100th Battalion's legacy lives on at veterans picnic

By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer

Some of the children ran up to Mel Inouye and asked him to change the music from the sing-songy old Japanese tunes to something techno.

World War II buddies Robert Arakaki, 85, and Saji Tanigawa, 79, former members of Company B, share a laugh at the 100th Infantry Battalion's Legacy Picnic at Disabled American Veterans Park. Jeff Widener • The Honolulu Advertiser

For dozens of grandfathers at the park yesterday, the music was the sound of the conflict they faced in the weeks and months after Pearl Harbor.

The music, like most of their parents, had come from Japan, but they were Americans, too.

By the hundreds, they fought for America, in an all Japanese-American U.S. Army unit their neighbors came to call, Hawaiian style, "the One Puka Puka."

"The reason I joined the Army," said the Battalion's club president, Stanley Akita, "is because back home when the war started, we were called Japs. The community learned a new word — Japs — which we had not heard before. And that hurt our feelings.

"But we were so successful in combat that the attitude of the community changed, so that when we came home at the end of the war, we weren't Japs any more. We were respected members of the community, and some of us, or our children, went on to become doctors, lawyers, politicians."

Akita, 79, of Kahala, a retired state highways engineer, remembered being frightened that he would not be accepted into the Army because he was only 5 feet tall.

"I wanted to be with the boys," he said. "I stood on my toes, and they took me."

As a private first class, assigned as a "runner" for his command, Akita fought with the 100th from Anzio to the outskirts of Rome, where the Army stopped the unit so others could take the city, from Rome to Leghorn, then to Southern France and the battle at Gruyeres, and on to Biffontaine.

Along the way, 600 of the original 2,500 men were killed, and about 95 percent were wounded, many of them more than once.

Not Akita.

"I got to be a prisoner of war," he recalled, eagerly. "And when I was in the POW camp, a German soldier hit me with the butt of his rifle, and it injured my back, and they gave me a Purple Heart for being wounded."

For years, Akita wouldn't mention that he was a prisoner of war. He'd joke about running so well that he didn't get shot.

"Small target," he said. "With all the other boys killed or wounded, I was afraid people would think I was one yellow buggah."

If he had said just "prisoner of war," people wouldn't know the whole story, how he was one of six men assigned to guard 27 German soldiers captured behind enemy lines at Biffontaine.

There were eleven other GIs with them, all of them wounded, and, on Oct. 23, 1945, they were overtaken and captured by the Germans.

"To be honest, I don't think any normal person can imagine what the boys in the 100th did," he said.

The D-Day scene in the movie "Saving Private Ryan" comes close to some of what it was like, he said.

"The noise, and certain scenes where the bullet hits the guy and you see the flesh flying — that's real."

Akita guesses, from the stories the boys told, and didn't tell, after the war, that half of them had some form of posttraumatic stress disorder when they came home. "They called it shell shock, then."

For years, no one talked about what had happened, he said. And then for years some couldn't stop talking about it.

Now, when they talk about fighting, many of the stories are not from the battlefields, but the bars, where the boys fought not with Germans but with one another during what they called "the champagne campaign" on a few rare and blissful days of liberty in southern France.

Even those stories are dwindling.

Every week or two, another soldier from the 100th Battalion goes down, felled not by enemy fire but by time.

"Last year we lost 42, the year before that 36." With only about five hundred men left paying dues, Akita bluntly estimates "we've got maybe five years more to get together."

That's the reason for the Legacy picnics, and opening up membership in the club to children and grandchildren who can keep the memory of the unit alive, he said.

"I want my grandson to know that Hawai'i is what it is today because of what we were able to do in the war, and what that enabled us to do after the war," he said.

Yesterday, though, there was not too much reminiscing among the grandfathers about battles of nearly 60 years ago.

Most were content to sit under the monkey pod trees, watch their children watching their children run sack races, stain their faces with shave ice, or compete in the doughnut biting contest.

It was a picnic, after all, and it, too, was what they had fought for.