How the 442nd Regimental Combat Team Overcame Racism During War

The 442nd Regimental Combat Team—the Japanese American unit heralded as the most decorated unit in U.S. military history—may seem like an odd topic for an essay on diversity and inclusion. After all, it was a racially segregated unit filled with Japanese Americans who had been removed from their homes because of their ethnicity and forced into desolate internment camps without due process. Yet from its racist origins came one of the most inspiring stories of heroism in the U.S. military.

Origins of the 442nd

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, there were approximately 127,000 Japanese Americans living in the continental United States and another 150,000 in the then-territory of Hawaii. Most were second- or third-generation immigrants (niesi or sansei) who had been born in the United States, possessed
birthright citizenship, had never lived in Japan, and were legally the same as any other U.S. citizen—at least on paper.

After Pearl Harbor, however, many Americans viewed all people of Japanese descent—regardless of citizenship—with suspicion or outright hostility. Unlike Italian Americans and German Americans, who could more easily blend in with the majority, Japanese Americans stood out and were more easily discriminated against. They were the “yellow peril.” Korean Americans and Chinese Americans were forced to proclaim their non-Japanese origins so they would not become targets for discrimination or harassment.

On 19 February 1942, under the guise of national security, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing the designation of most of the West Coast as a military zone. Some 110,000 Japanese Americans—citizens and noncitizens—were “evacuated” to internment camps in desolate places, such as Manzanar and Tule Lake in California, and Heart Mountain in Wyoming. Their property often was either taken or sold at bargain prices. Roosevelt justified the order by claiming it was to protect the Japanese Americans from angry mobs. However, it was really an attempt to remove potential sympathizers from the coast where a Japanese invasion might take place.

As fears of a Japanese-American “fifth column” slowly subsided, the War Department decided to allow some Japanese Americans to join the military and fight overseas—albeit in racially segregated units. The most famous of these was the U.S. Army 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which included the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion. By war’s end, after vicious fighting at Monte Cassino, Anzio, and the Vosges Mountains, the unit had received thousands of awards for valor and many more Purple Hearts than it had men. As President Harry S. Truman said after the war, “You fought not only the enemy . . . you fought prejudice and you have won.”¹

Lesson #1: Diversity Is Not Skin Deep

The 442nd Regimental Combat Team at first may seem like a naturally cohesive unit—after all, they were all Japanese Americans who were segregated from the rest of the military because of their shared racial background. However, within that crew was a deep schism that could have easily torn apart the entire enterprise.

Half of the unit consisted of Japanese Americans from the U.S. mainland—the majority of whom enlisted straight out of the internment camps once they were permitted to do so.² These men enlisted largely to prove their patriotism and loyalty to a country that did not trust them. Many were understandably skeptical of their government. The other half of the unit consisted of Japanese Americans from Hawaii, where Japanese Americans comprised nearly 40 percent of the population and where there were no internment camps (likely because interning such a large percentage of the plantation labor force would have caused “the collapse of the community’s economic infrastructure”).³ To these Hawaiians, the mainlanders’ skepticism of government came off as unpatriotic. The mainlanders’ dourness contrasted with the more easy-going attitudes of the Hawaiians. The language barrier between the Hawaiians’ pidgin English and the mainlanders’ conventional English did not help either.⁴

The mainlanders and the Hawaiians repeatedly got into fights with each other. The Hawaiians referred to the mainlanders as “kotonks” because that was the sound their heads made when they struck the ground.⁵ The mainlanders referred to the Hawaiians as “buddhaheads”—a play on words because it sounded like the Japanese word for “pig.” Fortunately, the two sides eventually learned to work together. During training, the group took an emotional field trip to an Arkansas internment camp where the Hawaiians saw, for the first time, what their mainland brethren had experienced and overcome.⁶ Any differences not resolved by that trip eventually would be resolved in the heat of combat. But the lesson for today remains: Diversity is not skin deep, and the Navy cannot “win” the diversity battle through statistics and quotas alone. It needs inclusion, too.

Lesson #2: Strong Leaders Embrace Diversity

The 442nd had some phenomenal combat leaders, including First Lieutenant Daniel Inouye, who led an assault against a series of machine gun nests in the Gothic Line—a German and Italian defensive line during the Italian campaign. As Inouye prepared to throw a grenade, a German soldier shot off most of his hand with the grenade still in it. He used his other intact hand to pull the live grenade out of his severed hand and threw it into the machine gun nest, killing the German soldier inside.⁷ He would receive the Medal of Honor and later become a U.S. senator.

One of the most respected leaders of this Japanese-American unit, however, was not Japanese American. He was a Korean American: Young-Oak Kim. As a young man, Kim repeatedly tried to join the military but was turned away because of his Asian heritage. Fortunately, conscription laws were relaxed as the United States inched closer and closer to war, and Asian Americans were allowed to join in greater numbers. Still, things did not get much easier after he enlisted in January 1941. He was not permitted to attend Officer Candidate School until late 1942. After graduating, he was prohibited from joining any of the storied frontline units. Instead, in January 1943, the Army sent Kim to an Asian-American unit, the 100th Infantry Battalion—a Japanese-American unit from Hawaii and a precursor to, and later part of, the 442nd.⁸

Many Japanese-American soldiers did not trust their new Korean-American platoon leader, in part because of longstanding, historical tensions between the two cultures and populations.⁹ Kim was even offered a transfer to a different position to avoid racial tension.¹⁰ His response: “There are no Japanese or Koreans here. We’re all Americans and we’re fighting for the same cause.”¹¹ Kim eventually earned his men’s respect through both courage and compassion. He earned a Distinguished Service Cross by crawling 800 yards through enemy terrain, silently capturing two German sentries, and then crawling back to friendly lines with the two prisoners in tow.¹² He “did not risk his soldiers’ lives for his own glory” and “seemed to worry about the safety of his men, and for that reason he often did not make concessions to orders from his superiors.”¹³

Kim was not a great leader because of his race or the race of his men. He was a great leader because of his actions. But he also understood where his men were coming from—because he had come from a similar place himself—and he used that to gain their respect.

Lesson #3: Diversity Enhances Lethality

The 442nd was slotted to fight only in the European Theater. There were still too many who feared Japanese Americans could not be trusted in a fight against the Japanese. Nevertheless, some individuals were plucked from the 442nd and sent to the Military Intelligence Service in the Pacific Theater. There, they served as translators and interpreters of intercepted communications as well as interrogators of those few captured Japanese soldiers and sailors.

The Military Intelligence Service vastly increased the effectiveness of Allied operations in the Pacific. In the words of Major General Charles Andrew Willoughby, General Douglas MacArthur’s intelligence chief, “The Nisei saved countless lives and shortened the war by two years.”¹⁴ They helped pierce the veil of an enemy who had successfully surprised the United States in 1941—unlike with the Germans, the Americans had comparatively little experience interacting with or fighting the Japanese.

Serving in the Military Intelligence Service was dangerous work. The Japanese did not have a reputation for treating prisoners of war kindly, and they certainly would not extend any courtesy to captured Japanese Americans who had betrayed their “homeland.” The risks of friendly fire also were very high.¹⁵ The average U.S. soldier did not have much experience with Japanese Americans and might assume a Japanese-looking individual in the bushes was an enemy soldier who had stolen an American uniform—not an unreasonable assumption in a theater in which the Japanese would sometimes play dead only to detonate suicide bombs once the Americans were close. The Japanese Americans joined the Military Intelligence Service knowing the extreme risks. Diversity, far from being a handicap or a hindrance, can be a force multiplier.

Lesson #4: Diversity Compounds

The 442nd’s most direct impact was in the battles it won and the towns it liberated. But its influence extended far beyond that. One of the unit’s most famous engagements involved rescuing the “Lost Battalion” of the Texas National Guard, which been surrounded by German forces in the Vosges Mountains in 1944. Despite the daring rescue, newspaper coverage at the time did not always mention that it was Japanese Americans who did the rescuing. But the Texans of the Lost Battalion knew, and when they returned home, they would tell the story of the 442nd’s heroism.¹⁶ So, too, would many other veterans who had heard stories of the unit’s combat exploits. Those stories would pave the way for several positive developments for the Japanese-American community.

For example, an American Legion post in Hood River, Oregon, infamously refused to allow Japanese-American veterans. As news of this policy spread, veterans from the Lost Battalion and other supportive veterans wrote to the American Legion expressing their dismay: “More than three hundred servicemen in the Pacific wrote letters to the Hood River News, all but one critical of the post’s action.”¹⁷ The American Legion eventually changed its policy. That same supportive fervor likely had an influence on granting statehood to Hawaii in 1959, granting honorary Texas state citizenship to all 442nd veterans in 1962, paying reparations to internment survivors in 1988, and upgrading many of the 442nd members’ military decorations in 2000. Japanese Americans should not have needed battlefield heroism to prove their patriotism, but it provided additional political capital to make societal improvements.

In today’s society, the term “diversity and inclusion” can be politically controversial, but it should not be. The military has constantly sought to be more diverse and more inclusive throughout its history. The story of the 442nd should be a reminder of the harm that can come when people are excluded based on their race or ethnic heritage, as well as a reminder of the greatness that comes when people of different races and ethnicities work together.