Remembrances : He Served With Valor in Italy

Charles Ishii, 75, of Santa Ana, is a retired farmer. He served as a first sergeant with the famed 442 Regimental Combat Team during World War II.

Ishii was drafted by the Army in March, 1941. But after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI arrested his father, Kyutaro Ishii, on the family farm in Talbert (now Fountain Valley).

The family was sent to the internment camp in Poston, Ariz., but Ishii was assigned to a unit of an all-Japanese American regiment, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. He fought overseas in Italy, France and Germany.

Ironically, while his family had been interned in the United States, elements of Ishii’s unit, the 522nd field artillery battalion, liberated the Dachau concentration camp in Germany near the end of the war.

Ishii visited Dachau a day after the liberation. A Jewish guide showed him the gas chambers where the Nazis killed Jewish prisoners en masse, as well as the burial urns where dozens of bodies were stored.

“It was a miserable sight,” Ishii said. “You could see the survivors standing in the doorways of barracks, half dead. We weren’t allowed to give them food.”

Ishii came back to Orange County in 1946 with a Bronze Star and continued farming with his family in Talbert. In 1957, he was elected to the first City Council of Fountain Valley.