442nd story from WW2

[billcoe]

I want to share this true story before it disappears from the face of the earth. It's short as I got it 2nd hand so stay with me.

 

My wife's late father, Kiichi Sonoda, was in the 442nd in Europe, i company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/442nd They eventually became the most decorated unit serving in WW2, mostly because they were ordered to do the real shit jobs, and they took these head on uncomplainingly. Kiichi was on patrol outside of Pisa when some Germans jumped up out of the tall grass next to the waterway they were walking and opened fire. Kiichi thought he snapped a shot off from the hip and nailed the guy who shot him but wasn't sure as at the same time he took a hit to the chest that knocked him on his back. Kiichi watched as the head of the medic who came over to assist him and bandage his chest wound exploded and the dead medic slumped on top of him. Eventually he got the dead man off of him and with his wounded buddy (sorry, forgot his name) walked the 10 miles to the aid station. There was a vehicle available, but they wanted to leave that for those who were seriously wounded so they walked.

 

This wound saved his life as it turns out...perhaps more than once. The main one he missed was the rescue of the Lost Battalion. Ken Burns covered that pretty well in his documentary of the unit so I won't cover it here. However, before they were ordered to go save the lost battalion, they were pulled out of Pisa and sent to Northern Italy to dislodge the Germans in the cliff side fortifications of the Dolomites there. Regular US troops and extensive bombardment had failed to roust the Germans in there. In fact, a couple of years later these very Germans who had dug in so well, that they were still in there after the war was literally over. They had not surrendered and were still fighting in Italy even as Berlin had fallen. So the US think tank sees that this has to be some mandatory ugly manno-to manno stuff and decides to send the 442nd in there to do the job. The kids get there and try an attack and get shit on bad almost as soon as they show up. There's no easy way up to the Germans as the few trails through the cliffs were very heavily defended by machine guns in strongly fortified positions from above. Many of the kids die learning this the hard way trying this and that. After a while, they finally decided that the only way to get up there to kill these Germans, the ONLY way, was right up the very cliffs. But the catch was, a daytime climb, although possibly able to be done physically, would expose them to murderous fire from above. They feel that they might be able climb it in the dark. With weapons. In combat boots. Free solo. Silently. No one gives this much of a chance, but it's the only way of overrunning these German positions ever happening. So the bulk of the boys pull back to fixed positions and while waiting try for an occasional sniper shot. They were waiting for the moon to wane so that it would be very very dark.

 

The moon finally goes dark and they organize and start up, climbing by feel up the cliffs in the blackest of night. It's steep, it's black, and there are men on top who will kill them. The part Kiichi really wanted to share with me, was that on that cliff, in the dark, men started to fall off. And when they fell, they did not utter a word. Not a scream, not a humpph, no utterance of any kind. They fell to their deaths forcing themselves to die as silently as possible so as to not betray the position of those friends who would hopefully be left living. Eventually this tactic as well was shown to be a failure, and these kids, who did not know the word fail and had still not given up, were pulled out by the upper ups for an emergency rescue of a Texas battalion who had been surrounded and were trapped. That's a whole 'nother story though.

[Toast]

Thanks for sharing Bill. My uncle was also in I Company, and he was probably friends with your Father in law. I didn’t really learn to appreciate the sheer heroics of who my uncle was until after he passed. The few 442nd veterans who remain today are now in their late eighties and falling away like flies each month.

 

While my uncle was alive, he just my uncle Shiro. Since he passed away, I started helping with the NVC Foundation. Their purpose is to preserve the legacy of the Nisei war veterans. I began to hear firsthand accounts of what these guys went thru during and after the war. I Company was among the most legendary. After the rescue of the Texas Lost Battalion, a dimwitted Coronel called for an assembly of troops to recognize their accomplishment. When I Company passed by, all eight of them, he got upset at the laggards who were too lazy to get out of bed. Truth was, that was all that remained of them. The rest were casualties.

 

When the war passed, a handful returned to Seattle. Racism was prevalent. There were No Jap Allowed signs posted on some of the businesses their families once ran. In 1942 they had a week or two to liquidate all possessions and were ushered into horse stalls at the Puyallup Fair Grounds and eventually onto remote internment camps in the interior.

 

Anyway, Seattle wasn’t quite friendly to the returning Nisei war heros. Some of the veteran organizations like the VFW wouldn’t admit them as members. As a result, the local Seattle boys formed their own veterans club, the Nisei Veterans Committee, Inc. The NVC Foundation was formed to remember and honor these guys. Guys who paved the way as citizens, who took it in the gut without a sound, so that me, my generation and kids could go to college and have a better life. I have the highest respect for these guys, and I really appreciate you posting this.

 

More information on the NVC Foundation can be found at

http://www.seattlenvc.org

[billcoe]

Good on you for carrying on that work Toast! I woke up this very morning and my first thought was thinking of John Bachar's recent fatal free solo fall and how amazing of a climber he was... and some of the free-solos I'd personally seen him do....and then...BAMMM! this old Kiichi story next near immediately hit me out of the blue: I thought, all that fantastic amazing shit John did was really nothing in comparison to what this group of non-climbers did when they took a shot at doing their very first climb ever!

 

A mandatory first-ascent, big assed long free-solo... in the pitch dark.... with no backup... no pro....no rope....carrying lots of extra weight in ammo, knives and rifles....no climbing shoes just combat boots.... not on any kind of a regular climbing route.... and most likely certain death above even if ya did make it up there. Straight up into the dark and unknown.

 

Holy f@@@K!!!

 

BTW, it was the General I believe who you meant to reference above. The story is that the Colonel cried when the General asked where the rest of i company was. I think that "The Boys" even as old guys mostly felt that the General was a racist, and he sure may have been - there was a lot of that then, but it is certainly true that he was a dumbass: no question. He sent those Texans right into the jaws of hell and death even after an aide both told him it was a bad idea and why it was a bad idea based on accurate intel that the Germans were there in depth and entrenched and could surround and cut them off. He doubted the intel, ignored all information contrary to his misinformed belief - sent them in and they got trapped just like everyone but him saw before he sent them in and the 442nd was his bail out attempt. Many people, both Nisei and Texans died due to this stupidity.

 

My favorite uncle on either side of the family was my wife's Uncle Kenji. They use to group folks together, so Kiichi and Kenji served together. It is hard to imagine seeing a guy like Kenji, perhaps 4 and a 1/2 foot tall in shoes as an elderly gentleman, and one with the sweetest disposition and of such gentle, kind and solid character: running straight at some big assed Germans armed to the teeth, but that's what they did....all the time. Those guys have stories of having discussions with Germans even as they were trying to kill each other. The Germans sometimes only 20 feet away, once they got over their first shock and confusion of seeing what they saw as Japanese, would at first try and explain to the 442nd guys that the Japanese were their allies and their friends and they were on the same side.

 

What a horror story for everyone, everywhere, all sides, civi's and soldiers both in many many counties. What the Germans and Soviets went through on the Eastern Front or the Japanese and everyone in that theater of war....whew. Anyone complaining today has only to look back a bit to realize that in many ways, we are soooooooo blessed! Others may feel differently. That's my take and thoughts for me anyway. I wish Bachar was still alive, but I wish even more that Uncle Kenji and my father still were: but that's just the cards that got dealt.

 

Warm regards to all:

 

Bill

[XXX]

 

What a horror story for everyone, everywhere, all sides, civi's and soldiers both in many many counties. What the Germans and Soviets went through on the Eastern Front or the Japanese and everyone in that theater of war....whew. Anyone complaining today has only to look back a bit to realize that in many ways, we are soooooooo blessed! Others may feel differently.

 

Great story I agree. I am particularly interested in what happend on the Eastern Front. So many Americans today only think about DDAY and stuff like the Battle of the Buldge.

 

In all honesty those battles were pretty tinu in comparison to what took place on the eastern front. Sometimes in one day more people died on the eastern front then the entire battle of the Buldge. The scope and carnage of killing was something never before seen in history.

 

 

[billcoe]

Yeah, I understand we, like about everyone else, have a US concentric view of history and the world XXX. The Russians have a totally different perspective of WW2 than us on it all. I understand that too. They saw us dawdling and letting thousands upon thousands of Russians die daily even after they begged us to attack and for our help while they, and us, awaited D-Day. We can't even conceive of a Leningrad or a Stalingrad.......or go to France and see the War displays and museums. They, like us, focus on their own country to the exclusion of others. I go to France and do not see the contributions my Grandfather made in WW! as something of significance. Sure, we helped....WW2, same thing. To them, DeGualle liberated the country with a few "Partisans", when in reality.....

 

Same with Poland. The Soviets (and Germans) fucked them over so bad that we have no conception of it and can't even start to understand. We had rationing in the US. My mom is telling me that they couldn't get much gasoline or sugar or some other things. In some of these places they were starving and happy when they caught a skinny rat to nosh on raw....or a leather boot they could gnaw on. Where the hell is Polish Bob now? Give us that story Glassgowkiss.

 

I use to be in the hospital as a patient and later worked in, a VA hospital. When the Vietnam memorial design question was still up in the air (they had requested a design and had received many, many interesting designs). A Green Beret guy who had done 2 tours I was friends with had thought that a single Vietnamese woman holding a baby would be the best memorial we could ever do....at first, I was taken aback and a bit angry, but upon reflection later, I thought: wow, that might be brilliant! Who took a bigger hit? Who felt the full pain and brunt of these actions? Not anyone in the US that's for damn sure. It didn't fulfill the design criteria though, and Maya Ying Lin's Wall is much more powerful to us than that would have been.........but the point is, we only look at us, not at others.

 

 

sadly

[mkporwit]

Same with Poland. The Soviets (and Germans) fucked them over so bad that we have no conception of it and can't even start to understand. We had rationing in the US. My mom is telling me that they couldn't get much gasoline or sugar or some other things. In some of these places they were starving and happy when they caught a skinny rat to nosh on raw....or a leather boot they could gnaw on. Where the hell is Polish Bob now? Give us that story Glassgowkiss.

You want a story, Bill?

 

My mom's side of the family comes from just south-east of Warsaw, near a town called Garwolin. Before the war as part of the family farm they kept bees. During the war the Germans wanted to have access to the honey, so it was in their interest to make sure that the bees didn't die during the winter. Typically bees were given sugar during the winter to make sure they had something to eat. The Germans, wanting to ensure that the sugar would go to the bees and not the starving Poles would mix the sugar in with pine sawdust -- can't dissolve it out because of the resin, can't pick it out, can't burn it out... but the bees could work around it...

 

Or to give you another one... my paternal grandfather spent almost 1.5 years in Auschwitz, finally escaping from it right as it was being evacuated. He did a lot of hard labor there, fed just enough to maybe not keel over. Occasionally they had Russian POWs as part of the work detail -- those guys were basically starved to death. As part of digging a trench my grandfather and this Soviet POW found a rotting dog carcass mixed in with manure. The POW tore into it like it was Thanksgiving dinner, offering to share it with my grandfather... years later I saw the barbed wire enclosures at Bergen Belsen, where they would simply herd Soviet POWs into them and let them starve, so as not to even waste a bullet on them...

[YocumRidge]

How about eating human flesh and wood for 3 years in a row when the city was seiged by Germans? I was born and raised in St.-Petersburg (former Leningrad) and my dad has miraculously survived those tortures.