Why the US Army Ranked the 442nd Above Every Other Regiment of Its Size
Riier, Eastern France. The 12th of November, 1944. A major general of the United States Army has ordered the 442nd Regimental Combat Team to stand for a review and is about to see what a regiment of this size looks like after 3 weeks in the Vogge. Major General John Dalquist walks out in front of the formation and stops.
The arithmetic is wrong. Two of the rifle companies drawn up before him should number around 400 men between them. 18 are standing for K Company. Eight for I. Dulquist turns to the officer beside him, a colonel born in Sanman, Puerto Rico named Virgil Miller, and says he wanted every man present as ordered.
Miller’s answer is four words. That’s all that’s left. Here is the part that does not fit. Every account of this outfit opens with the same sentence. The most decorated unit for its size and length of service in the history of the United States Army. And the explanation everybody reaches for is standing right there in the gaps, killed in extraordinary numbers, therefore decorated in extraordinary numbers, except that the army had made up its mind about these men 21 months earlier in a Wisconsin winter before a single one of them had been shot at
anywhere in Europe. So, what did it see in 1943 that it was prepared to bet on? Why did this formation keep being handed the jobs that had already failed once in somebody else’s hands? And why, 55 years later, did the army go back through its own paperwork and admit it had been wrong about what these men earned? Here is what I can tell you before we start.
The colonel who spoke those four words was not Japanese American. The general he spoke them to was at that moment being considered for relief of command over what had just happened in those mountains. And against a fighting strength of roughly 4,000 men, the army would issue this unit more than twice that number of Purple Hearts.
Honolulu Harbor, the night of the 5th of June, 1942. Part one. There is no announcement in the newspapers, nothing on the radio. 1,432 soldiers of the Hawaii National Guard walk up the gangway of a Matson liner in the dark and the ship sails for a destination that nobody on board has been told. They are American soldiers.
Many of them have been in uniform since before Pearl Harbor in the 298th and 299th Infantry Regiments. And on the morning of December 7th, they were the men standing on the shore firing at the aircraft. their rifles were taken away from them afterwards. Anyway, that is the situation the army has created for itself by the summer of 1942 and it is worth sitting with because it is genuinely strange.
On the 30th of March 1942, the War Department stopped inducting Americans of Japanese ancestry and classified them as unsuitable for service. On the West Coast, Executive Order 90066 was moving roughly 120,000 people, most of them citizens, into camps behind wire. And in Hawaii sat 1,400 trained, armed men the army had just decided it could not use and could not quite bring itself to discharge.
So it put them on a boat. They arrived in Oakland on the 12th of June and were redesated on the spot. The 100th Infantry Battalion, separate. separate meaning attached to nothing. An orphan formation with no parent regiment, no division and no obvious purpose. They gave themselves a nickname out of Hawaiian pigeon. One pukah puka.
Puka being the word for whole because that is what the two zeros looked like. They chose a motto, too. And the motto tells you something about the temperature of that year. Remember Pearl Harbor. Then the army sent them to Wisconsin to Camp McCoy. And while they were there, it did something with 26 of them that has almost entirely disappeared from the popular version of this story.
In November 1942, 26 men of B company third platoon were flown out of Camp McCoy under secret orders. One of them was a Honolulu born private named Raymond Nosaka. They landed at Gulfport, Mississippi, and were taken out to ship island in the Gulf where for two weeks nobody told them anything at all. Then Major James Levelvel arrived and explained the mission.
They were going to train dogs. Six miles across the water was Cat Island, low and swampy and semi-ropical, chosen because it resembled a Pacific island. Waiting there was a Swiss former hunting guide named William Prester, who had persuaded the United States government of a theory that Japanese people give off a distinct racial odor and that dogs could be trained to detect it and attack.
The army would not use Japanese prisoners of war for fear of reprisals against American prisoners. So it used American soldiers who looked to press Eye close enough. Picture the actual working day. The men are fed across each morning. They put on padded protective suits. They carry raw horsemeat. They go into the marsh and the scrub and they hide from the dogs and from the alligators which are a genuine hazard.
And when a dog finds a man, the man fires a pistol into the air, pretends to fall dead, and throws the animal the meat. The theory was nonsense, and it failed in the most humiliating way available. Dogs do distinguish between individual humans, but by diet and individual scent, not ancestry.
And these were men eating US Army rations. Worse, the dogs got to know them, and familiarity made the animals friendlier. Pre’s response was to order the Ni to beat the tethered dogs until they bled so the animals would have something to avenge. Noaka, who loved dogs, remembered it with disgust decades later. In January 1943, Psterus staged a demonstration for visiting officers.
And one colonel described the performance as a vaudeville animal act. The project was wound up after about four months and on the 15th of April 1943, the site reopened as an ordinary war dog training center. 400 animals, no bait required. I’ve read a fair amount of Army ground forces paperwork from these years. What is striking is not that a crank got a hearing in wartime.
Cranks always do, and a war is a market for miracle solutions. It is that the institution dropped the theory inside weeks once it failed, which tells you it was never much attached to it. What it was attached to was finding these men something to do that was not soldiering. And here is where the standard explanation of this unit’s record starts to come apart.
Because at the exact moment those 26 men were crawling through a Mississippi swamp in padded suits, the rest of the 100th battalion was on the training grounds at Camp McCoy and then Camp Shelby. And something else was being noticed. Senior officers came to watch. The battalion’s own commander, Lieutenant Colonel Farren Turner, had led these men before the war and had asked for the job of taking them into combat.
His officers pushed for it and the reports coming back out of the exercises were not the reports anybody in Washington had been braced for. On the 28th of January 1943, the War Department announced it would raise an all nissi combat team. It was activated on the 1st of February. Franklin Roosevelt put the announcement in language people still quote, “Americanism,” he said, “is not and never was a matter of race or ancestry.
” Now hold that date against the other one. The 100th Infantry Battalion did not land at Solerno until the 22nd of September 1943. It did not fight its first action until the 29th. Sergeant Shigo Takata, killed that day, was the first man of the battalion to die and the first to be recommended for the Distinguished Service Cross.
Which means the decision to build the 442nd regimental combat team, the decision that produced everything that followed, was taken almost eight months before any Nissi infantrymen had been under fire in Europe. There were no casualties yet. There was no Purple Heart battalion yet. There was nothing to be sentimental about and nothing to commemorate.
There was a battalion that had performed unusually well on maneuvers and a war department that decided on that evidence alone to raise a regiment. The record did not begin with the dying. The dying came afterwards. The rescue and sacrifice reading of this unit has been the standard one for eight decades. And I read the paperwork differently.
Sacrifice is what the 442nd is remembered for. And sacrifice is the least interesting thing in the file. Institutions do not restructure themselves out of admiration for the dead. They restructure themselves when somebody produces numbers that are hard to argue with. The order that created this regiment was not written by men who had been moved by anything.
It was written by men who had read training reports in the middle of the worst manpower year of the war and concluded that they had been wasting an asset. That is a colder story than the one usually told. And I think it is a better one because it credits the men of the 100th with something the sentimental version quietly takes away from them.
Competence demonstrated in advance in front of witnesses before anyone could call it a memorial. Then the shooting started and the evidence stopped being theoretical. The 100th came ashore at Serno with just over 1,300 men attached to the 133rd Infantry Regiment of the 34th Division.
In the first eight weeks of combat, six of its soldiers were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Six. That is the army’s second highest decoration for valor in a single battalion inside two months in a theater where the army’s second highest decoration was not being handed out for enthusiasm. Then came the winter in the mountains in Monte Casino.
By January 1944, the arithmetic had turned savage. The battalion that had landed with roughly 1300 men could field 521 who were still able to fight. In sea company, of the original 170 men, 23 were left. Picture that. 170 men walk onto a troop ship in the Mediterranean. Four months later, you could seat what remains of them in a school bus with rose to spare.
That is where the nickname comes from. Not from a slogan and not from a press officer. The Purple Heart Battalion was a description. And it created a problem that nobody in the War Department had thought through. because a battalion that has lost twothirds of its riflemen has to be refilled. And there was exactly one pool of replacements in the United States that could refill this one.
The men who came forward to do it were in large numbers living behind barbed wire in the American interior in camps their own government had built, which raises the question everybody arrives at eventually and which almost everybody answers the same way immediately without looking. Of course, those men fought like that.
They had something to prove. Part two. The call went out on the 28th of January, 1943, with numbers attached. 1,500 volunteers wanted from Hawaii and 3,000 from the mainland camps. In Hawaii, more than 10,000 men stepped forward, and the recruiters could take a fraction. A farewell ceremony at Ayolani Palace in Honolulu.
That march drew a crowd estimated at 15 to 17,000 from the mainland camps against a quota of 3,000. Roughly 1,200 volunteered. Sit with that gap. The motivation theory lives or dies in it. same generation, same ancestry, same recruiting drive, same month, and a response rate that differs by an order of magnitude depending on whether a man was standing in a Honolulu street or behind a fence with a tower looking down at his family. Picture that.
The mainland manpower pool for what became the most decorated regiment of its size in American history is a line of young men filling in a government form inside a camp watched from a tower by soldiers of the army they are joining. In February 1943, the War Department and the War Relocation Authority put that form in front of every adult in the camps.
History knows it as the loyalty questionnaire and two items on it detonated. Question 27 asked whether the respondent would serve in combat were ever ordered. Question 28 asked him to swear unqualified allegiance to the United States and for swear allegiance to the emperor of Japan. A question that put to a citizen who had never held any other allegiance carried its insult inside the grammar.
At Hart Mountain, Wyoming, Koshi Okamoto had begun talking to anyone who would listen, calling himself a fair play committee of one. Frank Emmy and others joined him. Their position was not a refusal to serve. It was that citizenship comes before conscription. Restore our rights, then send the notices. Men who had answered no to 27 and 28 were barred from membership.
In March 1944, 12 men at Hart Mountain refused the bus to their draft physicals. By months end, 54 of the 315 called had not complied. 63 were tried in Cheyenne that June and convicted. 85 in all were sentenced there, 3 to 5 years. Across the 10 camps, the resistors numbered close to 300. Judge Lewis Goodman throwing out indictments against 27 men from Tulle Lake wrote that it was shocking to the conscience to confine a citizen for disloyalty and then compel him under that restraint to serve.
On Christmas Eve 1947, Truman pardoned all of them. I have gone through a good deal of the wartime correspondence around Nissi recruitment. What is striking is not that some men refused. Refusal under those conditions is the least surprising thing in the file. It is that the army built its whole manpower plan on the assumption that gratitude would do the work of policy.
Then acted astonished when the mainland quota came in at 40%. So the men who filled the ranks at Camp Shelby, Mississippi in the spring of 1943 were not one motivated mass. They were two populations who did not know each other and did not at first like each other. The Hawaii men called the mainlanders kotunks.
The sound they said that a mainland head makes hitting the floor. The mainlanders called the islanders Buddha heads. The Hawaii recruits had expected the non-commissioned officer slots and found them already filled by mainland ni who had been in uniform longer. The islanders spoke pigeon and struck the mainlanders as rowdy.
The mainlanders struck the islanders as cold. There were fights and enough of them that the high command discussed breaking the unit up before it ever shipped out. What Colonel Charles Pence did about it is one of the strangest command decisions of the war and one of the most effective. He put groups of Hawaii soldiers on buses and drove them 250 miles into Arkansas to Jerome and rower.
The men thought they were visiting Japanese American towns. They went off singing with ukuleles. Then the buses slowed at the gate and they saw the wire, the towers, the machine guns pointed inward, the tar paper barracks with whole families partitioned into single rooms, and the people inside those barracks, who had almost nothing, pulled their rations and threw the soldiers a party and cooked for them and danced with them.
Daniel Inuier, then a 19-year-old sergeant, described the ride back. Nobody talked. He said the word went round Camp Shelby overnight and changed everything. And he had a phrase for what the two groups became blood brothers. His judgment was blunt. The regiment was not formed when they volunteered and not when they reached Mississippi.
It was formed on that trip. Here is why that matters and why they had something to prove is not an answer. Motivation was not scarce in 1944. Every infantry division in Europe was full of men who wanted to win, to go home, to avenge a friend. It is the cheapest commodity on a battlefield and the least predictive of anything.
What is rare and what shows up in the afteraction reports is a unit whose small formations keep working when they are out of sight of anyone senior at night where nobody can see them and nobody can help them. Look at what these men did with a tactical problem. The 16th of May 1944 near Sistna on the Anzio front.
The Allies need a prisoner. They need to know whether there is armor in the path of the planned breakout. And every combat strength patrol sent into that sector has failed to bring anyone back. A first lieutenant of the 100th named Young Oak Kim, Korean-American in a Japanese American battalion, which is its own small story about how little the army’s categories meant on the ground, proposes going himself with one enlisted man.
He takes private first class Irving Akahoshi. They cut the lower strands of the wire, crawl several hundred yards into German ground in daylight, take two prisoners at an outpost, and make both men crawl back with them. That settled the question about the armor. A week later, the breakout began and Rome fell on the 5th of June.
Fifth Army General orders number 102, dated the 18th of June, 1944, records the distinguished service cross for Kim. Mark Clark came to the battalion and pinned it on him and on Akahosi himself. Now the 26th of June 1944 at Belvadier in Tuscanyany, the first action fought by the regiment as a whole.
A German battalion holds the town in the high ground with an observation post directing artillery onto the Americans below. The second and third battalions are pinned in a frontal attack and going nowhere. The 100th is sent around. A and B companies jump off at noon. By 1:00 they are completely around the town and sitting behind it at a farm called Poino on the road out.
The town falls and the German battalion is destroyed. Not driven off, destroyed inside about 3 hours. On the 27th of July, the 100th received the presidential unit citation for it. There is your mechanism and it is not a mood. Go around, move on foot at night. Get behind the position, cut the road first and fight the garrison second.
It is exhausting and unglamorous, and it needs an officer willing to let a company vanish into the dark for an hour with no way of reaching it. Go for broke gets read as a slogan about recklessness. Bet everything, charge anything, damn the cost. I read the record the other way round.
A reckless regiment does what the second and third battalions were already doing at Belvadier. It goes at the hill. What distinguishes this outfit in the afteraction reports is a marked preference for the long way round on foot in the dark at hours when most units are consolidating. That is not a gambler’s temperament. It is the temperament of men who intend to be alive at the end and have worked out that the shortest route to a German position is almost never the safest one.
The name was Hawaiian craps slang. The tactics were the opposite of a gamble. Lieutenant Marshall Haynes, one of the battalion’s Caucasian officers, wrote home about the Anzio period in a letter that ran in his hometown paper in California, passing on what his own liaison officers were saying about the Nissi, the best damn infantry they have ever worked with.
Men like Shago Takata, killed in the battalion’s first hour of combat, whose name sits on the first distinguished service cross recommendation the unit ever filed, do not get statues. A like on this video is a small thing, but it keeps a name like that in front of people who care about getting the history right. By late summer 1944, something had changed around these men.
Generals knew the name. Correspondents knew the name. Fifth Army knew exactly what it had. And a unit that becomes useful and famous in the same season is standing at the edge of a new problem. Because from here on, every honor it receives can be explained away as a story the country needed told. Part three.
The voes in October is a place designed to hide an army. Steep wooded ridges, mud, freezing rain, and fog that on the worst days closed visibility down to about 20 ft. Close enough that men held on to each other’s packs to keep from getting separated. The 442nd arrived in mid-occtober 1944. Detached from the 34th division in Italy and attached to the 36th, the Texas division under Major General John Dalquist.
They took Brier between the 15th and the 18th of October. House by house, a rail and communications town, a real objective. Then they were sent east through the woods toward Biffontaine, a village, Young Oak Kim. By then, the battalion intelligence officer argued openly was worthless as a tactical objective and beyond the range of their own artillery and radios. He was right.
On the 23rd of October, the Germans cut the 100th off from behind. Kim was shot through the hand at a window in a house in Biffantine and was still being evacuated when the next order arrived. On the 24th of October, the first battalion of the 141st Infantry, Dulquist’s own division, Texans, 275 men under Lieutenant Colonel William Bird with Captain Marty Higgins commanding on the ground, was surrounded on a ridge 2 kilometers beyond the nearest friendly troops.
They had been ordered to advance past their own flanks. Their officers had warned that they would be cut off. They were cut off. The 141st’s other two battalions attacked to reach them and failed. Fighter aircraft of the 405th Fighter squadron dropped supplies. Most of the bundles fell into German hands. Artillery crews tried firing hollowed shells packed with rations into the perimeter.
On the ridge, water ran out, then medical supplies. Then the wounded began to deteriorate in the cold. The 442nd had come out of the line on the 23rd for the first dry clothes and hot food in weeks. They got about a day. I have gone through a good deal of the correspondence around this episode. What is striking is not that a division commander made a bad call.
The voge in 1944 was full of them, and the fog alone was enough to ruin any plan. It is that having made it, he reached first for the one unit in his command that could least afford to be seen to fail. They moved before dawn on the 25th and attacked on the 26th. Nine miles of mind twisting ridge trails uphill in fog with German machine guns and artillery firing down from prepared positions.
There is a detail in the accounts of those days that tells you everything about the fighting. The advance was measured in yards per day. Men slept where they stopped in water. On the 29th of October, they were pinned on a bare slope and being cut apart. A private first class named Barney Hajiro, a Hawaii man 38 days short of his 28th birthday, who had spent the early war shoveling coal in a labor battalion before volunteering, stood up with a Browning automatic rifle and walked into it, firing from the hip alone for about
a 100 yards. Men followed him. So did others down the line, and the slope turned into something the survivors afterwards called Suicide Hill in Bonsai Hill. Hajiro killed two snipers and destroyed two machine gun positions and was shot four times. On the same slope that day, Private George Sakato of Colton, California, a man whose family had moved to Arizona specifically to stay out of the camps, took over his squad after his squad leader was killed, fought with a captured rifle and a German pistol, and personally killed 12
men, captured four, and helped take 34 prisoners. The German line broke. There was no counterattack. Late in the afternoon of the 30th of October, a patrol from Eye Company, Technical Sergeant Teo Senzaki’s platoon with scouts Mut Sakamoto and Henry Nata out front, came through the trees and saw American uniforms.
Sakamoto, having nothing prepared to say to men he had spent six days and several hundred casualties reaching, asked them whether they needed any cigarettes. 211 of the original 275 walked out. To get them, the 442nd took more than 800 casualties, including 121 dead. I Company had gone in with 185 men. Eight came out unheard.
K Company started with 186. 17 were left standing. And then Dquist ordered them to keep going after the Germans for another 9 days before they were allowed to rest. Lieutenant General Lucian Truscott, commanding Sixth Corps above him, considered relieving Dalquist of his command over the whole episode.
That is the arithmetic behind the empty formation of the 12th of November. Now, for the doubt that has followed these men since 1945, and it is not a stupid one. A country that had put 120,000 of its own citizens behind Wire had an obvious interest in a redemptive story. The War Relocation Authority ran publicity campaigns.
News reels ran. If you wanted to argue that the decorations were inflated to serve a political purpose, this is exactly the moment you would point to. The documents say the opposite. Not slightly, completely. Barney Hajiro was recommended for the Medal of Honor for what he did on that slope. It came back a distinguished service cross.
So did the recommendations behind him again and again through 1944 and 1945. Men whose written citations described single-handed assaults on fortified positions and who received the second highest award instead of the highest. In 1995, Senator Daniel Aaka introduced legislation requiring the Army and Navy to go back through every Distinguished Service Cross and Navy Cross awarded to Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders in the Second World War and determine whether they should have been medals of honor. It became law in 1996. The
research was run out of the command history office at the Defense Language Institute in Mterrey under the historian James McNotton. On the 12th of October 1998, the Army Center of Military History reported that a two-year search had identified 104 Army recipients. On the 21st of June 2000, President Clinton presented the Medal of Honor to 22 Asian-American soldiers of the Second World War. 20 of them were Na.
All but two of the awards went to men of the 100th or the 442nd. Seven were still alive to be handed one. Barney Hajiro was one of the seven. So was George Sakato. So the propaganda theory predicts a thumb on the scale in favor of these men. And the audit found a thumb on the scale against them applied so consistently that the pattern was visible 50 years later to historians reading the files cold.
The decorated record of the 442nd, the one everybody quotes, is the suppressed version. What you’re looking at when you look at those numbers is what survived the filter. The usual reading of the June 2000 ceremony is that it was a beautiful correction. A country finally saying, “Thank you. I read it as an audit result.
” And I think that is both less comfortable and more useful. Nobody in 1944 wrote a memo saying, “These men will get one grade less than they earn.” It did not need writing. Award recommendations run upward through human beings who are comparing a piece of paper in front of them against a picture in their heads of what an American hero looks like.
And in 1944, the picture had a face. The face was not Barney Hajiro’s. The 2000 upgrades were not generosity. They were the correction of an accounting error that ran for five decades. And the reason we can be confident of that is that the correction was made by the same institution that made the error working from its own paperwork with no living recommener left to embarrass.
Once you line up the assignment orders instead of the citations, a different pattern starts to show through. A unit that kept being given the objective that had already failed once in somebody else’s hands and that kept taking it. Belvadier, where the frontal attack had stalled. the ridge in the Voge where two battalions of the 141st had already tried and been thrown back.
There is a footnote to the Voge that stayed with me. Years after the war, Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Singles, who had commanded the 100th Battalion, was serving as a brigadier general’s deputy at Fort Bragg when Dquist arrived to review the post. Dquist recognized him, walked over, and offered his hand, saying, “It was all water under the bridge.
” Now in front of the assembled third cors held his salute and did not take the hand. By the spring of 1945 the 442nd had a reputation with a very specific shape to it. Hard hill bad odds. Send the nay. And that reputation carries its own dismissal. One you can hear in the way people tell the story even now. Fine shock infantry brave beyond sense. One trick.
throw them at the slope and they go up it, which makes what happened on a marble mountain above the Lurian Sea on the 5th of April, 1945 very difficult to explain. Part four. To understand the Gothic line, you have to stop thinking about a line at all and start thinking about geology. Its western end runs into the Apoan Alps above the Leguran coast.
saw to marble mountains, some rising 3,000 feet more or less, straight out of the ground, scoured bare, shale, and scrub on the slopes, and nothing anywhere to hide behind. The Germans had used something on the order of 15,000 forced laborers to build more than 2,000 fortified positions along the whole line. Up here, they held the peaks.
From those observation posts, they could watch an approach march develop for hours before it arrived. The Allies have been stuck against it since the previous autumn. Aircraft bombed it. Artillery shelled it. In February 1945, the 92nd Infantry Division attacked toward Massa in an operation called Fourth Term.
And after several days of costly and unproductive fighting, the divisional commander called it off. Then winter closed the front down, and on the Western sector, nothing moved for 5 months. I have read a fair amount of fifth army material from that winter. What is striking is not that the position held. It was as good a defensive line as anyone built in that war, and troops had died against better planned attacks than fourth term.
It is that for five months the answer at every level above division was to try the same approach again with more shells behind it, and that nobody senior appears to have asked the obvious question, which is whether the problem was the attack or the direction it kept coming from. In March 1945, General Mark Clark asked for the 442nd by name.
They came out of the Maritime Alps, landed at Lavoro, and reached Pisa on the 25th of March. Some of them had liberated Pisa the previous summer. Eight months later, the front was in the same place. The reaction recorded in the unit’s own history is exactly what you would expect from infantry. Here we go again. Colonel Virgil Miller, the man from the empty formation in November, now commanding, sat down with Lieutenant Colonel James Connley of the 100th and Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Pcel of the Third Battalion to work out how to attack a
mountain that could see them coming. Their answer was to not be seen coming. At quarter to 8 on the evening of the 3rd of April, they started moving in the dark. The 100th went west toward Valia and Seraveza. The third battalion walked east all night to the village of Adzano in the folds below Monte Folgaro.
Guided through the mountains by Italian partisans of the Apoan Resistance, men who knew the ground, the paths, and the German routines better than any map in fifth army’s possession. Then on the 4th of April, both battalions did nothing at all. They hid. An entire day of daylight in country under constant observation, spent packed inside houses in Azano and lying up in olive groves.
No movement, no cooking, no vehicles. If one soldier had broken cover in the wrong field, the operation was finished, and so probably were the two battalions. When darkness fell again, the 100th moved onto its start line on a hill they had christened Florida and relieved the 371st infantry there without being detected.
and I and L companies of the third battalion with M Company’s machine gunners hauling their weapons up with them began to climb. The slope was around 60°. It was shale covered and slippery. It was pitch dark and they were carrying packs, ammunition, and belt-fed guns. The climb took eight hours.
Everything depended on absolute silence. One shout, one rifle clattering down the rocks, and the garrison on the summit would have had hours of warning and a battalion strung out helpless on a cliff face beneath them. Somewhere on that climb, a man lost his grip and fell 300 ft. He made no sound on the way down. At 6:00 in the morning on the 5th of April, the third battalion came over the crest of Monte Folgaro onto a garrison that had no idea anyone was there.
The forward positions were taken without a shot being fired. Almost simultaneously, the 100th went up the hill called Georgia and had the crest in 20 minutes. 32 minutes. That is the figure in the unit’s own history for the time it took to break a position that had held the Allied armies on that sector since the previous November.
Not 32 hours, 32 minutes. The popular image of this outfit is the frontal assault, the shouted charge up the bare slope, sheer will against machine guns. And that image is not invented. Suicide Hill happened and men died there in exactly that way. But I read the Gothic line as the corrective and I think the record forces it.
The most consequential victory these men ever won was achieved by not attacking for two days, by hiding a battalion inside a village in broad daylight. By walking eight hours up a cliff in the dark, and by taking the first objective in silence. The unit everybody remembers as the one that charged actually opened the German line by refusing to be heard.
And if you want the single sentence that separates this regiment from the ones that had failed on the same ground for 5 months, it is not in any citation. It is that anonymous line in the unit history about a man going off a mountain in the dark and not screaming. because he had worked out in the half second available to him what a scream would cost the 600 men above him and he chose there is no medal for that there’s no name attached to it is the most complete description of what this outfit actually was that exists anywhere in the record then the mountain
woke up the Germans understood immediately what had been done to them and threw everything within reach at the breach heavy mortar and artillery concentrations machine guns firing from bunkers on the forward slopes of the next hills in the chain. Coastal guns at Pontab Bianca ranged the whole area. As the 100th came down the reverse slope of Georgia toward the next objective, it was pinned flat, and the only way forward was to filter men through the fire until they were close enough to use hand grenades and then take the bunkers
one at a time. Among the men doing that on the 5th of April in company A of the 100th was a private first class from Los Angeles named Saddaw Munamorei. Friends called him Spud. He had graduated from Lincoln High School in June 1940 and was already in the army before Pearl Harbor. In 1942, his parents and his brothers and sisters were incarcerated at Manzanar.
And his mother, Nawa, hung a blue star flag in the family’s barrack to show she had a son in the service. He visited them there in May 1943. It was the last time he saw them. That morning, his squad leader was hit. Munamorei took over the squad, went forward through the fire, and destroyed two machine gun positions with grenades.
Then, moving back toward a shell crater where two of his men were sheltering. He took a German grenade off his helmet. It bounced and rolled toward the crater, and he threw himself onto it. He was two weeks short of his 23rd birthday. His award was published as general orders number 24 on the 7th of March 1946. For the next 54 years he was the only Japanese American to hold the Medal of Honor.
The fighting on those ridges went on. Monte Cario was consolidated by midday on the 6th of April. And that afternoon company attacked Monte Belvadier above the town of Masa and had the height the same day, though the pockets behind it took another full day to clear. The Germans on that front never reestablished the line. Within four weeks, the German armies in Italy surrendered. Picture that.
The last intact German defensive system in Italy, 15,000 laborers and 2,000 imp placements and five months of Allied bombing. And the thing that finally opens it is 600 infantrymen going up a rock face one at a time in the dark, carrying machine guns on their backs, saying nothing. I have taken a position here that is not the usual one.
that the defining engagement of this unit was an exercise in stealth and patience rather than the frontal courage it is famous for. If you read the voes and the Gothic line the other way round, put it in the comments and say what you’re basing it on. The men who fought both would probably have enjoyed that argument a great deal more than the eulogies because there is still a way to make all of this small.
Grant every fact of it and you can still say a hard fighting outfit, well led with a magnificent story attached, given a place of honor afterwards for reasons that had as much to do with the country’s conscience as with its combat value, an honorary ranking. And honorary rankings do not move artillery. Part five.
On the 9th of March 1945, three weeks before the infantry sailed for Pisa, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team was taken apart, the 52nd Field Artillery Battalion, roughly 650 men, four 105 millimeter howitzers to a battery, was detached from the outfit it had trained beside since February 1943 and sent north into Lraine. It never came back.
From the 12th to the 21st of March, it fired for the 63rd Division against the Seek Freed line. Then the German front dissolved into open country, and the 522nd became what the army calls a roving battalion, passed around wherever the fighting was, at times displacing several times a day. The numbers are worth hearing slowly. 52 separate assignments, roughly 1,100 miles across Germany.
More than 11,000 rounds fired for one formation after another up to the 101st Airborne at the end. I have read a certain amount about how artillery was allocated that spring. And what is striking is not that 7th Army wanted a good battalion. Everybody wanted a good battalion. It is that this one arrived with no divisional patron.
nobody senior lobbing for it and a name that in 1943 had been treated as a security risk and was handed the busiest support schedule in the sector anyway. Now hold that against something from 7 months earlier. In mid July 1944, the 442nd anti-tank company was pulled out of the line in Italy under secret orders, taken to an airfield near Rome and told the men were now glider infantry.
They spent two weeks learning to lash a jeep and a gun into an aircraft of steel tube, canvas, and plywood with no engine and no armor. On the 15th of August at 4 in the afternoon, 167 and 44 Waco gliders lifted off the Omba airfield behind C47s and were cut loose over southern France with the 517th parachute infantry to put guns on the ground behind the invasion beaches.
The landings were rough. Gliders came apart in the vineyards. Two pilots were killed by a jeep that tore through its lashings. Nine nay were hurt. The guns were in action inside an hour and for two months the company covered the exposed right flank of seventh army. It remains the only element of the 442nd entitled to the glider badge.
Put those two side by side and the answer arrives on its own. An army that regards a unit as a symbol leaves it whole and photographs it. An army that regards it as the best available instrument takes it to pieces and spends the pieces where they will do the most good. The anti-tank company went into an airborne operation because somebody needed guns on the ground at Leoy within the hour and judged that these gunners would get them there.
The 522nd went to 7th Army because a fast, accurate artillery battalion is the most portable combat power there is. and the infantry was moved between armies across the sea twice because commanders kept concluding they would rather have it than not. None of those are honors. They are decisions taken under pressure by men who would have been relieved for getting them wrong.
Rankings are cheap and every institution produces them. What is expensive is an assignment order because it is a bet with other people’s lives on it and the man who signs it owns the outcome. read this file that way. Not the metal list, the movement orders. And the army’s opinion is legible from mid 1944 onward. Stated by different commanders in different theaters who had no reason to agree and every reason to be careful.
It is the strongest statement in the record and the one nobody quotes because it was never written as praise. It was written as arithmetic and it kept coming out right, which is the part nobody could have arranged in advance. On the 21st of April 1945, on a ridge called Cole Musatello, a second lieutenant named Daniel Inuier, 20 years old, who had noticed the morning that he had lost the two silver dollars he carried for luck, took his platoon around a defended road junction and into three machine guns at 40 yards.
He destroyed the first with grenades from five yards, was shot through the abdomen, kept going and took the second, reaching back for another grenade, he had his right arm shattered at close range, pried the live grenade from his own dead fingers with his left hand and threw it.
He received the Distinguished Service Cross and in June 2000, the Medal of Honor. Picture where those men were standing that spring. The only Japanese American unit on German soil is a gun battalion moving through Bavaria. And a great many of its crews have parents living in tar paper barracks behind wire in Arkansas and Wyoming and California waiting on mail.
On the 29th of April, scouts of the 522nd reached the wire of a camp near Hurlock. Calfring four, one of a ring of sub camps around Lansburg feeding the DAO system. One of them shot the lock off the gate with his carbine. The men inside were so far gone, the Americans took them for dead until they moved. Three days later, near Wakurchin, artillery men ahead of the battalion came over a rise and saw a field of snow with several hundred dark shapes in it.
They were people, prisoners from the Dashau death marches, shot or left where they dropped. Some were alive. The gunners on short rations themselves gave away their food, took off their coats and jackets, and carried people indoors. The 522nd finished the war at Burkeisgotten in Hitler’s Mountainhouse. The verdict.
Two things happened after the guns stopped that belong here. On the 8th of December 1945, a four-star general flew across the country to a small frame farmhouse near Talbert in Orange County, California. Joseph Stillwell had commanded in Burma and China and a reputation for saying precisely what he thought. He stood in that porch and pinned the distinguished service cross onto Mary Massuda, next of kin to her brother, Staff Sergeant Kazuo Massuda of the 442nd, killed in Italy in 1944.
The Los Angeles Times ran the photograph next morning. The general saluting as he walks up to the cottage, the family on the porch. Mary Masuda had lately brought her parents home from Gila River, and neighbors had told her to go back where she came from. Stillwell’s line about it has not aged a day. The nayi, he said, bought an awful big hunk of America with their blood.
He then proposed in apparent earnest that veterans form a club to protect Japanese Americans from harassment and volunteered as its charter member. On the 15th of July 1946, the regiment marched down Constitution Avenue in heavy rain and was reviewed by President Truman on the Ellipse. He fixed the seventh presidential unit citation streamer to their colors himself and said something that reads 80 years on like a sentence written by a man who knew what he was looking at.
You fought not only the enemy, he told them, but you fought prejudice. And you have won. And the ranking this story has been chasing rests on nothing so soft as gratitude. Every other unit in the United States Army was asked to prove it could fight. This one was asked to prove its country had been wrong about it in front of a government holding its families as security.
With combat performance the only language the argument could be made in, which is why the battle reports read as they do, because they were the only briefs these men were ever permitted to file. And every order came back finished to a standard built to survive being read by people who wanted it to fail. That is a heavy thing to give a 20-year-old.
They carried it for 19 months. Colonel Virgil Miller, the man in front of the empty ranks at Bruier, commanded through that November, through the winter, and up the marble mountains to the end. The army’s record of him is worth reading for the dates alone. His Silver Star, published in general orders number 94 by the 92nd Infantry Division on the 4th of October 1945 cites his conduct on the 29th of October and the 7th of November 1944 and the 10th of April 1945.
Three dates bracketing precisely the stretch of war this story has covered. given to a colonel from Puerto Rico for walking repeatedly into fire to keep the scattered parts of his command talking to one another. He never had to explain what those four words meant. The army had already answered him in the only form it takes entirely seriously.
It kept giving him the hardest thing on the map. If this was worth your time, the like button costs a second and puts it in front of more people who care about details rather than legend. Subscribe for the next one because the Military Intelligence Service, the Nissi, who fought the other war in the Pacific, reading captured Japanese plans while their family sat in camps, is a story almost nobody tells properly.
And if you take one thing from this, make it that the men on that mountain in 1945 were not trying to be remembered. They were trying to be believed. It took their country 55 years to finish reading what they wrote.
