On January 20, 1945, Higgins learned he would not spend the rest of the war in Oflag 64. The Russians were approaching from the east. The following day, he and fourteen hundred other prisoners were shepherded into an enormous column of twos and marched out of camp. The temperature was barely above zero. Their ultimate destination was Stalag VII-A at Moosburg, Germany, 350 miles away.
The death march during one of Europe’s most brutal winters in recent memory littered the countryside with dead bodies. Medic Jimmie Kanaya was part of the odyssey across frozen Germany. He had been incarcerated in Oflag 64 since Kanaya and the rest of his group of wounded men on stretchers had been captured at the outset of the mission to rescue Higgins. After subsisting on eight hundred calories a day, Kanaya, Higgins, and the others walked twelve miles a day through the snow. Most had only a wool blanket for protection, and they usually slept in abandoned barns at night. They were fed boiled potatoes and beets. Polish officers who had been confined much longer than Higgins and Kanaya died during each day’s march. Kanaya passed many as they lay dying along the road. “I still see their hands sticking out of the snow. I think knowing the same thing could happen to me gave me incentive to keep going,” he recalled after the war.6 Only one-third of the prisoners, about four hundred, including Higgins and Kanaya, reached Stalag VII-A six weeks later. The POWs in Germany’s largest prisoner camp barely noticed their arrival.a
AS SPRING BEGAN TO WARM SOUTHERN EUROPE, MACHINE GUNNER Hank Yoshitake of the 100th Battalion, medic Jim Okubo, and the rest of the 442nd embarked on a secret mission in late March 1945. The Champagne Campaign had come to an end when the 442nd had shipped out of Marseille on transport ships bound again for Italy. Their transport ships took a circuitous route to avoid German spotters. Secrecy was paramount as they headed back into battle.
After disembarking in Leghorn, the 442nd gathered in Pisa. All identifying insignia were removed from their helmets and uniforms. No one could know the 442nd had arrived in Italy. The replenished battalion had been assigned to be the western spearhead of a massive attack to break through the Germans’ foremost Italian defensive line. The Gothic Line stretched from the west coast a few miles north of Pisa east across Italy to Pesaro on the east coast. Attacks against the Gothic Line had produced only casualties and a stalemate. The Allies had made almost no progress in Italy since the 442nd had left for France seven months earlier.
General Mark Clark, who commanded the 15th Army Group, had developed an ambitious plan to break through the Gothic Line. Major General Lucian Truscott’s Fifth Army would make a frontal assault to the west. The British Eighth Army would attack to the east and then turn west to trap the fleeing enemy. It was a massive pincer movement across the width of Italy. The 442nd would face at least four divisions of enemy soldiers that had reinforced the western portion of the Gothic Line.
Much like what it had faced in the Vosges five months earlier, the 442nd faced a seemingly impregnable ridgeline held by the enemy. This time the south–north ridgeline was riddled with deep ravines and defined by a series of mountains. Mount Cerreta, Mount Folgorito, Mount Carchio, and Mount Belvedere loomed in their path. The eight-hundred-foot ridges of the Vosges had been replaced by mountains nearly four times taller. The 442nd would have to climb up into the series of mountains, cross minefields, evade enemy artillery zeroed in on mountain paths, and drive the Germans out of hundreds of bunkers.
Secrecy and a surprise attack were essential for success against the dug-in enemy. The 100th Battalion would make a frontal assault at the westernmost end of the enemy line, while the 3rd Battalion would attack about four miles to the east and then swing west to meet the 100th. It was to be a mini-pincer movement within the overall campaign. Battle planners for the 442nd believed, “All the theory of security, [a] night approach, and the frontal attack coordinated with a surprise flank assault from the least expected source, were wrapped up in this action. . . . The flanking movement [by the 3rd Battalion], made with the eyes of the enemy looking down from 3,000-foot heights, had only a 50–50 chance of success.”7
On April 3 the 100th and 3rd Battalions loaded into trucks for a seventeen-mile journey north toward Pietrasanta under the cover of darkness. Slowly and quietly, they disembarked. Hundreds of unidentifiable men, their gear carefully packed to avoid noise, formed into units and began hiking. The 100th headed toward Vallecchia, eight miles away, while the 3rd Battalion marched four miles to Seravezza and then another eight miles up to Azzano, a mountainside village on the final hill before enemy territory.
The climb to Azzano was terrifying. Local guides led Okubo and the others up narrow trails carved into the hillsides in the dark. Switchbacks were especially treacherous, and unseen rocks on the path could become as deadly as a land mine. Most men carried enough K rations for three days, one pouch for a canteen, another to carry grenades, more grenades attached to a shoulder strap, their weapon, extra bandoliers of ammunition, spare socks stuffed inside their shirts, and toilet paper tucked into their helmet liner. Loaded down with the equipment tightly strapped to their bodies, twenty-five men fell off the trail, sliding and rolling uncontrollably down the hill. Two had to be hospitalized from the injuries they suffered in their fall. None uttered a sound as they caromed off rocks. The Germans could not learn of the sneak attack.
The 3rd Battalion reached Azzano shortly after midnight. Everyone was exhausted as they settled into houses and other buildings. Okubo and the other medics made rounds to check on the troops as the eastern sky lightened. The 100th and 3rd Battalions rested, out of sight, most of April 4. That night just before midnight, the 3rd Battalion headed out again. The men still had to cross one final valley after leaving Azzano and then make another brutal climb up toward Mount Folgorito and Mount Carchio. “The trail skirted drop-offs of 15 to 150 feet high and was so steep that the troops were forced to practically scramble up on hands and knees,” stated an after-action report.8
Finally, just before dawn on April 5, the 442nd was ready to attack. At 0500 Hank Yoshitake was at the forefront of the 100th’s assault. The machine gunner supported the second platoon of Company A. When Company A led off the attack, all was quiet for a few minutes. Quietly, slowly, they advanced about the length of a football field until a man stepped on a land mine. The battlefield erupted. Germans raked the minefield with gunfire and lobbed grenades into the Americans. Many fell wounded or dead.
Like many others, Sadao Munemori’s squad was pinned down when its leader was killed. Munemori summoned a courage that would make him legendary. He mounted a one-man charge at the enemy. He single-handedly knocked out two machine-gun nests under intense fire. As he withdrew to a crater that held two American soldiers, a German grenade bounced off his helmet and rolled toward them. Munemori dove onto the grenade a second before it exploded. He died instantly as he saved the two men’s lives.b
In only thirty minutes the 100th took its first objective, a hill designated “Florida.” By the end of the day, twelve German bunkers had been destroyed.
To the east, the 3rd Battalion had also caught the Germans by surprise. Believing a major assault force could not climb the precipitously steep mountainsides undetected in the middle of the night, the Germans miscalculated. When dawn broke, the 3rd Battalion attacked almost at point-blank range. By midday Company L had captured Mount Folgorito to the south, and Company I had taken Mount Carchio to the north.
Vicious fighting persisted into the night along the length of the ridgeline and in the surrounding area. At one point, Okubo’s Company K was called out of reserve to reinforce troops up on the ridge. As the men crossed the valley near Azzano and approached the mountains, enemy artillery rained down on Company K. German observation posts high in the mountains had pinpointed Company K’s advance. As a result, Okubo’s unit suffered more casualties than most of the units up in the mountains. Okubo and the other medics treated forty-two wounded men. Four others were killed.
Only two days later, elements from the 100th and 3rd Battalion
linked up as the last enemy resistance was overcome on Mount Cerreta. The western end of the Gothic Line had been breached. Men of the 442nd had accomplished the feat in less than a day’s fighting, followed by several days of mopping up isolated pockets of the enemy. Dozens of Germans had been taken prisoner, and the 442nd captured two thousand hand grenades, enough rations for a battalion for two days, one hundred bazooka shells, one hundred boxes of land mines, and other enemy equipment.
THE OPERATION AROUND MOUNT CERRETA WOULD BECOME THE last major battle for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Europe. In only two years, it had become the most decorated U.S. Army regiment of its size. In less than ten months, the 442nd had earned a remarkable 7 Presidential Unit Citations, 4 of them for reaching the 1/141. More than 9,000 Purple Hearts had been issued to men who had been wounded on the battlefield. Some wore as many as 4 Purple Hearts on their chest. Before war’s end, the 100th was widely recognized as the “Purple Heart Battalion.” The 442nd was earning what would forever characterize it as the “Go For Broke Regiment.”
In addition to the single Medal of Honor, its 18,000 men earned more than 18,000 awards for bravery and sacrifice. That included 29 Distinguished Service Crosses, more than 330 Silver Crosses (28 men earned multiple awards), and more than 2,000 Bronze Stars.
In the years following the war, many veterans questioned the lack of Medals of Honor for the men of the 442nd. Command decisions that had downgraded Medal of Honor nominations written on the battlefield offered minimal rationale.
George Sakato’s award citation stated that he had made a one-man charge against the enemy on October 29 when his unit was pinned down. A few minutes later, the citation recounted, he led a squad that repulsed an enemy counterattack. After running out of ammunition, he picked weapons up off the battlefield and kept fighting. He had killed twelve Germans, wounded two others, captured four, and had assisted the platoon in capturing thirty-four others.
But that wasn’t good enough for the Medal of Honor. Three weeks before the assault on the Gothic Line, his nomination had been downgraded to a Distinguished Service Cross. The decision memorandum stated, “It is considered that the recorded acts were not so conspicuous as to clearly distinguish the nominee for gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty.”c
On April 11, a brief memorandum from General Dwight Eisenhower’s command staff downgraded Barney Hajiro’s nomination for a Medal of Honor for his legendary “banzai charge” to a Distinguished Service Cross. A month later, medic Jim Okubo’s heroism in saving lives in enemy-held territory on different days was downgraded two levels from a Medal of Honor to a Silver Star. Okubo received his Silver Star at a memorial service on May 6, two days before the Germans surrendered.
BY THAT TIME, MARTIN HIGGINS AND OTHER MEMBERS OF THE 141st were on their way home. He and four others from Company A had brazenly escaped their POW camp by walking out the front gate. Higgins could remember the French he had learned in school as he watched French soldiers being repatriated by the Germans.d Could he and others blend in with the French? The pipe-smoking Higgins had an idea. He swapped his unwanted Red Cross cigarettes to other prisoners for parts of a French uniform. As Frenchmen were released, Higgins and four others fell in with them and simply walked out of camp. One of them was Eddie Guy. Higgins had spotted Guy earlier through a fence that separated enlisted troops from the officer prisoners. Higgins had always considered Guy “one of his rocks” and one of the most reliable men under his command.9 The five men dodged patrols as they made their way through fifteen miles of enemy territory to the Elbe River and the American line. Once they had reached friendly territory, they were transported to a rest-and-rehabilitation camp near Normandy before being shipped home.
The 442nd, however, remained in Italy for nearly a year following the German surrender, guarding German prisoners and military installations. First, they were sent to Ghedi, where eighty thousand POWs were processed. Later assignments included the Italian Alps, Florence, Pisa, and the Leghorn area, not far from where the 442nd had entered battle several years earlier. Replacements continued to arrive following the war, as battle veterans earned enough points to be discharged and sent home.e
Finally, in 1946, the 442nd sailed into New York Harbor on July 4. Less than two weeks later in Washington, DC, they paraded down Constitution Avenue in a muggy rain, bound for a reception on the White House lawn. President Harry Truman presented a seventh Presidential Unit Citation. He told them:
You are to be congratulated on what you have done for this great country of ours. I think it was my predecessor who said that Americanism is not a matter of race or creed, it is a matter of the heart. You fought for the free nations of the world along with the rest of us. I congratulate you on that, and I can’t tell you how very much I appreciate the privilege of being able to show you just how much the United States of America thinks of what you have done. You are now on your way home. You fought not only the enemy, but you fought prejudice—and you have won. Keep up that fight, and we will continue to win—to make this great Republic stand for just what the Constitution says it stands for: the welfare of all the people all the
time.10
He shared the sentiment of nearly every senior military officer who had any knowledge of Japanese American troops who had served in Europe and in the Pacific. Six thousand Japanese Americans trained as linguists and served as interpreters, interrogators, translators, and radio-message interceptors in the Military Intelligence Service. General Douglas MacArthur considered them crucial in the war against Japan in the Pacific. “Never has a commander gone into battle as did the Allied Commander Southwest Pacific, knowing so much about the enemy.”11
General George Marshall noted, “The men of the 100/442 took terrific casualties. They showed rare courage and tremendous fighting spirit. . . . [E]verybody wanted them.”12 A week after the 100th entered battle in Italy in 1943, Marshall received a glowing report from General Mark Clark. Clark told Marshall that the 100th had performed brilliantly and asked for as many Japanese American soldiers as Marshall had available. In his postwar memoirs, Clark lavishly praised the combat record of the 442nd, considered it one of his most accomplished regiments, and recognized that the Japanese Americans’ acceptance of brutal casualty rates was spawned in part to prove their loyalty.
Perhaps Major General Dahlquist understood what and why the 442nd had endured the missions he had assigned them when he wrote to his wife, Ruth, during the rescue campaign, “It astounds me how the men are able to stand the physical and mental strain under which they are constantly living. It is almost beyond comprehension that the human being can stand so much.”13
a Estimates of the number of POWs at Moosburg in 1945 vary greatly, from fifty thousand to more than one hundred thousand, in a camp designed to hold only about ten thousand prisoners.
b Munemori became the only Japanese American soldier to receive the Medal of Honor during World War II or shortly thereafter. For others, decades passed before they were recognized.
c Command decisions typically were conveyed in sparse memoranda, in this case by Lieutenant General Ben Lear, U.S. Army deputy theater commander, on March 11, 1945.
d Germany allowed some French prisoners of war—World War I veterans, those with skills in short supply, fathers of large families, and others—to return to France prior to the end of the war.
e Military personnel earned points based on length of service, time spent overseas, campaign participation, awards and decorations, and the number of young children at home. Generally, an enlisted soldier needed eighty-five points to be discharged from the army.
CHAPTER 9
HONOR BESTOWED
LIKE OTHER MEMBERS OF THE GREATEST GENERATION, 442ND veterans likely anticipated plaudits and credit when they returned to America. Some, however, discovered that bigotry trumped patriotism. Some Americans continued to wage their own brand of war against Japanese American citizens in the months following World War II.
Se
veral incidents became national news. A wounded Japanese American soldier, Raymond Matsuda, was ordered out of a barbershop owned by Andy Hale. “I don’t want none of their business. They might close me up but I sure as hell won’t work on a Jap,” he told a newspaper reporter.1 Others were tolerated silently. A San Francisco–area barber refused to cut future U.S. senator Daniel Inouye’s hair when he returned home after losing an arm in the war. On many occasions, restaurant staff took the food orders of Japanese American families and then silently refused to serve their food until they grew tired of waiting and left. Some veteran associations denied Japanese American membership, prompting the establishment of Nisei- only veteran groups.
Such racism proved relatively rare, however, as many Caucasian Americans came to the defense of Nisei veterans. Colonel Pursall’s battlefield aide Rudy Tokiwa was confronted by a group of men in Salt Lake City. “Why the hell they let Japs walk on the street for?” one taunted. But then a policeman stepped in. “Either you guys get on your knees and apologize to this man, or I keep swinging this [billy club].”2 One day Ushuro Ito’s barn near San Diego was burned to the ground by unidentified vandals. It stored tools used in his commercial nursery. The nine-thousand-dollar loss could have been devastating. “In the midst of Ito’s despair, his friends descended on his little farm. They came from nearby Vista and Del Mar, bringing material from which they erected a new building for Ito’s tools.”3 Ito was able to continue growing stunted cacti.
Similarly, the Fort Hood American Legion post that had erased Nisei GI names from a monument had become the object of national scorn. “Why the dirty, lousy . . . that’s the lousiest thing I ever heard of. The men who came off that hill in the mountains know those Japanese aren’t as good as the average soldier, they’re better,” said Lieutenant Joe Kimble of the 141st.4 Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who had supported the internment of Japanese Americans, was especially critical of the post’s action. A week later, a group of Hood River ministers announced plans for a new memorial that would include all local Nisei veterans.a
Honor Before Glory Page 22