to be captured if confronted with an overwhelming German attack. There was simply no way they could stave off the enemy. Why die when capture offered a whisper’s hope of surviving? Mortarmen like Estes had buried their weapons and ammo and been reassigned to other posts. Bond and others couldn’t be sure if that was because the dense forest rendered mortars ineffective. Maybe the lieutenants wanted to make sure the Germans would not collect a bounty of weapons and ammunition when the 1/141 was taken prisoner. Regardless, burying one’s firepower was never an omen of victory.
Huberth harbored similar thoughts. But being second in command brought a responsibility that changed a man’s view of the world when facing an uncertain fate. “Something told us that we never thought we were going to be captured. . . . Even though there wasn’t a defeatist attitude, it was a day-to-day attitude because we couldn’t anticipate when we would get out of there. We kept on expecting the Germans to come in and clobber the hell out of us, and we knew we couldn’t stand up because we didn’t have enough ammunition. We were fairly weak, too.”4 Given the results of the attempts to resupply Higgins’s men so far, it was likely the lost battalion would be growing weaker in the days ahead.
But several knew another resupply attempt was imminent. As Dahl quist was urging the 442nd to mount an all-out attack, more Thunder bolts took off from the 405th Fighter Squadron base. The pilots knew they would face foul weather and antiaircraft fire and then would search for a nearly invisible target. Major John Leonard led them. The squadron leader was respected for his willingness to fly both the routine and the more dangerous missions. This time two Thunderbolts at a time would drop supplies on the 1/141. Five passes would be made on a route now predictable from the earlier missions. Leonard and the other pilots knew German artillery was primed and aimed.
At noon over the ridge the pilots looked down at a thick, gray carpet of clouds. The arrow had disappeared. There was no point in resupplying the Germans again if Leonard’s pilots couldn’t draw a bead on Higgins’s position. They turned for home, the supply tanks still attached to their wings. Ten minutes later, faint shadows appeared on the ridge. “Weather is clear now, please do something,” Higgins radioed headquarters.5
It was too late for Leonard’s squadron to return to the ridge. As the aircraft approached the city of Epinal and entered a valley flying only 300 above the ground, tracers shot up from the valley. Leonard had no time to react as .50-caliber bullets ripped through his plane. The fire was inevitable. Leonard chose to stay with his aircraft, flying it toward the countryside past Epinal. His wingman, Milton Seale, knew his commanding officer was in trouble as flames spread and smoke thickened. “It’s a little warm in here,” Leonard told Seale in what Seale remembered as a southern drawl. “I think I’ll bail out.”6
Although Seale thought Leonard had gone down with his plane, Leonard ejected at the last second after turning his aircraft upside down. He escaped serious injury despite ejecting only about 250 feet off the ground. The squadron later learned that an American mobile antiaircraft crew had shot Leonard down, thinking he was a German aircraft. Stories after the war spread that Leonard located the crew and held a “spirited discussion” about proper aircraft identification procedures.
Gloom settled over Higgins’s men as the cloud cover swept away the hint of sunshine that had tantalizingly appeared. Yet the forest never grew completely silent after Leonard’s squadron had headed away from the drop zone. Lieutenant Edward Hayes arrived over the 1/141 less than an hour later with three other aircraft carrying auxiliary tanks for Higgins’s men. It was the third attempt of the day, the fourth in less than twenty-four hours, and like the others they had flown through German flak to get there. Hayes looked down on the ridge. Nothing. Only the thick, gray fleece of a blanket of clouds. The drop zone once again was socked in.
Hayes and the other pilots had only one option. Reports later in the day indicated they used radar to make blind drops on the 1/141. Tanks away, they disappeared into the clouds. Coming in from the south, the tanks hit the south side of the ridge. They never reached Wilson, Estes, and the others. Hayes and the other pilots had released the auxiliary tanks perhaps a few seconds too early. Even at a relatively slow speed, flying abnormally low gave the pilots almost no margin of error. Germans gathered around most of the tanks, rolled a few over to expose the access doors, and pulled out food, water, ammunition, and medical supplies for their wounded. Much of it was taken a few hundred yards down into the valley, where German units had commandeered farmhouses and hamlets. Another failure.
COLONEL PENCE’S BATTLE PLAN FOR THE DAY HAD BEEN SHREDDED. Dahlquist had ordered Pence to the front, and he moved between the three battalions’ command posts, piecing together battle reports. Pence concluded his men had advanced less than four hundred yards. The Germans’ roadblocks were deadly when combined with the German artillery that thundered into the forest when his men’s advance stalled. All three battalions were suffering significant casualties, far more than the day before. Ultimately, seventeen 442nd soldiers would be killed on this day, with dozens more wounded. More than half would be members of 3rd Battalion. Medic Jim Okubo likely shared Pence’s exhaustion when Pence uncharacteristically admitted to an enlisted soldier that he was “really tired.”7
As he approached Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Singles’s position, shrapnel from a German artillery shell slammed into his jeep, most of it missing Pence by inches. One man in the jeep was killed, another wounded seriously, and Pence suffered a leg wound. When the 442nd command sent another jeep to collect Pence and take him to an aid station, the regiment lost one of the two commanding officers the men had known since Camp Shelb
y. He had led them through Italy and up France to Germany’s doorstep. He would lead them no more in this campaign.
Three days into the rescue mission, the 442nd’s executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Virgil Miller, took command. Miller had tried to drop out of school to join the army and fight in World War I. But his father refused until Miller turned eighteen. Miller’s eighteenth birthday was November 11, 1918, the date the Armistice was signed and World War I ended.
His men knew the Puerto Rico native well. He had served in Puerto Rico’s 65th Infantry Regiment before transfer to the 21st Infantry Brigade in Hawaii, where Miller had developed a personal affinity for the Nisei that he carried to Camp Shelby in June 1943. Miller, a Caucasian, had been a crucial bridge between the Hawaiian- and mainland-born Nisei in basic training. He had also learned that threatening a wayward Nisei with traditional military discipline, such as work details or demotion, was ineffective. Instead, the threat of writing a letter to a recruit’s parents informing them of their son’s offense proved to be remarkably effective. A son could not bring shame to his family, regardless of the circumstance. He must honor his family name by being a good soldier.
Miller also knew what to expect from Dahlquist, including operational orders for the 442nd down to the platoon level. The forty-three-year-old would experience the same micromanaging command of Dahlquist as every other regimental commander had endured.
Almost at the same time that enemy fire forced a change in the 442nd’s regimental command, Dahlquist had had enough of Colonel Lundquist as his commanding officer of the 141st. He was convinced Lundquist wasn’t aggressive enough in the scant three weeks he had been in command and no longer accepted Lundquist’s explanations for his men’s lack of progress. Dahlquist fired Lundquist and replaced him with his division’s chief of staff, Colonel Charles Owens. Dahlquist immediately ordered the 3/141 “to crawl and run forward; that is the only way to get enemy to move back. Battalion CO [Owens] and company commanders to get up front and drive companies forward.”8 Owens had been Dahlquist’s top aide for only sixteen days when he was tapped to become the 141st’s fourth commanding officer in just two and a half months. Higgins and the others had been handed a new regimental commanding officer every eighteen days since landing in France.
Meanwhile, Singles assembled his 100th Battalion’s company commanders for a midafternoon brief. He was appalled that only two lieutenants and two sergeants stood before him. He had lost nearly all of his frontline officers and his battalion operations officer, Lieutenant James Boodry. A short time earlier, Boodry and Company C commander Bill Pye had stood together studying a map. Boodry was one of those Caucasian officers who had earned the respect of the Nisei. He exuded an aura of almost brazen invincibility. Somehow, he seemed happy even during the most horrific battles. “You’d think he was watching his football team winning by a tremendous margin when [in reality the lives of his men were] hanging in the balance, and the whole battle was hanging in the balance,” recalled another officer.9
Suddenly, a tree exploded overhead. Shrapnel slammed into Boodry’s skull, killing him instantly. Pye suffered superficial wounds but stayed with his men. A second enemy shell found him later, shredding his leg and bringing his fighting to a bloody end.
As Singles looked at the handful of men before him, a signal officer approached and looked at the collegial commanding officer who relied heavily on his subordinates. He told Singles that Dahlquist was on the field telephone and wanted to talk to him. Singles had two choices. He could take the call and risk telling Dahlquist exactly what Singles thought of him or insubordinately refuse to talk to his commanding officer in the middle of battle. In front of his men, he pulled the thin black wire out of the phone. The message was clear to both Dahlquist and Singles’s men: Stay out of our way. We have objectives to meet and a mission to be accomplished.
GEORGE SAKATO AND KELLY KUWAYAMA WONDERED WHY THE 2/442’s Companies E and F were moving through units of the 141st on the extreme northern flank of the rescue mission. Why isn’t the rest of the 141st taking the point to rescue their own guys? A soldier in a foxhole and a medic climbing over mossy boulders could only speculate. At midafternoon Lieutenant Colonel Hanley was positioning the companies to ambush the Germans on Hill 617 from the north. He had to clear the hill if his battalion was to protect the 442nd’s left flank. The ambush was to be part of a renewed 442nd frontal attack at 1445. Kenji Ego and the rest of Company G, directly in front of the Germans, were a diversion and were paying a heavy price in casualties simply to hold the Germans’ attention.
So were others. Company K’s Jim Okubo had treated more wounded men by repeatedly running from sheltered positions into a blizzard of noise. Tree bursts pounded eardrums, automatic weapons spewed a staccato cough of death, shrapnel screamed through the air, bullets slammed into logs, squad leaders yelled, and men cried out as they writhed in the mud. At one point, a roadblock and enemy machine-gun fire pinned them to gullies and the back sides of trees until their artillery destroyed it, only one hundred yards in front of them. A short time later, the 100th endured a concentrated enemy artillery attack. By then the heavy clouds had again closed in on the forest, casting a dreary pall over the battlefield.
Scraping replaced the staccato sound of gunfire late in the afternoon, as another cold night loomed and a few snowflakes fluttered onto the battlefield. Some soldiers commandeered foxholes dug by Germans perhaps the day before or weeks earlier. Others started digging, preferably behind a tree for added protection from snipers. Some soldiers still had their shovels, others used a trenching knife, and few had only their hands and helmet.
FORWARD ARTILLERY OBSERVER ED ICHIYAMA COULD ONLY wonder how Isamu Minatodani and Goro Matsumoto were doing somewhere on the ridge. Ichiyama, Minatodani, Matsumoto, and Tetsuo Ito had quit their jobs in a Honolulu shipyard, and the group of close friends volunteered on the same day less than two years earlier. Matsumoto and Minatodani had been assigned to Company I, which had been taking a beating. Tetsuo Ito had joined Company G and been killed three months earlier in Italy. Now it had been Ichiyama’s turn to accompany frontline troops into battle on this mission and pass along requests for artillery support. Like many others, he drew from childhood lessons to cope with the realities of the battlefield.
Young Japanese American boys had often been taught kachikan, Japanese group values deeply ingrained by family elders who may have been born in Japan. Now, in the middle of a war, those values became a wellspring of strength when a rifleman, scout, or machine gunner settled into his slit trench for the night and looked up at the blackened forest canopy. Some swallowed their growing hatred of Dahlquist with shikataga nai (acceptance with resignation). Kikuyo Fujitomo had taught her sons kuni no tame ni (for the sake of our country) before her son Kunio had joined the 100th and his younger brother Hikoso later volunteered for the 442nd. Some parents had reminded their sons of gisei, giri, meiyo, hokori, and sekinin when they had volunteered or been drafted. Sacrifice. Duty. Honor. Pride. Responsibility. Many had admonished their sons Kamei ni kizu tsukeru bekarazu. Never bring dishonor to the family name. A value system from another world in a structured culture brought comfort and context when the fighting stopped, the cold night air soaked into a man’s body, and certainty grew that tomorrow’s dawn would bring more death.
Perhaps some in the 442 drew strength from those values as they speculated whether Dahlquist considered them little more than “cannon fodder.” How else could they explain the 442nd being ordered to lead the Higgins mission when the 141st’s other battalions were on the sidelines, protecting the 442nd’s flanks? Why, many wondered, were horrific casualty rates seemingly acceptable for the 442nd?
JAMES COMSTOCK MIGHT HAVE HAD A HEADACHE AS HE FACED A fifth night in his foxhole and the end of a fourth day of almost no food. Bruce Estes’s breath likely had turned sour as his body began to eliminate waste through his lungs. One of the toughest men in the outfit and one who had endured brutal fighting in Italy, Jack Wilson ma
y have been tired, even sluggish. Harry Huberth may have suffered spells of lightheadedness. By now the hunger pains had subsided for most of the men and been replaced by a preoccupation with food. Some dreamed of their favorite meals when they catnapped, while others described their favorite restaurants to the soldiers in the next foxhole. Harry Huberth fantasized over his next breakfast of bacon and eggs. Debating the merits of different breakfasts became a widespread hobby. Some discussed the proper method of making golden-brown waffles. All were common symptoms of extended food deprivation. While four days certainly did not qualify as starvation, the surrounded battalion was enduring an involuntary fast. After more than two months of near-constant combat, their bodies were poorly equipped to function without food and only sips of silty water.
A fifth bone-cold night loomed. Everyone stunk, their body odor becoming sweetly bitter in filthy uniforms. Many men were suffering from trench foot. They couldn’t leave the immediate vicinity of their foxhole, and in any event they had no place to go. A few men on water duty prepared to crawl to the muddy bog after dark to fill canteens with the forest’s seepage that smelled of a frog pond. Would the Germans decide that they had waited long enough? Did they know Higgins had lost about one-fourth of his men since he had been cut off? That a weakened battalion was ripe for an all-out assault tonight before the 442nd got any closer? The 1/141 would be even weaker the following morning if the Germans attacked at dawn. Such prospects lengthened a cold, wet night into eternity. A weak, immobilized, and disoriented soldier could easily lose his inner clock. Was dawn only an hour away? Two? Three? Will I make it through another night?
Honor Before Glory Page 14