Honor Before Glory Page 5
Hundreds of other 442nd soldiers also eagerly absorbed their news from home. Nearly all of the 442nd’s units had been placed in reserve to rest in the area surrounding Bruyères and Belmont. A primitive shuttle system had been established to transport handfuls of men back to another nearby town, Laval, for a precious hot shower and clean clothes. Laval was safer than the 442nd’s service (supply) area near Bruyères, which was getting shelled by German artillery. Blackout conditions were in effect, so Kashiki and nine others huddled around the candle, even though they were supposed to be dispersed when within range of the enemy. News from home easily trumped army regulations.
Bruyères had been liberated by the Americans seven days earlier. The town of three thousand residents had suffered through German occupation since June 22, 1940, and then near-constant artillery fire and house-to-house combat as the Americans approached in October. Bruyères is located on a broad plateau at sixteen hundred feet in elevation directly in the path of the American 36th Division’s assault through the Vosges. Four of seven heavily wooded hills at the town’s edge had seen fierce and costly fighting as the Americans and Germans alternated control of each. Shrapnel gashes from grenades, mortars, and artillery on light poles, churches, schools, and the town hall bore witness to its strategic value as a railroad center and gateway into the Vosges. The two main thoroughfares, rues Grande and J. Ferry, were littered with roofs blasted off homes and buildings turned to rubble by direct hits. None of that mattered to those lucky enough to have letters from home handed to them in the war zone, even though some may have been written more than a month earlier.
Tattered troop transports, supply trucks, and jeeps rolled into Bruyères, Belmont, and the surrounding farms with replacement troops for all three battalions resting there. The new faces reminded battle-weary veterans of buddies who had died only a few days earlier. While some of the losses had been strangers, far more difficult to accept were the grisly deaths of friends. Some wondered if they could possibly forge the same level of trust with the newcomers who had yet to see a German sniper draw a bead on them or who had not yet survived a blizzard of shrapnel. Some men thought back to how suddenly death had come.
About a week earlier George Sakato had been chatting with Yohei Sagami. They talked about what they would do when they got home. What they would eat and who they would see. Only a few months earlier, Sakato had left his family in Poston, Arizona, for basic training, where he was a poor marcher and a worse shooter. His family had avoided internment by moving to Arizona and staying with a farming family. They slept on the family’s back porch, picked cantaloupe in the blistering Arizona summer sun, and plowed farm fields at night. Although Sakato had lost thirty-five pounds as a farmworker, it was better than internment. He had earned a little extra money by sneaking cases of bootlegged liquor into the nearby Poston internment camp.
Sakato and Sagami ended their conversation when their unit moved out and soon engaged the enemy. Only minutes into the fighting, Sakato had heard the “vroom” of an incoming shell for only a second before it exploded yards away, knocking him off his feet. Stunned, he looked around. Sagami was lying facedown. Sakato turned him over. Blood pulsed out of Sagami’s neck. “Medic!” Sakato pressed his hand against the side of Sagami’s throat to avoid choking his friend. A medic slid to a stop next to Sagami. He tore open bandages as Sagami’s blood tapped against Sakato’s palm and then trickled through his dirt-encrusted fingers onto the ground. Sagami died where he fell.a It had been Sakato’s first day in battle.
Replacements arrived from the rear and looked for their unit’s commanding officer. The sheer numbers of men new to combat drove home just how many soldiers had been lost in the preceding days of the campaigns to capture Bruyères, Belmont, and Biffontaine. The 100th had lost 21 killed in action, 122 were wounded, and 18 had been captured. The number of newcomers, however, fell short of returning the 442nd’s combat units to full strength. The 442nd would have to enter combat without nearly enough men necessary to face the enemy that was waiting for them.
The only good news was that the beleaguered 442nd would be given a few days to recover and assimilate their replacements. That was especially vital because the losses suffered in the region had included some men who commanded extraordinary respect and trust among the men in foxholes. Some were officers who had led daring and dangerous assaults in Italy and then again in France. The loss of those men represented not just a loss in manpower but also a loss in leadership and morale. One was a Korean, Young Oak Kim.
YOUNG OAK KIM HAD JOINED THE 100TH BATTALION AT CAMP Shelby, Mississippi, in early 1943 after graduating from officer candidate school. He had been raised in a family whose alcoholic father, an illegal immigrant to the United States in 1906, had hated the Japanese for occupying Korea. Kim was a quiet, hardworking boy in a family on the brink of poverty and one that endured frequent anti-Korean discrimination in Los Angeles. He had enlisted in 1941 at the age of twenty-five, shortly before his father died of liver cancer. Kim had started military life as a mechanic before his leadership skills and photographic memory made him a candidate to become an Officer.
At Camp Shelby his orders were to train Japanese American recruits for combat as the 100th Battalion. He had been offered a transfer to another outfit, given the historic and deep-seated animosity between the Koreans and Japanese, but he refused. He inherited an unfit, poorly disciplined unit in which Japanese Americans from Hawaii thought their counterparts from the States were too Americanized. Meanwhile, the Stateside Japanese Americans openly taunted the Hawaiians over their pidgin English. At first his recruits called him yeobo. In English it meant “darling,” so to use it with a superior officer was an intentional insult.
The living conditions at Camp Shelby had been primitive at best. Young men new to the army slept in quarters made of moldy plywood and damp tarpaper. Swamp life sickened many who missed their rice diet and gagged at the sight of beef liver or tongue. Many made peanut-butter–and-jelly sandwiches and a piece of fruit as their standard meal. The training was worse. Four- and five-mile marches through swamps teeming with mosquitoes, chiggers, leeches, and wood ticks sapped the strength and stamina of the slightly built Nisei.b Suffocating humidity threatened to choke exhausted soldiers wearing full combat gear that weighed as much as seventy-five pounds. Infantrymen often carried two hundred rounds of ammunition, enough for one day’s fighting. Other gear included K rations for one day, a first-aid kit, a trenching tool, a full canteen, a mess kit, a blanket, and personal items such as a toothbrush, razor, and soap powder. Letters from home were wedged into a helmet’s lining, while diaries and cameras were forbidden for fear of their falling into the enemy’s hands. Under Kim’s tutelage, they had learned how to properly pack gear that could weigh nearly half as much as they did.
After landing at Salerno, Italy, Kim and the 100th Battalion had entered combat for the first time against the Germans’ Tenth Army on September 29, 1943. On his first day in battle, Kim had refused an order to send his troops directly into enemy positions. He suggested alternative routes less deadly and more effective. But it was the 100th’s first firefight. Japanese Americans could not be seen as cowardly, so his men convinced Kim they should advance into enemy fire as ordered. The word spread. Kim had his men’s interest at heart.
In the following months, he became known as “Samurai Kim” for his courage in the Italian campaign. On one patrol he encountered four enemy machine-gun nests, each time intentionally taking fire so the Germans could be spotted and counterattacked. He earned the Silver Star that day. On another, he followed a German night patrol on his belly approximately eight hundred yards back to its camp in German-held territory. He hid, waited until sunrise, took two Germans prisoner, and crawled back under barbed wire and between enemy listening posts to his unit’s position with his prisoners without being seen. That day he earned the Distinguished Service Cross.
Kim’s courage, serenity under fire, innate battlefield intelligence, and idiosyncras
ies became widely recognized. He risked a fifty-dollar fine for wearing a knit cap instead of a helmet, so he could “think straight.” He disdained foxholes. If it was his fate to die, he would accept it where he stood or slept. He also had the odd habit of unnecessarily skipping meals.
Kim’s hand had been severely mangled by a sniper on October 22 in the assault to take Biffontaine. Kim thought it a worthless mission, because it had taken his men off a ridge to capture a town of debatable value. It was the same ridge that the 1/141 would be ordered to secure the following day. That night 100th Battalion chaplain Israel Yost encouraged him to fight, as significant blood loss and shock gripped Kim.
He made it through the night. The next morning Lieutenant Jimmie Kanaya, other medics, and nearly forty German prisoners of war formed a litter team to carry Kim and ten other wounded men to a field hospital away from enemy fire. Kanaya, a former mechanic from Pontiac, Michigan, had received a battlefield commission after earning a Silver Star in his first week in combat in Italy three months earlier. The medic had crawled into intense enemy fire to treat nine badly wounded men for more than two hours. A week later he had earned a Bronze Star for walking up a road into enemy fire to find and treat a soldier who had been shot and then rolled down an embankment.
“Let’s hang back,” Kanaya told some of the other medics. He didn’t like the idea of a long line of stretchers, carried by Germans and guarded by Americans, stretching more than one hundred yards, crossing enemy territory on its way to an American field hospital. “We’ll be the last ones through. Let them go first and see what happens.”1
As they crested a hill, a German patrol of about thirty-five men spotted them. An intense standoff resulted, as each side ordered the other to surrender. But the Americans were outnumbered and outgunned. In the initial confusion, Kim and another medic slipped into nearby bushes. Kanaya stayed with the remaining wounded. As Kim made his way west toward an American field hospital, German soldiers led Kanaya and the rest of the American prisoners east toward a prisoner-of-war camp.
Now all three battalions of the 442nd had to set aside the loss of veterans like Kim and Kanaya, men who had led them into combat and men they knew would be at their side if they fell wounded. Rumors of Germany surrendering by Christmas now seemed no more than idle hope, given the enemy’s stiffening resistance in the Vosges. If the Germans were fighting as hard across Europe as they were in the Vosges, a brutal war of attrition might last forever. But at least the 442nd could rest and recover from the price it had paid in recent days.
ABOUT SIX MILES AWAY ON OCTOBER 25, THE PREDAWN CLOUDS that cloaked the forest lightened slightly at Col des Huttes, a stretch of forest about fifteen hundred yards from the end of the ridge. After assigning lookouts, all three companies of the 1/141 had dug in late the previous night. They had yet to reach their objective, and the fighting the day before indicated they may have advanced far into enemy positions designed to entrap rather than delay and fall back. How could they be sure?
Higgins’s Company A got to its feet and moved back along the trail they had used the day before. They needed to make sure the trail was clear for reinforcements and supplies. Perhaps they could make it nine hundred yards back to Col de la Croisette, the junction of several logging roads. Meanwhile, Huberth and Kimble led Companies B and C farther east. They were taking a chance, splitting the 1/141 into two groups nearly a mile apart. But their two objectives overruled caution. They had to protect their rear and also reach their objective at the end of the ridge.
Company A had barely gotten under way when once again enemy fire ripped into it. Exhausted soldiers dived to the ground, crouched behind trees, and returned fire. Dozens of trees had been cut to fall across the logging road, and they had probably been mined by the Germans during the night. One of Higgins’s men was killed and another wounded before he pulled them back toward Companies B and C, ultimately consolidating the battalion in the same area where it had spent the night.
They were trapped. Germans had closed in behind them to the west the night before and built at least one roadblock. The enemy was dug in to the north, and the forest precariously dropped off to the south to the valley that still held German infantry units, tanks, and artillery. The 1st Battalion led by five lieutenants had been advancing and fighting on the trail for a little more than twenty-four hours. They had advanced approximately six miles before entering the German net. Now their casualties were mounting, as the Germans had trapped them on a small rise in the forest. The enemy roadblock would stop any easy re inforcement or resupply attempt from the west. When the battalion’s radioman contacted headquarters, he was assured that a “friendly force” would be coming. But that didn’t matter to the lieutenants who found themselves in charge. Decisions had to be made. Quickly.
The senior men in the group gathered: Higgins, Huberth, Kimble, First Lieutenant Gordon Nelson of the weapons company, and Second Lieutenant Erwin Blonder, forward artillery observer. Although junior to the other four lieutenants, Higgins was elected to make the command decisions, with Huberth second in command. Higgins would be responsible for this beleaguered, understrength battalion that had already suffered major losses. Higgins was the only Company A officer left from when it had come ashore in France two months earlier.
Higgins and Huberth made an unusual pair. Higgins had been a tempestuous Irish kid living in a clearly defined New Jersey ethnic neighborhood. Huberth was the son of a well-to-do German commercial and residential real estate manager for the Hearst Corporation raising a family in Scarsdale, New York. Huberth had traveled to South America and France. In Huberth’s household, the family always ate together, and attending an Episcopal church was mandatory. Higgins had attended neighborhood schools, while Huberth had been sent to a private school with a stable nearby. He cleaned stalls and groomed and exercised horses before attending college as a social science and history major. Huberth had grown to admire Higgins’s Irish sense of humor, calm demeanor, and steel nerves under fire. Both had developed a deep respect for each other as well as self-confidence.
Higgins placed decisiveness as the most important quality of a leader. “You tell the men to do something. You don’t stand there looking puzzled. You can lead a company one of two ways. You can lead them or push them from the rear. I led and Harry Huberth led,” Higgins recalled years later. That self-confidence had been instilled in Higgins by his parents throughout his boyhood. Huberth had witnessed Higgins’s confidence and “steel nerves” as his immense respect for Higgins developed under enemy fire. “You don’t bond with a man until after you’ve looked at him. It happens because you see what he is made of. He is not afraid. He will stand up for you. You know you can trust him. That comes from actual experience under fire,” said Huberth after the war.2
Higgins knew he had to establish a defensible position for his men. He set a .30-caliber machine gun at each end and at various points along a 350-yard oval perimeter. The easternmost was manned by Sergeant Jack Wilson and the other by Staff Sergeant Bruce Estes. Harold Buchheim was assigned a third light machine-gun post, and a fourth was positioned to guard what appeared to be the only nearby water source. Higgins placed the bulk of his men in a belt of foxholes to protect against enemy advances from the west, north, and east. The precipitous drop-off on the south required fewer foxholes to defend. Higgins didn’t have a large-enough force to secure the water hole. He and Huberth would have to devise a plan to send patrols to get water if their men’s supplies ran low.c
Higgins had an array of firepower at his disposal: 81mm mortars, heavy automatic rifles, M1 rifles, .30-caliber carbine rifles, six light ma chine guns, and bazookas distributed among the three companies and a weapons platoon. A few months earlier, Higgins had developed a particular appreciation for the weapons platoon. He had bucked standard army doctrine by moving his weapons platoon from the rear to the front, in order to lay down suppressing fire to protect the rest of the unit when it first met the enemy. His weapons platoon was now positioned to pl
ay a similar role when the inevitable German attack came. But Higgins couldn’t predict the Germans’ available firepower. Additional enemy reinforcements may have arrived during the night.
His men were huddled together in an area the size of a few football fields, and they were stationary targets for German artillery. Higgins needed every advantage he could manufacture. He established an observation post in front of each company with sound-powered telephones linked to Higgins’s command post. He also established listening posts about one hundred yards in front of each of the platoons he had positioned along the perimeter. The posts were hard-wired back to his foxhole command post, giving him 360-degree sound-surveillance capability. The listening posts would track and report German movements for Higgins so he could request American artillery strikes onto their positions. While the 1/141 was outnumbered and short on firepower, at least it would not be surprised when the inevitable attack came.
Meanwhile, his men pulled folding shovels and knives out of backpacks to chip and scrape as deep into the muddy forest floor as possible. Slit trenches afforded minimal protection, so if they could somehow dig deeper foxholes on both sides of the logging road that bisected their position, they might elude deadly shrapnel. Sometimes massive roots or boulders stopped them cold, forcing them to shift a few feet to one side or the other and then resume digging. Breaks came only when they flopped onto their bellies when a new round of enemy artillery arrived.