Tag Archives: world-war-ii

Dear Dona,

Page 5

By Michael Shannon.

The group of sixteen translators from your dad’s class arrived by train at the siding in Pittsburg, California. Pittsburg was the major debarkation point on the west coast for those heading for the Pacific War Theater. After a week confined to barracks at camp Stoneman, Hilo and his fellow graduates found they would be leaving by ship in a few days. They could see the skyline of San Francisco shimmering under clear sky’s just across the bay but were not allowed to visit owing to the high commands orders that all Nisei be confined to base for their own safety. The danger from their fellow soldiers was real, particularly the Marines who were across the bay. To prepare Marines for what was coming all Japanese were brutally vilified in speech and print. Such indoctrination is common to all wars no matter the country. Propaganda yes, but no less dangerous especially to those who had not been exposed to combat yet. There had been several serious incidents where Nisei in uniform were assaulted by groups of soldiers and sailors. Feelings ran very high.

Camp George Stoneman, Pittsburg, California, 1943. National Archives

Stoneman was brand new, completed just two months before your dad arrived. The camp was named after George Stoneman*, a cavalry commander during the Civil War and later Governor of California. In addition to almost 346 barracks (63 man), 86 company administrative and storehouses, 8 infirmaries, and dozens of administrative buildings, the 2,500 acre camp held nine post exchanges, 14 recreation halls, 13 mess halls, a 24 hour shoe repair and tailoring business, one post office, a chapel and one stockade. Overall, the camp was a city unto itself. It had a fire department and observation tower, water reservoir, bakery, Red Cross station, meat cutting plant, library, parking lots and 31 miles of roads. For recreation, Stoneman boasted two gymnasiums, a baseball diamond, eight basketball courts, eight boxing rings and a swimming pool and bowling alley. Officer and enlisted clubs provided everything from reading rooms to spaghetti dinners. The camp also contained the largest telephone center of its day, with 75 phone booths and a bank of operators who could handle 2,000 long distance calls a day. Stoneman even had USO shows featuring stars such as Groucho Marx, Gary Moore, and Red Skelton. Lucille Ball once donned a swimming suit to dedicate an enlisted men’s club.

Camp Stoneman had a maximum capacity of 40,000 troops and at one time ran a payroll of a million dollars per month. Leaving camp to the docks where transport ships waited meant departing the camp at the California Ave. gate and marching down Harbor St. to and catch the ferry at Pittsburg landing. Many “Old Timers” recall the day when they would shine shoes, sell newspapers, round up burgers and and cokes in service to the troops to earn some coin. It is said that when the troops were departing or being “shipped out” they would toss their remaining coins or dollars to the local children as their was no longer any need for American currency where they were headed.

Camp Savage was pretty small by comparison and the Nisei soldiers must have been amazed. Mostly farm boys from California or fisherman’s sons and plantation workers from Hawaii, Stoneman dwarfed old Fort Bliss. The fort covered half the acreage of the entire Arroyo Grande valley and had forty times it’s population.

After a week the men were told to pack and be ready to catch a ferry across the bay to pier 45** where they would board for an unknown destination.

Foreground, pier 45, 1943. U S Naval vessels in background.

The Army and the Navy had chartered dozens of passenger ships from home fleets and foreign flagged companies. Operating out of San Francisco were several that had flown the company flags of the Dollar Line,*** American President Lines and the Matson Line. Famous luxury liners in the Hawaii trade such as the SS Lurline, Monterey, Matsonia, Maui and the Malolo were now being operated by the US Army Transport Service. These ships in particular, because of their size and speed were referred to as “The Monsters.” Just three of them, They traveled alone, rarely needing warships for protection as most naval vessels couldn’t match their speed. This was considered protection enough from Imperial Japanese submarines. They could also make the 6,725 nautical mile trip to Auckland, New Zealand without refueling. Thats where they were headed though only the Captain knew it. Everyone else was in the dark.

USAT Lurline pulling out of San Francisco, fully loaded with over 6,000 soldiers, sailors and Marines. US Heritage Command Photo. 1943

Steaming under the Golden Gate bridge and out past the Farallone Islands she left the treacherous Potato Patch to port and headed southwest. She picked up her escorts, three Fletcher class destroyers and the Cruiser USS Indianapolis. The officer of the watch rang up full ahead on the telegraph, the engine room lit off all the boilers, smoke poured from the stacks, bow wave arched higher and they headed for the sunset.

The Nisei found their quarters for the trip and were pleasantly surprised. They were to stay in two converted first class cabins on the promenade deck. A pre-war cabin for a trip from San Francisco to Honolulu cost $200.00 in 1940. ( $4,509.49 today ) The boys joked that they were getting a really good deal. They also felt lucky because they knew the berthing decks where the soldiers were stacked as much as six high in their pipe bunks breathing the odorous air, a mix of cigarette smoke, and dirty smelly clothes. The ships laundry was out of operation for the trip. There were too may passengers, so going on deck for some fresh air had to be done in shifts. Likewise chow. You stood in long lines for hours in order to eat. Almost as soon as the ship hit her first Pacific roller, the unbelievably foul smell of vomit began sluicing around the below decks. There were pails but they soon overflowed. Miserable doesn’t describe it. They were young though and adjusted as best they could. There was no where to escape anyhow.

At the beginning of the voyage the Nisei were restricted their cabins for fear that there might be trouble with the soldiers and the crew. Later it was thought that perhaps getting to know them was the better course of action. Everyone was notified of the decision and everyone was allowed to mingle. During the day the decks were completely covered by soldiers, mainly replacements for the 32nd, Red Arrow, Wisconsin National Guard, the 37th, Buckeye Division, Ohio National Guard, the 41st, The Sunshine Division from the states in the Pacific Northwest and the 23rd or Americal Division. All of them involved by this time in heavy fighting in New Guinea.

Each day the soldiers practiced with the bayonet, cleaned their rifles, sharpened knives and convinced themselves how tough they were. They averaged just about twenty years and their hubris came from being young and having almost no exposure to life outside the mostly rural areas they came from. Many had never seen a Japanese in their lives.

For the Nisei the release from their cabins turned out to be a mostly positive thing. As they got to know each other they found out how much alike they really were. A farm boy is a farm boy no matter his ancestry. In the trek north to Japan the soldiers would come to value very highly their new Nisei friends who would share all the hardships of combat with them and whose translation skills would save hundreds of lives.

Still they talked about the problems communicating directly with the enemy, in the language of one’s parents. The idea was incredibly fraught with personal feelings especially for the Kibei who had the greatest exposure with Japan proper. To some it presented difficult questions about identity and heritage. For many Japanese Americans, it was difficult to reconcile using the Japanese language for American victory when their dog tags bore the address of the camp back home in the United States where your parents were incarcerated. In many cases, the translators had had no opportunity to even visit families and the addresses that listed Manzanar or Tule Lake California, Gila River and Poston Arizona, Amache Colorado or Rowher, Arkansas must have caused pain every time they looked at them.

So here they were, a small contingent of specialized troops traveling with thousands of Caucasians whose suspicions and hatred was dangerous to them, whose families were locked behind barbed wire in concentration camps and whose President had written about his decision to intern Japanese Americans was consistent with Roosevelt’s long-time racial views. During the 1920s, for example, he had written articles in the Macon Telegraph opposing white-Japanese intermarriage for fostering “the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood” and praising California’s ban on land ownership by the first-generation Japanese. In 1936, while president, he privately wrote that, regarding contacts between Japanese sailors and the local Japanese American population in the event of war, “every Japanese citizen or non-citizen on the Island of Oahu or in California who meets these Japanese ships or has any connection with their officers or men should be secretly but definitely identified and his or her name placed on a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp.”

Imagine the confusion on the one hand and the desire to fight for a country that didn’t want you on the other. Like my father said when questioned about the issue, “You cannot understand it because you haven’t lived it.” And of course thats true as far as it goes. Today, we have far more documentation of those events than was possible during the war when the public was restricted to almost none.

Steaming day and night the group of ships headed southwest, zig zagging to reduce the chance of torpedo attack and on the seventh morning those on deck sighted Diamond Head. A soldier from Ohio turned to the Nisei next to him who was from Kaimuki, Oahu and asked if that was what Japan looked like to him, the Nisei replied “It looks like home to me.” As Bob Toyoda told the story years later he laughed at the confusion on the face of the Ohio boy who was going to war against a country he knew nothing about, not even where it was.

SS Mariposa, USAT enroute to Auckland New Zealand, July, 1943. Australian War Memorial photo****

Much to the dismay of the passengers, especially the translators from Hawai’i, the escorts turned to starboard and headed for Pearl Harbor but the Mariposa turned to port and picked up a compass bearing of 150 degrees south-southeast (SSE). It was going to be another long, long three weeks aboard.

Dona page 6

From the promenade deck, Hilo and the other translators could just make out the smudge on the horizon that they knew by now was Auckland, New Zealand. Six thousand seven hundred miles and a month at sea and no one aboard was any more anxious to get to shore than they were.

*General George Stoneman was a cavalry general in Grant’s army. He is mentioned in the song “The night they drove old Dixie down.” His name would have been well known to southern boys.

**Todays home of The San Francisco Maritime Museum and known as the Hyde Street Pier.

***The old Dollar Line owned by Robert Dollar has through mergers become the American President Line.

****This very likely the ship Hilo traveled on.

Cover Photo: SS Lurline in war paint leaving San Francisco for the southwest Pacific.

Michael Shannon is a writer from Arroyo Grande California.

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Dear Dona

Written by Michael Shannon

Page Four

Unlike the American military where mail was censored and journals and diaries forbidden the Japanese Imperial Army thought the differences in language would make ordinary Japanese as indecipherable as any code to an American reader. The head instructors at the MILS schoolalso knew that Japanese soldiers were brutalized by their superiors and would likely be resistant to the treatment the British were using on captured Afrika Corps German troops where violence and intimidation were routinely used to coerce confession and information. As many of the instructors had lived in Japan for extended periods of time they knew the Japanese were generally very kind and the spirit of co-operation was instilled in them from birth. The culture of Japan was bound to duty to the Emperor and higher authority, but they also believed that force would not be enough to get prisoners to break down. Instead the language program not only include reading a writing and the general makeup of the Japanese soldiers battlefield strategy and tactics but a heavy emphasis was put on Japanese society, geography and religious beliefs. The idea was to draw a picture of the individual soldier in an attempt to establish rapport with him. They planners knew that they would resist brutality because that was a soldiers daily life in the Imperial Army. Instead a cautionary approach was adopted where kindness and not only assurances of kind treatment but whenever possible knowing about the persons home. Differences in prefecture, religion, the social mores of a particular part of Japan helped build trust between the interrogator and the prisoner.

American government sponsored propaganda was designed to present the enemy as a monolithic structure, all Japanese being of the same mind. Depictions of the Japanese were as vile and hateful as the propagandists could make them. It was impressed upon the American public that they needed to be eradicated. This conveniently swept under the rug the fact that, just like the US they were a diverse people with many different beliefs. Led by a military dictatorship whose war aims were no less than domination of the entirety of east and Southeast Asia.

The two largest religions were Shintoism, the official state religion and Bhuddism which originally came from China and was characterized as a forign religion. Various western religions were also represented particularly the Methodists. In 1940, Christians in Japan united in a declaration of church unity after the Religious Organizations Law required all Protestant churches to merge into one.

Japan had religious freedom during World War II and there was separation of church and state. It was not a theocracy. It is correct to say that most religious people were pro-war at the time.

During the pre-1945 period, Japan moved into political totalitarianism, ultranationalism, and fascism culminating in Japan’s invasion of Chinese Manchuria in 1931. This was part of an overall global period of social upheavals and conflicts.

Regardless of the political reality the instructors knew that the average Imperial Japanese soldier would have far less interest in politics and much more allegiance to his family, friends and the local village life. All of these observations dictated a much more friendly and kind approach than the Germans were getting from the British. Establishing a connection between the Nisei interpreter and the prisoner was an important part of the curriculum at Camp Savage.

The very first class which started on June 1, 1942 was made up of 200 enlisted men, 193 Nisei and 7 Caucasians. The entire class, which had been moved from the Presidio was made up of soldiers who had already enlisted before the war and were considered regular army. Their studies had begun in San Francisco and it wasn’t until after order 9066 was signed in February of ’42 that they moved east.

There were three types of student classification. There were Caucasians who had studied abroad or attended universities where they studied Japanese The majority were Nisei, American born citizens who had varying degrees of language experience. Some had attended locally run Japanese schools which they attended after regular public school classes and came from homes where the Japanese was spoken. The third classification were the Kibei, A subset of Nisei who spent a significant part of their youth in Japan, usually for education, and then returned to the U.S. They ranged from students who had gone to elementary school, many from Japanese high schools and some University students. The Kibei were terrific asset to the MIS because of their familiarity with Japanese culture at all levels.

The terms the Japanese used to describe what generation they were from were introduced to Western American cultural language in the late thirties. Hilo’s immigrant parents were referred to as Issei or First Generation. The 2nd generation like Hilo and his brother were Nisei or 2nd generation. Sansei were their children, the ones I went through school with.

Families wealthy enough to send children to Japan were relatively uncommon. Kibei (帰米, literally “go home to America”) was a term often used in the 1930’s and 40s to describe Japanese Americans born in the United States who were studying in or had studied in Japan. Many Kibei got trapped in Japan when war broke out between Japan and the U.S. In a sense, they became stateless because they were Americans living in Japan, labeled as the “enemy” in both.

The Kibei were the foundation blocks of the school at Camp Savage. Because the service would need soldiers to read fluently, translate to careful english, have some background in Japanese cultural, both civilian and military classes were on educating each student in a curriculum that matched both his background, Nisei or Kibei, and the specialty he was being trained for. Graduates would operate in teams where each member had one of the key components they studied at Savage.

Savage was an apt description for both the curriculum and the school. Foremost in their minds must have been the consequences they likely faced if they failed. The military is essentially faceless. You have a serial number because thats how you are identified. Transfers aren’t exactly blind but primarily rely on number that are needed here or there. For the Nisei soldiers at camp Savage, that meant that failure meant transfer back to your original unit. In Summer of 1943, nearly all Nisei in the various units of the army were transferred to the 100th Infantry Regiment, a mostly Hawaiian unit made up from the Hawaii National Guard. Trained in Mississippi and Wisconsin they shipped out to Italy in September of 1943 and were immediately thrown into the battle for Salerno in southern Italy near Naples. They spent the next eight months in nearly constant combat in some of the most vicious fighting of WWII. Every Nisei at Savage knew of this and what the price of failure would be, immediate transfer to the 100th as a replacement. They weren’t cowards, far from it, but they also understood the reality.

Your father lived in one of those tarpaper shacks for six months. I’m sure he had his turn rolling out of his cot at 4:30 am and priming the stove. He may have been lucky in the placement of his bunk, next to the little coal stove would have been as good as it got. Having a bunk on the end of the row would not be the best place to be in Minnesotas winter. Tarred paper is not among the greatest insulators. In fact it dwells pretty near the bottom. You can poke a pencil through it with no effort. Those shacks were drafty and pretty close to sleeping out of doors. In the morning they must have smelled. A confection of bad breath, farts, nearly dead hunks of coal giving off a noxious vapor and the clinging smell of cigarettes and uniforms they were not able to keep clean. Hanging just below the rafters a white cloud of condensed vapor from the mens breathing which would melt a drip as the room and the day heated. Soldiers had to do their own laundry, in tubs and basins outdoors with rough alkaline soap. Avoiding that chore would have been paramount.

Barracks at Camp Savage with stoves. US Army photo. 1943

Being young and soldiers they would have laughed at their predicament and blamed the army in no uncertain terms. Grousing soldiers have alway found the military to be the villain. SNAFU* was the word in WWII.

The classrooms were a better place to be. Semi-permanent buildings, well heated and clean would have been a relief. Luckily student were relieved of all the most basic duties that a soldier normally carried out. There was no drilling or inspections, no standing post in the middle of the night, all the little annoying things that the regular private has to put up with. The Army was desperate to prepare them for their combat jobs and made sure they had no more distractions than absolutely necessary.

After six months in the classroom, class C-10 at Camp Savage walked out of the classroom for the last time and stood in front of one of the remaining log buildings and stood for a class picture. Everyone smiling and glad to be through the grinding curriculum.

1942 1943 Camp Savage MIS Niseis. Your fathers class.

Hilo received a promotion to Tech five, an enlisted rank slightly below Corporal.** Like the others, he walked back to his hutment to open his official orders. He would have opened the manila envelope with the printed label, Official, Department of the Army and like all soldiers held his breath while he slid the paperwork out. Along with his service record was a single page warning him that he was now a holder of a Top Secret Clearance and was liable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Official Secrets Act not to share or divulge any information as to his assignment or duty station under penalty of law.

Every MIS soldier carried a Secret designation. Information on the school and its graduates, their purpose was to be a closely held secret. This designation was to be enforced for a period of fifty years after WWII. The Military was concerned about the fact that they had interpreters in the Pacific theater whose importance could not be overstated.

Hilo’s parents who were housed at the Gila River, Arizona concentration camp had been visited by the FBI. Every MIS graduate had been thoroughly vetted before they were ordered overseas. This must have been very confusing to Hirokuni and Ito who would have been interrogated by two agents who gave them no information at all about the reason. Hilo wasn’t even mentioned during the questioning. The were and would remain completely ignorant of the reason until the war was over.

The second sheet of paper stated his destination; future duty station and was clipped to a set of official orders and travel vouchers. He was to report to Army headquarters in Oakland where he would travel by available transport to the Southwest Pacific Theater of Operations immediately. There would be no leave as Nisei soldiers were not yet allowed to enter the restricted zone to see family.*** Censorship rules meant that he could not tell them his destination just that he was being ordered overseas.

MIS interpreter PFC Geo Hara leaving for the Pacific, 1943. Densho Archive photo

Hilo himself wouldn’t have known his actual destination. He wouldn’t find out until his ship passed Hawaii so sensitive was military command. Some of the instructors at Savage were returnees and would have shared general information but not too much. He could have likely guessed that it would have been the Western Theater of Operations under General MacArthur but where? He was left to wonder.

Page Five coming Saturday November 23rd.

Destination, Southwest Pacific theater of operations and the real war.

Notes on text:

*SNAFU, Situation Normal, All f****d Up.

**The Army forbid the Nisei commissioned rank until late in the war. All MIS personnel were enlisted or noncommissioned rank.

*** Restrictions on visitation were lifted for servicemen in late 1943.

Links to other chapters in the series.

Page one: https://wordpress.com/post/atthetable2015.com/12268

Page two: https://wordpress.com/post/atthetable2015.com/12861

Page three: https://wordpress.com/post/atthetable2015.com/12872

Michael Shannon is a writer living in the Central Coast of California. He went to school with many children, whose parents were survivors of the camps in his little farming community of Arroyo Grande, California..

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Dear Dona, 2

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.

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Dear Dona

Written By Michael Shannon

Page One

Saturday, October 19, 2024

Dear Dona,

Something in your note about not knowing what your dad did in WWII struck a cord. I have some research from the Manzanar story so I though I’d look into your dads service in World War two.

Most people have very little or no knowledge of the Japanese Nisei experience. I’ve interviewed people of that generation who had no idea that there were Nisei soldiers at all. In fact, there were none in the Navy, Marines or Air Corps, only the Army and its nurse crops accepted Nisei and only citizens at that.

I’m sending you this to pass along what I found about your dad’s service. One of the complaints of military men is the constant record keeping they must do. The funny thing is that once they are separated from the service the records go who knows where. Perhaps they are stored in cardboard boxes at the back of the warehouse pictured in the first Indiana Jones movie. Who knows? In any case some can be found in order to fill in a family’s story. In a way its a treasure hunt. There can be quite unexpected results. In fact its like assembling a puzzle when some of the pieces are missing.

The difficulty for children is that wartime veterans are extremely hesitant to tell them what their experience was like. There are a few reasons why that is so. One, the kids have no background experience or education to make much sense of it. Two, in the case of combat veterans, the stories are too horrible to contemplate telling your own children. Third, their hope is, that surely the kids will never have to experience their fathers hell for themselves.

Most sons and daughters of veterans never hear much about the parent who actually served. In WWII, somewhere around 12% of all regular army soldiers saw combat in which their was actual shooting. The average combat soldier was involved in combat for a period of around forty days. By comparison soldiers in Viet Nam averaged 240 days and in Afghanistan close to 1,200 days. The difference wouldn’t matter to your father. One day at a time is how it’s done.

Your father saw active combat against the Japanese Imperial Army on the islands of Luzon in the Phillipines and went in on the first wave in the invasion of Okinawa. The battle for Okinawa drug out over nearly three months, from April 1st until June 22nd 1945.* Okinawa was the last major battle of World War II. It was the bloodiest battle in the Pacific War. It involved 1,300 U.S. ships and 50 British ships, four U.S. Army divisions, and two Marine Corps divisions. The U.S. objective was to secure Okinawa, which would remove the last barrier between U.S. forces and Imperial Japan. By the time Okinawa was secured by American forces on June 22, the United States had sustained over 49,000 casualties including more than 12,500 men killed or missing. The fighting was absolutely vicious with the Japanese fighting to the last man in most cases. The battle caused more than twice the number of American casualties than the Guadalcanal Campaign and Battle of Iwo Jima combined, with the Japanese kamikaze effort causing the American Navy to suffer more casualties than any previous engagement in the Atlantic or Pacific. The Navy suffered the greatest loss in its history.

The U.S. Navy lost 32 ships and aircraft, and 368 ships suffered damage during the Battle of Okinawa, . The U.S. Navy also lost 49,151 sailors, with 12,520 killed or missing. The Japanese by comparison lost more than 110,000 military personnel killed, and more than 7,000 were taken prisoner during the fighting.

The number of Japanese surrenders was unusual for the Pacific war. Most of the credit must go to the personnel of the Japanese American members of the Military Intelligence Language Service or MILS as it was known. Both your father and uncle were members and attended the Army’s Japanese language schools.

So how did he get there. The answer is multifaceted and complicated because as always anyone history when its being written is like a juggler trying to keep too many balls in the air..

When I was researching the series on Manzanar I used, as my primary sources two Japanese American archives which were put together after World War two and have grown year by year ever since. Collected were diaries, letters, newspapers and radio news, family photos and most fascinating; oral histories by a very wide cast of characters. Generals, politicians, researchers and thousand of ordinary citizens who lived through the concentration camps.

When I talked to people in that generation, many whom I knew personally, I learned that the community, the community of the same age, those in high school or younger who were coming of age in the late thirties lived quite a different life than many might imagine. What they though about one another was different than the preceding generation.

Looking through the old yearbooks from that time it’s easy to see Nisei kids were completely integrated into teenage life. Sports and clubs, social events all featured mixes of kids from all backgrounds.

My dad was a scoutmaster in the late thirties and kids like Haruo , Ben Dohi, John Loomis, Gorden Bennett and Don Gullickson along with my father told me funny stories about camping together and there wasn’t a hint of any racism. Stone went to HS with my father and was a life long friend. Personally, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that Leroy or Masaki was any different than I was.

Quite obviously there was discrimination by older folks and would be a great deal after Pearl Harbor but amongst those kids who who were in or just graduated in the years before the war there was little. Contemporary accounts in the local papers list Nisei kids names in all the kinds of chatty articles written about the goings on of youth. My fathers Boy Scouts listed the names of many Nisei kids and interviews with them showed me that they were friends no matter their skin. It strikes me that that generation saw little difference amongst themselves. They spoke the same high school language, they dressed alike as kids do, they combed their hair the same. Nisei boys played baseball, football and basketball together and as now, kids for the most part supported each other against the machinations of adults.

My own experience as a high school teacher illustrates my point. Adults, teachers and administration might publicly dislike your style of dress, or how you wear your hair but the kids themselves will put up a united front against any perceived transgression into the territory they reserve for themselves. You yourself will remember girls climbing the trees at school to protest the dress code. I’m sure ethnicity had nothing to do with that because kids unite over things they find unfair. Your dads friends would have felt the same.

A case in point, I never heard a disparaging remark from any adult I knew who went to school with your dad, uncle or any other Nisei because they knew who they were. They weren’t “Japs,” they were friends. That foul term was reserved for the Imperial Japanese, not friends.

When your father graduated from Arroyo Grande High School, the old brick one on Crown Hill in 1936 the Japanese Imperial army had invaded Manchuria and was moving into China, the Rape of Nanking was the next year. Mussolini, 1928 had annexed Libya and in just the year before your dad’s graduation had instigated the war in Ethiopia where he used poison gas, tanks and air power against tribal armies armed with old muskets and spears. Hitler had opened the first concentration camps in 1933, just one year after he was elected to office. In little Arroyo Grande all of this would have been news. Radios and newspapers published world news. Young men were not much concerned I’m sure about all of this conflict, it was worlds away from the lives of rural farmers. was the possibility of war. Arroyo Grande was far, far away from world events.

The next three years would mean a great deal to the lives of the young and as events were to prove, terrible things to the were coming to the 126,948 people of Japanese ancestry in the United States, 74% of whom lived in California.

Crown Hill High School, 1941

Your dad graduated Arroyo Grande HS with the class of 1936 and was working for your grandfather until late 1941 when he decided to follow your uncle Ben into the service. He was inducted on October 31st, 1941 just a little more than a month before the attack on Pearl Harbor. No one knew that was coming of course but by that time the German army along with their allies the Italians had overrun France, Holland, Belgium, and most of western Europe, They had occupied Norway and were advancing on Egypt in north Africa. Greece was under Nazi control and most of eastern Europe as well. German submarines were slaughtering ships transporting material to Britain in the north Atlantic. On the 2nd of October the German army launched operation Tornado which was a continuation of the previous years invasion of Russia.

In the far east the Imperial Japanese army had invaded and conquered Manchuria and was steamrolling across China. The general staff in Tokyo was in the final stages of planning for the surprise attacks that were to come at Pearl Harbor, the Phillipines and the rest of Southeast Asia.

No one in the United States could have possibly missed the threat to the country by these events. On October 17, 1941, the German U-boat U-568 torpedoed and damaged the destroyer USS Kearny off Iceland, killing 11 and injuring 22. The day your father raised his right hand in Los Angeles and swore to defend his country disaster struck in the early morning hours in the north Atlantic. While escorting convoy HX-156, the American destroyer U.S.S. Reuben James DD-245 was torpedoed and sunk with the loss of 115 of its 160 crewmen, including all the officers.

The draft had been instituted by congress in September of 1940. Called the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, it required all men between the ages of 21 and 45 to register for the draft. This was the first peacetime draft in United States’ history. Those who were selected from the draft lottery were required to serve at least one year in the armed forces. Once the U.S. entered WWII, draft terms extended through the duration of the fighting.

Although the United States was not at war at the time, many people in the government and in the country believed that the United States would eventually be drawn into the wars that were being fought in Europe and East Asia. Isolationism, or the belief that American should do whatever it could to stay out of the war, was still very strong with almost half the Americans polled saying we should stay out. But with the fall of France to the Nazis in June 1940, Americans were growing uneasy about Great Britain’s ability to defeat Germany on its own. Our own military was woefully unprepared to fight a global war should it called upon to do so.

The first number drawn in the 1940 U.S. draft lottery was 158, which was announced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on October 29, 1940. Your father along with your uncle must have thought that it was better to volunteer than wait. The thinking at the time was that it was better to have some choice in where and when you served than be at the mercy of a blind system of quotas.

Hilo registered in Arroyo Grande on the 16th of October 1940. He may have waited to be called up because of your grandparents. Under the exclusion act they were not allowed to own land or a home and so like most Isei, rented. The land below the Roosevelt highway in the Cienega where they farmed and lived was rented. For tax and census reasons your uncle Ben was listed as the head of the family though he was just 24. I’m sure that was all just on paper though. Your grandfather certainly ran the show since with only your aunts left at home he was able to continue farming for the next five months until they were hauled off to Tulare and then to Poston, Arizona on the Gila River, the concentration camp where they and your aunts remained until 1945

the Poston concentration camp, Gila River, Arizona where most of the Arroyo Grande citizens where held.

Your father reported for active duty in Los Angeles on the 23rd of December 1941. There he took the oath to defend the constitution of the United States from all enemies foreign and domestic. Five months later his family was locked up behind barbed wire and held inside by soldiers armed with rifles and machine guns.

Name Hiroaki
Race Japanese
Marital Status Single, without dependents (Single)
Rank Private
Birth Year 1917
Nativity State or Country California
Citizenship Citizen
Residence California
Education 4 years of high school
Civil Occupation Farm hands, general farms
Enlistment Date 23 Oct 1941
Enlistment Place Los Angeles, California
Service Number 39167146

Nisei men reporting for Army induction, 1410 East 16th Street Los Angeles, CA, 1941

Page Two

Coming on October 26th, 2024

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, his parents 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. 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………..

  • I was born on the day Okinawa was invaded.
  • The cover photo, The Brothers taken in 1945.

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

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