Written By Michael Shannon

Page Two

The living quarters of the Poston relocation camp, Poston, Arizona 1943. Pop: 18,000

Poston Camp

Endless rows of tar paper buildings housing six to eight families with no partitions, no toilets, no furniture and no running water. It was 88 degrees in April. They would not see temperatures under 100 degrees until Christmas. The camp was completely surrounded by nothing. No trees, no grass only desert scrub. On top of all that, it was not the worst of the all camps. I have a friend who remembers a little about life there. He was just a small boy from Guadalupe but he does remember the heat. Mothers tried soaking sheets and hanging them inside in the high summer. He said the little kids would run back and forth the length of the barracks purposely running through the wet and slightly cool sheets.

It’s pretty easy to form a picture of your great grandparents taking your dad to the old Greyhound bus depot at Mutt Anderson’s cafe, both wearing their best clothes as they did for important occasions. In 1941 they would have both been wearing hats, he in his Fedora and she with her go to church best, purse on her arm and those sensible heels women wore then. Mom holding a crushed linen hanky in her clenched hand. The family scene is always the same, father looking prideful and the mother just on the edge of tears but holding it all in so as not to embarrass. Hilo would have walked up the steps into the bus and found a seat, maybe at the window so he could look out and see mom and dad. All of them giving a subdued, shy wave as your grandparents hearts broke. Perhaps your mother was there too. My guess is she was.

Boarding the buses April, 1942

I well recall my own parents took me to the Greyhound in San Luis in 1966. My father proud, my mom doing her best to smile but visibly shaking. When the bus pulled out, I looked back to see her fall into my dads arms and bury her head in his shoulder. Just like your grandmother my mother had to go through the leave taking twice.

It is very different than sending a child in peacetime. Then they knew that the devil would take his due and this might be the last time the beloved boy would ever be home again. As always the future was grim and completely unknown.

George, Hisa and Yasbei Hirano with a picture of their son Hirano, Robert; Private; 442nd regimental combat team, 2nd Battalion Headquarters company; killed in action 26 June 1944 at Belvedere, France.

After enlistment your dad was sent basic training at Camp Roberts in San Miguel. He arrived there on the 29th of October and was assigned to Company B of the 82nd Training Battalion for 17 weeks of basic Infantry instruction. He was fortunate. By 1944 boot camp had been reduced to just eight weeks because of the expanding war and the urgent need for new soldiers. Basic is designed to teach you about the Army, it’s history, Its rules and how to operate as a group or groups of many different sizes. Your dad qualified as an expert marksman. He also passed courses in map reading, signals and hand grenade. He learned to fire the 80 mm mortar though he wasn’t assigned to a mortar platoon yet. Guys that weigh 125 pounds are too light to carry them so I’m sure he felt pretty fortunate. He stuck bayonets into canvas bags, fired the fifty caliber machine gun and could disassemble and reassemble his 1903 Springfield rifle with his eyes closed.

Just a week after Pearl Harbor he was headed for Fort Lewis Washington to join Company D, 162nd Infantry. The 162nd was a component of the 41st Division, Oregon National Guard which had been inducted into the regular army in late 1940. The beginning of WWII saw the various state National guards federalized for national defense. Strange as it may seem, the state you were from had little to do with where you were assigned during wartime. It was simply a matter of bodies needed.

While at Fort Washington which is near Tacoma he received further training as a mortar man. The military seems to have a perverse way of surprising you. He qualified as an assistant gunner in February and was re-assigned to the 138th infantry regiment of the Missouri National Guard. The Missourians had probably never met a Nisei since the 126,000 thousand plus Japanese in America were almost exclusively living in the far west, primarily California. One of the great things about the army is the mingling of kids that are from parts of the country where their upbringing and customs are so different. A sort of culture shock takes place at first until they learn that at heart they are not so different. I think you can say that your father like many kids, remember he was just 22, was getting a real education about the country he lived in that didn’t come from any textbook.

The 138th was ordered to Alaska that same month. Going with them would be Private Hiraoki Fuchiwaki, assistant gunner on a mortar crew. Right, a mortar crew for which he was deemed to light too carry. Thats the army for you.

Your dad’s commanding officer was Colonel Archie Roosevelt one of Theodore Roosevelt’s four sons who served in both WWI and WWII. Archie was the only one who survived. Quentin Roosevelt was the youngest son of President Theodore Roosevelt and Edith Roosevelt. Inspired by his father and siblings, he joined the United States Army Air Service where he became a pursuit pilot during World War I. He was killed in aerial combat over France on Bastille Day, 1918. Ted, the oldest died soon after the Normandy invasion. He was a Brigadier General and died of a heart attack while leading his troops. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for Bravery. Kermit died after serving in North Africa in action against the Afrika Corps and then fighting the Japanese in Alaska.

I mention the above because the sense of duty people felt was different then. Wealthy, educated and privileged kids stepped up. Sons of bankers (Clair Gibson, Army Air Corps), Judges, (Jim Moore, Navy Seabees) and the well-off who could have wangled a deferment but stepped up to the head of the line. (John Loomis, Marines) The list from Arroyo Grande is long and represented are kids from all walks of life. Grown-ups you knew in school who were your teachers, Del Holloway, Army, Cliff Boswell and Al Sperling, Air Corps, your neighbors, Gordon Dixon, Army, Ace Porter, Army, James Mankins, Army, all three Baxter boys, Don, Bill and Tommy, Navy, Maxine Bruce, Chuck Bells mother and Virginia Campodonico, from the Nipomo clan. Both were Army nurses who served overseas. Your father must have felt the same, that he owed it to his country to serve. He and your uncle were amongst hundreds of young men and women who volunteered from our county.

Many Nisei volunteered out of the camps, the ultimate irony, jailed and held under guard by a suspicious government they nevertheless took it upon themselves to serve a country who didn’t want them.

It wasn’t only the boys either. we wasted the girls and young children, five years stolen from young lives. High school girls with an entire life before them were ripped from school, loaded on buses and taken on the long drive to barbed wire compounds guarded with machine guns. Some would be held until 1948. A single drop of Japanese blood was all it took. Adopted kids went, mixed race kids too. Even white kids raised in Japanese homes. A young man whose mother was half Japanese was at Manzanar. He said because he was mostly white he was allowed to go to high school in Lone Pine where the other kids called him “The Jap.”

Arroyo Grande High School Graduates class of 1941. Courtesy AGHS

Sixteen or seventeen year old kids of any generation are ill equipped to understand the why of it. The transfer must have been stunning. The Nisei in Arroyo Grande High Schools class of 1941 represented a full 22 percent or more than one in five pupils. Every former student interviewed made a point of saying that there was no bias with the Japanese American kids and in fact they were fully integrated into school life.

Chimiko Alice Fuchiwaki. Prisoner #882, Pima, Sacaton, Gila River camp. Arrived Sept 1, 1942, Departed May 3,1945. She was given an early release to go to Colorado for work. Chimmie never returned to Arroyo Grande. More than half of all the Nisei from Arroyo Grande never returned. The 1943 yearbook had no Nisei grads and almost no boys of any race. The war was in full swing in America.

Called to headquarters just before departure for Alaska your father was given a new set of orders. It was the cold finger of the federal governments Japanese re-location program. Even though neither your father or brother was in camp, they had both enlisted before the war, they are listed as internees in camp documents. There was no escape. When you were on laeave you could only go home, nowhere else. The reaction to the attack on Pearl Harbor was a disaster for the Japanese on the west coast. The war department had suspended enlistments from the Nisei and was pondering discharging all soldiers of Japanese decent. In the meantime they were withdrawn from their units and essentially parked at army bases in the middle of the country until it was decided what to do with them. Your dad was sent by train to Fort Bliss, Texas. He traveled along with other Nisei soldiers on trains with window shades drawn so as to not draw any attention to them. Fort Bliss was the perfect place. Located in West Texas just north of the Mexican border you can hide anything in its 1.12 million acres of scrub desert in El Paso County.

At the time Fort Bliss, was an old Cavalry base dating to post Civil War, it still had a barracks named for Robert E Lee. Don’t forget that Texas was part of the Confederacy. Run down after two decades of governmental neglect, it held a hodge podge of military from the “Old Ironsides” 1st cavalry division (Armored) to Nisei units waiting to be shipped to Mississippi for infantry training with the 442nd or up to Minnesota to the language schools. Afrika Corps POW’s were also interned there right next to Japanese Americans held in concentration camps. The Japanese were behind barbed wire, the Germans were not. Some irony there.

The 138th’s experience in Alaska was a disaster and your dad was extremely lucky to have missed it. Deployed to the island of Kiska in the brutal cold and perennial fog, the new and untried soldiers saw shadows everywhere. One dismal night of combat saw thirty soldiers killed and fifty wounded all by friendly fire. The Nisei soldiers were justifiably terrified of being shot by their own comrades. It was soon apparent that the Japanese had evacuated the island before the 138th had even arrived. Diaries and un-mailed letters left behind and read by MILS interpreters made it clear the Japanese soldiers hated the war and wanted to go home. So did the Americans. Operation Cottage was a dismal failure. General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. who was in charge of the Alaska campaign said, “The invasion of Kiska was a great big, juicy, expensive mistake.” General Buckner would cross paths with the Nisei and the MILS again in the far Pacific in 1945.

138th regiment, mortar crew, Kiska Island, Alaska. 1942 War Dept. photo

Assigned to random make work duties the Nisei soldiers had no idea what their fate would be. Back home their families were packing their one suitcase of belongings and preparing to be bussed out to holding centers where they would await their assignments to the infamous relocation camps where they were destined to spent the war. Your grandparents and your aunts were taken to Tulare where they were housed at the county fairgrounds, keeping house in dirty old horses stalls. Everything they had other than the one suitcase was left behind to be stolen or destroyed by vandals. Neither of their sons could do anything to help. It must have been agonizing. As soon as the half completed camps were ready, your grandparents and your aunts were taken by train to Poston, Arizona and then trucked to the Gila River concentration camps. They at least were able to see friends from Arroyo Grande, the Saruwataris, Kobaras, Hayashis, Ikedas, Fukuharas and the Nakayamas were all there. They would have to make a new life there. They could no longer dream of a future. They would have to bear what could not be born. ( Shikata Ga Nai )

After eight months in Texas, he and the other Japanese boys were ordered to a barracks building where an officer with the Military Intelligence Service presented an opportunity to leave Fort Bliss. He said the army was looking for soldiers who had knowledge of the Japanese language. Could they speak it, or write it? Had they spent any time in Japan attending Japanese schools? The army had figured out that since they had no one who could speak or write Japanese they were going to be at a great disadvantage when they began their cross Pacific advance where the were sure to have captured Japanese soldiers and workers.

Those who could were encouraged to apply to the school and take a test which would qualify them for jobs as interpreters in the Army’s Intelligence Services.

Both your dad and uncle spoke, read and wrote Japanese. Your grandmother is listed as a Japanese speaker on her census forms so Japanese was spoken in the home. They both qualified as speakers and it’s very likely they attended the old Japanese school off Cherry Lane. They would have gone there after school to study reading and writing and the customs and history of Japan. How seriously its hard to say. In some of my interviews there was a lot of laughter about how serious they were. As one man said, “We hated it, we were American kids after all, not Japanese,” but we had to go.

For the Fuchiwaki boys it was to pay off. Ben was already at Presidio in San Francisco studying at the Military Language Institute while Hilo was in Texas being bored. Volunteering is simply not done in the military, at least not often. Soldiers know better. The thought is, if you volunteer for a duty you want, the army will make sure you never get it. But it was Texas, flat, dusty, desert Texas at that and if volunteering might get them a transfer and out of there, why not? The thinking was that at least it could turn out to be an important job.

All the candidates who volunteered were whisked off to an empty barracks building and spent two grueling days test taking. They were tested on the spoken word; They were tested on reading and writing and finally at the end, a sit down interview by a senior enlisted man from the language institute. White officers were present but not as interviewers because the Army only had a very few who had any fluency in Japanese at all. The interviewers were enlisted, non-officers because it was Army policy that no Japanese Americans could rise above the rank of Sergeant. At the time all Nisei units were commanded by white officers.

Your dad would have had no real idea of how he did on the tests. The military rarely gives a grade to the one taking any test. So, they waited….and waited, and waited some more. Some volunteers waited weeks before they were called in for final interviews. The waiting was just the military way. It was and is something that sailors, Marines and soldiers soon get used to. “Hurry up, and wait” has been the way since long before Alexander the Great. Never changed, never will.

As time passed, the Nisei soldiers began to see what their future might be. It had become common knowledge that because of manpower needs the War Department had decided not to discharge the Nisei but to incorporate them into new, all-Japanese units which would eventually be sent to the European theater and in particular Italy thus solving the issue of Japanese Americans fighting the Imperial Japanese.

The 100th Infantry was the initial unit which was made up of Nisei boys from Hawaii and the west coast who had been enlisted before Pearl Harbor. Later, the 100th would be integrated into the 442 Regimental Combat Team which did see terrible combat in the climb up the boot of Italy. The 442nd was to become the most decorated small unit, ever, in US Army history. Those kids felt they had something to prove and they laid down their lives by the thousands to do it. As happens in wartime, hard fighting units are “used up.” They are sent into combat again and again until they are ground down to nothing. Such it was with 442nd. A difficult objective and they were first in line. Their patriotism and the racist general who was their commander who was looking for promotion from his own superiors guaranteed that.

Your dad, if accepted in the language program might be spared combat for the time being, Nisei troops were already being sent for combat training. For one year, the men trained at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin and Camp Shelby in Mississippi. In May 1943, the 100th participated in training maneuvers in Louisiana. That August, the 100th deployed across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean where they took part in the Italian campaign. The men selected the motto “Remember Pearl Harbor,” to reflect their anger at the attack on their country. In Hawaiian slang they said, “Go For Broke.” They did just that too.

Hardly anyone here remembers that but when I lived in Hawaii just two decades after the war, those soldiers had used the GI Bill to go to college. They ran the unions and the banks. They were college professors and business owners. The Nisei had gone from the cane fields to the corporate office in one generation. “Go for Broke” they said and they did.

Dear Dona

Page Three

Hobson’s choice is a free choice in which only one thing is actually offered. The term is often used to describe an illusion that choices are available. That’s the military to a “T”

December 3rd, 1942.

At morning roll call, the Lieutenant called your father’s name. He was told to report to headquarters right after morning chow. Like any good soldier he asked what was up and like any good officer the Lieutenant wouldn’t tell him. So after breakfast he hustled over to the headquarters building and reported to the Top Kick, the first sergeant. Hilo would have entered the office, stood on the yellow footprints painted on the floor and announced himself. The sergeant merely looked up then rummaged on his desk until he found what he wanted, then said simply, “Your Orders.” “Where to Sarge?” “Camp Savage, you’d better pack your winter uniforms,” and he laughed……

Coming November 2nd

Link to Dear Dona page one: https://wordpress.com/post/atthetable2015.com/12268

The writer is a lifetime resident of Arroyo Grande California and writes so his children will know the place where they grew up.