Leaders of the 405th squadron that resupplied the 1/141st met various fates. Major John Leonard kept flying combat missions. Only about two months after the lost battalion missions, he was shot down during a vicious dogfight with enemy aircraft over the city of Worms. He shot down two enemy aircraft before he was hit. Leonard bailed out, but witnesses reported his parachute never opened as he plummeted toward the German forest. He had been promoted to lieutenant colonel before he died on impact that day. Leonard had earned two Distinguished Flying Crosses and twenty-two Air Medals, among other awards. He was twenty-four years old.
Others, like 405th pilot Eliel Archilla, quietly built new careers after surviving the war. After completing three missions over the English Channel and ninety-five more over France and Germany, he came home on VE Day, was discharged from active service in 1947, and retired from the reserves as a lieutenant colonel in 1964. He and his wife, Sue, raised a family, and he worked for decades for a Texas lubricant and fuel-additive company. Widely known as “Arch,” Eliel was a longtime and highly respected deacon in his Baptist church until he died in 2015 at the age of ninety-one.
THE GERMAN LEADERS WHO COMMANDED THE ENEMY TROOPS ON the ridge met a different postwar fate.
General Hermann Balck, commanding officer of Army Group G in eastern France, surrendered to the Americans in Austria at the end of the war and remained in prison until 1947. After he found work as a depot worker a year later in Germany, he was arrested and convicted of murdering a German artillery commander in the war. Balck served eighteen months. In the 1970s he participated in panel discussions with senior leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization at the U.S. Army War College. He died in 1982 at the age of eighty-nine.
Major General Dahlquist’s nemesis, General Friedrich Wiese, was relieved of his command of the Nineteenth Army after his army failed to retake Strasbourg late in the war. He was captured by the Americans in 1945 and released two years later. He died in Germany in 1975 at the age of eighty-two.
“OLD STONE FACE,” COLONEL CARL ADAMS, COMMANDING officer of the 143rd Infantry Regiment, never followed through on his threat to have Dahlquist “busted.” He retired as a general in 1966 after serving thirty-eight years in the military. He died in 1987, only three weeks after his eighty-first birthday.
Major General Lucian Truscott never fired Dahlquist. The ambitious general commanded the Fifth Army in Italy at the end of the war and succeeded General George Patton as commanding officer of the Third Army in Germany. He returned to the United States, and in 1954 Congress passed Public Law 83-508 making him an honorary general. Truscott died in 1965 at the age of seventy.
Days after the war ended in Europe, Major General John Dahlquist was ridiculed for his courteous treatment of Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring after he had been captured. He and Brigadier General Robert Stack were filmed shaking Göring’s hand, smiling, and posing for a photograph as they welcomed him to a lunch of chicken and peas. At one point, Dahlquist dismissed the group’s interpreter and spoke with Göring in German. When the lunch became public knowledge, Stack and Dahlquist were widely criticized over their conduct. General George Marshall was among those critics.
Marshall wrote to General Dwight Eisenhower that he was being “deluged with violent protests and the radical press, as well as numerous conservative papers, carry bitter editorials on the subject. For your information I think the serious error lay in Dahlquist, Stack, etcetera, permitting themselves to be photographed.”15 Eisenhower later stated publicly that he “regretted” the public hospitality shown by Dahlquist, Stack, and other senior American officers in their treatment of Nazi leaders.
Dahlquist left the 36th Division on November 1, 1945, and returned to the United States and to a military life he knew well. He was assigned to the secretary of war’s Personnel Board for a year and then became deputy director of Personnel and Administration in the War Department until 1949. Other assignments followed, and in August 1954 he received his fourth star to become a general. He retired from the army in 1956 and died in June 1975 at the age of eighty-nine.
As critical as most soldiers in the 442nd were of Dahlquist, the 36th Division came home with a notable war record. Dahlquist commanded the 36th for all but nine months during World War II. The division earned twelve Presidential Unit Citations. It also had the ninth-highest casualty rate of all army divisions in World War II.
Colonel Carl Lundquist, the commanding officer of the 1/141 whom Dahlquist fired only days after Higgins’s men had been surrounded, was assigned to other combat posts. He was chief of staff for the 41st Infantry Division until March 1945 and then became the commanding officer of the 14th Infantry before returning to the United States in 1946. He retired as a colonel and died in 1980 at the age of seventy-six.
Martin Higgins received a battlefield promotion to captain about the time of his capture. Before he reached Oflag 64, he was interviewed by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. At the end of the interview, Himmler told Higgins, “Fuer Dich ist der Krieg vobei!” (For you, the war is over!). In later years, he rarely mentioned his Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, Purple Heart, POW Medal, or other citations.
After the war he went to work in sales for a playing-card company, Diamond International. Higgins retired as a regional sales manager in 1979. Thereafter, he earned a master’s degree in education and later taught adult literacy. He died in February 2007 at the age of ninety-one. When he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, the only flowers permitted on his grave by his son were the crimson-red anthuriums presented by members of the 442nd who were in attendance. Higgins always felt his men were “relieved” by the 442nd, not rescued.e But out of respect and deep gratitude to the men of the 442nd who used the term rescue, he never argued the point.
Higgins’s second in command, Harry Huberth, built a prosperous real estate career in New York following the war. Like many soldiers after World War II, he drifted away from his religious upbringing, and only in the latter years of his life did he again become active in the Episcopal Church. He was an avid and accomplished horseman. Higgins remained close to Huberth, and they went riding together. Late in his life, Huberth said one of his most cherished possessions was a letter Higgins had written to Huberth, saying, “While I received all the credit as commanding officer of the lost battalion, there was not a move I made without consulting you as B Company commander. You are one of the finest and bravest officers I ever saw in combat and I cherish our friendship. . . . [M]ay the bond never be broken.” Huberth died in 2009 at the age of eighty-seven.
Machine gunner Jack Wilson went to air-conditioning school in Chicago following the war. He couldn’t find a job upon graduation and returned home to Newburgh, Indiana. He became a rural mail carrier and retired on his fifty-fifth birthday, after thirty years of civil service (including his time in the army).
Radioman Erwin Blonder was hospitalized in Illinois with the severe trench foot that had developed while he was surrounded for a week in the Vosges. Gangrene was found in both ankles, and at one point amputation was considered. Rehabilitation took nearly a year after Blonder returned home. For a while, Blonder didn’t want his wife or parents to see him, and he wouldn’t talk about his war experience. After he recovered, he rejoined the family’s successful paint-and-wallpaper business in Ohio. He retired in 1971 and ultimately sold the family business. He was active in a number of civic organizations and loved to talk about politics. More than fifty years after the war, he met some of the members of the 442nd at the Texas Military Forces Museum and started attending their reunions. Blonder died in 2013 at the age of ninety-two.
For decades following the war, battlefield memories sometimes haunted Eason Bond, the rifleman who was tempted to leave his station when surrounded in the Vosges. He returned to his native Thomaston, Georgia, to work at the local cotton mill. That life offered minimal prospects, so he went to technical school. For the next thirty-five years, he ran an auto-body shop and then retired a few miles east of Monroe. “I thi
nk of the war every day,” he recalled more than sixty years later. Various memories would flash into view. Sometimes he wondered if a man whose jaw had been blown to pieces and whose tongue had been shredded somehow regained his ability to speak. “When I go to bed I think about the ol’ boys and what they’ve been doing. I don’t always remember their names, but I sure do remember their faces.”16
Faces of men saved and lost haunted many members of the 442nd to the last days of their lives. The 100th’s Young Oak Kim articulated an epitaph that spoke for many in the decades following World War II: “My memories of France still show the bitterness burnt deeply into my soul.”17
a Meanwhile, the local newspaper carried advertisements listing farms still owned by Japanese Americans and encouraging Caucasian residents to make offers to buy them.
b Sandra Tanamachi was the niece of Saburo Tanamachi, who had been buried at Arlington National Cemetery more than fifty years earlier.
c About 40 percent of Japanese American families who were interned never returned to their homes in California, Oregon, and Washington. Like the Okubos, they settled in states far from the West Coast neighborhoods they had known prior to the war. Many prewar “Japantowns,” like that in San Diego, disappeared permanently from the urban landscape.
d Sakato’s last rehabilitation hospital was at Camp Lockett, east of San Diego, where Higgins and Huberth had trained. By war’s end, it had been converted into a hospital for returning soldiers.
e According to his son Michael, Martin felt his men could have held out indefinitely with adequate supplies. Therefore, they were not rescued, in his view, but relieved by the 442nd that then carried out the rest of the mission to the end of the ridge.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY SOURCES
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Higgins, Martin L., Jr. Family Papers Collection. Courtesy of Michael Higgins.
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ORAL HISTORIES AND INTERVIEWS
141st
Gene Airheart, Erwin Blonder, Eason Bond, Arthur Cunningham, Bill Estes, Martin Higgins, Joe Hilty, Harry Huberth, John Krause, Albert Lasseign, Jack Wilson.
442nd
Nelson Agi, Seitoku Akamine, Tets Asato, George Buto, Kenji Ego, Frank Fukuzawa, Minoru Furuto, Barney Hajiro, Kaz Hamasaki, Ed Ichiyama, Lawrence Ishikawa, Victor Izui, Stanley Izumigawa, Harry Kanada, Enoch Kanaya, Jimmie Kanaya, Young Oak Kim, Larry Kodama, Sadaichi Kubota, Yoshikatsu Maruo, Rocky Matayoshi, Frank Matsuda, Shigeru Matsukawa, James Matsumoto, Paul Matsumoto, Kats Miho, Rocky Miyamoto, George Morihio, Kiyoji Morimoto, Edward Nishihara, Ron Oba, Ted Ohira, Francis Ohta, Yukio Okutsu, James Oura, Mas Sakagami, Ray Sakaguchi, Seichi Sakaida, George Sakato, Larry Sakoda, Eddie Sasaki, Kazuo Sato, Sus Satow, Takashi Senzaki, Jun Shiosaki, Sam Sugimoto, Eji Suyama, Al Takahashi, Keyo Takahayashi, Shuji Taketomo, Richard Tanaka, Thomas Tanaka, Jim Tazoi, John Togashi, Rudy Tokia, Jim Tokushige, George Uchimiya, Ernest Uno, Kei Yamaguchi, Jim Yamashita, Fred Yasukochi, Hank Yoshitake.
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Higgins, Michael P. Crimson Threads: The 405th Fighter Squadron and the Lost Battalion. Kent: Edon, 2009.
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