Facing the Mountain (Adapted for Young Readers), page 11
With automatic fire ripping through the trees above them, Pursall and Rudy worked their way forward a few dozen yards, out past the line, crawling uphill on their bellies through wet moss and rotting leaves to get a better view of what was throwing so much fire at them.
What they saw was chilling.
The entire hillside above them bristled with German machine-gun nests and dug-in infantry armed with heavy weapons. Higher upslope, they could hear tanks and half-tracks moving.
Pursall asked Rudy what he thought about trying to take the hill.
Rudy answered as he always did, honestly and bluntly. It would be insane. They needed to wait, to bring up more firepower first.
Pursall nodded.
But by the time they worked their way back downslope, General Dahlquist himself had appeared on the scene. The general looked around and saw exactly what he didn’t want to see: men dug in on all sides.
“I want you guys to charge,” he yelled. “Charge, charge, charge!”[52]
Pursall planted himself squarely in front of the general, standing closer than was comfortable for either man. Speaking slowly but firmly, he tried to explain the situation. That a charge now would be suicidal. That they needed to bring other units up first.
Dahlquist, red in the face now, didn’t want to hear it.
Finally, Pursall wheeled around and said to Rudy, “Okay, let’s go.”
Rudy hesitated. The last thing he wanted was to start back up that hill again. “Where’re we going, sir?”
“We’ve got to take the general up, to show him what we are up against.”
Rudy and Pursall began leading Dahlquist uphill. Bullets snapped into trees all around them. Rudy was horrified, but he wasn’t going to be the first to dive for cover, so he kept walking.
Pursall pointed out the German positions to Dahlquist—all in all, an impenetrable wall of resistance.
Dahlquist seemed unimpressed.
Rudy couldn’t believe what he was seeing: two senior officers standing in full view of the Germans, nose to nose in the pouring rain, arguing with each other as bullets whipped by.
Eventually, Dahlquist spat at Pursall, “I’m ordering you, you will attack! That’s an order!”
Pursall grabbed Dahlquist by the lapels of his shirt: “Those are my boys you’re trying to kill. Nobody kills my boys like that. Nobody.”
The two men stood for a long moment, seething at each other. Then, Dahlquist wheeled around and walked away, shouting over his shoulder, “That’s an order!”
Pursall stared grimly up the hill in front of him. Then he pulled a pearl-handled pistol from a holster, stood up, and yelled, “Come on, you guys! Let’s go! Let’s go!” He started up the hill, firing the pistol, and bellowing again, “Let’s go! Artillery, too! You charge, too!”[53]
Chester Tanaka looked up, saw Pursall, and thought, My God! If he is going to walk up into that fire, I guess we’d better, too.[54] He stood up and motioned for his men to follow him.
Fred Shiosaki stared at Pursall for a moment, disbelieving. Then, like Tanaka, he rose to his feet and started hobbling forward, his swollen feet throbbing with pain.
George Oiye heard someone next to him clicking his bayonet onto his rifle. To his right, his radioman, Yuki Minaga, got up and took a few steps forward. Even though he was scared to death and armed with only a pistol, Oiye got up and started running up the hill, too.
So did Sus Ito.
So did Rudy.
Charging uphill into enemy fire in the Vosges.
They all did. With their fathers’ words echoing in their minds, their mothers’ love beating in their hearts, one by one, then as one, the men of K Company rose and began to charge up the hill, shooting blind through the tangle of trees looming above them.
Down the line, in I Company, Private Barney Hajiro saw K Company go. He stood and began moving steadily uphill, spraying the terrain ahead of him with automatic fire.
The rest of I Company rose and followed him. Sergeant Joe Shimamura yelled, “Make! Make! Make!”—“death” in Hawaiian.[55] Others roared insults in Japanese or Hawaiian Pidgin, hurling them at the Germans. Most of them just gritted their teeth and ran, slipping and sliding in the mud, tripping over roots, getting up and running again, expecting to die at any moment.
A torrent of steel and lead descended on them. Mortar shells plunged down among them. Machine-gun fire ripped them apart as they ran. A bullet smacked into the head of the man running next to Fred. Howling eighty-eight-millimeter tank shells slammed into trees, shattering them, toppling them over onto the men.
A shell exploded a few yards in front of George Oiye. The blast blew him thirty feet downhill and deafened him. He staggered back onto his feet and started up the hill again. Another shell hit a tree next to him and fell right at his feet, spinning in the mud, but didn’t go off. He stepped over it and kept going.
Yet another shell slammed into a tree directly ahead of Fred. This one did explode, and something hard and hot sliced into Fred’s side. God, I’m hit, he thought as he went down.[56]
He rolled onto his back, pulled up his shirt, and found a jagged piece of steel shrapnel embedded in his abdomen. But there wasn’t much blood.
K Company’s medic, James Okubo, crawled over to him, pulled the shrapnel out, bandaged the wound, and told Fred he was okay, to get up and keep going. He did.
The higher they climbed, the steeper the slope became. Grabbing at tree roots and rocks, they hoisted themselves higher, drawing closer to the German tanks, which were pointing directly downhill, firing point-blank at them. Dust and smoke mixed with the fog in a dense yellow-gray soup that made it hard to discern friend from foe. The men crawled over logs, stepped over dead bodies, hurled grenades uphill.
And kept going.
Then, suddenly, just as Fred reached the top, the sounds of battle simply ceased. One moment there were explosions and shrieks and wailing and bellowing, the next near silence. Nothing but the crack of occasional rifle shots, the whumping of artillery off in the distance, and the moaning of wounded men. In the woods ahead of him, Fred saw something he had never seen before: Germans running away from him.
“My God,” he muttered to himself. “It’s done.”
Then he looked around and thought, But there’s hardly anybody left.[57]
Of the hundreds of men who had started up the mountain three days before, fewer than two dozen in K Company were still alive and able to walk. In I Company, there were even fewer.
Chapter 19
At daylight, the remains of K Company moved forward again. All the company’s commissioned officers were now dead or wounded, so command fell to Sergeant Chester Tanaka.
When artillery and mortar shells rained down on the Nisei soldiers once more, it was clear that the Germans had regrouped in the forest ahead of them. K Company dug in about four hundred yards from the top of the ridge where the Texans were trapped. The Germans, meanwhile, were charging the Texans from all directions, closing to within thirty yards in a matter of minutes. It seemed clear that their intent was to kill them all before the Nisei could reach them.
The encircled Texans threw everything they had left at the Germans, hurling grenades and unleashing furious automatic weapons fire. But they knew they wouldn’t be able to sustain it for long. Soon they’d run out of ammunition and would be at the mercy of the Germans. And there was no reason to believe the Germans would have any mercy to show them.
Then, in the midst of the chaos—mingled with the smells of high explosives, shattered wood, and mud—the Nisei and the Texans began to smell smoke. A few minutes later, they saw billows of white smoke rising from the German-held valley beyond the ridge.
As the smoke screen spread out, filtering through the trees, the Germans pulled back off the ridge and simply disappeared.
A patrol from I Company had been advancing cautiously, on hands and knees much of the time, ahead of the main force. One of their number, Mutt Sakumoto, saw a pale face peering around a tree. The face disappeared, then reappeared, then disappeared again.
Eventually, a figure stepped cautiously out from behind the tree, clutching a rifle and staring hard at the approaching Nisei. Finally, the soldier threw down his rifle and ran downhill, shouting, whooping, laughing. When the two came face-to-face, technical sergeant Edward Guy of the 141st Infantry Regiment embraced Sakumoto of the 442nd in a bear hug.
At about the same moment, Rudy Tokiwa and Chester Tanaka, approaching from a different direction, saw a helmet moving in a foxhole. They froze. Tanaka leveled his rifle, preparing to shoot, but hesitated. It was an American helmet. Tanaka lowered the rifle, and Sergeant Bill Hull scrambled out of the hole.
Someone unseen in the woods called out, “Hey, the 442 guys are here!” Texans began rising out of the earth, emerging from camouflaged foxholes all around the Nisei soldiers like prairie dogs popping from their burrows, their faces gaunt, begrimed, their eyes hollow.
Realizing that their ordeal was finally over, they hugged one another, some of them laughing, some blinking away tears. When Rudy approached them, one of the Texans croaked out, “God, thank you, thank you, thank you.”[58]
As the Texans filtered out of the woods and onto a muddy logging road, a newsreel cameraman arrived by jeep and began to film the scene. The rescued GIs shook the Nisei soldiers’ hands and patted them on their backs. The Nisei handed them cigarettes, candy bars, and canteens full of water. The Texans smiled wearily and said thank you again but then walked quickly on. None of them wanted to linger. They just wanted to get off the mountain.
* * *
★ ★ ★ ★
On November 9, in Parker, Arizona, a little town just north of Poston, Private Raymond Matsuda wandered into a barbershop to get a haircut. He was on crutches, having been shot in the knee in Italy that July. Recently released from a hospital in California, he was on his way to visit friends incarcerated in the Poston camp.
Raymond figured he should get spruced up before heading to the camp. So, wearing a uniform emblazoned with the 442nd patch and six or seven other army ribbons and badges, including the Purple Heart, he hobbled through the barbershop’s double swinging doors.
He did not see, or he chose to ignore, a sign on the door.
Japs Keep Out, You Rats.
The proprietor, Andy Hale, took one look at Matsuda, strode over to him, cussing, and shoved him back out through the doors, crutches and all.
Asked about it later, Hale was unapologetic. “I don’t want none of their business . . . I sure as hell won’t work on a Jap.” When someone pointed out that Matsuda was both an American citizen and a wounded US Army soldier, Hale just snarled, “They all look alike to me.”[59]
At Poston, every morning since Rudy’s departure for the army, before the dawn began to lighten the desert sky, before the doves began to coo in the mesquite trees down by the river, his mother, Fusa Tokiwa, was one of the first to rise. She checked her slippers carefully to make sure no scorpions had moved in during the night. Then she stepped quietly out of her room and made her way through the chill desert air to the women’s showers. When she got there, she turned the cold water tap on and stepped into the freezing stream, gasping and shutting her eyes tight against the pain. As she endured the intense physical discomfort, she prayed silently for her son, that God would let her sacrifice be enough, that he would allow Rudy to come home safe.
On November 11, the camp newspaper, the Poston Chronicle, reprinted parts of an Associated Press story, the first brief telling of what had happened in the Vosges. The article quoted one of the rescued Texans, Private Walter Yattaw, expressing his gratitude. “It really was ironical that we were so glad to see the Japanese, but boy, they are real Americans.”
The piece had few specific details about what Fusa Tokiwa and everyone in camp most wanted to know: the casualties. That news would soon begin to arrive in dribs and drabs, brought by blunt telegrams or by military officers arriving unexpectedly in full dress uniforms.
* * *
★ ★ ★ ★
After a further week of fighting and a few days’ rest, the surviving members of the 442nd assembled on November 12 in a snowy field so General Dahlquist could formally acknowledge their role in rescuing what by now everyone was calling the “Lost Battalion.”
Fred Shiosaki stood with what was left of K Company, his rifle over his shoulder, watching wearily as Dahlquist and a cluster of officers approached them in a jeep.
Like all the men around him, Fred was tired in his bones and tired in his soul. His face was pinched and pale, his cheeks devoid of their usual rosiness. His eyes were downcast, blank. A dusting of snow clung to his shoulders and sleeves, and his feet still throbbed from the ravages of trench foot.
At last, the ceremony got underway. A color guard paraded past the Nisei, led by the 442nd’s regimental band. Dahlquist and Lieutenant Colonel Virgil Miller clambered out of their jeep. Miller had taken over command of the 442nd when Pence was wounded.
Now he and Dahlquist stepped forward. Instead of addressing the men, Dahlquist paused, looked at the paltry number of men lined up in front of him, a fraction of what he had expected, and scowled. He turned to Miller and snarled, “Colonel, I told you to have the whole regiment out here. When I order everyone to pass in review, I mean everybody will pass in review!”[60]
Stunned survivors of the Lost Battalion rescue standing in review for General Dahlquist.
Miller’s jaw clenched, and a long, awkward silence ensued. Then he pivoted slowly, looked the general in the eye, and, his voice wavering, croaked, “General, this is the regiment. This is all I have left.” His eyes were filled with tears.[61]
Dahlquist fell silent. For the first time, he realized the price the Nisei had paid to rescue the Texans. Far more Nisei had been lost than Texans had been rescued. He stuttered out a few words of congratulations then silently made his way down the lines of soldiers, pinning on the chest of each a ribbon representing a Distinguished Unit Citation.
As he passed and shook their hands, the men simply stared past him, looking over his shoulder at the dark mountains beyond.
Chapter 20
Nearly nine hundred of Poston’s young people were now in the armed services, and even as the casualty lists from France grew, more were signing up. Almost every week, friends and well-wishers gathered for farewell ceremonies at the Cottonwood Bowl. The new recruits left with a particular sense of pride. After three years, in spite of the heat, the dust storms, the monotony of mess-hall meals, and the degradation of confinement, the people at Poston, as at the other camps, had created extraordinary communities behind barbed wire, and they were justly proud of them. In the face of injustice and humiliation, they had stood tall. They nourished their spiritual lives, educated their children, found a refuge in creativity and productivity.
They dug irrigation canals from the Colorado River to the camp, and land that had been nothing but sagebrush and sand was now green. Vegetable patches flourished; tea gardens surrounded ponds full of koi and goldfish. Carefully transplanted cottonwood trees offered at least a bit of shade over barracks and walkways.
Some people wrote haiku and practiced calligraphy, or they carved ironwood and polished semiprecious stones into exquisite sculptures. Others crafted paper flowers from pages torn from mail-order catalogs and tissue wrappers from oranges and apples and used the paper flowers to create ikebana arrangements, adding seedpods, vines, and twigs they found in the surrounding desert.
The Cottonwood Bowl now hosted almost daily theatrical performances, ranging from kindergarten pageants to formal Kabuki productions. It continued to be used for memorial services, too, of which there were ever more as the 442nd’s casualties mounted.
Buddhist priests and Christian ministers tended to their flocks. Doctors, lawyers, architects, farmers, carpenters, truck drivers, florists, and electricians all brought their specialized skills to bear on improving the quality of camp life.
There were still many hardships and difficulties, though, and many disruptions to traditional family life. Young people now preferred to take their meals with their friends and not with their families. Those who had grown up on remote farms, observing their parents’ traditional ways, now mixed with young people who had grown up wearing the latest fashions and listening to the latest popular music.
Some young Japanese American women, flying in the face of traditional gender norms, were determined to serve in the military. In February 1943, shortly after Nisei men were first allowed to serve, the Army Nurse Corps began accepting Japanese American women. Then, in September, the Women’s Army Corps also began to enlist Japanese American women.
For the most part, the women found themselves doing clerical work, acting as typists, stenographers, and supply clerks. But forty-eight of them who had good Japanese-language skills were assigned to the army’s Military Intelligence Service Language School, to work as translators of intercepted Japanese communications.
Another 350 joined the Cadet Nurse Corps, a nonmilitary program designed to replace the thousands of nurses who left American hospitals to serve overseas. The program offered a rare opportunity for Japanese American women to pursue a career outside the home.
Many of the Nisei women who wanted to serve faced strong opposition from friends and family members. Those who persisted were largely motivated by the same reasons that had led Nisei men in the camps to enlist.
Some had brothers in the army and wanted to support them. Some wanted to get out from behind the barbed wire of the camps. Some saw an opportunity to acquire job skills they could use after the war. Most, though, simply wanted to show their loyalty to their country, to do what they could to serve it, and to help end the war as quickly as possible so they could all return home. For many, though, that dream was cut short when they found that accredited nursing programs more often than not refused to admit Japanese American students, on the basis of their race.
