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Dear Doug Collins

The 22: They Went For Broke in Battle and Were Second-Guessed at Home — and the Medal Took Fifty-Five Years

They volunteered from behind barbed wire. The 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team — segregated units of Japanese American soldiers, many of whose families were imprisoned in camps at home — fought in eight campaigns in Italy, France, and Germany, rescued a lost Texas battalion at a cost of more than 800 casualties, and came home the most decorated American unit of their size in the war. Their country gave them one Medal of Honor. It took Congress, a two-year search of the files, and fifty-five years to correct the count by twenty-two. This page is the documented record of what they did, what the wartime awards process did with it, and the day in 2000 when the record was finally set straight.

The service, and the promise

After Pearl Harbor, Americans of Japanese ancestry were classified as enemy aliens — citizens included. In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, and more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forced from their homes on the West Coast and confined in camps, in President Clinton’s later words, “behind barbed wire in tarpaper barracks.” Japanese Americans were barred from military service. Daniel K. Inouye, a Honolulu teenager who had treated the wounded as a Red Cross volunteer on December 7, 1941, applied to enlist and was refused: “Here I was, though I was a citizen of the United States, I was declared to be an enemy alien and as a result not fit to put on the uniform of the United States.”

The Army reversed itself in stages. The 100th Infantry Battalion, formed mostly of Japanese American National Guardsmen from Hawaii, was organized in 1942 and was fighting in Italy by the autumn of 1943. On February 1, 1943, Roosevelt activated the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated all-Nisei unit — Nisei are the American-born children of Japanese immigrants. Nearly 10,000 men volunteered from Hawaii; from the mainland camps, some 1,200 volunteered. Many served, as Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki later put it, straight out of the camps where their families had been relocated. The 442nd’s motto was “Go For Broke” — Hawaiian slang, in the Army Center of Military History’s words, for “shoot the works.” In 1944 the 100th became the 442nd’s first battalion, keeping its own number in honor of its record.

The promise made to men like these was the same one made to every soldier: fight as ordered, and your country will judge you by what you did. What follows is what that promise was worth to men whose country had to be argued, in writing, into believing they were Americans at all.

What happened — Italy, France, and the Vosges, 1943–1945

The combined 100th/442nd fought in eight major campaigns — Monte Cassino, Anzio, and the drive through Italy; the liberation of Bruyères and Biffontaine in France; the Gothic Line in the war’s last spring. By the Army’s count the two units earned more than 18,000 individual decorations, including 9,486 Purple Hearts and seven Presidential Unit Citations, and became, for their size and length of service, the most decorated unit in American military history.

Their most famous fight came in the Vosges Mountains in late October 1944. The 1st Battalion of the 141st Infantry — a Texas National Guard outfit — had been cut off and surrounded. After other rescue attempts failed, the 442nd was ordered in. In five days of fighting through fog and forest, the regiment relieved the 211 besieged Texans on October 30 — at a cost of more than 800 casualties of its own. The National Park Service records what that arithmetic did to the rifle companies: I Company went in with 185 men and eight walked out unhurt; K Company began with 186 and 17 walked out. Privates Barney F. Hajiro and George T. Sakato earned their citations in that fight — Hajiro advancing alone ahead of his company to destroy two machine-gun nests, shot as he went and refusing evacuation until more seriously wounded men were treated first. Medic James K. Okubo, at Biffontaine, crawled under fire again and again across October 28 and 29 to treat the wounded and carry them to safety, and a week later ran through machine-gun fire to pull a man from a burning tank.

In April 1945 the regiment went back to Italy and broke the Gothic Line. There, on April 21, 1945, near San Terenzo, Second Lieutenant Daniel K. Inouye led his platoon against a defended ridge held by three machine guns. His official citation records the fight in the Army’s flat prose: he crawled to within five yards of the nearest gun and destroyed it with grenades, stood and neutralized a second nest, was wounded by a sniper, kept fighting at close range until a grenade shattered his right arm — and then refused evacuation and directed his platoon until the ridge was taken. Twenty-five enemy soldiers were killed and eight captured. Inouye lost the arm, spent twenty months in hospitals, and was discharged in 1947 as a captain.

Then came the count — and the count is the reason this page exists. The 100th/442nd alone earned 52 Distinguished Service Crosses, the Army’s second-highest award. But by the end of the war, exactly two Asian Americans had received the Medal of Honor for World War II service: Sergeant Jose Calugas of the Philippine Scouts, and Private First Class Sadao S. Munemori of the 442nd — Munemori’s awarded posthumously, in 1946, and itself upgraded from a Distinguished Service Cross only after a senator asked whether the nation’s second medal was the best Asian Americans could hope for. Inouye came home with the Distinguished Service Cross. President Clinton, telling the story fifty-five years later, recalled what happened when Captain Inouye, in full uniform and decorated, went for a haircut and was told: “We don’t cut Jap hair.” President Truman had told the regiment the truer thing on its return in 1946, words Clinton quoted at the ceremony: “You fought, not only the enemy but you fought prejudice, and you have won.” On the evidence of the medal count, the second fight had not been won at all. It had not yet been fought.

What the institution did afterward

For fifty years, the institution did nothing — and the correction, when it came, was built by analogy. In 1993 Congress ordered a review of Black soldiers’ World War II records, and the Army-commissioned Shaw University study led to seven Medals of Honor in January 1997. The Japanese American community and its senators asked why the same question had never been put to the Asian American file.

Senator Daniel K. Akaka of Hawaii — himself a World War II veteran — wrote the answer into law. His provision of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1996 (Public Law 104-106, signed February 10, 1996) ordered the Army and Navy to review the records of Asian American and Pacific Islander recipients of the Distinguished Service Cross and Navy Cross for service in World War II, to determine whether any had been denied the Medal of Honor, and it waived the statutory time limit so the awards could still be made. The work fell to the Command History Office at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey, California, where a research team led by historian James C. McNaughton spent two years in the files. By October 1998, the names of 104 Distinguished Service Cross recipients had been forwarded to a board of senior officers. The Navy determined that its sole Asian American case did not merit upgrade. The Army board recommended twenty-one.

Akaka stated the finding in the plainest terms available: “The number of nominations made by the Army and approved by the president underscores the reason I sought this review: to dispel any doubt about discrimination in the process of awarding the Medal of Honor.” President Clinton approved the Army’s recommendations on May 12, 2000.

The twenty-second man was not in the review, because he had never held a Distinguished Service Cross to review. James Okubo had been recommended for the Medal of Honor in 1944 and given the Silver Star instead — under the mistaken belief, as the record now states it, that medics were not eligible for higher awards. A week before the ceremony, Akaka learned of Okubo’s case and moved separate legislation to waive the time limit for him. Okubo, interned with his family at Tule Lake and dead since a 1967 traffic accident, became the twenty-second name.

On June 21, 2000, on the South Lawn of the White House, President Clinton awarded the Medal of Honor to 22 Asian American soldiers. Twenty of the twenty-two had served in the 100th Battalion or the 442nd. The other two were Rudolph B. Davila, an American of Filipino and Spanish descent who had broken through German lines near Anzio with the 7th Infantry, and Captain Francis B. Wai, an American of Chinese descent who was killed at Leyte on October 20, 1944, drawing enemy fire onto himself to reveal their positions. Only seven of the twenty-two were alive to stand on the South Lawn: Davila, Hajiro, Shizuya Hayashi, Inouye, Yeiki Kobashigawa, Yukio Okutsu, and Sakato. Army Secretary Louis Caldera, inducting all twenty-two into the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes the next day, gave the arithmetic of the delay: eight of the men had been killed in action, and seven more had died in the years since the war. The rest of the twenty-two, as Clinton read them into the record that day, were Mikio Hasemoto, Joe Hayashi, Robert T. Kuroda, Kaoru Moto, Kiyoshi K. Muranaga, Masato Nakae, Shinyei Nakamine, William K. Nakamura, Joe M. Nishimoto, Allan M. Ohata, James K. Okubo, Frank H. Ono, Kazuo Otani, Ted T. Tanouye, and Francis B. Wai. Their medals were received by their families.

Clinton named what the ceremony was: “Rarely has a nation been so well served by a people it has so ill-treated. They risked their lives, above and beyond the call of duty. And in so doing, they did more than defend America; in the face of painful prejudice, they helped to define America at its best.” And: “It is long past time to break the silence about their courage, to put faces and names with the courage, and to honor it by name.” General Shinseki, whose own uncles had served in the 100th and 442nd, said of the men: “These quiet men, small in stature, performed unbelievable acts of bravery; they were tigers in battle.”

Where it stands now

The account is closed, and it closed in the men’s own lifetime only for seven of them. Inouye carried his medal back to the Senate, where he served until his death on December 17, 2012 — Hawaii’s first representative in Congress and the first Japanese American to serve in either house. On November 2, 2011, the units themselves received the Congressional Gold Medal — Congress’s highest civilian honor — awarded collectively to the 100th Infantry Battalion, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and the Military Intelligence Service in Emancipation Hall at the Capitol. Inouye accepted it on behalf of all three; the medal is held by the Smithsonian.

The record is kept by the Go For Broke National Education Center, the National Veterans Network, the National WWII Museum’s oral histories — Inouye’s own among them — and the Army’s citations, all twenty-two of which now read Medal of Honor. No further Asian American World War II upgrades came out of the 1996 review, and none are pending from it.

But notice what it took, because that is the pattern this site exists to document. The wartime Army looked at 52 Distinguished Service Crosses from one segregated regiment, at a medic recommended for the Medal of Honor, at a lieutenant who had lost an arm taking a ridge — and, in the whole of the war, found one Nisei worthy of its highest award, and him only after a senator intervened. Correcting that took an act of Congress, a two-year archival search, a senior-officer board, a separate statute for the medic the first statute could not reach, and fifty-five years — during which fifteen of the twenty-two men died uncorrected in the record. The men had kept their side of the promise in 1944. The institution kept its side in 2000, and said so itself, in the president’s words: rarely has a nation been so well served by a people it has so ill-treated.

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 22 were corrected in the record twice over — once in the citations, and once on the South Lawn, on camera, with the president reading the names. Six films: the ceremony itself, Inouye in his own words, the museum on the regiment, the veterans on the Gothic Line, one of the seven who lived to receive it, and the Army on Inouye.

The ceremony. The Clinton Presidential Library's White House Television footage of June 21, 2000: President Clinton presents the Medal of Honor to the 22 on the South Lawn and reads their names into the record. (Clinton Presidential Library video.)

In his own words. The National WWII Museum's oral history with Daniel Inouye: Pearl Harbor, enlistment, the 442nd, the Lost Battalion, and San Terenzo, told by the man himself.

The regiment, in brief. The National WWII Museum's short history of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team — the unit, the campaigns, and the record.

The Gothic Line. The Go For Broke National Education Center's "Heroes Among Us": veterans of the 442nd recount breaking the Gothic Line in April 1945, the campaign of Inouye's citation.

One of the seven. The National WWII Museum on George T. Sakato of the 442nd — one of the seven living recipients who stood on the South Lawn in 2000.

The Army on Inouye. The Department of Defense's short portrait of Capt. Daniel Ken Inouye — the first aid volunteer of December 7, the platoon leader of San Terenzo, and the senator the medal finally caught up with.

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.