“Pssst!” he called to Sakagawa as the latter sprayed his vegetables. “Come here.”
“What?” the grocer shouted.
“Out here!”
Sakagawa left the store and allowed Sakai-san to lead him to an alley, where the latter said in awed tones, “I have found a husband for your daughter!”
“You have?” Sakagawa cried.
“Yes! A wonderful match!”
“A Japanese, of course?”
Sakai looked at his old friend with contempt. “What kind of baishakunin would I be if I even thought of proposing anyone but a Japanese?”
“Forgive me!” Sakagawa said. “You can understand, after the narrow escape we had.”
“This man is perfect. A little house. More than a little money. Fine Japanese. And what else do you think!”
“Is he …” Sakagawa would not form the words, for this was too much to hope for.
“Yes! He’s also a Hiroshima man!”
A thick blanket of positive euphoria settled over the two whispering men, for the go-between Sakai was just as pleased as Sakagawa that a fine Japanese girl had at last found a good husband, and a Hiroshima man at that. Finally Sakagawa got round to a question of lesser importance: “Who is he?”
“Mr. Ishii!” Sakai cried rapturously.
“Has he agreed to marry my daughter?” Kamejiro asked incredulously.
“Yes!” Sakai the baishakunin cried.
“Does he know about her … the haole?”
“Of course. I was honor-bound to tell him.”
“And still he is willing to accept her?” Kamejiro asked in disbelief.
“Yes, he says it is his duty to save her.”
“That good man,” Sakagawa cried. He called his wife and told her, “Sakai has done it! He has found a husband for Reiko-chan.”
“Who?” his practical-minded wife asked.
“Mr. Ishii!”
“A Hiroshima man!” And before Reiko-chan knew anything of her impending marriage, word that she had found a Hiroshima man flashed through the Japanese community and almost everybody was truly delighted with the girl’s good fortune, especially since she had been mixed up with a haole man, but one girl, who had been through high school, reflected: “Mr. Ishii must be thirty-five years older than Reiko.”
“What does it matter?” her mother snapped. “She’s getting a Hiroshima man.”
Reiko was in the barbershop on Hotel Street cutting the hair of a sailor when the news reached her. The girl at the next chair whispered in Japanese, “Congratulations, dear Reiko-chan.”
“About what?” Reiko asked.
“Sakai-san has found you a husband.”
The Japanese phrase fell strangely on Reiko’s ears, for although she had long suspected that her parents had employed a baishakunin to find her a husband, she had never supposed that any solid arrangement would come to pass. Steadying herself against her chair, she asked casually, “Who did they say the man was?”
“Mr. Ishii! I think it’s wonderful.”
Reiko-chan kept mechanically moving her fingers, and the man in the chair warned: “Not too much off the sides, ma’am.”
“I’m sorry,” Reiko said. She wanted to run out of the barbershop, far from everyone, but she kept to her job. Patiently she trimmed the sailor’s head just right, then lathered his neck and sideburns and asked, “You like them straight or on a little slant?”
“Any way looks best,” the young man said. “You speak good English. Better’n me.”
“I went to school,” Reiko said quietly.
“Ma’am, do you feel well?” the sailor asked.
“Yes.”
“You don’t look so good. Look, ma’am …”
Reiko was about to faint, but with a tremendous effort she controlled herself and finished the lathering; but when she tried to grasp the razor she could not command it, and with great dismay she looked at the frightened sailor and asked softly, “Would you mind if I did not shave your neck this time? I feel dizzy.”
“Ma’am, you ought to lie down,” the sailor said, wiping the soap from his sideburns.
When he left, Reiko hung up her apron and announced, “I am going home,” and on the long walk to Kakaako she tried not to compare Mr. Ishii with Lieutenant Jackson, but she could not keep her mind from doing so; then as she approached the family store she fortified herself with this consoling thought: “He’s a crazy little man, and more like my father than a husband, but he is a proper Japanese and my father will be happy.” Thinking no more of her absent Seattle lawyer, who had never even written to her, she went into the Sakagawa store, walked up to her father, and bowed. “I am grateful to you, Father.”
“He is a Hiroshima man!” Sakagawa pointed out.
At the wedding, which was a highlight of the Japanese community in February of 1944, the baishakunin Sakai commanded everything. He told the family where to stand and the priest what to do and the groom how to behave. Mr. Ishii had spent the first part of the afternoon showing the assembly the latest copy of the Prairie Shinbun, which proved that valiant Imperial troops had finally driven all American marines off Guadalcanal and were about to launch a major invasion of Hawaii. One guest, who had two sons in Italy, whispered to his wife, “I think the old man’s crazy!”
“Ssssh!” his wife said. “He’s getting married.”
When the crush was greatest, Reiko-chan, in old-style Japanese dress, happened to look at her bridegroom for the first time since her engagement had been announced, and she could not hide from herself the fact that he was a pathetic, cramped-up old man; and all her American education inspired her to flee from this insane ceremony, and great dizziness came upon her and she said to one of the girls near her, “This obi is too tight, I must get some air,” and she was about to run away when the baishakunin Sakai cried, “We begin!” and the intricate, lovely Japanese wedding ceremony proceeded.
When it ended, women clustered about Reiko-chan and told her, “You were beautiful in your kimono. A true bride, with flushed cheeks and downcast eyes.” Others said, “It’s so wonderful to think that he is also a Hiroshima man.” And the crush became so oppressive that she said, “This obi is really too tight. I must get some air,” and she left the wedding feast and went alone to the porch, where she began to breathe deeply and where she arrived just in time to greet a messenger boy riding up on a bicycle.
At the next moment the guests inside heard a series of screams emanating from the porch, as if an animal had been mortally wounded, and they rushed out to find Reiko-chan screaming and screaming, and they could not stop her, for in her hand she held a message from the War Department advising the Sakagawa family of certain events that had recently transpired on a river bank in Italy.
ON SEPTEMBER 22, 1943, the Triple Two looked forward across the bow of their transport and saw rising in the misty dawn the hills of Italy, and Sergeant Goro Sakagawa thought: “I’ll bet there’s a German division hiding in there, waiting for us to step ashore.”
He was right, and as the Japanese boys climbed down out of their transport to invade the beaches of Salerno, German planes and heavy artillery tried to harass them, but their aim was wild and all the units made it without casualty except one crop-headed private named Tashimoto, who sprained his ankle. The gang passed the word along with the acid comment, “Wouldn’t you know it would be a guy from Molokai?”
Salerno lay southeast of Naples and had been chosen because it provided a logical stepping-off place for an encircling movement on Rome, some hundred and fifty miles distant, and on the day of landing, the Two-Two-Two started the long march north. The Germans, knowing both of their coming and of their composition, were determined to halt them. A specific order had been issued by Hitler: “To defeat the little yellow men who are traitors to our ally Japan and who are being cruelly used as propaganda by their Jewish masters in America, is obligatory. If these criminal little men should win a victory, it would be strongly used against us. They must be stoppe
d and wiped out.”
The Japanese boys from Hawaii did not know of this order, and after they had met one line of massive German resistance after another, they concluded: “These krauts must be the best fighters in the world. This is a lot tougher than they told us it was going to be.” If the Two-Two-Two gained three miles, they did so against the most formidable German resistance: mines killed boys from Maui, tanks overran fighters from Molokai; gigantic shells exploded among troops from Kauai; and dogged, powerful ground forces contested every hill. Casualties were heavy, and the Honolulu Mail began carrying death lists with names like Kubokawa, Higa, and Moriguchi.
The furious efforts of the Germans to halt and humiliate the Japanese boys had an opposite effect to the one Hitler wanted; Allied war correspondents, both European and American, quickly discovered that whereas other fronts might not produce good stories, one could always get something exciting with the Two-Two-Two because they were the ones that were encountering the best the enemy could provide. Ernie Pyle, among others, marched for some days with the Hawaii troops, and wrote: “I have come to expect our American boys to continue fighting in the face of great odds, but these short, black-eyed little fighters are setting a new record. They continue slugging it out when even the bravest men would consolidate or withdraw. They form a terrific addition to our team, and dozens of boys from Texas and Massachusetts have told me, ‘I’m glad they’re on our side.’ ” So Hitler’s determination to hit the Japanese so hard that they would be forced to collapse in shame, backfired because they fought on in glory.
Once Ernie Pyle asked Goro Sakagawa, “Sergeant, why did you push on against that cluster of houses? You knew it was crowded with Germans.”
Goro replied in words that became famous both in Italy and America: “We had to. We fight double. Against the Germans and for every Japanese in America.” Reported Pyle: “And they’re winning both their wars.”
September, October, November, December: the beautiful months, the months of poetry and rhythm, with nights growing colder and the soft mists of Italy turning to frost. How beautiful those months were when the boys from Hawaii first realized that they were as good fighting men as any in the world. “We fight double,” they told themselves, and when they came to some Italian town, bathed in cloudless sunlight, standing forth against the hills like an etching, each tower clear in the bright glare, they attacked with fury and calculation, and bit by bit they drove the Germans back toward Rome. Colonel Whipple, delighted by the showing of his troops and pleased with the good reports they were getting in the American press, nevertheless warned his men: “It can’t go on being as easy as this. Somewhere, the Germans are going to dig in real solid. Then we’ll see if we’re as good as they say.”
In early December Hitler sent to the Italian front a fanatical Prussian colonel named Sep Seigl, unusual in that he combined a heritage of Prussian tradition and a loyalty to Naziism. Hitler told him simply, “Destroy the Japanese.” And when he studied his maps he decided, “I shall do it at Monte Cassino.” Colonel Seigl was a bullet-headed young man of thirty-seven whose promotion had been speeded because of his dedication to Hitler, and on three different battlefronts he had proved his capacities. At Monte Cassino he was determined to repeat his earlier performances. The Japanese would be humiliated.
So as December waned and as the Two-Two-Two slogged steadfastly up the leg of Italy toward Rome, they picked up many signs that their critical battle was going to be engaged somewhere near the old monastery of Monte Cassino, and belts tightened as they approached it. At the same time, from the north Colonel Sep Seigl was moving down to Cassino some of the ablest German units in Italy, but he did not intend to engage the Japanese on the slopes of the mountain. His troops were not permitted to construct their forward positions on that formidable pile of rock; they were kept down below along the banks of the Rapido River that here ran in a north-south direction, with the Japanese approaching from the east and the Germans dug in along the west. Surveying the German might he now had lined up along the Rapido, Colonel Seigl said, “We’ll stop them at the river.”
On January 22, 1944, Colonel Mark Whipple halted his Japanese troops along a line one mile east of the Rapido and told them, “Our orders are clear and simple. Cross the river … so that troops behind us can assault that pile of rocks up there. The Germans claim a rabbit can’t get across the approaches without being shot at from six angles. But we’re going across.”
He dispatched a scouting party consisting of Sergeant Goro Sakagawa, his brother Tadao, who was good at sketching, and four riflemen, and at dusk on the twenty-second of January they crawled out of their hiding places and started on their bellies across the most difficult single battle terrain the Americans were to face in World War II. With meticulous care, Tadao Sakagawa drew maps of the route. Two hundred yards west of their present positions the Two-Two-Two would come upon an irrigation ditch three feet wide and four feet deep. As they crawled out of it, they would be facing German machine guns and a marsh some thirty yards wide, beyond which lay another ditch. Thirty yards beyond hid a third ditch, twice as deep, twice as wide. As the men climbed out of this one, they would face a solid wall of machine-gun fire.
When they got this far in the darkness Goro Sakagawa licked his dry lips and asked his men, “What’s that ahead?”
“Looks like a stone wall.”
“Jesus,” Goro whispered. “You can’t expect our boys to negotiate those three ditches and then climb a wall. How high is it?”
“Looks about twelve feet high.”
“This is impossible,” Goro replied. “You fellows, split up. You go that way, we’ll go this. Let’s see if there’s a break in the wall.”
In the darkness they found none, only a stout, murderous stone wall, twelve feet high and with a jagged top. When they reassembled, Goro said in a rasping whisper, “Christ, how can anybody get over that damned thing? With machine guns everywhere. Sssssh.”
There was a sudden chatter of German guns, but the men firing them must have heard a sound in some other direction, for the firing did not come close to Goro and his men. “Well,” he said when it ceased, “over we go.”
Patiently and with skill, in the darkness of night, the six Japanese boys helped one another over the terrifying wall, and from it they dropped into the eastern half of the dry river bed of the Rapido. It was about seventy-five feet across, about fifteen feet deep, and every spot of its entire cross section was monitored by German machine guns. On their bellies, the six soldiers crept across the dry river and trusted that no searchlights would be turned on. In the cold night they were perspiring with fear.
But when they got to the other side of the Rapido they discovered what fear really was, for both machine guns and searchlights opened up, but the young Japanese managed to secrete themselves in crevices at the foot of the western bank; but what terrified them was not the imperative staccato of the guns or the probing fingers of light, but the monstrous nature of the river’s west bank. It rose fairly straight up from the river bed, sixteen feet high, and was topped by a stout double fence of barbed wire which could be expected to contain mines at two-foot intervals.
“Are you getting this on paper?” Goro whispered to Tadao. “Cause when they see this, no general living would dare send men across this river.” A passing light illuminated the wild and terrible tangles of barbed wire and then passed on. “You got it?” Goro asked. “Good. Hoist me up. I’m going through it.”
Tadao grabbed his older brother’s hand. “I have enough maps,” he cautioned.
“Somebody’s got to see what’s over there.”
His men hoisted him onto the top of the west bank of the river, where he spent fifteen perilous minutes picking his way inch by inch through the tangled barbed wire. He knew that at any moment he might explode a mine and not only kill himself but doom his five companions as well. He was no longer sweating. He was no longer afraid. He had passed into some extraordinary state known only by soldiers at night or in
the heat of unbearable battle. He was a crop-headed, tense-bellied Japanese boy from Kakaako in Honolulu, and the courage he was displaying in those fateful minutes no one in Hawaii would have believed.
He penetrated the wire, leaving on the barbs tiny shreds of cloth which would guide him safely back, and in the darkness he found himself on the eastern edge of a dusty road that led past the foot of Monte Cassino. Hiding himself in the ditch that ran alongside the road, he breathed deeply, trying to become a man again and not a nerveless automaton, and as he lay there, face up, a searchlight played across the countryside, hunting for him perhaps, and it passed on and suddenly illuminated the terrain that rose above him, and although he had seen it from a distance and knew its proportions, he now cried with pain: “Oh, Jesus Christ, no!”
For above him rose an unassailable rocky height, far, far into the sky, and at its crest clung an ancient monastery, and from where he lay Goro realized that he and his men were expected to cross all that he had seen tonight, and that when they got to this road in which he now huddled, other fellows from Hawaii were expected to forge ahead and climb those overpowering rocks that hung above him. In the lonely darkness he shivered with fright; then, as men do at such times, he effectively blocked out of his mind the realization of what Monte Cassino was like. It was not an unscalable height. It was not mined and interlaced with machine guns. It was not protected by the Rapido River defenses, and a gang of Japanese boys were not required to assault it, with casualties that would have to mount toward the fifty-per-cent mark, or even the eighty. Goro Sakagawa, a tough-minded soldier, cleansed himself of this knowledge and crept back to his men, then back to his commanding officer.
“It’ll be tough,” he reported. “But it can be done.”
As he spoke, Colonel Sep Seigl was reviewing the same terrain and he knew far more about it than Goro Sakagawa, for he had maps prepared by the famous Todt Labor Corps, which had built this ultimate defense of Rome. He could see that the first three ditches which the Japanese would have to cross were covered in every detail by mines and machine-gun fire, and he told his men, “I suppose scouting parties are out there right now, but if they miss the mines, they’ll be lucky.” He saw the plans for defending the river itself, which presented one of the most formidable obstacles any army could encounter, and whereas Goro a few minutes before had been guessing as to where the mines and machine guns were, Seigl knew, and he knew that even his own soldiers, the finest in the world, could not penetrate that defense. And west of the river, of course, lay the exposed road which could be cut to shreds with mortar fire, and beyond that the cliffs of Monte Cassino up which no troops could move. At midnight Colonel Seigl concluded: “They’ll try, but they’ll never make it. Here is where we bloody the nose of the traitor Japanese. Tomorrow we’ll watch them wilt under fire.”