Infamy (32 page)

The American soldier was named Clarence Matsumura, from the island of Maui in Hawaii. He remembered finding more survivors along the roadside. “Almost all of them were wearing black and white striped uniforms. I don’t know how any of them could stand on their feet. They were nothing. They couldn’t speak. Most of them were lying on the ground, many of them unconscious.”

Matsumura began putting the survivors in barns, covering them with blankets, and giving them water and broth. Solly Ganor and the others could not swallow solid food. Some tried and some died, right there. Then the Americans started going into villages along the road, putting the German civilians out in the cold and putting the freed prisoners in their beds and on their couches and rugs.

Fifty years later, Ganor, who immigrated to Israel, received a telephone call from a hotel in Jerusalem, where a group of men, Nisei veterans, were staying on a reunion tour. He agreed to come to the hotel. “Solly,” said an American guide, introducing the men, “this is Clarence Matsumura. We think he is the man who saved you.”

Ganor remembered him. The two old men fell into each other’s arms.

*   *   *

On April 23, Inouye’s platoon, led now by Sergeant Gordon Takasaki, was ordered to take a Tuscan village, San Terenzo, a well-fortified outpost of the Gothic Line. One of the men who had served earlier in the battle where Inouye had lost his arm was a new replacement, Private Stanley Hayami. He wrote home before the battle for San Terenzo, “Well, doggone, here I am in Italy now! After studying all that French, I gotta learn Italian! Fooey! Yesterday was Easter and I went to the services. Reminded me of all the other Easters I’ve had. Guess I’ll remember this one for a long time.”

The Germans retreating north in Italy began surrendering in the hundreds, then the thousands. Army historians later reconstructed what happened in San Terenzo.

Through heavy German mortar, machine gun and artillery fire, Sgt. Takasaki advanced exposing himself to heavy fire in his attempt to surround and disorganize the enemy. Wounded in the chest by machine gun fire, he continued to direct his men in battle.… His men cut the enemy escape road and brilliantly accomplished their mission. Sgt. Takasaki died in the last major campaign of the 442nd. Five other
Nisei
were killed in the engagement.

One of them was Stanley Hayami.

Stanley, whose brother Frank was wounded in the same engagement, was posthumously awarded a Bronze Star. The citation reported that during the battle he had left his covered position and approached to help the men who had been wounded. Despite the shots directed at him from the hostile machine gun and sniper, he reached the first casualty, kneeled, and administered first aid. Still exposed to heavy enemy fire, he continued on to help another man. While aiding these men, he was mortally wounded.

Stanley was one of seven hundred Nisei killed in Europe. Sixty-seven more were missing in action. More than nine thousand were wounded.

That spring, the war in Europe was over. At Heart Mountain, the Hayami family celebrated V-E (Victory in Europe) Day on May 8, not knowing what had happened to their son Stanley. The telegram sent to Heart Mountain arrived the next day: “The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your son Pvt. Hayami Stanley K. was killed in Action in Italy 23 Apr 45. Confirming letter follows. J.A. Ulio the Adjutant General.”

Talking later, Grace and her mother discovered that they both had the same dream on the same night in April. It was April 23, the day Stanley died. Both of them dreamed that Stanley had come to them asking for a glass of water.

Guy Robertson, WRA director of Heart Mountain, paid tribute to Hayami and five other young men from Heart Mountain who had given their lives in battle. The Boy Scouts Drum and Bugle Corps opened the ceremony with an overture. Wreaths were laid before the Gold Star Flag by Camp Fire Girls and Girl Scouts, while the Boy Scouts band played “Nearer My God to Thee.”

10

GOING “HOME”

V-J DAY: AUGUST
15
,
1945

Sergeant Ben Kuroki flew twenty-eight B-29 missions over Japan—that made his total fifty-eight bombing missions over Germany, Italy, and Japan—but his nerves were beginning to fray. He found himself thinking and dreaming of innocent women and children burning to death in the firestorms caused by the incendiaries his plane was dropping over the frail wooden and paper-screen houses of the Japanese capital.

Then the war was over.

On August 6, 1945, the
Enola Gay
dropped its bomb on Hiroshima; another B-29, the
Bockscar
, dropped one on Nagasaki. Two weeks later, Ben Kuroki’s own war was ended by another American soldier, a drunken American, who stabbed him in the head while they were playing cards and arguing about which of them was “a better American.” He lost a lot of blood; it took twenty-four stitches to close the wound. He was in a hospital on Tinian Island and could not go home with the rest of his crew.

The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the Japanese American “Go for Broke” unit, earned more than eighteen thousand individual decorations, the highest number per capita of any unit in the army—including one Medal of Honor, fifty-three Distinguished Service Crosses, 588 Silver Stars, fifty-two hundred Bronze Star Medals, 9,486 Purple Hearts, and eight Presidential Unit Citations, the nation’s top award for combat units. More than fifty years later, in June of 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded twenty additional Medals of Honor to members of the One Hundredth Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the result of a reexamination of the files of dozens of Japanese American soldiers to see if any of them might have been denied awards because of possible prejudice by superior officers.

*   *   *

Months earlier, on December 15, 1944, Governor Earl Warren had received a letter from Major General Robert R. Lewis stating that “military necessity” should no longer be applied to the evacuation of California’s Japanese and Japanese American population. “It is my hope,” wrote Lewis, “that the return of those Japanese-Americans who choose to return may be accomplished without serious incidents.… I am confident that the fine Americans of your state will realize that among the American citizens of Japanese ancestry who are being permitted to return there are many families with sons or daughters now serving in our Armed Forces.”

General Lewis and Governor Warren were more than a bit overconfident in assessing the attitudes of people in the three states of the West Coast. Four days after Lewis wrote to Warren, an army intelligence report stated: “There are still 100 Salinas boys in Japanese prison camps and the Salinas’ mothers of those sons are somewhat bitter against the order permitting Japanese to return [to California] and have stated that the Japanese knew what happened on Bataan and won’t want to face us any more than we will be able to stand meeting them.” Like fellow Legionnaires in Oregon, the commander of the Salinas American Legion Post No. 31 told a local newspaper, “We don’t want Japanese here.”

When Governor Warren was interviewed in 1971 as part of an oral history for the Bancroft Library at the University of California, he recalled how he was contacted by the secretary of the army early in 1945 and he said that he had immediately agreed to the return of the Japanese and Japanese Americans to their homes in his state.

“It was a Saturday morning and I was in Los Angeles,” Warren said. “He told me that Monday at noon they were going to start letting the Japanese come back and asked me if I would help them do it. Well, I told him that I would. The war was all over and everything was—we had no need to fear anything.”

Warren told Amelia R. Fry in his contribution to the Berkeley Oral History Project:

I was on the telephone, I’ll bet nine-tenths of the time between then and Monday noon when it was finally announced … telling [people] that it was going to be done, and telling them that when we advocated the relocation of the Japanese we did it because we thought it was in the interest of the war, and the war’s over. The worst thing that could happen to the state of California would be to have us maintain a feeling of antagonism toward the Japanese who had lived in our state and who hadn’t done anything wrong, and that I hoped they would cooperate with the federal government and with me in bringing them back to California so they could be happy here.

Warren then recalled a positive view of the return.

They came back and started right to school, you know. The kids all welcomed them and everything. We had maybe a half a dozen or so instances of hoodlums going by and throwing rocks into windows and so forth, but most of those were caught and prosecuted and were convicted of doing it and the thing was just washed out. I don’t believe the Japanese were ever as happy in our state as they have been since.

Politicians are flexible folk. Warren and Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron, who, among others, had called for the evacuation in 1942, realized that there was no way to stop the WRA and the army from going ahead with their resettlement programs. The governor and the mayor made a point of greeting returnees from the camps at Union Station in Los Angeles. That’s where the newspaper photographers and reporters were.

*   *   *

By the beginning of 1945, after the White House released Public Proclamation 21, officially ending the evacuation, the population of the camps was down to almost 90,000. Without much publicity more than 25,000 American Japanese evacuees had already left, gone out to work, study, or fight during the first three years of the incarceration. In addition to the 4,300 students who went to colleges willing to accept them, most in the Midwest, more than four times as many Japanese American workers spread out to work in fields and factories and in offices and hospitals everywhere but on the West Coast. The majority of the permanently released Nisei—the farm workers were on temporary release—settled in seven states: Illinois (7,652); Colorado (3,185); Ohio (2,854); Idaho (2,084); Michigan (1,990); Minnesota (1,292); New York (1,131). A total of 25,778 Nisei, men and women, served in the U.S. Army between July 1, 1940, and June 30, 1945, winning 18,143 individual combat decorations in the ranks of the One Hundredth Battalion, the 442nd Combat Regiment, the 1399th Engineers Construction Battalion, the MIS in the Pacific, and a few smaller Japanese American units in Europe. An estimated 13,500 of those men were from the mainland and 12,250 were from Hawaii. More than 2,000 American Japanese and 800 Japanese from Peru and other South American countries had been sent to Japan on Swedish ships in exchange for American diplomats, missionaries, and other civilians held in Japanese camps from Manila to Tokyo.

Many had left the camps over the years, and since it was more than obvious by the beginning of 1945 that the United States was going to win the war in the Pacific, both the War Department and the War Relocation Authority were becoming more and more anxious to speed up the closing of the camps. The WRA barely checked anymore when evacuees wanted to leave, which is why it had no record at all of the whereabouts of at least twenty-three hundred supposed evacuees. Nearly all the camps were scheduled to be closed before the end of the year, some within months. The idea was to empty all the camps while keeping so-called disloyals at Tule Lake Segregation Center and in the Justice Department prisons in Bismarck, North Dakota; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Crystal City, Texas. After the announcement of the closings, the WRA began shutting down camp schools and cutting back on water and electric supplies.

Predictably, those who willingly left the camps were the most Americanized of the evacuees. Most of those who came back “home” to the West Coast or went to midwestern or eastern states were, in general, single, educated Nisei, young men, and some very strong and ambitious young women. They were pharmacists, teachers, engineers, mechanics, farmers, hotel workers, domestics, and waitresses. Many of them went to welcoming cities stripped of Caucasian workers by the war. Almost 20,000 of the freed Nisei went to Chicago. Others headed for Denver, Salt Lake City, Cleveland, Minneapolis–St. Paul, and St. Louis. The state of Utah and the city of Cincinnati sent representatives to the camps to recruit workers. Some chose New Jersey, where the frozen food company Seabrook Farms had lost local workers to the military or defense plants. Seabrook and International Harvester were among the corporations that posted job openings in the camps. Most of those who left first were Christians. Quaker meetings and hundreds of Protestant churches and organizations helped find homes and jobs for their religious brethren. In addition, 250 Nisei from Topaz were working in munitions factories in Utah. Several dozen more were in Washington, D.C., working for the War Department.

When news of the camp closings spread, once again waves of confusion washed over those remaining in the camps. Jeanne Wakatsuki described some of the reactions at Manzanar: “By the end of 1944 about 6,000 people remained at Manzanar and those, for the most part, were the aging and the young. Whoever had prospects on the outside and the energy to go, was leaving, relocating, or entering military service.”

The outlook for young Nisei was quite different from that of their elders. Children and young people more often than not had a different experience, a better experience. As the school in Manzanar was closing down, fifth graders in camp schools were asked by a camp magazine,
Whirlwinds
, what they liked and disliked about life there. They liked “the mountains, the creeks, the trees and birds, the bright stars, the snow in winter, the good drinking water, the free food, the free electricity and water.” Their dislikes included “the desert, the wind storms, the hard winds, the cold winters, the fence around the camp, a one-room house.”

The differences in the attitudes of the young and the old were picked up by the press. On August 31, 1945, three weeks after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, a
Los Angeles Times
reporter, Tom Caton, reported from Manzanar under the headline, “Japs at Manzanar Hope for Change: Elders Planning to Leave Center Remain Doubtful and
Nisei
Admit Wishful Thinking.” Caton quoted Jeanne Wakatsuki’s mother, Riku, who looked forward to returning to Terminal Island. “It will be good to go back to fishing and canning. We should get along if we can get together in our little fishing villages again.” That would never happen. The bungalows of the San Pedro fishing families were knocked down by bulldozers a week after the residents were evacuated.