Hawaii

  January 24, 1944, began with a cold, clear midnight and it was greeted with a thundering barrage of American gunfire which illuminated the bleak river but which did not dislodge the Germans. For forty minutes the barrage continued, and a beginner at warfare might have taken heart, thinking: “No man can live through that.” But the dark-skinned men of the Two-Two-Two knew better; they knew the Germans would be dug in and waiting.

  At 0040 the barrage stopped and the whistles blew for advance. Goro clutched his brother by the arm and whispered, “This is the big one, kid. Take care of yourself.” Progress to the first ditch was painful, for the Germans launched a counter-barrage and the first deaths at Monte Cassino occurred, but Goro and Tadao pushed stolidly ahead in the darkness, and when they had led their unit across the dangerous ditch and onto the edge of the marsh, they told their captain, “We’ll take care of the mines,” and they set out on their bellies, two brothers who could have been engaged in a tricky football play, and they crawled across the marsh, adroitly cutting the trip wires that would otherwise have detonated mines and killed their companions, and when they reached the second ditch Goro stood up in the night and yelled, “Mo bettah you come. All mines pau!” But as he sent the news his younger brother Tadao, one of the finest boys ever to graduate from Punahou, stepped upon a magnesium mine which exploded with a terrible light, blowing him into a thousand shreds of bone and flesh.

  “Oh, Jesus!” Goro cried, burying his face in his hands. No action was required. None was possible. Tadao Sakagawa no longer existed in any conceivable form. Not even his shoes were recoverable, but where he had stood other Japanese boys swept over the marshy land and with battle cries leaped into the next ditch, and then into the next.

  It took five hours of the most brutal fighting imaginable for the Japanese troops to reach the near bank of the Rapido, and when dawn broke, Colonel Sep Seigl was slightly disturbed. “They should not have been able to cross those fields. They seem rather capable, but now the fight begins.”

  Against the troops for which he had a special hatred he threw a wall of bombardment that was almost unbelievable, and to his relief, the advance was halted. No human being could have penetrated that first awful curtain of shrapnel which greeted the Two-Two-Two at the Rapido itself. “Well,” Colonel Seigl sighed, “at least they’re human. They can be stopped. Now to keep them pinned down. The Japanese cannot absorb casualties. Kill half of them, and the other half will run.”

  But here Colonel Seigl was wrong. Half of Goro Sakagawa had already been killed; he had loved his clever brother Tadao as only boys who have lived in the close intimacy of poverty and community rejection can love, and now Tadao was dead. Therefore, when the German shelling was at its most intense, Goro said to his captain, “Let’s move across that river. I know how.”

  “We’ll dig in,” the captain countermanded.

  But when Colonel Whipple arrived to inspect the battered condition of his men, Goro insisted that the river could be crossed, and Whipple said, “Go ahead and try.” At this point one of the lieutenants from Baker Company, Goro’s commanding officer, and a fine young officer from Kansas, said, “If my men go, I go.”

  “All right, Lieutenant Shelly,” Whipple said. “We’ve got to cross the river.”

  So Lieutenant Shelly led forty men, with Sergeant Sakagawa as guide, down into the bed of the Rapido, at nine o’clock on a crystal-clear morning, and they came within six yards of crossing the river, when a titanic German concentration of fire killed half the unit, including Lieutenant Shelly. The twenty who were left began to panic, but Goro commanded sternly, “Up onto that bank and through that barbed wire.”

  It was a completely insane thing to attempt. The Rapido River did not propose to allow any troops, led by Goro Sakagawa or otherwise, to violate it that day, and when his stubborn muddy fingers reached the barbed-wire embankment, such a furious load of fire bore down upon him that he had to drop back into the river. Three more times he endeavored vainly to penetrate the barbed wire, and each time Colonel Seigl screamed at his men, “Kill him! Kill him! Don’t let them get started!” But although tons of ammunition were discharged in the general direction of Sakagawa and his determined men, somehow they were not killed. Huddling in the protection of the far bank of the river, the gallant twenty waited for their companions to catch up with them, when all together they might have a chance of crashing the barbed wire.

  But the firepower of the Germans was so intense that the Japanese boys who were still on the eastern bank could not possibly advance. At times the wall of shrapnel seemed almost solid and it would have been complete suicide to move a man into it. “We’ve got to hold where we are,” Colonel Whipple regretfully ordered.

  “What about those twenty out there in the river?”

  “Who’s in charge? Lieutenant Shelly?”

  “He was killed. Sergeant Sakagawa.”

  “Goro?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He’ll get his men out,” Whipple said confidently, and at dusk, after a day of hell, Goro Sakagawa did just that. He brought all of his twenty men back across the river, up the dangerous eastern bank, back through the minefields and safely to headquarters.

  “Colonel wants to see you,” a major said.

  “We couldn’t make it,” Goro reported grimly.

  “No man ever tried harder, Lieutenant Sakagawa.”

  Goro showed no surprise at his battlefield commission. He was past fear, past sorrow, and certainly past jubilation. But when the bars were pinned to his tunic by the colonel himself, the rugged sergeant broke into tears, and they splashed out of his dark eyes onto his leathery yellow-brown skin. “Tomorrow we’ll cross the river,” he swore.

  “We’ll certainly try,” Colonel Whipple said.

  On January 26 the Japanese troops did try, but once more Colonel Sep Seigl’s able gunners turned them back with dreadful casualties. On January 27 the Japanese tried for the third time, and although Lieutenant Goro Sakagawa got his men onto the road on the other side of the river, they were hit with such pulverizing fire that after forty-five minutes they had to withdraw. That night an Associated Press man wrote one of the great dispatches of the war: “If tears could be transmitted by cable, and printed by linotype, this story would be splashed with tears, for I have at last seen what they call courage beyond the call of duty. I saw a bunch of bandy-legged Japanese kids from Hawaii cross the Rapido River, and hold the opposite bank for more than forty minutes. Then they retreated in utter defeat, driven back by the full might of the German army. Never in victory have I seen any troops in the world achieve a greater glory, and if hereafter any American ever questions the loyalty of our Japanese, I am not going to argue with him. I am going to kick his teeth in.”

  On January 28, Lieutenant Sakagawa tried for the fourth time to cross the Rapido, and for the fourth time Colonel Sep Seigl’s men mowed the Japanese down. Of the 1,300 troops with which Colonel Whipple had started four days earlier, 779 were now casualties. Dead Japanese bodies lined the fatal river, and men with arms and legs torn off were being moved to the rear. At last it became apparent that the Germans had effectively stopped the advance of the hated Two-Two-Two. That night Colonel Seigl’s intelligence reported: “Victory! The Japanese have been driven back. They’re in retreat and seem to be leaving the line.”

  The report was partially correct. Lieutenant Goro Sakagawa’s company, and the unit of which it was a part, was being withdrawn. The boys were willing to try again, but they no longer had enough men to maintain a cohesive company and they had to retreat to repair their wounds. As they passed back through a unit from Minnesota coming in to replace them, the Swedes, having heard of their tremendous effort, cheered them and saluted and one man from St. Paul yelled, “We hope we can do as good as you did.”

  “You will,” a boy from Lahaina mumbled.

  So the Germans stopped the Two-Two-Two … for a few hours, because in another part of the line other units from Hawaii were accumulating a might
y force, and on February 8 Colonel Sep Seigl’s intelligence officer reported breathlessly, “The damned Japanese have crossed the river and are attacking the mountain itself!”

  With a powerful surge the Japanese boys drove spearheads almost to the top of the mountain. They scaled heights that even their own officers believed impregnable, and they routed out more than two hundred separate machine-gun emplacements. Their heroism in this incredible drive was unsurpassed in World War II, and for a few breathless hours they caught a toehold on the summit of the mountain itself.

  “Send us reinforcements!” they radioed frantically. “We’ve got them licked.”

  But reinforcements could not negotiate the cliffs, and one by one the Japanese victors were driven back from their dizzy pinnacles. As they stumbled down the steep flanks of Monte Cassino the Germans gunned them unmercifully, but at last the fragments of the force staggered back to camp and announced: “The Germans cannot be driven out.” But one fact of triumph remained: the headquarters camp was now on the west bank of the Rapido. The river had been crossed. The way to Rome lay open.

  It was in their bruising defeat at Monte Cassino that the Two-Two-Two became one of the most famous units of the war. “The Purple Heart Battalion” it was called, for it had suffered more casualties than any other similar-sized unit in the war. The Mo Bettahs won more honors, more decorations, more laudatory messages from the President and the generals than any other. But most of all they won throughout America a humble respect. Caucasians who fought alongside them reported back home: “They’re better Americans than I am. I wouldn’t have the guts to do what they do.” And in Hawaii, those golden islands that the Japanese boys loved so deeply as they died in Italy, people no longer even discussed the tormenting old question: “Are the Japanese loyal?” Now men of other races wondered: “Would I be as brave?” So although the Prussian Nazi, Colonel Sep Seigl, did exactly what he had promised Hitler he would do—he crushed the Japanese at Monte Cassino—neither he nor Hitler accomplished what they had initially intended: for it was in defeat that the Japanese boys exhibited their greatest bravery and won the applause of the world.

  Therefore it is strange to report that it was not at Monte Cassino that the Two-Two-Two won its greatest laurels. This happened by accident, in a remote corner of France.

  After the Triple Two’s had retired to a rear area in Italy, there to lick their considerable wounds and to re-form with fresh replacements from the States—including First Lieutenant Goro Sakagawa’s younger brothers Minoru and Shigeo—the Mo Bettah Battalion was shipped out of Italy and into Southern France, where it was allowed to march in a leisurely manner up the Rhone Valley. It met little German opposition, nor was it intended to, for the generals felt that after the heroic performance at Monte Cassino the Japanese boys merited something of a respite, and for once things went as planned. Then, accompanied by a Texas outfit that had also built a name for itself in aggressive fighting, the Two-Two-Two’s swung away from the Rhone and entered upon routine mopping-up exercises in the Vosges Mountains, where the easternmost part of France touched the southernmost part of Germany.

  The Triple Two’s and the Texans moved forward with calculating efficiency until they had the Germans in what appeared to be a final rout. Lieutenant Sakagawa kept urging his men to rip the straggling German units with one effective spur: “Remember what they did to us at Cassino.” Hundreds of bewildered Germans surrendered to him, asking pitifully, “Have the Japanese finally turned against us too? Like the Italians?” To such questions Goro replied without emotion: “We’re Americans. Move through and back.” But if he kept his hard face a mask of indifference, secretly he trembled with joy whenever he accepted the surrender of units from Hitler’s master race.

  It was understandable, therefore, that Goro Sakagawa, like his superiors, interpreted the Vosges campaign as the beginning of the end for Hitler. But this was a sad miscalculation, for if the young, untrained Nazi troops sometimes faltered, their clever Prussian generals did not. They were now charged with defending the German homeland, and from his epic success at Monte Cassino, Colonel Sep Seigl, now General Seigl, had arrived at the Vosges to organize resistance at that natural bastion. Therefore, if he allowed his rag-tag troops to surrender in panic to the Triple Two’s, it was for a reason; and in late October of 1944 this reason became apparent, for on the twenty-fourth of that month General Seigl’s troops appeared to collapse in a general rout, retreating helter-skelter through the difficult Vosges terrain; and in so doing they enticed the battle-hungry Texans to rush after them, moving far ahead of American tanks and into the neatest trap of the war.

  General Seigl announced the springing of his trap with a gigantic barrage of fire that sealed the bewildered Texans into a pocket of mountains. “We will shoot them off one by one,” Seigl ordered, moving his troops forward. “We’ll show the Americans what it means to invade German soil.” And he swung his prearranged guns into position and began pumping high explosives at the Texan camp. There without food or water or adequate ammunition, the gallant Texans dug in and watched the rim of fire creep constantly closer.

  At this point an American journalist coined the phrase the “Lost Battalion,” and in Texas radios were kept tuned around the clock. Whole villages listened to agonizing details as the sons of that proud state prepared to die as bravely as their circumstances would permit. A sob echoed across the prairies, and Texans began to shout, “Get our boys out of there! For Christsake, do something!”

  Thus what had been intended as respite for the Triple Two suddenly became the dramatic high point of the war. A personal messenger from the Senate warned the Pentagon: “Get those Texans out of there or else.” The Pentagon radioed SHAEF: “Effect rescue immediately. Top priority white.” SHAEF advised headquarters in Paris, and they wirelessed General McLarney, at the edge of the Vosges. It was he who told Colonel Mark Whipple, “You will penetrate the German ring of firepower and rescue those men from Texas.” Lest there be any misunderstanding, another general flew in from Paris, red-faced and bitter, and he said, “We’re going to be crucified if we let those boys die. Get them, goddamn it, get them.”

  Colonel Whipple summoned Lieutenant Goro Sakagawa and said, “You’ve got to go up that ridge, Goro. You mustn’t come back without them.”

  “We’ll bring ’em out,” Goro replied.

  As he was about to depart, Mark Whipple took his hand and shook it with that quiet passion that soldiers know on the eve of battle. “This is the end of our road, Goro. The President himself has ordered this one. Win this time, and you win your war.”

  It was a murderous, hellish mission. A heavy fog enveloped the freezing Vosges Mountains, and no man could look ahead more than fifteen feet. As Baker Company filed into the pre-dawn gloom, each Japanese had to hold onto the field pack of the boy in front, for only in this manner could the unit be kept together. From the big, moss-covered trees of the forest, German snipers cut down one Hawaiian boy after another, until occasionally some Japanese in despairing frustration would stand stubbornly with his feet apart, firing madly into the meaningless fog. At other times German machine guns stuttered murderously from a distance of twenty feet. But Goro became aware of one thing: firepower that an hour before had been pouring in upon the doomed Texans was now diverted.

  To rescue the Lost Battalion, the Two-Two-Two had to march only one mile, but it was the worst mile in the world, and to negotiate it was going to require four brutal days without adequate water or food or support. The casualties suffered by the Japanese were staggering, and Goro sensed that if he brought his two younger brothers through this assault, it would be a miracle. He therefore cautioned them: “Kids, keep close to the trees. When we move from one to the other, run like hell across the open space. And when you hit your tree, whirl about instantly to shoot any Germans that might have infiltrated behind you.”

  At the end of the first day the Triple Twos had gained only nine hundred feet, and within the circle of steel wounded Texa
ns were beginning to die from gangrene. Next morning the Japanese boys pushed on, a yard at a time, lost in cold fog, great mossy trees and pinnacles of rock. Almost every foot of the way provided General Seigl’s riflemen with ideal cover, and they used it to advantage. With methodical care, they fired only when some Japanese ran directly into their guns, and they killed the Triple Two’s with deadly accuracy. On that cold, rainy second day the Japanese troops gained six hundred feet, and nearly a hundred of the trapped Texans died from wounds and fresh barrages.

  A curious factor of the battle was that all the world could watch. It was known that the Texans were trapped; it was known that the Two-Two-Two’s were headed toward their rescue, and the deadly game fascinated the press. A Minnesota corporal who had fought with the Triple Two’s in Italy told a newspaperman, “If anybody can get ’em, the slant-eyes will.” In Honolulu newspapers that phrase was killed, but the entire community, sensing the awful odds against which their sons were fighting, prayed.

  On the third day of this insane attempt to force the ring of fire, Baker Company was astonished to see trudging up the hill they had just traversed the familiar figure of Colonel Mark Whipple. The men well knew the basic rule of war: “Lieutenants lead platoons against the enemy. Captains stay back and encourage the entire company. Majors and light colonels move between headquarters and the companies. But chicken colonels stay put.” Yet here was Colonel Whipple, a West Point chicken colonel, breaking the rule and moving into the front lines. Instinctively the Japanese boys saluted as he passed. When he reached Goro he said simply, “We’re going to march up that ridge and rescue the Texans today.”