Honor by Fire Japanese Americans at War in Europe and the Pacific

 

In the European theater of WWII, the Japanese Americans making up the 442nd Regimental Combat Team were so dependably fierce that, according to General Alfred Greunther, every division in the Fifth Army "insisted that the 442nd be assigned to it." The Nisei (second-generation) soldiers also distinguished themselves in the Pacific. As Crost reveals, their life away from the battlefield was hazardous as well: non-Asian GIs in Europe scorned them as turncoats, while in the Pacific they were in constant danger of being mistaken by Marines for the enemy. While these Japanese Americans were defending the country of their birth, their families languished in internment camps in the U.S., marked as "enemy aliens" after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Crost, who covered the Nisei soldiers throughout the war for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, offers a stirring but saddening account. This is an invaluable addition to the literature on Japanese Americans in World War II, providing the most comprehensive coverage of their military activities yet and going far beyond telling merely the admittedly epic story of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. While the 442nd and the 100th Battalion were covering themselves with glory in Italy, other Japanese Americans had already stood to arms in defense of Pearl Harbor and volunteered by the hundreds and thousands as indispensable translators for military intelligence in the Pacific theater. Some of those intelligence operatives worked in occupied areas; others risked and sometimes lost their lives trying to persuade Japanese soldiers to surrender. Crost's effort greatly increases knowledge of this aspect of Asian American history, even as it also increases outrage at the panic, bigotry, and outright criminality behind the placing of Japanese Americans on the home front in internment camps.

 

Lyn Crost

Hardcover with d/w 346pp Presidio 1994 1st Ed

 

Fine/Fine

Book Code:  SH1755