Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II

Despite the courage of General John E. Dahlquist, “many of the Nisei soldiers he commanded came to loathe him” (345). Dahlquist commanded aggressively, “blustering, scowling, berating perceived slackers” (345). But what Japanese American soldiers “would never forgive” was Dahlquist ordering the 141st Infantry Regiment of Texans, to “push as rapidly as possible along a series of ridges north of the village of Biffontaine” (346). As a result, the Texans—now known as the Lost Battalion—were lured into a German trap in a mountain forest. All attempts to get them back failed. The Texans “were almost entirely out of rations” (350) as well as medical supplies.

Dahlquist, “growing increasingly desperate” (347), ordered the Nisei to climb up the mountain to help the Texans. Fred Shiosaki and Sus Ito, along with K and I Companies of the Third Battalion, walked through thick fog, mud, and rain, with the French resistance fighters as their guides. They came across several dead Nisei in foxholes—soldiers from the Second Battalion who had attempted to help the Texans before them. Given the German counterattack, K and I Companies, including George Oiye and Sus Ito, were forced to dig in for the night. In the morning, they came across a “simply unpassable” place filled with trees and mines (354). Fred Shiosaki’s “feet were now so swollen in the tattered remains of his boots that he thought the boots might split open” (356). At this time, a US Thunderbolt aircraft dropped ammunition, food, radio batteries, and medicine in fuel tanks attached to parachutes. However, these provisions bounced and rolled downhill, so the Germans got them. All were exhausted but unable to sleep. Meanwhile, the Japanese chaplains were having a moral crisis and a crisis of faith. They, along with the soldiers, discussed the nature of killing in war, and the role of God. At times, Hiro Higuchi felt that “he’d had no answer, no solace to provide” (359).

Dahlquist pushed K and I Companies to “go straight down the middle of the ridge, through a series of heavily fortified positions under constant fire from the higher ground”—“a death trap” (359). Alfred Pursall challenged Dahlquist about the mission’s danger, “in full view of the Germans, arguing with each other as bullets whipped by them” (362). Dahlquist won the argument due to his seniority. Thus, Nisei charged up the hill in Vosges as a “torrent of steel and lead descended on them” (365). Many died: “[o]f the hundreds of men who had started up into the Vosges with the two companies three days before, fewer than two dozen in K Company were still alive and able to walk out of the woods; in I Company there were even fewer” (366). Fred Shiosaki was hit in his side, but was able to go on. As the remaining Nisei neared the Texans who “fought furiously to repulse the Germans assaulting them from all sides” (369), the Germans, who had also suffered heavy losses, used a smoke cover to retreat. The emotional rescue of the Lost Battalion was complete, and everyone “wanted to get off the damned mountain” (370).

Racist attitudes among white Americans persisted domestically. For example, when 442nd RCT veteran Raymond Matsuda, recipient of a Purple Heart, was back in the US due to his wounds, he was ejected from a barbershop on racial grounds.

In her concentration camp, Rudy Tokiwa’s mother subjected herself to daily cold-water showers “praying silently for Rudy, imploring God to let her pain suffice” for her son to return safely home (373). Camp residents found “solace in exercising their creative impulses” (377), from calligraphy to carving. As news of the 442nd’s heroic rescue of the Lost Battalion slowly made it home, their sacrifices labeled them “real Americans” (373). Young Japanese Americans at Poston kept enlisting, “with a particular sense of pride” (376).

Following his reelection in late 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt announced that the government “was terminating both the mandatory exclusion zone and ‘evacuation’ orders” (378). Except for a small number of “disloyals,” concentration camp residents would “return to their old communities in the former exclusion zone along the West Coast” (378). The news brought relief along with anxiety. Some had no home to return to. Others worried about their reception.

In France, General Dahlquist formally acknowledged the actions of the 442nd RCT to save the Lost Battalion with the Presidential Unit Citation. K Company, including Fred Shiosaki, only had 17 riflemen remaining out of 180, whereas I Company only had four riflemen and some machine gunners. Dahlquist angrily inquired where the rest of the men were at the snowy ceremony: “Apparently, this was the first time he fully realized the magnitude of the price the Nisei had paid to rescue the Texans” (375). The Nisei soldiers of the 442nd “were broken in every way that war can break young men” (379).

Next, the soldiers headed toward the French Riviera. Kats Miho hauled the howitzers. Sus Ito and George Oiye used mules to transport supplies. But the Mediterranean offered them a sense of safety not felt in a long time. The Côte d’Azur was “the kind of war we dream about” (382). The soldiers had the time to roam the streets, eat at restaurants, and visit a photography studio and the cinema. Nisei even saw themselves rescuing the Lost Battalion in news reels. They were “fast becoming celebrities in France” (384). The soldiers had a Christmas program and invited the local French girls to sing English-language carols they learned: “These were the first women some of them had seen in any kind of social setting since the Nisei girls had come to their dances back at Shelby” (387). During “Silent Night,” many men wept.

Seventeen-year-old Solly Ganor, a Lithuanian Jewish boy, was enslaved by the Nazis a year prior. As a 13-year-old in Ukmerge, outside of Kaunas, Lithuania, he had seen Lithuanian nationalists teaming up with German Nazis to take part in massacres of the local Jewish population, including women and children. Witnessing many Nazi atrocities, Solly realized that he realized that “he was, at best, an animal to be hunted” (390). Solly’s family lived in the Kovno ghetto. When the Red Army approached the area, the SS dissolved the ghetto, sending its residents to death camps like Dachau and setting fire to the buildings. Solly and his father were separated from his mother and sister, given striped uniforms, and used for forced labor in the Lager Ten camp in the Dachau complex. By Christmas 1944, “Solly was weakening, his thin, striped pajamas were perpetually infested with life, and his father, now fifty-two, was failing fast” (392).

In the US, Gordon Hirabayashi left his pregnant wife Esther and headed for the federal prison on McNeil Island off the Pacific Coast of Washington. Approximately 300 “draft resisters” were also tried for violating the Selective Service Act, typically receiving three-year sentences. Some judges like Chase Clark of Boise, Idaho, advocated sending “them all back to Japan” (394). Others, like Judge Louis E. Goodman of California, were “troubled by the very notion of trying young American citizens who had been transported to his courtroom from what he termed a ‘concentration center’” (394). He dismissed the charges against all Nisei tried in front of him, claiming that “[i]t is shocking to the conscience that an American citizen be confined on the ground of disloyalty, and then, while so under duress and restraint, be compelled to serve in the armed forces, or be prosecuted for not yielding to such compulsion” (395). Unfortunately, these Nisei were returned to the Tule Lake concentration camp until closure.

Throughout the country, racially charged incidents continued to happen. Hood River blacked out the names of Japanese American servicemen. When the family of Shig Doi of the 442nd left their Colorado camp and returned to Auburn, California, some locals tried to set their farm on fire. The Dois did not contact the police, “[n]ot wanting to cause trouble in the community” (398). They were then attacked with guns and dynamite. Despite confessing, the perpetrators were acquitted in court.

Some Japanese American soldiers sent to the Pacific theater saw combat. Those soldiers “faced unique risks, particularly the danger of being captured by Japanese forces, labeled traitors, and subjected to barbaric tortures and execution” (396). In one case, a Japanese American was mistaken for an enemy soldier and killed. Back in Europe, the 442nd RCT headed for Marseille in March 1945, traveling incognito.

Rudy Tokiwa’s mother continued with her morning routine of cold-water prayer at the Poston camp. Fred Shiosaki’s parents awaited his return while working the laundry business. In Tokyo, Fumiye Miho always reacted to the sound of airplanes after the March 10 US firebombing of Tokyo, which “incinerated as many as a hundred thousand people and injured another million” (403). Meanwhile, her father Katsuichi was still at the Santa Fe prison camp.

At the Puget Sound prison on McNeil Island, Gordon Hirabayashi “worked diligently at whatever task he was assigned” (403). However, he was concerned about racial discrimination in this prison, just like he had been at the Catalina work farm in Arizona where he had “started a protest movement” (403). In Tucson, he had been assigned to the white quarter, but here, he was put in with non-white inmates. He calmly questioned guards about these inconsistencies. Gordon expected punishment, but instead, the prison superintendent promised to investigate this issue. Soon, the prison began to integrate its inmates

In March 1945, the Nisei were in Germany, crossing the Saar River. George Oiye and Sus Ito acted as forward observers in the night. Mines were always a threat: The infantryman in front of George stepped on one, and his foot was almost completely blown off. The man begged George to shoot him, but George carried the much larger wounded soldier to a medic. To Kats Miho, the landscape was punctuated by damaged buildings, and black smoke, while the locals “seemed to suggest that something even beyond the horrors of war, something profoundly dark, lay just over the horizon ahead of them” (407). General Mark Clark wanted the Nisei back in Italy to push the Germans in the Gothic Line area to move their troops west. Clark “did not necessarily expect that the 442nd would be able to break through the rugged terrain on the western end of the line” (408) because nobody had done this.

The 442nd marched to the village of Seravezza, hiding in barns and cellars “out of sight of the German observers and gun crews” across the valley (411). The next night, an Italian partisan guided the Nisei in full combat gear to the steep 3,000-foot peak of Monte Folgorito. The mission was “to make what seemed an impossible ascent up the back side of the mountain, surprise the Germans from behind” (412), thus controlling the high ground. The Nisei reached the peak before dawn and took advantage of unmanned guns and sleeping German sentries, forcing open the Gothic Line.

At the same time, the 100th Battalion targeted the same mountains from another direction. Sadao Mumenori, in charge of his unit after their squad leader went down, rallied the men. When an unexploded grenade rolled into a hole where Jimi Oda and Akira Shishido were sheltering, he jumped on top of it, killing himself, but saving them. In the next two days, the 100th climbed the ridge toward Mount Folgorito. 32 lives were lost, but they accomplished “what no other unit had done, and what nobody thought possible” (416). The Gothic Line now had a “gaping hole” in the west (416). Clark’s intended diversion “turned into a major breakthrough” (416) for Allied troops. Rudy Tokiwa was wounded by shrapnel, so the war was over for him. 

In late March, the 522nd pushed through Germany’s Siegfried Line as German defenses collapsed. During breaks, Kats Miho and Flint Yonashiro foraged the countryside for food. Some Hawaiians played accordions. The Nisei came across dead soldiers hanged for cowardice or desertion, and factories of workers with shaved heads. The “cold reality” of war was “just around the next bend in the road” (419). In Italy, Rudy Tokiwa recovered from his wounds. Boredom pushed him to return and cook for others. After President Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, some mourned, while others recalled his Executive Order 9066 which sent them into camps.

Some soldiers, like Daniel Inouye, continued to display “insane” acts of heroism (422). Leading a platoon near San Terenzo Monti in Italy and shot in the stomach, he killed Germans with grenades. As he prepared to launch a grenade, most of his right arm was severed by gunfire. He removed the grenade from his own now-lifeless, detached hand and threw it with his left arm back at the German who shot him—killing him in the process. Now also shot in the leg and applying a tourniquet, he kept ordering his men into battle until passing out.

The Germans sometimes killed field medics like Hiroshi Sugiyama, shooting them in the back, disregarding their red cross arm bands. In one particularly noteworthy incident, Fred Shiosaki took Pete Sugiyama, the brother of a medic who had been killed, to headquarters, along with an older German POW. Fred “wrestled with” (426) the urge to shoot the POW in the back the same way Pete’s brother had been shot earlier. The POW arrived unharmed. Later, Fred could not stop thinking of “how close he had come to doing it” and how much he changed (426).

As the 522nd moved deeper into Germany, Solly Ganor and his father, dressed in lice-infested camp uniforms, were sent to walk to Dachau. The prisoners were ordered into showers and anticipated death. Instead, these were real showers washing away “months of accumulated sweat and grime” (431). Solly was “startled to realize how much he still craved life” (432). Thousands of other prisoners arrived at Dachau from its subcamps, speaking Polish, Russian, and other languages. Many new SS guards came as well. Later that day, the guards began marching approximately 7,000 of the healthiest prisoners out of Dachau in a five-day “column of human misery” (432). Those who could no longer walk were shot or torn apart by snarling dogs. The prisoners had no idea where they were being taken (the Nazis were moving their victims to hide evidence of their horrific genocidal war crimes). It kept raining, and prisoners attempted to sleep on the wet ground. Solly Ganor lost sight of his father. He “wanted to lie down on the roadway and let the SS have their way” (438), losing his will to live, but continued walking.

On April 29, 1945, American troops of the Seventh Army arrived at Dachau, which they “could smell” before they even saw it (433). They encountered 2,310 emaciated corpses of all ages in 39 boxcars that came from Buchenwald. The GI pushed deeper into the campgrounds, uncovering many horrors such as “some kind of an interrogation room, its concrete walls splattered with blood and brain tissue” (434), along with a crematorium, and many more bodies.

Kats Miho and others from 522nd also arrived within miles of Dachau as forward observers. They remember discovering the network of forced-labor camps, and although “[t]here is no firm evidence that any of the 522nd participated in the initial breaching of the Dachau perimeter” (435), there are indications that some Japanese Americans entered the camp the same day as other American troops. Toshio Nishizawa found “hundreds of living corpses” (436)—people so starved they were unable to move anything but their eyes. Prisoner witnesses like Josef Erbs also recalled seeing 442nd’s insignia. On April 30, Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler died by suicide.

On May 2, Solly woke up, he thought that “he was in heaven” (439). He found a dead German civilian’s cigarette lighter and a knife. Solly used them to cut meat off a dead horse, build a fire, and make soup in a pail with snow. George Oiye, Kats Miho, and Sus Ito walked through Waakirchen, Bavaria finding corpses wearing striped pajamas in the snow. Then, the Nisei found Solly, who spoke a little English. They gave him a chocolate bar, which he thought “would be like eating a treasure” like the Mona Lisa (440).