Honor Before Glory

by Scott McGaugh

  I am spiritually low for once. My heart weeps with our men, especially those who gave all. Never has any combat affected me so deeply as this emergency mission. I am probably getting soft, but to me the price is too costly for our men. I feel this way more because the burden is laid on the [442nd] combat team when the rest of the 141st is not forced to take the same responsibility. In spite of my personal lamentations, our men are facing their enemy with the courage that comes from the heart. When we complete this mission, which we will today or tomorrow, we will have written with our own blood another chapter in the story of our adventures in Democracy.7

  THE CHAIN-SMOKING MUTT SAKUMOTO HAD ONLY A FEW Chesterfields left in his pocket when he faced another day of fighting. As he looked around each morning, he also noted fewer and fewer men left in his Company I. On the morning of the thirtieth, there had been only two men in the second platoon and ten men in the first platoon. So the two from the second joined Sakumoto and the others in the third platoon. As they had every morning since the rescue mission had begun, scouts took the point and crept ahead to gauge the enemy’s positions. On missions of such extraordinary danger, the soldiers on the scouting patrol took turns in the lead, the place where the enemy would first take aim.

  The slightest sound might give them an advantage. Perhaps a careless German’s voice might be heard. A mess kit might bump against a machine-gun tripod. Even the scrape of a boot across a bare rock could reveal the enemy’s position. When the enemy was spotted by those at the front, hand signals would be used to pass the word to the rest of the patrol. Not many soldiers wanted to be assigned to a scouting patrol. Fewer wanted to take the point.

  On this morning, the scouts had an unusual guide to determine their route of advance. At their feet was an American communications wire, a black tar-covered strand about the width of a round shoelace that followed the logging road. It stretched east into the forest and toward the lost battalion’s position. It must have been laid by Higgins’s men as they had advanced nearly a week earlier. Would it lead to Higgins’s position on this day? Colonel Pursall ordered Sergeant Takahashi Senzaki to take nine others and follow the communications wire.

  The patrol headed out shortly after first light. The squad advanced slowly and silently along the wire. By late morning, the mist and smoke had dissipated. Sakumoto and Henry Nakada had taken the lead, following the wire. Less than a half mile ahead, they estimated, they heard gunfire. After passing the roadblock, they saw a small rise ahead. Nakada heard grumbling a few yards behind him. He left Sakumoto in the lead, as Nakada fell back to tell Fred Ugai to stop complaining about being assigned to the mission. Nakada was worried the Germans would hear Ugai. It was getting difficult for Nakada to keep pace, as a case of trench foot made walking more and more painful. But after a short distance, Nakada nearly caught up with Sakumoto.

  By late afternoon, most of the smoke had cleared in the forest. The scouts had not heard any meaningful gunfire in the forest. Perhaps Higgins had not faced the all-out enemy assault that he suspected would accompany the smoke screen.

  Up ahead, someone peered out from behind a tree and looked directly at Sakumoto. He quickly stepped back behind the tree. Who was that? Sakumoto stopped. He was sure that he had seen a man appear and then duck back behind cover without firing. Why?

  “Hey, Hank. There’s a guy out there looking at us.”

  “Where?”

  They kept moving forward, more slowly and alert than ever, their eyes locked on that tree.

  “Hank, this guy is looking at us again!”8

  Technical Sergeant Edward Guy couldn’t be sure what he had spotted from his machine-gun position. The replacement soldier and high school dropout from Indiana stared at the three men out in the forest as they approached his position. They were holding rifles across their chests. They seemed pretty small. It took a few seconds before he could identify their American uniforms.

  “Hey!” was all he could muster before he ran down the hill toward them.

  He stopped a few feet short of Sakumoto. They stared at each other for a moment. Neither knew what to say. Sakumoto looked up at Guy. A few years earlier, the poor kid from a Hawaii sugar plantation had to convince a recruiting sergeant to let him volunteer, despite his size. Now he didn’t weigh much more than the 110 pounds he weighed when he had entered the army. The soldier who once stole cigarettes from his father stuck a hand into a pocket. “Need any cigarettes?” asked Sakumoto.

  With that, the lost battalion had been saved.

  THE SMOKE SCREEN HAD BEEN LAID TO COVER THE GERMANS’ retreat. For six days they had trapped Higgins’s men, suffered horrific numbers of casualties, and brought reinforcements into the battle. Finally, the 442nd had overcome a dug-in enemy almost within sight of Germany.

  After a few puffs, Guy escorted Sakumoto to Higgins.

  “Sir, this is the first man who came up to us,” said Guy.

  Sakumoto looked at Higgins. Grime blended with a week’s beard growth gave Higgins a gaunt look. A shelter half was wrapped around Higgins. Twice in the previous hour he had called division headquarters, asking whether the 442nd was getting closer to his position. The cold, exhausted lieutenant simply said, “Thank you,” and asked Sakumoto if he had any more cigarettes. Sakumoto emptied his pocket for Higgins and his men.9

  As the men of the 442nd approached Higgins’s men, reactions varied. One of the men on the scouting patrol, Masao Furugen, walked up to a small group of men. “They had tears in their eyes when they came up to thank us for breaking through. They could hardly speak, they were so happy. Maybe, but we didn’t do anything unusual. We just did our jobs as soldiers, that’s all,” he recalled after the war.10

  Not far away, one soldier of the 1/141, machine gunner Gene Airheart, watched a 442nd soldier approach. “But when that young man got within three feet of us and said something about ‘go for broke,’ that was my first encounter with Japanese Americans, and he was one of the greatest I’ve ever known,” explained Airheart fifty years after the war.11

  As he approached Higgins’s men, Kazuo Takekawa heard someone yell, “Here come the Japs!” Not every man who had been surrounded for nearly a week knew that the 442nd had led the battle to reach the 1/141. As he and the rest of Company I arrived, Takekawa shared his water, cigarettes, and food. There were no formal greetings, no joyous backslapping. Just relief.12

  Forward artillery observer Susumo Ito had a similar experience. When the logs covering foxholes had been packed with mud and brush, they blended with the landscape so effectively that their narrow openings were almost impossible to spot. That, of course, had been one of the objectives of every foxhole digger. As Ito “approached the incredibly deep and cave-like foxholes the trapped men peered out and seemed relieved or perhaps shocked at seeing us. They greeted us with appreciation, but they seemed in no mood for any celebration,” said Ito.13

  Soon Company K reached Higgins’s position. One unnamed soldier began scanning the forest in every direction. He saw an American climb up out of a hole in the ground. His complexion was almost the same as his uniform, as a gray-green filth covered him. The two exhausted men approached each other silently, just staring. A cigarette was offered. A simple “Thanks” followed.

  Others on the ridge were not as reserved.

  After the first quiet minute the whole place erupted. “Hey, the 442nd guys are here!” The guys started coming out of the ground like you don’t believe. We didn’t know that there were that many GIs out there. We had been pounding all alone up that deadly trail for days, finding nothing but Germans, gunfire and barrages. Then all of a sudden we hear these guys, and there’s no more fighting here. And they found they didn’t have to fight because we were allies. You know, it takes a little while for a simple thought like that to sink in after all the days of terror and the fighting. We were together and we were happy.14

  Pursall ordered a defensive perimeter be established, as the realization of being rescued settled on Higgins’s men. There
would be no more whispered funeral services for the 1/141’s dead who had been buried in shallow, sodden graves within sight of the enemy. Higgins would no longer have to lead groups of men into enemy territory, fighting their way to resupply tanks that had fallen outside the 1/141’s perimeter.c It was over.

  NO ONE WANTED TO STAY. AL TORTOLANO, THE RIFLEMAN WHO had been told by his parents he was no better or worse than anyone else, greeted the 442nd with vacant silence. “I heard one guy say, ‘Oh my God, we’re fighting the Japs.’ All we wanted to do was get out of there. We didn’t stop to say ‘thank you’ then or anything. All we wanted to do is get our butts off that mountain.”15

  For some men of the 100th and 3rd Battalions, it was no occasion for celebrating. Entrenched Germans remained in the forest. Too many friends had been left along the logging road either for medics to treat or for grave-registration units to collect. At dawn Hiromu Morikawa, Tadashi Takeuchi, Joseph Byrne, Kosaku Isobe, and George Omokawa had prepared for another day’s push toward Higgins. By midafternoon when the 442nd reached Higgins, all five had been killed. Probably not far away, George Takahashi of the 100th and medic Niroku Dochin were guarded by Germans. They had been captured the day before and were on their way to Stalag VII-A in Germany.

  Many of the rescuers were in shock. Only eight remained in Company I, and only seventeen still stood in Company K. Chet Tanaka, Company K’s clerk who had found himself in command of K’s survivors, was witness to Company K’s near destruction. “My pencil was worn down to a stub trying to keep track of the people we lost. We kept asking for replacements. None came up. We were lucky to get just food and ammo. Nothing could come up through that barrage the Germans put down on both sides of us.”16

  The relentless fighting for nearly a week had forced Tanaka and others to stow their compassion deep inside themselves. One night during the mission, Tanaka and a sergeant were counting their men to determine how many they had lost during the day’s fighting. When they were finished, Tanaka sat down on his helmet. Not far away, the sergeant sat on the stiff body of a German soldier. Both started eating their K rations, oblivious of the callousness that draped their meal. Each man was so exhausted and numbed to death that the only things that mattered were food and then a little sleep before the next day’s killing began again.

  Some survivors of the rescue force depended upon a callousness that numbed every thought, every action. When Sergeant Tak Goto of Company K was asked by a member of the lost battalion for a drink of water from his canteen, a direct “No” was his answer. No hesitation, no explanation, was offered. The rescued soldier could only speculate why the volunteer from a relocation camp might want to keep his canteen on his hip.17

  The leader of the lost battalion, the young confident lieutenant knew better than anyone what the 442nd had accomplished. “Chills went up our spines when we saw the Nisei soldiers. Honestly, they looked like giants to us,” said Higgins.18

  At 1600 General Dahlquist finally received the news in a simple radio transmission that he had desperately sought for several days. “Patrol from 442nd here. Tell them we love them.”19 Only about fifteen minutes later, Higgins radioed, “Anxiously awaiting orders.” It was clear the 1/141 couldn’t move off the ridge fast enough. But there were dozens of wounded men to take care of and others who were too weak to walk off the ridge under their own power. He was told to wait for Major Claude Roscoe, the officer who had replaced Lundquist as commanding officer of the 1/141, to reach Higgins.

  Meanwhile, a skeleton 3rd Battalion pressed ahead on the ridge, fighting for every yard, until it reached Higgins’s original objective. More men would be killed or maimed before the Americans finally secured the strategic vantage point high above the valley leading to the German border.

  DARKNESS FORCED THE 1/141 TO SPEND ONE MORE NIGHT ON the ridge while the wounded were taken off. It was the first time the men of the 1/141 slept secure in the knowledge that others stood lookout posts and had formed a perimeter to guard against enemy attack. As they slept, litter squads and transport vehicles were brought forward to the 1/141 to evacuate the wounded as quickly as possible.d

  At the same time, some soldiers in the 442nd were ordered to begin carrying their dead off the hill on stretchers. They would have to be careful when they approached a dead Nisei who had lain undisturbed in the forest. Combat veterans of the 442nd knew Germans sometimes rigged dead American bodies with mines, making the corpses macabre booby traps. It was a trick of the enemy the veterans of 442nd had learned earlier on the Anzio beachhead in Italy.

  The wounded were carried or driven to nearby aid stations, where medics checked them, jotted a few notes, and then sent them back down the ridge to field hospitals near Bruyères. Dozens of men suffered from wounds inflicted by the enemy, trench foot, dehydration, and exhaustion, including many who had never left their posts. After thanking Higgins, Erwin Blonder finally set his radio aside and was carried off with a severe case of trench foot. The thoughtful young man who had volunteered one month before college graduation never left his radio post and would not see Martin Higgins again during the war.

  As the wounded and dead were taken back along the ridge, Colonel Charles Owens sent Higgins one final message at 1830:e “Best wishes and God bless you.”20

  AT 0915 ON OCTOBER 31, AN ESTIMATED 108 MEN OF THE 1/141 marched off the ridge. About an hour later they loaded onto trucks. Just before noon they reached Deycimont, about two miles southwest of Bruyères. It was the first time the 141st had withdrawn since it had come ashore in France on August 15. Signal Corps videographers were on hand to record many soldiers walking and then riding in jeeps and transports back down the logging road. War correspondents waited, as the saga of the “lost battalion” had become big news back home. When Higgins’s men arrived, hot soup was ready and followed by a hot meal about an hour later. It had been eight days since they had enjoyed a full, hot meal.

  A noted BBC war correspondent, Colin Wills, was one of several reporters who interviewed Higgins. The interview was broadcast on Radio Newsreel, a BBC program aired in England and the United States within a week of the 1/141’s evacuation. Higgins and Sergeant Harold Kripisch were also interviewed for another radio program, Army Hour, which was broadcast nationally on Sunday afternoons to more than 3 million listeners.

  Throughout November a video newsreel report of the rescue riveted American moviegoers. Many of the newsreels showed Higgins and his men grinning and shaking hands with other GIs and the 141st’s medical officer Captain Charles Barry. None had rescued the 1/141.f Some reporters were stunned at Higgins’s description of what the 1/141 had endured. In one interview, he pulled his canteen off his hip and emptied its filthy water. “That’s what we drank, or worse,” he said.21

  MEANWHILE, THE 442ND HAD NO TIME TO SAVOR ITS ACCOMPLISHMENT or mourn its dead. As those interviews took place on October 31 and in the days that followed, the 442nd had to reach and secure the 1/141’s original objective, which was the eastern end of the ridge. It was about a quarter of a mile beyond where the 1/141 had been surrounded. Once again, Jim Okubo and the rest of the 3rd Battalion took the lead, with the 100th on the south side of the ridge to protect the 442nd’s supply road it had just opened. George Sakato and the rest of the 2nd Battalion moved off Hill 617 and closed in on the 3rd, protecting its left flank. Inevitably, the Germans were waiting.

  The day’s advance began shortly after dawn, and by 1100 another firefight with the Germans developed at a newly discovered roadblock. The 442nd captured a handful of Germans, pulled back slightly, and called in the artillery. A short time later, the roadblock was neutralized by a renewed attack. That marked the end of German resistance. Shortly before dark, the 442nd reached Hill 595, giving those still fighting a commanding view of the Corcieux Valley and the hamlet of La Houssière at the foot of the ridge. Shigeki Nishimura, Albert Sunada, Tadashi Kubo, Ben Masaoka, Renkichi Matsumura, Ned Nakamura, and Minoru Yoshida were part of the final push early in the day. By the time Hill 595 had b
een cleared of Germans, all seven of them had been killed. Seven more entries in the tally to take the ridge from the Germans.

  The valley below would become one of the principal routes of the Allies’ advance toward the strategic city of St. Die, on the Alsatian plain, and then to the German border. On that final day of fighting, Bert Akiyama of Company I and others found piles of K rations that had been retrieved by Germans from the supply tanks that had landed far from Higgins’s position. Most of their contents were uneaten by the hungry enemy, leading Akiyama to conclude, “The Germans knew what was inside and they didn’t want any of that crap.”22

  In the days that followed, the chaos of battle was transformed into an orderly occupation. Supply trucks moved forward to support the Americans at the far end of the ridge. They brought food, ammunition, medical supplies, and replacement troops. On their return trips, they ferried the dead and wounded off the battlefield. Litter teams carried dead men to where they could be loaded onto trucks and jeeps. The processionals stopped some men in their tracks.

  Four men came slowly up a trail along which was strewn with the debris of war. . . . The four were carrying a dead [100th] comrade on a litter. It was not so much the weight of their burden as it was the weight of the sorrow in their hearts that made them tread so slowly on their way. Toward them came a lone [American] soldier, of a different division and of a different race. When he noticed the funeral process he stopped, stepped off the path, removed his helmet, and stood with bowed head as the men bore the dead past him. I shall never forget how the white soldier of the 45th Division took the time to honor one of our Japanese Americans. In reverence, he stepped off the road and let the dead pass by.23

  VICTORY AND DEATH HAD COATED THE RIDGE. THE GERMANS’ 933rd Grenadier Regiment had been destroyed. Fewer than 100 men remained in a force that a few months earlier had numbered ten times that. The Germans’ back had been broken in this stretch of forest in the Vosges. The Americans had finally punched a hole in the German line. It would become the first time that any army in recent history had broken through the Vosges against entrenched defenders.