Facing the Mountain (Adapted for Young Readers), page 9
Now the men of K Company arrived at their assigned area for making a camp, on a grassy, wildflower-strewn hillside five miles east of Anzio. Exhausted, and out of shape after nearly a month at sea, they threw down their gear, sat on the ground, and began picking through their K-ration boxes, trying to find something palatable to eat.
On the hike in, some of them had bartered with locals, exchanging cigarettes for bunches of sweet, white onions, baby carrots, and bags of string beans to supplement their rations.
While they were sitting in the afternoon sun, eating and looking out over Anzio and the turquoise sea beyond, news began to filter through. At the same time as they were boarding their landing craft the previous day, tens of thousands of men like them were pouring off similar craft in northern France, in a place called Normandy, plunging into the cold Atlantic, wading ashore onto the beaches into gales of machine-gun and artillery fire. The much-anticipated Allied invasion of northern Europe had finally begun. The news about D-Day heartened the Nisei soldiers. Maybe this war they were about to become part of would be short and relatively easy.
Kats was chatting with George Oiye and Sus Ito nearby when one of their officers hurried up and told them to dig foxholes. Although the Germans were retreating north, they still had some very big guns within range. Suddenly, shells came screaming over their heads. To Kats, they sounded enormous, like washing machines hurtling through the sky. His stomach tightened. He dove for his foxhole. They all did. The barrage was short-lived, but when it was over and Kats climbed out of his foxhole, he noticed he’d gone weak in the knees with fear. The men dusted themselves off and laughed about what had happened. At least now they’d been under fire.
Then, as a full moon rose above the dark Italian hills, the black forms of German bombers appeared in the sky overhead. The Nisei soldiers dove for their foxholes and hunkered down again. The ground trembled with the concussions of bombs and occasionally a deeper roar and a more violent trembling when towers of flame and smoke rose from the munitions dumps down by the beach.
As soon as they realized they were not the target, the men peered over the edge of their burrows, scared but exhilarated too. The German planes finally peeled away and disappeared over the horizon, and the men crawled out of their foxholes again, talking excitedly, their hearts thumping.
The next afternoon, the men of the 442nd traveled to a new encampment, where they came across some old friends. For the Buddhaheads in particular, it was a joy to meet up with the men of the 100th Infantry Battalion. They sat in circles on the grass swapping news, talking story, showing one another photographs and letters from home.
It didn’t take long for the 442nd men to see that these weren’t the same guys they had known back home, nor were they the swaggering recruits with whom they had been briefly reunited at Camp Shelby. The men of the 100th had survived months of brutal fighting in southern Italy, and it had taken a toll on them.
Sometimes they looked off into space or got up and walked away in the middle of a conversation. They weren’t unfriendly, but the new arrivals could see at a glance that there was something hardened about them now.
The next day, the 100th was formally attached to the 442nd RCT. In recognition of their extraordinary valor in southern Italy, the men of the 100th were allowed to keep their original designation and were called the 100th Infantry Battalion (Separate). Now, finally, the Nisei soldiers were all together, a single all–Japanese American fighting force.
Over the next two weeks, Nisei troops traveled north by truck, creeping toward the front lines and the German forces in western Tuscany. With each stop, their living conditions grew more spartan. There were no tents now. They slept in hay barns or under the stars. The civilians they encountered were, if anything, even poorer and more desperate here than those in Naples and Anzio. The faces of some were blackened with soot from living in caves, cooking over charcoal fires, eating whatever they could scavenge. And yet, as they passed some farmhouses—those that were still intact—Italians, mostly older people, ventured cautiously out to greet and encourage them.
As they approached the front lines, the terrain began to change too. The open coastal plain gave way first to rolling hills and then to forested ridges rising up toward mountain ranges. The Nisei troops began to see something most of them had never seen before: dead German soldiers, lying sprawled in fields or in ditches. The 442nd men stared silently at the corpses. The 100th guys didn’t even seem to notice them.
On June 25, the men clambered out of their trucks and marched fifteen miles up narrow, winding roads into the hills. Shells whistled regularly over their heads now, fired from somewhere behind them—their own artillery pounding whatever it was that lay in the hills ahead.
When they encamped that night, Chaplains Yamada and Higuchi gathered as many of their men as they could, and they knelt together in the dirt and prayed. Whether they were religious or not, whether they were Buddhist or Christian or Shinto or none of the above, whether or not they had ever prayed in their lives, the men all prayed together now as the earth trembled and flashes of light lit up in the hills ahead. In the morning they were to attack.
Few of them slept, despite the long hike. They lay on the cold ground, looking up at the stars and wondering what battle would be like. But they couldn’t know. They couldn’t know that they were about to see and do things that would change them utterly. They couldn’t yet understand that they were about to step off the edge of the world.
Chapter 16
At 6:22 on the morning of June 26, as the sun rose over western Tuscany, Cannoneer Roy Fujii picked up a shell to load into the breech of the howitzer Kats and his artillery crew had named Kuuipo—“Sweetheart” in Hawaiian. Kats crouched nearby, his fingers in his ears, having just set the coordinates for what was about to be the 522nd’s first shot of the war. Their target was a formation of German vehicles about to get underway, two miles south of their position.
As Roy shoved the shell into the breech, it jammed. For a few moments, he wrestled with it. Swore at it. Wrestled with it some more. With the enemy vehicles liable to move at any moment, there was no time to lose. Roy picked up a sledgehammer, and—disregarding the distinct possibility that he would detonate the thing and kill them all—began pounding on the shell.
At last it popped into the breech. One of the other men pulled the lanyard, the shot was off, and the 442nd’s artillerymen were finally at war.
A little to the north, the young men of K Company were spread out, walking ten feet apart through fields and olive groves. They weren’t sure where they were going except that it was somewhere in the hills ahead of them and that they should expect to run into German resistance by midmorning. Now and then they heard the sharp, splitting sound of a rooster crowing or the cooing of wood pigeons from dark forests of cork oaks.
But mostly the world was silent and still except for the shuffling of their boots, the clanking of their gear. Fred found to his surprise that he was not particularly afraid. More eager than afraid, anyway. Anxious for the fighting to start, if for no other reason than to know for sure that he wouldn’t run.
Directly ahead of them on a low hill lay the town of Suvereto, an attractive jumble of buildings with red tile roofs. Beyond the town rose steeper hills clad in olive groves with vineyards on the lower slopes and mixed deciduous forests higher up. At the summit of those hills was a tiny hamlet called Belvedere that the Germans were using as an observation post from which to direct artillery fire on the countryside below.
The morning blossomed into a lovely early summer day, the kind when you could see for miles if you had a good vantage point. And that’s exactly what the Germans had. All morning they had been biding their time, watching the Nisei advance on Suvereto. Now they unleashed a torrent of shrieking steel.
The worst of it fell on F Company. Mortar shells landed among them with devastating effect, blowing men off their feet. Then Tiger tanks—enormous sixty-ton machines armed with massive eighty-eight-millimeter main guns and a pair of machine guns—rolled out from the cover of nearby woods and began to fire on the Nisei soldiers, more or less at point-blank range. Clutching their helmets to their heads, those F Company men who were still able to move scrambled and crawled for any cover they could find—a tree, a ditch, a stone wall, a ripple in the landscape.
In the midst of the chaos, Private Kiyoshi Muranaga grabbed a mortar tube, shoved some mortar shells into his pack, and scrambled out into the middle of a field. From there he had a clear line of sight on one of the tanks. His third shot landed directly in front of the tank but slightly short.
Before Muranaga could adjust the range and get off another shot, the German tank crew zeroed in on his position and fired, killing him instantly. But then, apparently rattled by the mortar fire, they withdrew into the woods, and Muranaga’s squad was able to scramble to safer ground.
The K Company men were also in trouble. They were under direct fire from heavy machine guns immediately in front of them as well as from artillery pieces higher up in the hills. Fred and Rudy flung themselves on the ground and tried to dig in, frantically scraping the rocky, sunbaked earth with field shovels, bayonets, even their helmets.
By late morning, they had been pinned down for hours, steadily taking casualties, unable either to advance on the town or to retreat to safer ground. Fred noticed that all the shells were coming from the Germans’ side. Where was their artillery? Where was the 522nd?
After firing at the German vehicles, Kats and the rest of the 522nd had been ordered to move north to take up positions closer to Suvereto, where they would be better able to support the infantry. But all three batteries were still slowly wending their way up narrow country roads, largely unaware of the disaster unfolding in the hills.
By noon, Colonel Pence, Major General Charles Ryder, and Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Singles, commander of the 100th, had gathered enough information to come up with a plan for getting the 442nd out of its jam.
The commanders had held the more experienced Nisei soldiers of the 100th in reserve. Now orders went out, and within an hour A and B Companies of the 100th were racing uphill and circling around behind the Germans. Within another hour, they had silenced most of the German artillery, destroyed their observation posts, overrun Belvedere in house-to-house fighting, and sent the Germans fleeing on the road to the next town to the north, Sassetta.
The officers of the 100th had anticipated that retreat and had sent more men ahead to ambush the withdrawing Germans. They lay hidden in the dense foliage beside the road, clutching their guns, waiting for the Germans to rush into their trap.
They held their fire until all the German vehicles were nearly abreast of them, then they opened up with all they had, unleashing thundering volleys of fire.
It was more or less a massacre.
A few minutes later, more German troops rumbled down the road in trucks. As soon as their drivers realized they were driving into an ambush, they accelerated, swerving this way and that, trying to navigate their way around the abandoned vehicles littering the roadway.
The Nisei opened fire again. Men in gray uniforms tumbled from the backs of trucks and tried to run or crawl away.
Again, it was a massacre.
The 442nd’s first day of combat had been brutal, its performance uneven at best. What started as a debacle for the Americans had turned into a rout of German troops—but only with help from the 100th, and only after the young men of the 442nd had seen things they’d never dreamed of seeing.
Rudy Tokiwa found a patch of ground to stretch out on. Even though the evening was chilly, he was sweating. And he felt sick. Sicker than he’d ever felt. So did Fred. A shaken Hiro Higuchi wrote to his wife about his first experience of war: “It’s just hell—un-dreamable goriness and death . . . Someday I will tell you all about it, but now I don’t want to think about it.”[49]
* * *
★ ★ ★ ★
Over the last days of June and into July and then August, the 442nd fought almost continuously, day and night. Along with other elements of the Fifth Army, the men crept north through western Tuscany, mile by mile, sometimes yard by yard, trying to push the well-dug-in Germans north toward the Arno River.
As the terrain grew even steeper, the Nisei soldiers had to crawl uphill, grabbing at roots and rocks. In the humid heat of an Italian summer, it would have been grueling work even without someone shooting at them.
The 442nd and the 100th continued to take tremendous casualties. By early July, nearly four hundred of the roughly four thousand Nisei troops who arrived in Anzio in May had been killed or wounded.
But every time one of them went down, the others learned something new about surviving. Never linger in a crossroads—German artillery will have it zeroed in. Never pause in the shade under a single tree in the middle of an open field, for the same reason. And never, ever, kick a can in the road.
One thing the Germans had learned about American boys was that if they came across a can lying on the ground, they were almost certain to kick it down the road. In Italy, it was likely to be sitting on a land mine.
Indeed, most of the casualties were from mines. The Germans laid thousands of them across the Italian countryside, and they were nearly impossible to detect unless you got down on your hands and knees and crawled, inspecting the ground in front of you. Even then you could easily fail to see them and wind up losing an arm, a leg, or your life.
In the early hours of August 25, Harry Madokoro—Rudy’s friend from Poston, one of those who had talked the others into signing up—stepped on a mine. In an instant, he simply disappeared in a shower of mud, metal, blood, and bone. There was nothing Rudy or any of his friends could do but stare silently at the crumpled form lying in the dark void where Harry had once been.
* * *
★ ★ ★ ★
As a runner, Rudy was particularly wary of mines. He spent much of his time out on his own, carrying messages to and from the front lines. He was tired and dirty all the time. His feet ached. His face was unshaven and perpetually caked in sweat and dust. His uniform was torn and ragged, and it stank. At night he sometimes had to crawl into culverts or bushes alongside some dried-up stream, alone and unfed, to try to get some sleep.
But because Rudy was Rudy, he found opportunities wherever he went. When passing through villages, rather than using the streets, he hopped fences from one backyard to the next. The backyards were where the good stuff was: a head of cauliflower, a handful of green onions, a nice fat cabbage, a fistful of baby carrots, half a dozen eggs—or, better yet, the hen sitting on the eggs. When he could, he left the owner a bar of chocolate or a pack of cigarettes as payment for whatever he took. When he couldn’t, he declared the booty the spoils of war.
He foraged in the open countryside too, collecting sweet, plump wild figs from the woods and harvesting watercress growing by the sides of ponds. Sometimes he came across rabbits, but he always passed them by. As a kid in Salinas, he had a pet rabbit that followed him around the farm and snuggled with him at night. He couldn’t bring himself to kill a rabbit.
Rudy seldom returned without a pack full of fresh food for his guys in K Company, and he made a lot of friends that way. The Buddhaheads were particularly grateful. Sometimes they would just prepare okazu—little side dishes of vegetables to go with their rations. When they had enough to work with, they made chicken hekka, a Hawaiian stew.
As they spooned it into their mouths from their stainless-steel mess kits, they smiled, often for the first time in days, even though the artillery boomed and machine guns rattled in the hills around them. It was the taste of home.
* * *
★ ★ ★ ★
After months of nearly constant combat, the 442nd finally got a break. The men headed south to the seaside village of Vada. If there was a place in Italy that looked like Hawaiʻi, this was it—a mile-long stretch of white-sand beach. There were even palm trees scattered along the shoreline. The Buddhaheads lost no time making Waikīkī Beach signs and affixing them to the palms. Then they waded eagerly into the warm aquamarine water and swam.
Fred Shiosaki and some of the K Company men commandeered a skiff, rowed a safe distance from the swimmers, and threw hand grenades into the water. As white columns of water erupted from the surface, a bounty of seafood floated up: sea bass, octopus, sea bream, squid—all stunned by the explosion, easy to grab, and ready to grill or to slice up for sashimi.
The Nisei soldiers spent long days on the beach, feasting on fish and cooking up Hawaiian dishes like chicken hekka and kālua pig, reading novels, playing their guitars and ukuleles, talking story—all of them, Buddhaheads and kotonks, speaking mostly Hawaiian Pidgin now. They tried desperately to push out of their minds what they had just been through.
Many of the officers stayed with Italian families, sharing their meals and drinking good wine with them. Chaplain Yamada was with a family of professional entertainers. When they found out he was from Hawaiʻi, they pulled out some cellophane grass skirts and began to perform one of their regular acts, shimmying and swaying a sort of hula—much to Yamada’s thigh-slapping delight.
Yamada and Higuchi spent most of their time sitting together in a favorite haystack, watching Italian farmers thresh wheat and working on their correspondence. Balancing typewriters on their laps, the two chaplains labored over condolence letters to the families of men who had been killed during the preceding few weeks.
The soldiers of the 442nd were not the same men who had landed in Italy four months before. They had come anxious to prove their loyalty, determined not to bring shame on themselves or their families. They were united by their shared ethnic identity, by friendships developed on the beaches in Hawaiʻi or in the mud at Camp Shelby. But now there was something more uniting them. Now they were bound together by something born out of their experience in battle, by the certain knowledge that before this war was over more of them would die, and that it was up to each of them to watch out for the others.
