Honor Before Glory

by Scott McGaugh

“Straight up. It’s the quickest way. There’s a battalion going to die if we don’t get to it.”

  “You realize what this means to our men, sir? They’ll be slaughtered climbing a hill in the face of heavy fire in full daylight.”

  “It’s got to be done.”

  “I refuse to accept your order. You can court-martial me. You can strip me of my rank and decorations but I refuse to accept your order.”

  “You refuse? I’m ordering you. Take your men and make a bayonet charge up that hill and get those Krauts off it quick!”

  “We’ll get them off it our way and try to save as many of our men as possible.”18

  Those watching the confrontation said Dahlquist walked away wordlessly, without challenging the twenty-six-year-old lieutenant who had already proved himself as a courageous soldier dedicated to his men.e

  Dahlquist wasn’t finished. He headed toward the 3rd Battalion’s headquarters in search of Pursall. For three days, Pursall’s battalion had absorbed horrific losses. His Companies I and K had been on the point, usually abreast, advancing directly into a dug-in enemy. Ration details back to the rear at night had been pounded by German artillery. Pursall’s men had suffered through nearly constant fighting under his command. Their respect for Pursall had been one reason they had fought so valiantly and accepted so many casualties. A largely disrespected general countermanding Pursall threatened that devotion. That wasn’t Dahlquist’s concern when he confronted Pursall as his messenger Rudy Tokiwa stood nearby.

  “I want you guys to charge! Charge! Charge!” yelled Dahlquist.

  Pursall tried to explain why his leading companies’ advance had been stalled by intense enemy fire and what a brazen charge up the hill could cost. Pursall knew the hill ahead was heavily defended, with a massive roadblock at Col de la Croisette behind it. The surrounded battalion was more than a mile on the far side of Croisette, and there was a second major roadblock at Col des Huttes, about midway between Croisette and Higgins. A suicidal charge now could leave the 442nd without enough men and firepower to breach the two roadblocks and reach Higgins.

  Dahlquist would have none of it. He wanted the 3rd Battalion to mount an all-out assault along with the 100th, just as he had told Sakumoto, Doi, and Ohata. Pursall grew madder by the second. All three 442nd battalion commanders had seethed with frustration over the meddling Dahlquist. But now Pursall had reached the breaking point. “You can go to hell! These are my boys you’re trying to kill. You don’t kill my boys. If there’s any orders to be given for my boys to attack, I’ll give the orders personally and I’ll lead them,” said Pursall, risking charges of insubordination and possibly dereliction of duty. “If you think it’s that simple, come with me and take a look,” added Pursall.

  Dahlquist and Pursall walked toward the gunfire, away from Tokiwa. After a few minutes, they returned, both of them livid, according to Tokiwa. The towering Pursall nearly shook with anger, his face red and wireless glasses steamed. As Dahlquist continued down the hill away from the front, Pursall followed him, yelling at Dahlquist.

  Dahlquist turned to face Pursall. “Colonel, you heard what my orders are. You don’t carry out my orders, I’ll have you court-martialed.”

  “You know what you can do with your orders. . . . I don’t want to see you up in the front lines again where I’m at. You stay out of our way,” said Pursall.19

  Pursall didn’t have many options. Two companies would have to advance on a one-hundred-yard front straight into German positions. At first Pursall thought that Company K might be able to flank the Germans. Within minutes of the flanking attempt, soldiers on both sides were only a few yards apart in a riot of gunfire, ricochets, and explosions.

  It became clear that Company K could not flank the Germans’ dug-in position. Companies I and K would have to mount a charge up a long slope pockmarked with foxholes and craters. Toppled trees had fallen into haphazard stacks of rain-slick logs, some as tall as a man. Jim Okubo, Jim Tazoi, Jim Oura, and the rest of Company K faced the steeper portion of the ridge. Next to them, Barney Hajiro, Joe Byrne, Shuji Taketomo, Matsuichi Yogi, Mutt Sakumoto, and the rest of a battered Company I faced a longer, slightly less steep climb. They all waited for the order to stand, fire, and advance.

  For some, it became known as the “banzai charge.” Those who survived referred to this stretch of forest as “Suicide Hill” or “Banzai Hill.” Accounts vary as to how it started. But every man from Companies I and K agreed on one point: the commanding officer who always had the best interest of the Nisei at heart, Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Pursall, led the charge. The towering, paunchy Caucasian must have lumbered up the hill, a pistol in his hand, yelling at his men to follow, as his chubby cheeks reddened and perhaps his steel-rimmed glasses fogged.

  Chet Tanaka remembered Pursall approaching Tanaka’s foxhole, where he had taken cover from enemy fire. Simply approaching Tanaka’s position on foot by a man as large as Pursall was an enormous risk.

  “Let’s get going, sergeant,” Pursall had said.

  “I looked up at him from my prone position and thought, My God, if that dumb son-of-a-bitch is going to walk up into that fire, I guess we better too. I called to the some sixteen men of [Company] K to get up and get going. I was the first up. All the others got up. No yelling. Didn’t want the enemy to hear us. Pursall led the way.”20

  Perhaps fifty yards away, Sergeant Joe Shimamura saw Pursall leap to this feet and say, “Okay boys, let’s go!” Shimamura noticed Pursall wasn’t wearing a helmet. Previously, Shimamura hadn’t thought much of Pursall. Maybe he was wrong. “I guess he is going to die with the rest of us,” recalled Shimamura. Shimamura jumped to this feet and followed Pursall up the hill, yelling, “Make! Make! Make!” (A battle cry for the multilingual Shimamura, it meant “death” in Hawaiian and “lose” in Japanese.)21

  Forward artillery observer Ed Ichiyama’s recollection was similar. His team had been attached to Pursall. He was alongside Pursall and Tokiwa when the frontline troops had been pinned down and Pursall had to make a decision. Should he try to slowly bleed the enemy faster than his men were getting picked off or force the issue and risk even greater loss of life?

  “So finally, Colonel Pursall . . . took out his pistol and said, ‘Infantry, charge!’ . . . Then from the forest, we saw the infantry guys just standing and starting to go. You know, shooting from the hips and just go.” Armed with just a carbine, Ichiyama stood and charged. A carbine had a fraction of the firepower of an M1 rifle. He thought his weapon looked like “a toy,” but he had orders to follow, regardless of the dangerous situation.22

  SOME VETERANS REMEMBER COMPANY I’S BARNEY HAJIRO, THE former malcontent desperate to show he was a good soldier, as one of the first to charge ahead toward the Germans, nearly one hundred yards in front of his company. In a sense, Hajiro had a running start after a brief exchange with Takeyasu Onaga, his BAR ammo man, a few hours earlier.

  “Barney take care, if I die, take my P-38,” he said.23

  Hajiro had been surprised at Onaga’s sadness earlier that morning. He had known the usually upbeat Onaga since basic training. Perhaps the relentless fighting since October 15 had begun to take its toll. The prospect of advancing up another exposed hill toward entrenched two-man machine-gun nests tested a man’s faith and hope for survival. “What are you talking like that for? If I die, you take my Luger,” said Hajiro. Words of more meaningful encouragement failed him, other than to offer Onaga his prized German souvenir. An exchange of weapons was a time-honored demonstration of mutual respect among men on the battlefield.

  Pursall’s order spread among the troops. “Let’s go!” yelled Sergeant Goro Matsumoto. A sniper killed Matsumoto minutes later.

  Hajiro was among the first to step out of his foxhole and into the enemy’s line of fire. Gunfire erupted and the ground shook as enemy machine guns raked the Americans’ path. Hajiro crawled over to Matsumoto, but there was nothing he could do. He took a sip from Matsumoto’s canteen just as another man i
n his unit, Sergeant Shiro Kashino, was shot in the back. Hajiro considered him “a good mainland boy, a good soldier.”24 Yelling over the gunfire and explosions, Hajiro told Kashino to get back to an aid station. Hajiro then turned to face the Germans.

  After helping load Hajiro’s BAR, Onaga was searching for a good firing position when an enemy shell hit nearby, toppling a tree onto a buddy. Onaga somehow lifted the tree so the wounded man could crawl to safety. Then Onaga, Hajiro, and dozens of others continued their advance up the hill. Each man confronted a personal hell where the margin between survival and death was measured in split seconds.

  After killing several Germans with a grenade, a sniper’s bullet pierced Onaga’s throat. He staggered, steadied himself, and ran nearly fifty yards to an aid man so the medic could remain behind cover. Then Onaga collapsed and bled to death.

  Several yards away, Hajiro watched his friend die. A hollow, aching rage erupted from the gut of a man who had grown up poor, insecure, and desperate to prove he was worthy of his fellow soldiers’ respect and trust. The enemy had killed his foxhole buddy. A stranger in basic training who had become a trusted friend, one who liked beer and had kept Hajiro out of trouble. A man in whose hands Hajiro had placed his life. Hajiro would find the enemy who had shot Onaga and kill him. He would not allow his friend’s killer to surrender. For Hajiro, there was no room for compassion in war, no room in his heart for forgiveness on the battlefield.

  Hajiro stood and faced the Germans, perhaps blinded by the rage of loss, by the horror of the carnage around him. He ran ahead of his unit, up the slope toward the enemy. Somehow he reached a two-man German machine-gun position guarded by a sniper. They raised their hands, unnerved by Hajiro’s charge. “They want to surrender, but I cut ’em down. . . . [T]here’s no prisoners, you know, at that time because you don’t have time, eh?” Hajiro recalled after the war.25 The foxhole was covered in German blood as Barney raced ahead. When a German sniper missed Hajiro as he ran, Hajiro stopped, swung his BAR to the side, and killed the sniper.

  The distinct sound of another German machine gun pulled at him. Somehow hundreds of bullets missed him as he wove his way toward the enemy. A few yards away, Lloyd Tsukano was struck by Hajiro’s dirty senninbari sash wrapped about Hajiro’s waist. The traditional battlefield Japanese cotton sash had been sewn with one thousand stitches by women where Hajiro had grown up.f He fired, forcing the enemy to pause and duck for cover. “I pin ’em down again and I wipe ’em out,” he said.26

  Hajiro never saw the enemy as he approached a third machine-gun emplacement. A burst thundered into his body. The massive invisible punch sent his helmet flying in one direction and splintered his automatic rifle. Hajiro had taken direct hits in his arm and face. Covered in blood and in shock, Hajiro was told by a medic that he had to go back down the hill to an aid station. Now. Hajiro looked around. Had he found a functioning weapon, he would have refused. He would have found a way to attack with a bloody face and blood-slick hands. But he could find none. He looked back down the hill and made a decision. He would walk off the battlefield. He would not give the Germans the pleasure of seeing him carried off. He still wanted to prove to his buddies that he was a good soldier. Only then would he allow the medics to take care of him.

  THE POUCHES ON THE TWO VESTS WORN BY COMPANY I MEDIC Victor Izui were growing lighter by the minute. He called his pouches shobai dogu, tools of the trade. The company’s charge up the hill had produced an overwhelming number of casualties. Every wounded soldier prayed an experienced medic like Izui would appear at his side. Izui had made the transition from fresh medic to combat veteran in Italy several months earlier. Perhaps it had been a little easier because he had worked in an internment camp hospital. His family had been evicted from the Japantown neighborhood of Seattle and sent to Camp Minidoka, in the desolate high desert of southern Idaho.

  Treating his first casualty on the battlefield had been far different from treating a patient on a cot. “Feeling the first quiver of panic, I wanted to be sick. Aw, jeez! But, somehow, training takes over. Hey, don’t freak out, stay cool, stop bleeding, watch for shock, watch for lung puncture, ease pain, jab morphine syrettes, dust wound and compress with sulfa, dressing on, tag him, and try to get him the hell out of there,” he recalled after the war.27

  Now Izui faced scores of wounded men across the battlefield. He sprinted fifty yards to a wounded man lying in the open. As the ground around him churned with enemy fire, Izui spread half a pup tent on the ground, pulled the man onto it, and then dragged him to a sheltered location. Okay, that’s all I can do for him. Do I leave him for a litter team? No, too far away. Izui picked up his patient and carried him farther back to a medical-collecting station. There, litter teams took the wounded soldier down to an aid station. Izui turned, scanned the battlefield, and ran toward the next man he would rescue. By the end of the day’s fighting, Izui treated thirty wounded men in Company I.

  Most of them were taken to an aid station that was part emergency room, part morgue. There was an eerie calm among the stretchers in the small cave created by digging into a hillside and then placing a few timbers on top. But far more men lay in the open than inside. Medics, a chaplain, litter bearers, unscathed men who helped the wounded reach the aid station, and transport drivers walked among them. If there was a sense of urgency among any of them, it was well concealed. A dying man carried enough fear. Most of the medics moved slowly and methodically, checking watches and making notes as they worked. When one of Izui’s wounded men arrived at the aid station, clothing was cut away. Then Izui’s bandages were cut or peeled off, exposing the man’s raw meat whose sulfa powder had hardened along the edges.

  Some men grinned at the medic treating them. Their joy at being alive triumphed over their pain. Others lay with their eyes closed, responding to questions as minimally as possible, their heads perfectly still, lips barely moving. Veteran medics knew to pay closer attention to the quiet ones. Perhaps their systems were shutting down. Internal bleeding could be invisibly draining their life. The loud ones, those who were yelling, crying, or groaning, usually were the less seriously wounded men. Tags containing critical triage notes were attached to Hajiro and the others bound for a field hospital closer to Bruyères or Belmont in the rear.

  In the midst of battle, dead men at the aid station could not always be immediately separated from those still fighting for survival. One difference: dog tags were removed from the dead bodies. After that, notes were taken for the official record. Each was wrapped tightly in a tarp. When time allowed, they were carried to a stand of trees next to the logging road, out of sight, if possible, from the wounded. The steady rain splattered on their death shrouds and left random patterns of droplets. They were aligned in neat rows, as if they had already reached a cemetery. Young men had become faceless, silent mummies, waiting for the rough ride on trucks down off the ridge. Their buddies up on the hill could only wonder who was still alive back at the aid station and who had been laid out with the other corpses.

  SLOWLY AND BRUTALLY, THOSE REMAINING ON THE FRONT LINE pushed the Germans back up the slope and finally off the strategic high ground. The firefight had stretched to nearly two hours. Pursall must have been horrified when he radioed his report to Dahlquist’s operations officer. “We have no officers left in K Company. We are up on the hill but may get kicked off. There is a roadblock, and we are having a lot of casualties. K Company CO [commanding officer] is gone, but we are using an I Company officer for K Company,” reported Pursall.g

  “Blue [3rd Battalion] of 141st is on your left flank,” the operations officer replied.

  “They are nowhere near us. We have to get that roadblock knocked out.”

  Dahlquist broke into the exchange. “Blue 141st started a patrol to La Croisette [forest location of roadblock]. They say they are getting tank fire. Is it yours?” Dahlquist asked.

  “It could be but we have to shoot up our way. Enemy tank is coming up from the south.”

  “Y
ou have TD [tank destroyer].”

  “The roadblock has those stopped,” said Pursall.

  “We are sending an engineer company toward you. How is Singles doing?”

  “He is up against the same thing. I questioned a PW [German prisoner] and he said they were well dug in. . . . How about some infantry help?”

  “I can give you only engineers,” Dahlquist offered.28

  Dozer drivers would have been little help to Pursall, and Colonel Stovall needed every man in his engineering crew. They trailed the front by a few hundred yards, rebuilding the logging road and responding to calls to clear minefields and roadblocks under enemy fire. The unit had built more than a mile of planked road, hauled and dumped more than one hundred truckloads of gravel, and installed dozens of culverts.

  The roadblock at Col de Croisette, nearly adjacent to the hill Pursall had just taken, was massive. The Germans had felled dozens of trees whose trunks were one to three feet in diameter. They formed a massive pile, blocking Pursall’s route. Mines were planted on both sides of the roadblock to prevent his men and vehicles from skirting it. The engineers had to clear a path if the rescue mission was to continue its advance.

  Mines and downed trees were so interlocked that the engineers needed to devise a clever solution to remove both as quickly as possible and with minimal loss of life. They welded large hooks onto the heavy equipment and connected them to cables that in turn were attached to the largest limbs of the downed trees that they could reach. Then as those trees were dragged a short distance, they detonated the unseen mines. One trunk at a time, the engineers cleared a path for Pursall and Singles. Stovall’s men had plenty to do. Pursall and Singles would have to fight with the men they had left. Both were fiercely devoted to their men, and neither relished the prospect of battle without reinforcements.

  AS NIGHT FELL, THE BATTLEFIELD WAS AS FLUID AND BLOOD soaked for the Germans as it was for the Americans. According to after-action reports, the Germans had lost approximately 150 dead and captured men in the day’s fighting on Hill 617.