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From camp to combat

"They were superb. While taking terrific casualties, they showed rare courage and tremendous fighting spirit. Everybody wanted them," said Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall.

Gen. Mark W. Clark, who commanded the U.S. 5th Army in Italy, said, "These are some of the best g--damn fighters in the U.S. Army. If you have more, send them over!"

Who were these GIs singled out for such high praise?

They were everyday American soldiers who simply shared a common ancestry with the enemy. Robert Asahina salutes their service in his new book, "Just Americans: How Japanese Americans Won a War at Home and Abroad."

On Feb. 19, 1942, just weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which set in motion the internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans. Couched in broad language, the order was aimed at 127,000 Japanese-Americans, the majority of whom were living in the Western states of Arizona, California, Oregon and Washington.

Suddenly stripped of their property, civil rights and dignity, these loyal, bewildered U.S. citizens, virtually all of whom were born here, were considered enemy aliens. By March 1942, they were bused to relocation centers, usually nearby fairgrounds and their pitiful racetrack horse stalls, then escorted to trains for shipment to dreary, fenced internment camps.

But less than a year later, in January 1943, Secretary of War Henry Stimson announced a plan for the voluntary induction of Japanese-American men into a separate combat unit with the statement, "It is the inherent right of every faithful citizen, regardless of ancestry, to bear arms in the nation's battle."

President Roosevelt reiterated the theme by declaring, "No loyal citizen of the United States should be denied the democratic right to exercise the responsibilities of his citizenship, regardless of his ancestry."

Within months, more than 8,000 young men from the internment camps joined 9,000 from Hawaii to form the 442nd Infantry Regimental Combat Team and 100th Infantry Battalion (Separate).

By late 1944, the 100th, whose motto was "Remember Pearl Harbor," was known throughout the armed forces as the "Purple Heart Battalion." The 442nd, christening itself the "Go For Broke" battalion because so many of its troops shot dice, was well on its way to becoming the most decorated unit in America's military history for its size and length of service.

Although not the definitive record of the Japanese-American soldier in World War II so many have been waiting for, "Just Americans" is history as it should be published: an exceptionally well-written narrative that has a certainty to it, if not outright passionate, unblushing partisanship for the Japanese-American GI, viewed against the background of prejudice and racial injustice.

Asahina, an able editor, writer, critic and publisher who is a visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program at New York University, has interviewed and studied his subjects with obvious care and affection.

"So in the end, it was the Japanese Americans in uniform whose heroism had shamed their own government into doing the right thing," Asahina concludes. "After fighting their way up the slopes of the Vosges [mountains], the 100th/442nd had unarguably occupied the moral high ground."

It was not protests in the camps or courtroom clashes that won the Japanese-Americans' fight for civil rights, he writes, but rather "bullets on the battleground."

And as they fought and bled, what of their families, parents, grandparents, sisters and little brothers, aunts and uncles confined in the barren internment camps? They were asking the same question posed by John Barrymore, the famed Hollywood actor of the 1920s and 1930s.

In March 1942, at the front gate of his Los Angeles mansion, Barrymore noticed his gardener, Kazuo Nishi and his family, their few belongings bundled at their feet, waiting to be carted away by soldiers.

Dying of cancer, and with his mind fading in and out, Barrymore couldn't understand why Nishi was leaving. When his daughter explained that America was now at war with Japan, Barrymore asked, "But is America at war with Nishi and his family?"

‘Just Americans: How Japanese Americans Won a War at Home and Abroad.’ By Robert Asahina. Gotham. 352 pages. $27.50.

Don DeNevi is a freelance writer in California.