The 100th Infantry Battalion

In the autumn of 1942 a battalion unlike any the US Army had yet had was training at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin. Almost all its soldiers were Nisei – American-born children of Japanese immigrants, most of them from Hawaii. Under the date of 12 October 1942 many chronologies state that the American 100th Infantry Battalion, more than 1,400 strong and made up mainly of Nisei, “began operations”. The number is correct; the date is not. The battalion had been formed four months earlier: on 12 June 1942, after arriving in California, it was named the 100th Infantry Battalion (Separate). By October it had already been training for several months, and it went into action only in September 1943, in Italy. Where the October date came from is unknown; it may be a mistake in the month.

Under suspicion after Pearl Harbor

In 1941 people of Japanese descent made up about 37 per cent of the population of the Territory of Hawaii – the largest ethnic group on the islands. Many young Nisei served in the Hawaii National Guard, in the 298th and 299th Infantry Regiments, some of them as draftees. On the morning of 7 December 1941, during the attack on Pearl Harbor, these soldiers manned positions on the beaches in expectation of a Japanese landing, fought fires and gave blood for the wounded. Even so, in the days that followed their weapons were taken away from them for a time, and Nisei from the student Reserve Officers’ Training Corps were discharged from the Hawaii Territorial Guard. In 1942 the War Department classified all Japanese Americans of draft age as unfit for service because of their ancestry (category IV-C, intended for “enemy aliens”).

On the mainland, under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, the army removed some 120,000 people of Japanese descent from the West Coast in 1942, two-thirds of them American citizens, and incarcerated them in camps. In Hawaii, which was under martial law, mass removal was impracticable – without Japanese workers, craftsmen and shopkeepers the islands’ economy would have ground to a halt. There, by various counts, between one and a half and two thousand people deemed suspect were interned: Buddhist priests, teachers at Japanese-language schools, community leaders. The military governor, General Delos Emmons, did however agree that some 170 students who had been thrown out of the Guard could form a volunteer labour unit, the Varsity Victory Volunteers, which built roads and fortifications.

From Hawaii to Wisconsin

The command in Washington feared that in the event of a Japanese landing in Hawaii, Nisei soldiers might prove disloyal or be mistaken for the enemy by their own side. At Emmons’s request it was therefore decided to move them off the islands. On 4 June 1942, as the Battle of Midway hung in the balance, 1,432 Nisei soldiers of the Hawaii National Guard boarded the transport Maui at night in Honolulu, unable to say goodbye to their families; the ship sailed the next day. As the Hawaiian Provisional Infantry Battalion they zigzagged across to Oakland, where on 12 June they were given the number 100. The battalion was “separate”, belonging to no regiment – hence both the number and the Hawaiian nickname “One Puka Puka” (puka is Hawaiian for a hole, that is, a zero). It was commanded by a white officer from Hawaii, Lieutenant Colonel Farrant Turner.

At Camp McCoy the soldiers were received with distrust; they lived in tents, and their officers were to watch their loyalty and efficiency. The battalion answered with its results on the rifle range and in field exercises. Five of its soldiers received the Soldier’s Medal for rescuing local people who had fallen through the ice of a frozen lake. Some 25 men were sent to Cat Island at the mouth of the Mississippi, where for several months they were to serve as the “enemy” in the training of dogs that were supposedly able to sniff out Japanese. The experiment, based on racial prejudice, produced no results.

In January 1943 the battalion was moved to Camp Shelby in Mississippi. Its training results, and the conduct of the Varsity Victory Volunteers, persuaded the War Department that it was worth drawing on the Nisei on a larger scale. At the beginning of 1943 the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, and the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, agreed to the formation of a whole volunteer Nisei combat team, and on 1 February 1943 Roosevelt declared that “Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry”. In Hawaii some 10,000 volunteers came forward; from the camps on the mainland, behind barbed wire, far fewer – which reflected well the bitterness of the incarcerated families.

“The Purple Heart Battalion”

In August 1943 the 100th Battalion, with the motto “Remember Pearl Harbor”, sailed for the Mediterranean. At Oran the commander of the Fifth Army, General Mark Clark, took it on when Eisenhower’s headquarters had no assignment for it, and attached it to the 34th Infantry Division. The battalion went into action on 29 September 1943 near Salerno, crossed the Volturno, and in January and February 1944 bled in the assaults at Monte Cassino. Of some 1,300 men, roughly 500 remained in the ranks after five months of fighting. War correspondents then dubbed it the “Purple Heart Battalion”, after the decoration for the wounded.

Replacements came from the new 442nd Regimental Combat Team, into which the battalion was incorporated in June 1944 while keeping its own number. The 442nd’s motto was the Hawaiian dice-players’ expression “Go for broke” – “bet everything”. Together they fought in Italy and, in the autumn of 1944, in the Vosges, where they rescued a surrounded Texan battalion at the cost of heavy losses. The 100th/442nd is regarded as the most highly decorated unit of its size in the history of the US Army. During the war the only Medal of Honor awarded to a Nisei soldier was the posthumous medal of Sadao Munemori; in 2000, after a review of decorations intended to undo the effects of prejudice, another 22 Asian Americans received the medal, among them the future senator Daniel Inouye.

Place in the war

The story of the 100th Battalion is the other side of the story of the camps for Japanese Americans. The very men whom the government had judged potentially disloyal mostly wanted to prove that they were Americans, and they did so at the front, far from the Pacific – Nisei were not sent to fight Japan in infantry units, although several thousand of them served in the Pacific as interpreters and intelligence officers. The record of the battalion and the 442nd strengthened efforts after the war to end discrimination. In 1988 Congress passed an act in which the United States apologised for the incarceration of Japanese Americans and paid compensation to the survivors, and in 2010 veterans of the 100th Battalion, the 442nd and the Nisei of the Military Intelligence Service were honoured with the Congressional Gold Medal. The 100th Battalion still exists today as the only infantry unit in the US Army Reserve.