‘Go For Broke’ Regiment Reflects on Bias Struggle : Japanese-Americans: Members of the segregated World War II outfit mark their 50th anniversary.
The old soldiers of World War II’s “Go For Broke” regiment aren’t about to fade away. Not, at least, until they make sure their sons and daughters know by heart their war stories--ones they believe tell something about battles on the home front as well as overseas.
This week they mark their 50th anniversary, and their recollections--both sweet and bitter--are pouring forth.
Take Jun Yamamoto’s tale. After Pearl Harbor, he tried to join the Army. But they would not take him, even though he had been training with his ROTC unit at UCLA. “We can’t take you. You’re Japanese,” the recruiter said.
Actually, Yamamoto was an American, born in Los Angeles. But within months he and his parents were transported at gunpoint to the Manzanar internment camp in the California desert.
Then President Franklin D. Roosevelt called upon Japanese-Americans to volunteer for a segregated battalion--the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Yamamoto jumped at the chance to serve and became part of the most decorated unit in U.S. Army history.
“All of us went because we knew we had a job to do--to prove to the people of the United States and the government that we’re not Japs. We are American citizens and should be treated as Americans,” Yamamoto said.
But when he came back to Los Angeles from Europe, having lost many of his friends in battle, it seemed nothing had changed. On the bus trip up to Manzanar, where his parents were still incarcerated, a sandwich stand operator refused to serve him--despite his U.S. army uniform.
When Yamamoto passed through the barbed-wire gates to embrace his mother, fellow U.S. Army officers demanded to search his duffel bag for dangerous contraband--such as a camera. Later, when he tried to buy a house in the nearly all-white Crenshaw district, no one would sell to him.
It has been half a century, but shared experiences in war and peace have kept the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the Japanese-American 100th Infantry Battalion some of the tightest-knit veterans units around.
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Today in Honolulu, about 3,000 veterans and family members begin what will probably be their last big hurrah. Alumni including Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) have gathered for luaus, speeches, golf, a parade--and reflection on what their service meant.
“The 50th reunion can give (people) a chance to pause and reflect. Japanese-Americans were relocated, made to wear black badges,” says George Nakasato, general chairman of the anniversary celebration.
“In the future, we don’t want to repeat that type of thing. (Prejudice) is . . . a continuing problem. Look at the issue of Rodney King . . . the emerging bigotry between foreigners and Germans.”
Fifty years ago, the Asian faces of their American liberators were a surprise to many in Europe. Inmates of the Dachau Nazi death camp wondered what Japanese faces were doing among the troops that set them free.
Some of the people of Biffontaine, France, were at first baffled by the unusual-looking Americans who liberated their village in a horrific battle. Georges Henry was 17 at the time. Today, he is mayor of the town and is leading a French delegation to the Honolulu reunion. Texans from the famous Lost Battalion of the 36th Division will also be at the reunion to thank once again the soldiers who saved them from encirclement by the Germans in one of the bloodiest battles of the war in eastern France. About 200 Japanese-American soldiers were killed and 600 wounded in the fight to free 211 Texans.
And perhaps most important, the children of the veterans will be there to honor their parents with a parade through Honolulu and a promise to keep telling their stories. The Sons and Daughters of the 442nd Veterans officially became a chapter of the 442nd Veterans Club in January.
“My driving force is that I can’t see all these guys . . . passing on without telling us what the legacy should be,” says Guy Koga, who is 46 and president of the association. “My dad told us, ‘What you guys should carry forth is not to let (something like the internment) happen again.’ ”
To the American veterans of Japanese descent, now mostly in their 70s, their fight during World War II was not just against fascism. In the words of President Harry S. Truman, they “fought not only the enemy, but . . . fought prejudice--and . . . won.”
Yamamoto thinks it was worth it. Indeed, some things had changed after the war. When the sandwich stand man would not serve him at the truck stop, a bus driver pointed out Yamamoto’s uniform and threatened to punch out the other man. When guards demanded to search his duffel bag, Yamamoto refused, and was backed up by their commanding officer.
Perhaps the clearest sign of his victory is something he points to proudly in a carefully kept scrapbook in his living room in the Hollywood hills: the American citizenship certificates of his parents. Until 1954, Japanese immigrants were not allowed to become citizens because of anti-Asian laws. But persuaded in part by the military service of Nisei (second-generation Japanese-Americans) like Yamamoto, the U.S. government finally allowed them to become naturalized.
The veterans of the 100/442nd also had a powerful impact on Hawaiian society after the war. Shut out previously by the Caucasian oligarchy that dominated the islands, they no longer were willing to accept second-class status. They educated themselves under the GI Bill and played a key role in putting Hawaii’s Legislature into Democratic hands and opening the corridors of power to Japanese-Americans. The experience of the Nisei echoes that of other minorities in the U.S. military. Since at least the days of the Civil War, military service has been a step toward acceptance into U.S. society--although an incomplete one. During World War II, African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and American Indians also served in the military, hoping to prove their right to equal protection under the law--and came back to a society that in many cases excluded them despite their sacrifices in its name.
But just as the World War II achievements of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first unit of black pilots in the Air Force, has served as a model of inspiration for African-Americans, members of the 100/442nd are icons in the Japanese-American community. Many younger Japanese-Americans credit their service with helping achieve in 1988 an apology and redress payments from the United States government for the internment.
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The decision to serve was a difficult one for those inside the internment camps. Twelve hundred men volunteered from inside the camps, and several thousand more were drafted. About 300 men refused the draft on principle and were jailed. (They were later pardoned by Truman.)
The bulk of the 33,000 Japanese-Americans who served in World War II--13,000 in the 100/442nd, the rest in the Military Intelligence Service and other battalions--were from Hawaii. The Hawaiians, who were not interned en masse, had volunteered enthusiastically for service.
Before they went off to war together, Japanese-Americans from the mainland and Hawaii found themselves fighting each other. They were thrown together for the first time for training at Camp Shelby, Mississippi.
“There was a cultural difference,” says Hiroshi Takusagawa, 70, a retired refrigeration technician who grew up as one of the few Japanese-Americans in Santa Barbara. The Hawaiian Nisei always seemed to be walking around barefoot, strumming their ukuleles, drinking beer and gambling, he said. He could not understand the pidgin English they spoke.
To the Hawaiians, the mainlanders were equally strange. “The mainland boys spoke English like the haoles (whites) and we didn’t like that idea,” says Hawaii-born Don Seki, 69, the son of sugar cane cutters.
The Hawaiians called the mainlanders kotonks (for the sound an empty coconut makes) and thought them uptight and small-hearted. The mainlanders called the Hawaiians Buddhaheads and thought them clannish and crude. There were plenty of fistfights between the two groups.
The mainlanders, growing up in a largely white society, had faced prejudice more directly and were used to “keeping their place” as minorities, Takusagawa says. He never challenged the rule prohibiting Japanese from using public swimming pools in Santa Barbara. The Hawaiians, by contrast, though many were plantation laborers near the bottom of the social ladder in the islands, were used to being an ethnic majority, so they were more assertive.
A bunch of Hawaiian Nisei once roughed up a white Mississippi bus driver and threw him off the bus when they saw him try to make blacks sit in the back of the bus. Mainlanders were shocked at their aggressiveness.
“(The islanders) didn’t understand why we were so quiet. We had other things on our minds,” Takusagawa says. The volunteers from inside the mainland camps had something very specific to prove by joining the military--that they deserved to be American citizens. They were deadly serious in their task. While the Hawaiians also wanted to show their patriotism, they did not always understand the intensity of their mainland comrades.
One thing the two groups shared was a drive to honor their parents. Don Seki’s parents, sugar cane cutters born in Japan, took the last ship that sailed back to the old country before the war. Seki, who lost his left arm in battle, recalls vividly his last conversation with his father before his departure. “My father says to me, ‘You’re born in this country, so you fight and die for this country, even if your enemy is Japanese.’ ”
Once in battle, the differences between the mainlanders and Hawaiians melted. “Go For Broke”--a phrase often used by the Hawaiians--became the slogan of the regiment. Today, Takusagawa says his ties to his comrades in arms are as strong as ever.
“It’s a bond thicker than blood. We trusted our lives to our comrades,” he says. Of about 13,000 Nisei who served in the 100/442nd, 9,486 suffered casualties and 600 were killed.
Many vets say their best friends are still the men they fought with when they were 18. In Los Angeles, at the 100/442nd Memorial Hall, an old stucco building on a scruffy street near the Los Angeles Convention Center, on any day you can find World War II vets playing poker or hanafuda, a Japanese card game, as they have since the late ‘40s.
In Honolulu, too, men gather daily to watch baseball and swap stories at the 442nd Club Headquarters, festooned with war memorabilia. There’s a poster for the 1951 MGM film “Go For Broke,” which featured Van Johnson as an officer from Texas gradually won over by the courage of the Nisei troops he at first scorned.
Ironically, although these Nisei veterans deeply want to be remembered, the question of how their experiences should be recalled has split their ranks in a bitter battle. One group wants to erect a monument in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, listing all the members of the 100/442nd, both the war dead and the survivors.
Another group thinks listing those still alive denigrates the sacrifice of those who perished. They propose a memorial listing only the Japanese-American war dead--and of all wars, not just World War II.
Debate raging in the pages of the community press and in veterans’ meetings has stymied the building of a monument for years. Men who fought side by side and were close friends for decades stopped talking to each other.
But the 50th reunion has inspired at least some of the veterans to bury the hatchet, at least for a while. Sumi Seki, Don’s wife, noted that he and Yamamoto, both members of L Company, started talking again just in the past few weeks. “The reunion should be a happy occasion,” she says. “They want to leave this to the children.”
These men have a different view of the world from their children, and from more recent immigrants from Asia. At a time when Asian-Americans are stereotyped as overachievers quickly gaining success as soon as they reach the United States, the veterans want to remind people that their opportunities were not won overnight.
“Before World War II, people of Japanese ancestry had a difficult time finding a job. There were lots of college graduates pushing lawn mowers or polishing fruit at Grand Central Market,” Takusagawa says. “My wife’s cousin was among the top three graduates of Cal Tech his year but could not get a job.”
Don Seki says the veterans fought not only for the United States, but also for the rights of their community. Their service “helped Japanese-American people, especially the Sansei (third generation) and Yonsei (fourth generation),” the retired shipyard worker says. “We fought for them.”
Moffat reported from Los Angeles and Essoyan from Honolulu.
