Combat in WWII Was Catalyst for Asian Invasion of U.S. Mainstream

When Young O. Kim, a Los Angeles-born Korean-American, arrived at Camp Shelby, Miss., in 1942 as a newly graduated second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, he had no idea what his duties were to be.

Kim soon learned that he had been assigned to the new 100th Infantry Battalion, made up of Japanese-American Nisei soldiers. But the camp commander told him that he would be transferred immediately.

“The men here are all Japanese,” the commander said, as Kim remembers the conversation, “and Koreans and Japanese don’t get along.”

“I said, ‘Generally that’s true,’ ” Kim recalled. “ ‘But we’re not Japanese and Korean. We’re all Americans. And we’re all fighting for the same thing.’ ”

Kim stayed.

It was a decision that thrust Kim onto a path that has made him, more than four decades later, a sort of elder statesman of both the Japanese-American and the Korean-American communities in Los Angeles.

The soft-spoken 68-year-old rose to the rank of colonel during his 30-year Army career, seeing combat and winning medals in Europe and Korea. Kim, who remains trim and appears in great shape, despite continued pain from his war wounds, was a prominent spokesman for Korean-Americans last summer when community leaders sought unsuccessfully to unite Koreatown into a single Los Angeles City Council district.

He heads a United Way committee that recently helped establish a health center in Koreatown. He is vice president of the Japanese American National Museum being planned for Little Tokyo. And he helped lead the successful effort to rename a Little Tokyo street after the late Challenger astronaut Ellison E. Onizuka.

All these efforts reflect Kim’s desire to see Asian-Americans achieve full participation in the mainstream of U.S. society. And he sees great progress, compared to his childhood memories of blatant discrimination against Asian-Americans and sharp divisions among different Asian ethnic groups.

“When I was growing up, my parents were prejudiced against the Chinese and the Filipinos,” Kim said. “Against the Japanese it was more, because Japan had occupied Korea. It was hatred.”

Kim grew up in the area of Figueroa and Temple streets, where his parents ran a grocery store.

“In the old days, that was a very peaceful area,” he recalled. “The old street car used to go up Temple Street. . . . This was the old, old-style grocery store where everything was sold in bulk. Nothing was packaged. You had little drawers with glass windows, so customers could look in. Everything had to be put in little bags and weighed.”

As a boy, Kim learned to stack cans and sweep the sidewalk. When he was a bit older, he began waiting on customers. His parents also sent him to an afternoon Korean school, although he was not very interested in learning the language.

Kim said his parents were married--but did not begin to live together--when they were children. This happened under an agreement made by their families when his mother was still a toddler and his father had not yet been born, he said.

Labored on Farms

Kim’s father, who was from a prosperous land-owning family, came to this country a few years before World War I, working as a farm laborer in Hawaii and Washington state before arriving in Los Angeles. His mother, from a middle-class farming family, was educated at an American missionary school and came to this country intending to study at the University of Chicago.

But when his father learned she had landed in Seattle “he insisted that his wife join him,” Kim said. “She had no choice, because the moment the missionaries received that message, they would have nothing further to do with my mother.”

In the early years of their married life, both of Kim’s parents worked as migrant farm laborers, his father later working as a houseboy in Hollywood and as a hotel bellboy. “Of course, they had a miserable first couple of years,” Kim said.

Similar hardships endured by Asian immigrants in Hawaii, who provided much of the labor on the islands but held very little economic or political power, were a frequent topic of conversation among Kim and the Japanese-American officers from Hawaii at Camp Shelby.

Topic for Discussion

During the summer of 1943 “we had lengthy bull sessions,” Kim recalled. “We’d start discussing the plight of the Nisei in Hawaii. It was during this period we started discussing the possibility of completely revamping Hawaii.”

The young officers, Kim said, dreamed of breaking the monopoly power held by the five biggest corporations on the islands, and of invigorating the Democratic Party to challenge the political grip of the Republicans on the islands.

“What we were talking about was how Asians were second-class citizens,” he said. “You could do the same work as others and get less pay. . . . What we were all hoping for is that we would do well in combat. We realized we had to do well in combat. Only by doing well in combat would we be in a position to try to effect some of these changes.

“The fallout effect was going to affect all Asians. People couldn’t tell if I was Chinese, Japanese or Korean. That prevailed before the war and it would prevail afterwards. And if they could achieve justice in Hawaii, they would achieve justice in the mainland.”

Internment Camps

At the time, most Japanese-Americans on the U.S. mainland were in internment camps. Kim had visited friends confined at Jerome, Ark., just before joining the 100th Battalion.

“The towers were manned,” Kim recalled. “There were soldiers up there with machine guns.”

When the 100th Battalion arrived in the Mediterranean theater in September, 1943, it was assigned to guard duty in North Africa. But the battalion commander, Farrent Turner, who understood the men’s desire to fight, “refused that assignment and demanded that we be sent into combat,” Kim said.

The battalion went to Italy, where it soon saw action as U.S. troops moved up the peninsula.

On June 26, 1944, United Press reported that Capt. Young Kim of Los Angeles had received the Distinguished Service Cross. The report stated that Kim “went behind the German lines at Cisterna . . . captured two Germans and brought them back past several enemy outposts to obtain information needed by the Allied command.”

Kim said that he was accompanied by another soldier, Irving Akahoshi, in the raid, which began at night with the crossing of barbed wire and a mine field. After daybreak, when both sides had pulled back and most of the German soldiers were asleep, he and his partner crawled about 800 yards through a wheat field in German-held territory until they came upon an infantryman and a sergeant sleeping in a trench, Kim said.

Gun in the Mouth

“We both simultaneously, very carefully, stuck our submachine guns in the mouths of the soldier and the sergeant,” he said.

The Germans, understanding that all four men would die if they refused to cooperate, crawled back with them through the wheat field to the U.S. side, Kim said.

That summer, the 100th Battalion was attached to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, another Japanese-American outfit, and the two units went on to win fame together.

In October, 1944, Kim suffered the injury that took him out of the war: during the battle of Bellefontaine, three machine gun bullets sliced into his right hand, taking off the tip of his third finger.

It was just a few days later that the 100th and the 442nd performed their most famous feat: the rescue of the Lost Battalion. “Go For Broke,” a 1982 account of the exploits of the 100th/442nd written by Chester Tanaka, records that the Japanese-American unit sustained 814 casualties in rescuing 211 soldiers from Texas who were cut off nine miles behind German lines in the French countryside.

This added to the fame of the Nisei soldiers, who through their bravery were winning battles against prejudice as well. Typical of these victories was a 1945 Stars and Stripes editorial that upbraided those agitating against Japanese-Americans.

Strong Respect

The GI newspaper said that the 100th was one of the most decorated battalions in the history of the U.S. Army, that no battalion had suffered more casualties in the war and that “none was more respected by the troops over here.”

Kim returned to Los Angeles on April 9, 1945. In addition to the Distinguished Service Cross, he had won a Silver Star, two Purple Hearts, three Presidential Unit Citations, the Italian Cross of Valor, the Italian Bronze Star and the French Croix de Guerre. “Korean Hero of Italy Home,” read a headline in The Times.

Six years later, Kim set off for another war. Upon his arrival in Korea in February, 1951, his first impression of his ancestral homeland was of hundreds of begging children in the freezing cold around the Pusan train station.

“They were grimy and dirty, purple, blue and yellow from the cold, scampering for coal and bits of food,” Kim recalled. “I was devastated.”

He and his fellow officers began distributing their food rations. “Of course, that only caused almost a riot,” Kim said. “We ended up giving almost all the food away.”

Kim was wounded twice in Korea, both times by artillery fire, he said.

After the Korean War, Kim served in the United States, Europe and again in South Korea. Married and divorced twice, he helped raise two stepsons. He retired in 1972, and moved back to Los Angeles that same year to be near his mother.

Back to School

During the 1970s, Kim sought treatment to ease the pain from his wounds and also went back to school, taking history courses at California State University, Dominguez Hills. In recent years, he has been active in the Asian-American community life of Los Angeles, working for recognition of the accomplishments of Japanese-Americans and the integration of Korean immigrants into the life of the city.

The Japanese American National Museum board has chosen Kim to be the honoree at its annual fund-raising banquet, scheduled for Sept. 10 at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel.

“As former volunteers in war, Kim and other veterans are now volunteers in peace, fighting for cultural understanding in America,” wrote David Hyun, another prominent Korean-American community leader, explaining plans for the banquet.

Bruce Kaji, the museum’s president, described Kim as “an ambassador of good will.”

“He’s a bridge-builder,” said Stewart Kwoh, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California. “He’s part of an elite group that has a scope beyond his or her own ethnic community. Especially for someone of his generation, that’s fairly unique. His efforts have served ethnic communities beyond the Korean and Japanese-American communities. He’s vitally concerned about other Asian groups as well.”

“I welcome the new immigrants of all countries,” Kim said. “By having that attitude, I think I’m faithful and true to the American dream. . . . I’m proud of my ethnic roots. I’ve always been proud of my ethnic roots. But at the same time, I feel I’m basically American. I fought for America. . . . I also fought for the Korean people.”

Starting Over

Many of the immigrants coming to this country today--especially those from East Asia--are from places where “the competition is much tougher than in this country,” Kim reflected. Those who come here have the initiative and drive to take the gamble of starting over again in a new country, often for the sake of their children, he said. This is especially true of Korean immigrants, he added.

“Koreans will have a major impact on Los Angeles--far greater than their numbers,” Kim predicted. An estimated 200,000 ethnic Koreans live in the Los Angeles area.

Kim said he believes that “the vast majority of Americans, whether they say so or not, feel threatened by the new immigration,” but that still “the climate is far more favorable than back in those days.”

“The media is not against them,” he said. “The government institutions are not against them.”

And for this, the Japanese-American soldiers of World War II--and a single Korean-American from Los Angeles who threw in with them--can take some credit.

“In hindsight, we were wildly successful,” Kim said. “I’m talking about as a combat unit, and in effecting the changes that we wanted to nationally.”