In late October 1944, a sergeant from Texas lay in a muddy trench on a forested hill in the Vosges Mountains of France. He had a few clips of rifle ammunition left and no food; the last rations had run out two days before. He got his water from a muddy hole down the slope, and the Germans watched that route, so every trip for a canteen was a gamble with a man’s life. The wounded lay in dugouts roofed with logs, with almost nothing left to treat them.
His battalion had advanced along these hills days earlier, deep into woods so thick that a man could not see more than thirty yards in places. Then the Germans closed in behind them. The road they had come up was cut. More than two hundred men were surrounded on a wooded hilltop, miles from their own lines.
Attempts to break out failed. Two other battalions from their regiment tried to fight through but were driven back. Airplanes tried to drop supplies, but most of the bundles drifted into German lines. Artillery fired shells packed with chocolate and medical supplies, and some got through.
The Germans attacked several times a day, and with each assault the number of Americans holding the line grew smaller. The sergeant did not know it, but the newspapers back home had given his unit a name. They called it the Lost Battalion. On the sixth day, he heard gunfire in the forest below, heavy fire, much closer than before.
Then shouting. Then, coming up the slope through the trees toward his position, he saw American helmets. The first soldier to reach him was a short man, wet and dirty, carrying an M1 rifle, with a face the sergeant did not expect to see under that helmet. The soldier looked at him and asked if he wanted a cigarette.
He was Japanese American. And the unit he belonged to had just paid a terrible price to reach that hill. To understand who those soldiers were, it is necessary to go back to the months after Pearl Harbor. In early 1942, the United States government ordered people of Japanese ancestry removed from the West Coast.
About one hundred twenty thousand men, women, and children, most of them American citizens born in the United States, were forced to leave their homes, farms, and businesses and were sent to camps in remote inland areas. They lived in tar-paper barracks behind barbed wire and under guard towers. They had not been accused of any crime. No evidence of disloyalty was presented.
They were detained because of their heritage. At the same time, Japanese Americans already serving in the armed forces were treated with suspicion, and young men of draft age were classified as unsuitable for service, the same category used for enemy aliens. In Hawaii, where people of Japanese descent formed a large part of the population, mass relocation was not practical. A battalion of Japanese American soldiers was formed from the Hawaii National Guard, shipped to the mainland, trained, and eventually sent to fight in Italy.
They suffered such heavy losses there that they became known as the Purple Heart Battalion. In early 1943, the government changed course and announced it would form a combat unit of Japanese American volunteers. In Hawaii, thousands stepped forward, far more than were needed. On the mainland, young men volunteered from inside the camps, leaving their parents and brothers behind the wire to wear the uniform of the country that had imprisoned them.
They became the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Most of their officers were white. The enlisted men were almost all Japanese American. They took as their motto a Hawaiian gambling expression meaning to risk everything on one throw: Go for Broke.
The 442nd entered combat in Italy in the summer of 1944, joined by the veteran battalion from Hawaii, and quickly earned a reputation as one of the most aggressive and reliable infantry units in the theater. In the fall of 1944, it was sent to France. Allied armies that had landed in southern France had pushed north through the Rhone Valley and were driving toward the Vosges Mountains, the last major barrier before the Rhine and Germany itself. The Vosges were a terrible place to fight.
The mountains were steep, cut by narrow valleys, and covered with dense evergreen forest. In October the rain never stopped. Temperatures fell toward freezing. Fog hung among the trees.
Men lived in water-filled holes and suffered from trench foot, a condition in which feet, soaked and cold for days, swelled and began to rot. The Germans had fortified the woods. They knew the Rhine was behind them and had orders to hold. They mined every trail, dug in machine guns with interlocking fields of fire, and zeroed their artillery and mortars to burst in the treetops, showering men in open foxholes with shell fragments and splintered wood.
The 442nd was attached to the 36th Infantry Division, a division that had begun the war as part of the Texas National Guard and still considered itself a Texas unit. In mid-October, the 442nd was ordered to take the town of Bruyeres and the hills around it. That took days of brutal fighting, hill by hill. Then came orders to advance toward the next village.
By that point the regiment had been in continuous combat for more than a week and had suffered heavy losses. It was pulled back for rest. The men had barely been out of the lines for two days when the order came to go back in. While the 442nd had been fighting for Bruyeres, a battalion from the 36th Division had been ordered to advance along long, heavily wooded ridges east of the town.
It was a risky move. The ridges ran deep into German-held territory, and the battalion’s flanks were exposed. But the division commander, a general named John Dahlquist, was under pressure to keep the advance going, so he pushed the battalion forward. The battalion advanced several miles along the ridges.
Then German forces, moving through the forest on both sides, cut the road behind them. More than two hundred Americans were now isolated on a hilltop, surrounded. They dug their foxholes into an irregular circle, pooled their ammunition and food, and sent out patrols to find a way back. They found nothing.
The Germans knew what they had. The command surrounding the trapped battalion reinforced the ring and attacked the hilltop again and again. The division’s own regiment tried first. Two battalions attacked the ridges and were stopped.
Then General Dahlquist turned to the 442nd. The men of the 442nd were utterly exhausted. They were short of riflemen after Bruyeres. Many suffered from trench foot.
They had been promised rest. They went back into the forest in darkness, each man holding the pack of the man ahead because visibility was zero under the trees. The fighting that followed lasted most of five days, and it was fighting at distances of yards. The ridges were narrow.
There was little room to maneuver around German positions. In many places the only way forward was straight up, into machine guns dug in behind logs and dirt. Every trail was mined. German artillery burst overhead in the trees.
The rain never stopped. The Japanese American soldiers advanced from tree to tree, crawling, throwing grenades, assaulting one position after another. Every German strongpoint had to be taken in close combat, and each one cost lives. Then came another fifty yards of advance.
Tanks could barely move on the ridges. Artillery support was difficult because the two sides were too close together. It came down mostly to infantry with rifles, automatic weapons, and grenades. General Dahlquist came to the front lines himself, pressing the regiment’s officers to keep attacking.
At one point, while he stood near the fighting, his personal aide was killed by machine gun fire beside him. On the hilltop, the trapped battalion could hear the fighting getting closer but could do nothing to help. Their radio batteries were nearly gone. They cut communication to a few words.
They buried their dead inside the perimeter and tried to keep the wounded alive with whatever they had. Planes came again, flying low through the clouds, and this time some supply containers fell inside their lines: food, ammunition, medical supplies, radio batteries. It was enough to keep them alive another day or two. Down the slope, the men of the 442nd knew none of the details.
They knew only that there were Americans at the other end of the ridge who would die if no one reached them. By the fourth day, some infantry companies had been reduced to a fraction of their strength. Officers were dead or wounded. Sergeants led platoons, and privates led squads.
On one of the last days, the advance stopped completely in front of a steep, heavily fortified slope. Two companies of the 442nd were pinned at its base. The German positions above covered every approach. Anyone who moved was hit.
Nothing seemed able to take that hill. What happened next has been described in many accounts of the battle, and it was not ordered by anyone. A few men stood up and began climbing the slope, firing as they went. Others saw them and rose too.
Within moments, the survivors of both companies were charging up the hill, shouting, firing from the hip, throwing grenades directly into the German gun positions. One of the soldiers who led that charge, a private named Barney Hajiro, ran ahead of his company, firing his automatic rifle, and destroyed two enemy machine gun positions on his own before being severely wounded. He would later receive the Medal of Honor for what he did that day. The German line on the hill broke.
The soldiers who made that charge had grown up in Hawaii and on the West Coast of the United States. Many of them had families living behind barbed wire in American camps. The next day, October 30, 1944, lead troops of the 442nd broke through the last German positions and reached the top of the hill. Accounts of the meeting are strikingly quiet.
There were no cheers. The Texas soldiers came out of their foxholes, pale and filthy after a siege of nearly a week. The Japanese American soldiers, just as exhausted, came up through the trees. The first words exchanged, as one survivor recalled, were an offer of a cigarette.
Two hundred eleven men of the trapped battalion walked off that hill alive. Now consider the cost. In the battles for Bruyeres and the neighboring village, then in the rescue of the Lost Battalion, about four weeks of combat in the Vosges, the 442nd suffered losses on a scale that is difficult to grasp. In the rescue operation itself, by the most commonly cited figures, the regiment suffered about eight hundred casualties to get those two hundred eleven men out.
Some accounts put the regiment’s total losses for the entire campaign considerably higher. Two companies that launched the final assaults had each started with more than a hundred men. When they pulled off the line, one was commonly said to have seventeen soldiers left, the other eight. There is a story from a few days afterward that has been told ever since.
General Dahlquist ordered the regiment to assemble for a parade so he could thank the men. When he saw how few were standing in ranks, he was reportedly angry and demanded to know why the whole regiment had not appeared as ordered. The regiment’s commander answered, according to those who were there, that this was the whole regiment. This was all that was left of it.
After the Vosges, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team fought in the mountains on the French-Italian border, then returned to Italy for the final offensive of the war, where it broke through German mountain positions that had held for months. By the end of the war, considering its size and length of service, the 442nd, together with the battalion that joined it from Hawaii, became one of the most decorated units in the history of the United States Army. Its men earned thousands of Purple Hearts. They received more than twenty Medals of Honor, though most were not awarded until more than half a century later, when the army reviewed its records and concluded that many Japanese American soldiers had been given less recognition than their actions deserved.
While they fought, many of their families were still in the camps. That is the truth underlying this entire story, and there is no way to soften it. Men whose fathers were detained behind barbed wire by the United States government volunteered to fight for that government, then marched into machine gun fire to rescue other American soldiers. Why they did it is a question asked of the veterans themselves many times.
The answers varied, but some themes recurred. They wanted to prove they were American. They wanted to show that the suspicions directed at their families were wrong. They felt an obligation to their fathers, their community, and each other not to bring shame to their names.
And they believed that the way they fought would determine how Japanese Americans were treated after the war. In 1962, the state of Texas declared the veterans of the 442nd honorary Texans in recognition of what they had done for the men of a Texas division on that hill. The rescue of the Lost Battalion is remembered as one of the greatest achievements of American infantry in World War II, and it was. But it should not be remembered only as a triumph.
The men who planned the operation and issued the orders made choices that have been questioned ever since. The battalion was sent up that ridge with its flanks exposed, and the unit sent to rescue it was a regiment that had just come out of more than a week of intense fighting, understrength and exhausted, and happened to be made up of soldiers many in the army still considered expendable. Some veterans believed until the end of their lives that they were used to save the reputation of a general who had made a mistake. Both things are true.
It was an extraordinary act of courage, and it cost far more lives than it saved. What cannot be argued is what those soldiers did. They climbed a mountain in the rain and faced fortified positions for five days, and they did not stop until they reached the men at the top.