Facing the Mountain (Adapted for Young Readers), page 10
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News of Harry Madokoro’s death in combat had reached the Poston concentration camp, where a memorial service was quickly arranged. As the last desert twilight faded away and a few bats flitted through the purple sky, someone helped Harry’s sixty-six-year-old mother, Netsu, onto the stage at the Cottonwood Bowl. Originally just a circle of dust scraped out of the sagebrush, the Cottonwood Bowl had become one of the most pleasant places in Poston. With a stage built of timber and stucco in the style of a Japanese theater and situated in the cooling shadow of several large cottonwood trees, it was a place where people could come together for community events.
Over the past two years it had been the site of theater performances, graduation ceremonies, Christmas pageants, band concerts, variety shows, and other community gatherings. Lately, though, it had been used more and more often for memorial services for fallen Nisei soldiers.
Service for fallen comrades in Italy.
As Mrs. Madokoro sat watching somberly, a bugler summoned a color guard. The camp’s Boy Scout troop led a salute to the American flag. Priests from all three of the camp’s churches gave readings from Buddhist and Christian texts.
Friends approached Mrs. Madokoro and laid flowers at her feet and read her telegrams sent from Harry’s friends. A choir sang. The camp’s military police fired a salute with their rifles. Finally, the bugler played taps. As the last long, sad, lingering notes drifted out beyond the circle of lights, into the absolute darkness of a desert night, friends helped Mrs. Madokoro back to her quarters, room 13-G in Block 213 in the Poston concentration camp.
Chapter 17
Over the summer, the 442nd’s reputation spread far and wide. Fighting their way up the western coast of Italy, the men had taken one hilltop town after another, gaining valuable ground for the US Army. They had taken heavy casualties, but their battle record was outstanding. The Germans came to respect and fear the Nisei soldiers, whom they called “the little iron men.” American newspapers and newsreels brought their accomplishments into movie theaters from Maine to Honolulu, and accounts of their exploits appeared in the military newspaper, The Stars and Stripes, drawing the attention of other American servicemen around the world.
Suddenly the Nisei soldiers were in high demand. General Mark Clark wanted to keep them in Italy with his Fifth Army. But General Alexander Patch wanted them in his Seventh Army in France, and Patch was backed by General George S. Patton and General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of Allied troops.
So the men of the 442nd boarded Liberty ships again, this time bound for Marseille. Their numbers were boosted by 672 replacement Nisei troops newly arrived from the States.
Rudy Tokiwa bringing in captured German soldiers in Italy.
By October 13, all three battalions of the 442nd had arrived in France at an assembly point roughly forty miles west of the German border. There they were formally attached to the Seventh Army’s 36th Infantry Division under the command of General John E. Dahlquist.
The 36th was composed mostly, though not entirely, of men from Texas. Now they and the Nisei soldiers stood together facing the Vosges—the region of heavily forested mountains that lay between them and Nazi Germany.
Studded with medieval castles, the Vosges was a dark and forbidding place. Armies had clashed there since well before ancient Roman times. When Kats, Fred, Rudy, and the other Nisei soldiers contemplated what new horrors might lie in store for them in those forests, their stomachs tightened. They knew now what combat was like, and they dreaded it.
The 442nd going into battle in the Vosges.
At 3:15 a.m. on October 14, Kats and his gun crew slipped a round into Kuuipo and fired the first shot of the new campaign. They settled into firing almost continuously through the night, pounding the dark mountains and softening up the German defenses.
With the 522nd’s guns rumbling behind them and white flashes lighting up the gray underbellies of the clouds ahead, the men of the 442nd began slogging through muddy fields of wheat stubble and trudging down wet country roads. Their objective was to secure the high ground around the town of Bruyères, where several roads and a railway line converged.
The Germans threw everything they had at the approaching Americans, contesting every yard of territory with mortars and shells, streams of machine-gun fire, and snipers on hilltops and in church spires.
Over the next three days, the four thousand residents of the town huddled in their basements while the Nisei soldiers fought furiously for every yard they could gain from the Germans.
Just before dawn on the morning of October 18, K Company exited the woods and entered the flatter, more open terrain immediately in front of Bruyères. Suddenly engulfed by the roar of battle, Fred stumbled over muddy furrows, bullets whipping by on both sides. Shells whistled over his head. Columns of black earth and fractured yellow stone erupted in front of him and behind him. Searing hot shards of shrapnel flew in all directions, making weird fluttering sounds. The smell of explosives and diesel fuel and mud and blood filled the air.
Closing in on the town, Fred and the men near him dropped to the ground and began to crawl forward on their bellies as streams of machine-gun fire poured from the windows of nearby farmhouses and machine-gun nests hidden behind stone garden walls. They returned fire, lobbed mortars at the buildings, threw hand grenades at each machine-gun nest in turn, and, when it was silenced, moved on to the next.
When K Company reached the town, the men advanced cautiously, running in a crouch from one doorway to the next. Lobbing grenades, kicking down doors, racing to rooftops, clearing houses, the Nisei gradually drove the Germans out of Bruyères. By early evening, most of the town was theirs.
German shells and mortar rounds continued to fall in the streets as a furious battle for the high ground to the east raged on. The streets were littered with slate roof tiles, bricks, piles of stone and mortar, and burned-out vehicles. Here and there a dead German in a bloodied uniform lay in the street. The smell of gunpowder lingered in the air, and the whiff of death.
Then Fred noticed flags emerging from upstairs windows—French flags and the Croix de Lorraine, the emblem of the Resistance, French citizens who had fought against Nazi rule. The townspeople poured out into the rainy and rubble-strewn streets. At first, confused by seeing Asian people, they exclaimed, “Chinois?! Chinois!”
The Nisei, pointing to their uniforms, tried to explain. “No, no, Americans. Japanese Americans!”
“Japonais?!” The French looked at one another, clearly baffled. Japan was supposed to be the enemy.
But nobody really cared what the Nisei soldiers looked like. Young women, old men, children, all ran to them, embraced them, and kissed them on both cheeks. Old men brought out bottles of wine and strings of sausages and patted their liberators on the back. Children flocked around them cheering, shouting, “Merci, merci, merci!” Thank you, thank you.
Fred dug out a chocolate bar from his kit, broke it into bits, and handed the pieces out to the kids. Then he moved on.
Over the next few days, K Company inched deeper into the mountains. At night, the men hunkered down and tried to catch some sleep, sliding into trenches the Germans had dug or craters left by their own artillery shells. The holes were half-full of rainwater, but the men were beyond caring. They just lay against muddy walls, closed their eyes, and let their feet and legs soak. A few chose to lie out in the open instead, despite the risk of shells.
Fred lay in one of the trenches, his eyeglasses smeared with mud, teeth chattering. His feet ached terribly, and he pulled off one of his boots and a soggy sock to have a look. The foot was an odd shade of purple—a sign of trench foot, the slow, agonizing death of the nerves and tissues.
When morning came, gray and wet and cold, they got up and pushed on to the northeast. For two more days and two more nights, they kept moving forward, yard by yard, under almost continuous fire, with nothing to eat but cold K-rations, nowhere to sleep but in the mud.
By late October 24, they had taken control of the villages of Belmont and Biffontaine and pushed the Germans deeper into the Vosges.
One day, Rudy was making his way back to the battalion’s command post to report on the successful completion of a maneuver when K Company’s medic, James Okubo, stopped him.
“When you came through, did you see any dead Germans out there?”
“Yeah.”
“You see any of ’em alive?”
Rudy shrugged. “I don’t know. I never look.”
Okubo had been up all night tending to the wounded, but he wanted to see if there were wounded Germans still out on the field. “I can’t carry a rifle. Will you go with me?”
Rudy shrugged again but picked up a Thompson submachine gun and led Okubo into the hills.
The two men began to sort through a pile of German dead and eventually found one boy who was still alive. Okubo patched him up as best he could, and the two of them carried him back to an American aid station.
There, Okubo turned to Rudy and said, “I hope you don’t get mad at me now.” Rudy replied that he was glad they’d helped the boy. But the truth was, it seemed odd to him, after he and his guys had spent so much time trying to kill Germans, to be trying to save one.
It wasn’t really that he objected. He just didn’t particularly care one way or another. But it got him thinking.
I wonder, he thought. When I get out of this—if I do—whether I’ll still be a human being.[50]
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K Company had now been on the battlefield for seven days and nights. Some units had been out eight days. Finally, two Texas units—the 141st and 143rd Infantry Regiments—began moving up through the 442nd’s lines to relieve them.
Fred and Rudy and the rest of K Company, their uniforms stiff with caked mud, stumbled out of the mountains into the shattered remains of the village of Belmont. There they collapsed in whatever shelter they could find—anywhere with a dry corner or a pile of hay or even just a cold slate floor to stretch out on—and fell asleep.
Chapter 18
A little more than forty-eight hours later, at 3:00 a.m. on October 27, Fred was sleeping soundly on the floor of a tavern when Rudy shook him awake.
Fred fumbled for his eyeglasses. “Hey! What the hell? Why you wakin’ me up?”
“No argue. Just get your gear . . . We’re moving back up.”[51]
All around him, other K Company guys were grumbling in the dark, groping for rifles and helmets, pulling on wet boots, stuffing their gear into packs.
An hour later, they shuffled out onto wet cobbled streets. It looked to Fred as if both the Third Battalion and the 100th were assembling, with K and I Companies out front, taking the lead. Behind them, he could hear tanks starting to move, and more men marching. Whatever this was about, it was big.
Up in the mountains, where the rain was threatening to turn to snow, more than two hundred men were trapped behind enemy lines, desperately trying to stay alive.
Four days before, on October 23, General Dahlquist had ordered some of the 141st Infantry Regiment of his Texas Division to push along a series of ridges north of Biffontaine. At first, the Texans met only light resistance, and, as evening approached, all was surprisingly calm.
Which didn’t make any sense.
Then, as darkness fell, the forest behind them erupted with gunfire. The men hastily set up a perimeter defense and dug in for the night.
In the morning, some of them tried to retrace their steps and came under heavy fire. Those who survived stumbled back into camp to report that the Germans had built a blockade on the road during the night.
There was no doubting it now. The Texans had been lured into a trap. Stuck at the end of a ridge, on a mountaintop behind enemy lines, they were sitting ducks, under nearly continuous artillery fire and repeated ground attacks.
For the next several days, by radio, General Dahlquist repeatedly ordered the stranded men to fight their way out. When those attempts failed, he ordered other companies from the 141st to relieve them, all to no avail.
Finally, growing increasingly desperate, he gave the order to wake up the battle-weary men of the 442nd and send them up the mountain. If none of his regular guys could get the Texans out, maybe the Nisei could.
Nobody had told Fred Shiosaki or anyone in his squad about any trapped Texans. As dawn approached, and the patches of sky above the trees shifted from absolute black to slate gray, he heard the sound of a battle up ahead—the rattle of machine guns, the cracking of rifles, the concussions of grenades, the growling of tanks.
He still had no idea where they were going, what their objective was, or what they were up against. All he knew was that they had come to an abrupt halt and their officers were suddenly screaming at them to spread out and take cover.
Kneeling behind a tree with a rifle in his hands and a mortar tube strapped on his back, Fred tried to make sense of the situation. The sounds of battle extended off to both the left and right of him. Judging from the amount of fire coming at them, there seemed to be a sizable enemy force somewhere ahead in the wet gray murk.
Advancing toward the Lost Battalion in the Vosges.
K Company started to advance. Fred tried to move up, tree by tree, toward the still mostly invisible Germans ahead as periodic bursts of machine-gun fire ripped through the forest around him. Dirt and stones and bits of bark flew in all directions.
Then 105-millimeter howitzer shells began to whistle overhead. George Oiye and Sus Ito had crept out in advance of the line. Using a forested ravine for concealment, they’d spotted some German tanks about a hundred yards in front of K Company and called in their coordinates.
Kats Miho and the 522nd guys began firing on the reported position of the tanks. However, because the terrain was so steep, they were having a hard time with accuracy, and the barrage had little effect on the tanks. By early afternoon, K and I Companies had advanced only a matter of yards in the face of the relentless tanks and machine-gun fire. Roughly three miles away, the surrounded Texans were almost entirely out of rations, completely out of medical supplies, and fast running out of hope.
At about 3:30 p.m., the Germans launched a full-scale counterattack. Fred and his squad frantically dug in wherever they happened to be.
Then someone shouted, “Tank! Tank!” A German Panzer IV tank rumbled out of the foggy woods ahead of them, firing point-blank into K Company’s positions.
Shells slammed into stout trees, shattering their trunks, toppling them over on men on the ground. Alongside and behind the tank, German infantrymen advanced steadily, firing machine guns. Within minutes they were within fifty yards of the shallow depression where Fred lay.
Kats Miho firing a howitzer at a high angle in France.
It was clear that the enemy was about to overwhelm them.
Out of the corner of his eye, Fred saw a friend, Matsuichi Yogi, stand up, a bazooka up on his shoulder, and run full tilt toward the tank.
Fred sucked in some cold, wet air and held his breath.
Right in front of the tank, out in the wide open, Yogi stopped and knelt. With bullets whistling all around him, he fired and scored a direct hit. Flames erupted from the underside of the tank, black smoke poured out of its hatch, and it ground to a dead stop.
By the time Yogi made it back to K Company’s lines, the German attack was tapering off. The gray-uniformed enemy was ghosting back into the foggy twilight.
Exhausted as they all were, nobody in the 442nd slept much that night. Nobody said much either. There really wasn’t much to say. When the sun came up, more of them were going to die, and they all knew it.
So they tried to imagine they were somewhere else. Home, maybe. A warm bedroom. With family laughing downstairs. Pots and pans rattling in the kitchen. The smell of ginger being grated, tea being brewed, bread being toasted. Anywhere but here. Any time but now.
When dawn came, the Nisei continued to push toward the stranded Texans. The only realistic option for reaching them was down the middle of a narrow ridge, through a series of heavily fortified positions while under constant fire.
All morning, General Dahlquist bellowed orders over the radio, demanding to know why progress was so slow, why they weren’t breaking through to his Texans.
Colonel Pence decided to go up to the front line to check on the situation for himself. Almost as soon as he arrived, his jeep came under attack. He suffered severe leg wounds and had to be hastily evacuated from the battlefield.
For the men of K Company who witnessed the incident, it was tough to see Pence go down.
It fell now to their other commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Alfred A. Pursall, to make Dahlquist understand the near impossibility of what he was asking for.
Pursall decided that he, too, needed to see the situation on the ground. He asked Rudy to go with him. It wasn’t the first time Pursall had sought out Rudy for a dangerous mission. He respected the younger man’s judgment, particularly in tough situations.
