Infamy (30 page)

The men of the 442nd were barely able to advance in the heavy rain up steep and slimy terrain and through the tangles of trees. The mined and booby-trapped land was dotted with German machine-gun nests and snipers. Second Lieutenant Edward Davis, the only officer left in his company—most of the 442nd officers were Caucasians at the beginning—stood up, turned to Sergeant Wataru Kohashi, and asked the Nisei sergeant to follow him. The two of them began a hopeless charge. Then, one after another, the Nisei stood and charged up the hilltop, shouting the battle cry, “Banzai! Banzai!” One of them was Private First Class Mickey Akiyama, who had been the first Nisei to volunteer at Manzanar when the army came looking for recruits. He was shot in the head during the charge, but then he bandaged himself up and put his helmet back on. In the helmet he kept the photograph of his baby daughter, Mariko Ann.

“We didn’t care anymore, we were like a bunch of savages,” said Private First Class Ichigi Kashiwagi. The 442nd took the hill in an hour. The next morning, October 30, was strangely quiet, until American artillery blanketed the ridge between the 442nd and the T-patchers. When the Nisei advanced again, there was little response. They saw discarded German equipment and uniforms; the enemy had moved out during the night.

At the end of the battle, the One Hundredth had been reduced from 1,432 men a year earlier to 260. The combined 442nd and One Hundredth, with 42 men killed in the rescue, was down to 800 men. The number of T-patchers rescued was 211. The first Nisei to break through, Private First Class Matsuji Sakumoto, saw a mud-blacked Texan, Sergeant Ed Guy, with his lips quivering in shock. Sakumoto said the only thing he could think of, “Want a smoke, soldier?” Hiro Endo found a wounded T-patcher in a foxhole, pouring something dark from his canteen. Endo thought it was chocolate dropped by P-47s, but it was just muddy water gathered from rain in the foxhole. “I offered him my canteen of water,” said Endo. “And I saw tears running down his cheeks.”

“Chills went up our spines when we saw the
Nisei
soldiers,” said Marty Higgins. “Honestly, they looked like giants to us.” The Lost Battalion’s final radio transmission was, “Patrol 442 here. Tell them we love them.”

The rescue of the Lost Battalion was an irresistible story for the American press, particularly because the battles of the south had become “The Forgotten Front” after the Normandy invasion seized the world’s attention. Dozens of newsmen and cameras were waiting for the T-patchers who came down from the hills. The 442nd was moving in the other direction, deeper into the forest. While the T-patchers were celebrated, the Nisei were only finally issued mountain winter gear—coats, sweaters, gloves, and waterproof boots—on November 4, to replace the summer combat uniforms they were wearing before the mission.

For most of the American reporters, the rescued not the rescuers, white men not Nisei, were the focus of the story. The
New York Times
account of the deadly drama in France, an Associated Press article, was published on November 7. The headline read, “Doughboys Break German Ring to Free 270 Trapped Eight Days.”

The article did not mention that the “doughboys” were Japanese Americans. The 442nd was not mentioned in the AP report. The accompanying photograph, supplied by the Army Signal, showed Marty Higgins shaking hands with Lieutenant C. O. Barry of Williamstown, Pennsylvania, “of the relief unit.” There was no Lieutenant Barry in the 442nd.

Time
magazine was an exception to most home-front journalism, writing: “From a cautious experiment the army has received an unexpectedly rich reward. A group of sinewy oriental soldiers, only one generation removed from a nation that was fanatically fighting against the U.S., was fighting just as fanatically for it.”

After the press was gone, General John Dahlquist, commander of the Thirty-Sixth Division, a controversial leader who would be accused of using the Nisei as “cannon fodder,” called a parade to honor the 442nd for the rescue mission at a ceremony on November 12. Looking out at the detachment, he angrily asked his adjutant why so few soldiers assembled when he had ordered a mass formation. The adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel Virgil Miller, answered, “This is all there is.” He shouted at Miller again, when Companies I and K of the 442nd marched by. “I ordered everyone out today.” There were only eighteen still standing from Company K and eight from Company I—twenty-six men out of the four hundred who went into battle.

The 442nd, exhausted and undermanned—the casualty list was over two thousand wounded and killed in just four weeks in the Vosges campaign—was taken off the line on November 17 as replacements began to arrive. The Nisei still standing were rewarded with what they called the “champagne campaign,” spending four months in light combat in the hills behind Nice, along the Riviera border between France and Italy. There was time off to check out the Mediterranean beaches and bars of the Côte D’Azur—and shock French men and women staring at Japanese men in American uniforms.

*   *   *

As the men of the 442nd came off the front lines, President Roosevelt was reelected for a fourth term, carrying thirty-six states in defeating the Republican governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey, by almost four million votes. The camps were never an issue in the campaign, but in his first press conference after the election, November 21, 1944, the president was asked about the imprisonment of American Japanese. His answer was rambling and he emphasized his feelings that if Japanese were scattered around the country, instead of being concentrated in California, there might be fewer resettlement problems. Then the man who ordered that the
Nikkei
be rounded up three years before shocked his own aides by saying, “It is felt by a great many lawyers that under the Constitution they can’t be locked up in concentration camps.”

Another reporter asked, “I was wondering if you felt the danger of espionage had sufficiently diminished so that the military restrictions that were passed could be lifted?”

“That I couldn’t tell you,” answered the president, “because I don’t know.”

He did know. That issue had been secretly decided almost a year before.

On Monday, December 18, 1944, six weeks after Roosevelt’s reelection, the Supreme Court handed down its decisions on the cases initiated almost three years before in the names of Fred Korematsu and Mitsuye Endo. After all that time and talk, the Supreme Court sided with the government and the army when it came to the mass detention. And yet, the day before the decisions came down, the War Department announced that Japanese and Japanese Americans were now free to live anywhere they wanted to in the United States, including in California and the rest of the West Coast.

In the Korematsu case, the Court voted 6 to 3 that his arrest was constitutional. Justice Hugo Black wrote the majority opinion, saying, “Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race.… Properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take properly constituted security measures.”

In dissent, Justice Robert Jackson wrote, “Korematsu … has been convicted of an act not commonly a crime. It consists merely of being present in the state whereof he is a citizen.… A citizen’s presence in the locality was made a crime only if his parents were of Japanese birth.” Then Jackson added this stinging line: “The Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination.… The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.”

A second dissenter, Justice Frank Murphy, called the decision a “legalization of racism” and wrote, “All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood and culture to a foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessarily a part of this new civilization of the United States. They must accordingly be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment and as entitled to all of the rights and freedoms granted by the Constitution.”

Murphy went on to say:

Such exclusion goes over the very brink of constitutional power and falls into the ugly abyss of racism.… Racial discrimination of this nature bears no reasonable relation to military necessity and is utterly foreign to the ideals and traditions of the American people. The reasons [for exclusion] appear to be largely an accumulation of much of the misinformation, half-truths, and insinuations that for years have been directed against Japanese-Americans by people with racial and economic prejudices.

Mitsuye Endo’s case was the only internment case where the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff. The Court agreed that the government itself, according to the decision, had already conceded that she was a loyal American, given that she had been a California state employee with no connections to the Japanese government. The ruling in her case was both unanimous and narrow. The Court ruled that, regardless of whether the United States government had a right to exclude people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast during World War II, it could not continue to detain a citizen that the government conceded was loyal to the United States.

All of the decisions were carefully written so as not to discuss the Constitution or question military decisions. By the time the decisions finally came down on December 18, 1944, Korematsu was a welder in Salt Lake City. Mitsuye Endo was working as a secretary in Chicago, and her brother, Hiro Endo, was one of the Nisei soldiers who rescued the Lost Battalion.

The Supreme Court decisions came at almost the same time as the War Relocation Authority announced that all of the relocation camps would be closed down within six months to a year. There were mixed reactions in the camps about the announcement. Many of the older Issei, particularly the bachelor farm workers, had grown used to the spare comforts of camp life. Younger people had their doubts, too.

From Minneapolis, Fusa Tsumagari had some of the same reservations as Louise Ogawa in Chicago, writing to friends, “Those with property are wanting to go back, but wondering what the sentiment will be. Of course we know good friends like you would be glad to have us back, but others who do not know us or understand us may not be so glad. As for us not so fortunate to have property in California, we’re content to stay here for a while, or maybe for the rest of our life.”

As soon as the announcement was public, the anti-Japanese drumbeats of 1942 were heard again in the West. Elsie Robinson, a
San Francisco Examiner
columnist, wrote that she would “slit the throat” of any internee who attempted to return to California.

*   *   *

On the night of November 29, 1944, in Hood River, Oregon, a town of three thousand people, the honor roll of local men in service, which covered one outside wall of the local courthouse, was defaced by black paint to cover up sixteen names—all Japanese Americans. The names covered were: George Akiyama, Masaaki Asai, Taro Asai, Noboru Hamada, Kenjiro Hayakawa, Shigenobu Imai, Fred Mitsuo Kinoshita, George Kinoshita, Sagie Nishioka, Mamoru Noji, Henry K. Norimasu, Katsumi Sato, Harry Osamu, Eichi Wakamatsu, Johnny Y. Wakamatsu, and Bill Shyuichi Yamaki. One Nisei name was left on the board: Isso Namba. Locals thought the name was Finnish. Another son of the valley never made it onto the wall in the first place, because Frank Hachiya of the Military Intelligence Service had enlisted in Portland.

The defacement job was done by members of Post 22 of the American Legion.

Spectacularly located in a valley above the Columbia River Gorge and under Mount Hood, Hood River was home to 431 American Japanese, many of them farmers who had made Hood River apples and cherries famous around the country. It seemed an idyllic place; certainly it was to young people. In the week after Pearl Harbor, students of Oak Grove High School published this poem in the school newspaper:

To those of Hood River—if you please

They are our friends—these Japanese

Not “Japs” or even Japanese

They are Americans, our schoolmates these.

Those feelings were shared by Nisei schoolmates. George Akiyama, who was fifteen, wrote to Glen Oaks’s principal, Vienna Annala, from the Fresno Assembly Center, “How is everybody back in the best community in the best place in the world? I am quite fine and so is everybody else, except the heat is getting to me … 130 degrees.… Although this may be a great sacrifice to all of us, it is so little we can do to help our country win this horrid war and we are all proud to do this one small cooperation.”

Hood River County had a population of almost twelve thousand before the evacuation of the
Nikkei
in May of 1942. Those farmers and their families were the subjects of Exclusion Order 49. When the story of the painted-over names got around the country, Post 22 was suddenly as big a name brand—for hatred—as Hood River apples. The Legionnaires were condemned by newspapers across the country, with
PM
in New York urging Oregon officials to send in the National Guard to restore the names. The
New York Times
and papers in Salt Lake City and Des Moines, Iowa, compared the Legionnaires with Hitler. “The Tops in Blind Hatred,” was a headline in
Collier’s
magazine. Legionnaires themselves were divided—while many posts, particularly in the East and Midwest, condemned their fellow Legionnaires in Hood River, more than a dozen American Legion posts in other states took Japanese names off their own honor rolls.

Federal officials, beginning with Secretary of War Stimson, attacked Post 22 and the town. Outraged letters flooded newspapers around the country. White soldiers in Europe, some of them writing to local newspapers, said that they would be dead if not for the bravery of Nisei comrades. Three local soldiers, Kenneth and Don Butzin and Hale Lyon, men from Hood River, wrote from Europe saying they wanted their names removed from the courthouse wall unless the Japanese American names were put back up.