Battle Field Angels (15 page)

“Did you hear what’s up?”

“No. What?”

“This is a rescue mission! More than two hundred guys have been surrounded up on Hill 351 for five days. They’re outta food and water. Almost no ammo! That’s why they’re pushing us so hard. As soon as it’s light, we’re movin’ out again.”

Word spread from foxhole to foxhole among the Nisei early on the morning of October 29. Some had been surrounded a few weeks earlier near Biffontaine and knew what it was like to face Germans on every side.

In the driving rain, fixed bayonets at the ready, Okubo and the few remaining men of K Company moved straight up the spine of a ridge, directly into the heart of the German position. It was the only path to the surrounded regiment. The frontal assault on the narrow ridge nearly became a suicidal banzai charge as K Company troops fired from the hip at the enemy.

More Nisei soldiers fell. Okubo applied a battle dressing, gave a quick morphine shot, and placed a sulfa tablet in a wounded man’s mouth. Sometimes he had to short-circuit his corpsman training. As he raced up to another injured man, a strange gurgling sound told him right away that the soldier had a chest wound. With each breath, the soldier sucked air into his lungs through the open wound. Training called for Okubo to close the edges of the chest wound with safety pins or sew them together with needle and thread, but he had no time for such precision. He placed a sterile dressing into the chest wound, hoping it would restore a semblance of internal pressure.

Eight times that day, Okubo pulled a wounded soldier through the mud and under enemy fire back to safety. Adrenaline fought numbing exhaustion as the mud thickened on his boots, his muscles burned, and the semisweet smell of blood filled his nostrils. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Pursall called headquarters for help:

The plea over the battlefield radio sounded shrill against the steady barrage of artillery explosions.

“I can only give you engineers,” replied General John Dahlquist.
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K Company was on its own.

As night descended on October 29, Okubo and the surviving soldiers of K Company dug shallow foxholes, knowing German outposts were within yards of their position. Okubo had treated and rescued twenty-five Nisei soldiers in two days, most of them well in front of the American line of assault. As he dug his foxhole, the forest chill deepened. Exhaustion failed to stem the searing pain that radiated from his elbows and knees, left raw from crawling along the debris-strewn ground to reach his fellow Nisei.

James Okubo awoke to snow flurries, but the weather had no bearing on the advance. With two battalions on their flanks, K Company and the remainder of the 3rd Battalion pushed closer to the enemy. Finally, by late afternoon, the relentless will of the 442nd and 100th overcame the last of the German resistance to liberate the Lost Battalion. The surviving 211 exhausted and starving soldiers of the 141st Regiment stared in disbelief when Nisei soldiers walked up to their position. Voices failed many of the mud-encrusted survivors of the six-day siege. They managed just a thin grin and a nod when their Nisei rescuers offered them cigarettes.

The 442nd had suffered devastating losses. Soldiers and medics had been in constant battle for nearly two weeks. Sometimes they had engaged the enemy in hand-to-hand combat as they advanced uphill against the well-entrenched Germans who held superior, elevated firing positions. Through extraordinary heroism, daring, and a willingness to pay a deadly price for each yard of forest, they had saved the Lost Battalion. Only 78 soldiers of the original 200 in K Company remained able to fight. Of the 2,000 Nisei ordered to rescue the Lost Battalion, nearly 1,000 had been killed—among them were more than a dozen medics—or wounded. Medics had treated more than 800 wounded soldiers in the brutal Vosges Mountains campaign, none more inspirationally than James Okubo.

Yet almost as soon as the Lost Battalion had been rescued, K Company was ordered to move out once more. Morale plummeted, as the Nisei grumbled that white officers pushed them into the teeth of the enemy without adequate rest, supplies, or personnel.

Men trained as engineers were the only replacements available. As they moved up to the front line, many picked up a rifle from a dead Nisei infantryman. Medical provisions also had to be carefully conserved, as the wounded far outstripped available supplies.

Sherman tanks led the infantry’s push toward Germany. At one point on November 4, Okubo spotted a smoldering tank only a few yards from the enemy. Again, he ran ahead of the front line—this time seventy-five yards beyond the nearest fire support—dodging small-arms fire as he neared the tank. He heard the moans of a tank crewman inside. As gunfire ricocheted off the tank, he pulled the crewman out and carried him back to the front line before treating his wounds.

Finally, on November 9, fresh combat units relieved Okubo’s unit. It had fought since October 15 with only two days’ break.

In May 1945, the Nisei gathered to honor James Okubo for his heroism. His commanding officer had recommended the Medal of Honor for the medic who required little supervision, was well liked by the grunts, and repeatedly ran into enemy fire to rescue and treat soldiers who otherwise would have died. But the nomination for the Medal of Honor was stamped “Approved for Silver Star.” Maddeningly, someone up the chain of command believed the highest honor “a noncombatant medic” could earn was the Silver Star.

James Okubo received his Silver Star at a memorial service in Novi, Italy, that honored nearly seven hundred dead Nisei and saluted the nearly ten thousand who had been wounded. Three days later Germany surrendered.

The organizational lessons learned in World War I in part had enabled the Army by April 1945 to support its 3 million soldiers in Europe with 258,000 medical personnel. They represented the largest and fastest expansion of the military medical corps in history. By the close of the war in Europe, the Army had established 318 hospitals whose capacity exceeded 250,000 beds, or one bed for every 12 soldiers.

If World War I was the first mechanized war, World War II was the first massively mobile war. The mobilization of military medical care paid enormous dividends. The full integration of medical personnel into the Normandy invasion enabled 97 percent of the men wounded in the assault to survive. The mobile army surgical hospital, particularly the version developed in the Far East, became the basis for MASH units that would define military medicine in future wars.

The evolution of expedited battlefield care beginning with medics like James Okubo and extending through hospital echelons ultimately enabled 231,000 seriously wounded men to be evacuated by air or hospital ship to the United States. As many as 100,000 per month were transported by air to the care they needed. By 1945, their mortality in flight dropped to only 1.5 per 1,000 patients. General Dwight Eisenhower believed the development of medical evacuation by air ranked alongside the availability of antibiotics, whole blood, and plasma as vital to saving hundreds of thousands of lives in World War II.

The Army’s medical detachment treated 2.3 million noncombat casualties and 393,000 battle casualties. Only 12,500 of those wounded soldiers died, resulting in a mortality rate of 3 percent, the lowest ever achieved by the medical corps to that point.

It came at a steep price to the corpsmen, medics, nurses, doctors, and surgeons who served. More than 14,000 casualties were suffered by the medical corps in Europe, of which nearly 12,000 were wounded and 2,700 died. Six medics earned the Medal of Honor, three of them posthumously.

Medic James Okubo and the other Nisei soldiers returned home to hostility and sometimes unconcealed racism that had festered throughout the war. As Japan neared defeat in 1945, Oregon Governor Walter M. Pierce made it clear that some Americans had yet to make peace with neighbors of Japanese descent:

Yet some Americans rose to the defense of the Nisei. “The Nisei bought an awful big hunk of America with their blood,” said General Joseph Stilwell:

When James Okubo was discharged in December 1945, he reunited with his family and enrolled at Wayne State University. He married Nobi, a Wayne State student, and upon graduation decided to study dentistry at the University of Detroit. They started a family and had two sons, John and William, and a daughter, Anne. When he received his degree, he joined the faculty at the University of Detroit and established a part time-dental practice. Quiet and industrious, James Okubo struck his colleagues in much the same way as neighbors in Bellingham had seen him: a hard-working young man with a smile that put others at ease. He rarely mentioned his Silver Star and revealed little about the horrors of the Vosges Mountains.

In the early 1990s, the 442nd Veterans Club, Oahu AJA Veterans Council, and others began campaigning for a review of 442nd and 100th Battalion battle records. In 1996, Hawaii Senator Daniel Akaka sponsored legislation that required a Pentagon review of Japanese-American service records. Approximately sixty thousand Asian Americans had served in World War II, yet only two had received the Medal of Honor. Also, 1.2 million blacks had served in World War II, but none had been awarded the Medal of Honor. However, more than 430 Medals of Honor were awarded to white soldiers. It was clear that American soldiers of color had been denied medals for valor that they had earned.

In 1997, a Senior Army Decorations Board recommended that twenty-one Asian Americans’ Distinguished Service Crosses be upgraded to the Medal of Honor. Once federal legislation was passed waiving a time limit in Okubo’s case, he was added to the list of Americans who had been denied proper honor. Only seven of the twenty-one were still alive by 2000. James Okubo was not among them. He had died in an auto accident in Detroit in 1967 when he was forty-seven years old.

The haunting notes of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” swept across the enclosed pavilion outside the White House on June 21, 2000. Seven old men shuffled toward reserved seating under a massive American flag, accompanied by other Japanese Americans. President Bill Clinton and other government officials waited patiently for them.

As James Okubo’s award citation was about to be read, his diminutive widow, Nobi, stood before the president. When the reading was completed, he handed her an open wooden box containing James’s Medal of Honor.

“They did more than defend America,” President Clinton told the audience. “They helped define America at its best … Rarely has a nation been so well served by a people it has so ill-treated.”
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In fewer than two years of combat in World War II, the 442nd fought in seven major campaigns and earned seven Presidential Unit Citations. More than 18,100 individual honors were earned by 18,000 men, including 21 Medals of Honor, 42 Distinguished Service Crosses, 588 Silver Stars, more than 4,000 Bronze Stars, and almost 9,500 Purple Hearts. Although some Army units saw desertion rates of 15 percent, there were no reported cases of desertion among the Nisei.

Far away in the Pacific, hundreds of corpsmen found themselves marooned on island atolls where evasion and retreat were impossible.

World War II: Peleliu

T
he yellow quarter moon slowly rose in a darkening desert sky over ridges dotted with sage and creosote bush as quail and brown birds scratched the baked earth. Tonopah, Nevada, quieted in the early summer night as the yard lights at the Y Service Station cast a humming white glow over the gas pumps.

A few blocks away, three teenagers stood at the cusp of manhood. Hours before, Sammy Petrovich, Bob Warren, and Joe Marquez—the town’s entire high school senior class of boys in Tonopah—had graduated at a time when war defined young men’s dreams. In June 1943, they faced a simple choice: stay in Tonopah to become a miner, bartender, or grocery store clerk or go to war.