442nd pays homage to its fallen
By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer
They've mellowed, the boys who became men in the 100th Infantry Battalion, 442nd Regimental Combat Team nearly six decades ago.
Eugene Tanner ª The Honolulu Advertiser
"We talk about it now," says Ron Oba, 79, of 'Aiea, a Fox Company corporal who was among a few hundred surviving veterans who gathered at Punchbowl yesterday.
Veterans from the 100th Battalion, 442nd Regimental Combat Team conducted a memorial service for their fallen comrades yesterday at Punchbowl.
It was the 59th anniversary memorial service for the Japanese American soldiers who died defending their country and proving their loyalty in World War II.
"When we first came back, the group was very reticent, they didn't want to talk about the war," Oba said. Part of it was the stereotypical reason: "Us Orientals, especially Japanese, we're not supposed to brag, or tap our shoulders," he said.
There was a quiet cultural pride, though, in the same virtues that most Americans in 1942 saw as sinister attributes of the armed forces of the Empire of Japan.
Many of the men in Hawai'i, Oba said, had learned in Buddhist temple and at Japanese language school about bushido, the way of the warrior, and don't dishonor your family; and "yamato damashi," the phrase loosely translated as "Go for broke," which became the 442nd's legendary motto.
Some insist to this day it was no big thing, no more than what hundreds of thousands of other GIs went through.
"There were countless guys in the 101st Airborne, the RAF pilots defending Britain, all the guys at Iwo Jima and the Battle of Midway, that did the same things we did," said another old soldier, Cpl. Eddie Yamasaki, who was trained as a machine gunner in a rifle company but ended up as a chaplain's assistant in Europe.
There were deeper reasons than modesty not to talk at first.
"It was too painful," Oba said yesterday. "We lost our buddies right and left, we saw our friends getting killed."
Today, when they get together for a beer bust, the old men with hearing aids and canes and dark glasses hiding cataract surgery, "Oh, everybody talking about, 'Remember the time we killed the Germans,' 'Remember the time I had to carry you out.' "
From a distance, it is one heroic battle after another. Oba's unit fought "right through Italy, through France, came back to Italy — the whole thing."
"We joined the 100th above Rome and went to Hill 140, where there was a big battle and a lot of boys got killed, and we chased the Jerries out of this field," he said. "And then we went on to Leghorn and occupied the Arno River and then we went to Southern France and rescued the Lost Battalion."
Oba rattled off the list of victories like a high school team's football season.
"Five months later, we came back to almost the same spot in Leghorn, and there was a division that couldn't take the Gothic Line for five and a half months, and our colonel said, 'Give me two days and I'll take it,' " Oba said. "And the 92nd Division general said, 'No way, impossible.' But the colonel sent our boys at night to the foothills of these rugged mountains, and he told the boys, 'Don't move, don't talk, just sleep during the day,' and that night he sent them up the hills again.
"And when they reached the summit, the rise, they attacked the Germans and caught them completely by surprise and the 442nd took the rise in 39 minutes when a division couldn't take it in five and a half months."
Victories came at a hellish price, and Oba remembers that, too.
"We had 49 guys killed, and I had to carry some of them out, and, especially in the Vosges mountains, I remember carrying them out and dropping them in a Jeep trailer and when I dropped them it made a sound like a cord of lumber, kathunk, and I said, 'Oh,' and I knew their bodies were frozen," he said. "These were guys you slept next to in training, you ate with, some you remembered from high school," Oba said, pausing. "And after 60 years, all I can say is they are all heroes. They defended their country."
