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The Nisei Soldiers: They Volunteered From Behind Barbed Wire, and Became the Most Decorated Unit of Their Size in Army History

They were classified as enemy aliens by the country of their birth. Their families were held behind barbed wire, in camps their own government built, while they wore that government's uniform in Italy, in France, and across the Pacific. The 100th Infantry Battalion, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and the Military Intelligence Service became, by the Army's own accounting, the most decorated soldiers of their size and length of service in American military history. This page is the documented record of what they did, what was done to them and their families at the same time, and how long the reckoning took — an apology in 1988, twenty Medals of Honor restored in 2000, a Congressional Gold Medal in 2011, and one group of the incarcerated whose redress was never made equal at all.

The service and the promise

Nisei means second generation: the American-born children of Japanese immigrants. They were citizens by birth. Their parents, the Issei, were barred by law from becoming citizens at all. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Nisei were already serving in the Army and the Hawaii National Guard — and the institution’s first answer to them was rejection. In January 1942, the Army discharged Japanese Americans from the ROTC and reclassified Nisei draft registrants as 4-C, “enemy alien,” ineligible for service — a designation Congress itself later recorded in the findings of the Congressional Gold Medal law.

The promise made to every soldier is that service is a two-way bond: the soldier gives the country everything, and the country stands behind the soldier and the soldier’s family. For the Nisei, the bond was tested in a way it was tested for no other group of American soldiers in the Second World War. They were asked to prove loyalty to a nation that had announced, in writing, that it presumed theirs was in doubt — and many of them were asked from inside the wire of the camps built to hold their own parents.

They went anyway. Their motto, taken from Hawaiian gambling slang, was “Go for Broke” — shoot the works, risk everything on one throw. The Army’s historians record the phrase without embroidery. What it meant in practice is the rest of this page.

What happened

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing military exclusion zones on the West Coast. Under it, some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated in camps run by the War Relocation Authority — about two-thirds of them United States citizens, as the Federal Register’s Day of Remembrance proclamation and the FDR Presidential Library both record. They had committed no crime and were charged with none. Families lost homes, farms, businesses, and years.

The soldiers came out of that. The 100th Infantry Battalion was activated on June 12, 1942, from Nisei soldiers of the Hawaii Provisional Infantry Battalion — some 1,400 men shipped from Hawaii to the mainland, in the findings of Public Law 111-254. In Hawaii, Nisei students who had been dismissed from the Territorial Guard organized themselves as the Varsity Victory Volunteers and did manual labor for the Army for nearly a year rather than accept rejection, as the National Park Service records. Their record, and the 100th’s training record, helped persuade the War Department to reopen service. On February 1, 1943, the Army activated the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated, all-Nisei unit. The National Park Service records that nearly 10,000 volunteered from Hawaii, but only about 1,200 from the mainland — where the volunteers were stepping forward out of the incarceration camps themselves. Others were later drafted, including men drafted out of the camps. In June 1944 the 100th was folded into the 442nd as its first battalion, keeping its own designation because of the record it had already made in Italy, where its casualties had earned it the name the “Purple Heart Battalion.”

What the combined unit did in Europe is established in the Army’s own histories:

In the Pacific, the war was fought by the third of the units on this page. Roughly 6,000 Nisei linguists graduated from the Military Intelligence Service language schools — moved from San Francisco to Camp Savage and then Fort Snelling, Minnesota, because the West Coast was closed to people of Japanese ancestry, even in uniform. Densho’s encyclopedia records that by September 1945 MIS linguists had translated 18,000 captured enemy documents and interrogated more than 10,000 Japanese prisoners of war, serving with American and Allied forces in every major battle against Japan — translating the captured “Z Plan” that laid out Japan’s 1944 defense strategy among them. Their work was classified, so it was largely invisible. Major General Charles Willoughby, General MacArthur’s intelligence chief, later said — as the Army’s official history, Nisei Linguists, records his estimate — that the Nisei “shortened the Pacific war by two years.” That is one general’s estimate, attributed here as he made it. What is not an estimate is the secrecy: the MIS did not receive its Presidential Unit Citation until the year 2000.

The cost and the record, together: the 100th and 442nd earned seven Presidential Unit Citations and, by the Go For Broke National Education Center’s accounting, more than 18,000 individual awards — and the combined unit is described by the Army, the National Park Service, the National WWII Museum, and the White House alike in the same standard formulation: the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in the history of American warfare. Twenty-one of its members hold the Medal of Honor. Only one of those medals was given during the war itself.

What the institution did afterward

That one wartime Medal of Honor went to Private First Class Sadao Munemori, posthumously, for falling on a grenade near Seravezza, Italy, on April 5, 1945. For the rest, the wartime institution gave Distinguished Service Crosses — the Army’s second-highest award — or lesser decorations, and stopped there. Whether valor was being downgraded because of race was a question the record left hanging for fifty years.

One of those Distinguished Service Crosses belonged to Second Lieutenant Daniel K. Inouye of the 442nd. On April 21, 1945, in Italy, already shot in the stomach, he destroyed two German machine-gun positions; attacking a third, a rifle grenade shattered his right arm, leaving his own primed grenade clenched in a fist that no longer answered him. He pried the live grenade loose with his left hand, threw it into the bunker, and kept fighting one-handed until a bullet in the leg put him down. His right arm was amputated. He came home to a Distinguished Service Cross, became Hawaii’s first congressman and then one of its senators, and carried the question of the missing Medals of Honor with him into the institution that had issued the Cross instead.

The institution’s accounting for the incarceration itself came first, and it came because the community forced it. A federal commission, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, concluded in its report Personal Justice Denied that the incarceration had not been justified by military necessity but was the product of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” The redress movement — carried by the Japanese American Citizens League, by community organizations, and by Japanese American members of Congress including Inouye, Representative Robert Matsui, Representative Norman Mineta, who sponsored the act in the House, and Senator Spark Matsunaga, who sponsored it in the Senate — pressed that finding into law. On August 10, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988: a formal apology on behalf of the nation, and $20,000 to each surviving person who had been incarcerated. The first checks were presented on October 9, 1990. In the end, Densho records, 82,219 people received redress.

The medals took twelve years longer. Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawaii authored the provision of the 1996 Defense Authorization Act that mandated a review of the records of Asian American and Pacific Islander soldiers who had received the Distinguished Service Cross or Navy Cross in the Second World War, to determine whether they had been unfairly denied the Medal of Honor. The review found what the veterans had said for decades: as the Department of Defense summarizes the investigation, prejudice did play a role in the awards selection process. On June 21, 2000, on the White House South Lawn, President Bill Clinton presented the Medal of Honor to 22 Asian American veterans — 20 of them Japanese American veterans of the 100th Battalion and the 442nd, the other two being Captain Francis B. Wai, a Chinese American officer, and Second Lieutenant Rudolph B. Davila, of Filipino and Spanish descent. Clinton stated the debt plainly, as the Army’s account of the ceremony records: “It’s long past time to break the silence about their courage… Rarely has a nation been so well-served by a people it has so ill-treated.” Daniel Inouye was among the twenty — his Distinguished Service Cross of 1945 upgraded, fifty-five years on, in the room where he now sat as a senator. Most of the twenty were not in the room at all. Their medals were presented to their families. The wider story of all twenty-two recipients of that day is told in full elsewhere in this section; this page notes the twenty who were its own.

The final collective honor took another decade. The Congressional Gold Medal bill, S. 1055, was introduced by Senator Barbara Boxer with Senators Inouye and Akaka among its sponsors, and carried in the House by Representative Adam Schiff. On October 5, 2010, President Barack Obama signed it as Public Law 111-254, in the Oval Office, with six Nisei veterans present — Senator Inouye among them, as the Smithsonian records. On November 2, 2011, the medal was presented collectively to the 100th Infantry Battalion, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and the Military Intelligence Service at Emancipation Hall in the Capitol Visitor Center, before hundreds of veterans in their eighties and nineties. Speaker John Boehner presented the medal to Grant Ichikawa on behalf of the MIS; Senator Inouye accepted and spoke on behalf of all three units. The medal itself is held by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. President Truman, reviewing the returning 442nd on July 15, 1946, had told them: “You fought not only the enemy, but you fought prejudice — and you have won.” The honors of 2000 and 2011 are the institution, sixty and sixty-five years later, putting that sentence into its own record.

Where it stands now

The veterans’ fight — the fight of the units, for recognition of what the units did — is complete. There is no decoration left unissued: the Presidential Unit Citation for the MIS in 2000, the twenty Medals of Honor that same June, the Congressional Gold Medal in 2011. What carries the story now is not a pending case but a custodianship. The Go For Broke National Education Center, founded by the veterans themselves, keeps their monument in Los Angeles and an oral-history collection of some 1,200 interviews; Densho preserves the incarceration record and the veterans’ own filmed testimony; the Smithsonian’s exhibition built around the gold medal tours the country. The men themselves are almost all gone — the medals of 2000 mostly went to widows and children, and the ceremony of 2011 was, by design, held while any of the men could still attend it.

What is not complete is the civilian account underneath this page — and precision requires keeping the two separate. The Civil Liberties Act paid only those who had been United States citizens or permanent residents at the time of their incarceration. That line excluded the Japanese Latin Americans: more than 2,200 people, the Japanese American Citizens League records, most of them from Peru, who were seized from thirteen Latin American countries at the United States’ request, shipped here, and held in American camps — principally at Crystal City, Texas — as a pool for hostage exchanges with Japan. Over 800 of them were in fact exchanged and sent to a Japan most had never lived in. The government that had taken them then classified them as “illegal aliens” in the country it had brought them to, and on that ground denied them redress.

Their claim was settled separately, and for less. In Mochizuki v. United States, a class action filed in 1996, the Justice Department agreed on June 12, 1998, that nearly 600 surviving Japanese Latin American internees could each receive $5,000 and an apology — one quarter of the Civil Liberties Act payment, for the same camps. A handful of internees, among them Isamu Shibayama, refused the settlement and kept litigating for equal redress; after the American courts dismissed their claims, the Shibayama case went to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which ruled in the family’s favor after Shibayama’s death. No equalizing payment has followed. That claim belongs to the incarcerated civilians and their descendants, not to the veterans — but it began in the same order, the same camps, and the same wire as everything on this page, and its ledger is still open.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

The Nisei story was carried for decades by the veterans’ own testimony — in oral histories, in classrooms, and in two ceremonies in Washington that most of them did not live to see. Six films: the linguists of the Pacific, the 442nd at its training ground, the veterans’ tribute, the Army’s own wartime film, the unit’s story in brief, and the Smithsonian’s film of the gold medal.

The linguists. Minnesota PBS's full documentary on the Military Intelligence Service: some 6,000 Nisei trained at Camp Savage and Fort Snelling to translate, interrogate, and intercept — while their families were incarcerated. (Minnesota PBS.)

Where the 442nd was made. The National WWII Museum, with the Mississippi Armed Forces Museum: the Nisei troops' training at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, before Italy and France. (The National WWII Museum.)

The tribute. The American Veterans Center's short tribute to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team — the unit, its motto, and its record, in the veterans' honor. (American Veterans Center.)

The wartime film. The period documentary record of the 442nd in training and in Europe — the unit as the Army itself filmed it, while the war was still on. (Periscope Film archive.)

The story in five minutes. Filmmaker Stacey Hayashi's "Journey of Heroes" — the origins of the 100th and the 442nd, from the comic-book history she built from veteran interviews. (Stacey Hayashi.)

The gold medal. The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center's film on the Nisei soldiers and the Congressional Gold Medal — the units, the medal, and the men who lived to receive it in 2011. (Smithsonian APA Center film.)

Sources

Further record

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.