Scaling a steep 3,foot mountainside in the cover of darkness, the Nisei launched a successful surprise attack at dawn. Not satisfied, they continued to attack and by 14 April what had been ordered as a decoy had broken the western flank of the Gothic Line.. On May 2, , the German Army in Italy surrendered. To this day, the nd RCT, for its size and length of service, is the most decorated combat unit in the history of the United States Army. None from the mainland, at least not in my company.
I was a corporal then, and I found myself one of the fortunate ones to be selected as an invitee. And so, the night before we really gussied up. Next morning we had our uniforms were all creased and clean, and all shaven and smelling nice.
To spend a lovely weekend hoping to meet the young lovely mainland damsels. So here we are with our ukuleles and guitars, if you can picture that, quite a riot. And we're singing all the way from Mississippi to Arkansas. Until weI recall turning the bend and looking out, you could see in the flat land, in the valley, rows of buildings. And we thought, wow, here's a military camp because it looks just like our camp.
Wooden barracks. And this one had a tall fence around, barbed wire fence. And unlike our area, there were machine gun towers at certain intervals. And you could see somebody up there handling a gun. But when we got closer and we turned into it, then we began to realize what was happening.
The men who were manning the guns were Caucasian men. They were military people. At that time, the military was in charge, the Army. They had rifles with bayonets, and here we were with ukuleles, you know. We didn't bring our guns. And we were told to get off the cars, and thank God they didn't search us because if they had searched us, I think we would have resented that.
But then we trooped in into the camp, and there you could see men and women and children of Japanese ancestry. And we realized we were in a camp of some sort, a prison camp or something like that, because why else would they have these machine gun towers. It didn't take long to realize what had happened. And then we realized that the people there had set aside one week's ration of food so that they could give us a party.
They had an orchestra and all of that. We tried our best to be happy, but how can you be happy in those circumstances? They had set aside several of their barracks so that we could spend the evening there, and the occupants would camp in with other families or in the mess hall. And we said, "No, we can't do that. But then when we left there and went back to Mississippi, obviously the mood on the trucks were different. In my truck, for example, no one sang. In fact, there was no conversation.
If you can imagine a truck full of GIs leaving an area like this and not a word said. Not a word. Just quiet. Every man, eyes closed or looking out in the open, thinking, whatever it is, to himself. And I believe that what was running through the minds of most, if not all, was a question: would I have volunteered from that camp? Now that's a very important and profound question. Now we in Hawaii had a pretty good life.
We were not sent to camps. Yes, the priests and some of the teachers went, but the rest of us, we carried on in our work as usual, went to school and the teachers were good to us. We had our senior proms, but they were not in the evening. So life was business as usual. But then when this came upon us, that question was a very important one, and immediately our assessment and estimate of our mainland cousins suddenly changed.
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Roosevelt issued Executive Order , which authorized the War Department to place Japanese-Americans in prison camps for the duration of the war. Despite the assumption that native-born Japanese-Americans, or Nisei, as they called themselves, would choose to betray the United States, thousands of young men volunteered to serve the country that had condemned them.
In early , the Director of the War Relocation Authority instituted a loyalty oath for all of the interned Japanese-Americans. After fores wearing any allegiance to the emperor of Japan and expressing a willingness to serve in the American armed forces, 3, soldiers were recruited into the nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated all Japanese American unit.
These young men formed what was known as a Regimental Combat Team. It consisted of three battalions of infantry the th, 2nd, and 3rd battalions , the nd Field Artillery Battalion, and the nd Combat Engineer Company.
After volunteering while in the internment camps and passing some of the toughest training the Army had to offer, this combat team would fight the best units in the Wehrmacht the German Army. Some of us have to go to the front. Our record on the battlefield will determine when you will return and how you will be treated.
When the U. Army went to Japanese internment camps, they knew they were asking much of people who had little reason to sacrifice for the United States.
The recruiters said,. The circumstances were not of your own choosing, though it is true that the majority of you and your families accepted the restrictions placed upon your life with little complaint and without deviating from loyalty to the United States.
The Japanese-American soldiers who did sign up paved the way for a larger regiment when they formed the th Infantry Battalion. It did not take long for them to prove their worth.
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