The valor and exploits of the World War II-era 442nd Regimental Combat Team are the stuff of legend: Japanese-American men from Hawai'i and Mainland Japanese-American "katonks" — whose families were imprisoned in Mainland internment camps — came together as an all-Nisei fighting force to become the most highly-decorated unit of its size.
They rallied behind a war cry that inspired them in their bloody battles across Europe: "Go For Broke!"
The heroism of the men of the 442nd earned members of their unit the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and more than 9,000 Purple Hearts.
As they fought racism back home and from their own haole commanders, many of the heroes of the 442nd were denied their rightful honors.
Right after the war, only one Medal of Honor was awarded to a Nisei — or second-generation — Japanese-American soldier: to Private 1st Class Sadao S. Nunemori of the 100th Infantry Battalion.
It took half a century for President Bill Clinton in 2000 to award the Medal of Honor to 22 Japanese-Americans whose exploits had not been honored. Twenty of the Medals of Honor went to veterans of World War II.
In 1943, the War Department announced that it was forming an all-Nisei combat team and called for 1,500 volunteers from Hawai'i, the focus of the Japanese attack that propelled America into war. Ten thousand volunteers answered the call.
But the Mainland response was far different. By the time the War Department asked for 3,000 Japanese-American volunteers on the Mainland, the federal government had already rounded up between 110,000 and 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry and sent them to "relocation centers" or "internment camps" around the country. President Truman had his own term for the centers. He called them "concentration camps."
The 442nd Regimental Combat Team was activated in February 1943 and fistfights broke out in the training barracks at Camp Shelby, Miss., between the pidgen-speaking Island volunteers and the volunteers from the Mainland.
It was at a 1943 dance put on by a Japanese-American internment camp in Rohwer, Ark. that then-Cpl. Daniel K. Inouye and his fellow Hawai'i soldiers realized they had bigger issues to worry about than fighting their fellow volunteers from the Mainland.
Back at Camp Shelby, Cpl. Inouye assembled his squad of Hawai'i soldiers and told them about the trip to the internment camp, Inouye recalled in a 2001 Advertiser interview.
"At that moment," Inouye said, "the regiment was formed, and we were ready to fight anybody."
Reach Dan Nakaso at dnakaso@honoluluadvertiser.com.
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