Free The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II by William B. Breuer

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“We Poison Rats and Japs” 45
    Hoover was a voice crying in the wilderness. No doubt responding to demands from influential public sources and segments of the media, President Roosevelt, on February 19, 1942, signed Executive Order No. 9066. It authorized Secretary of War Henry Stimson to “establish military areas” on the West Coast and “exclude from them any and all [suspicious] persons.”
    The ink had hardly dried on Roosevelt’s order than a mass evacuation of Japanese civilians and Nisei began. They were given forty-eight hours in which to dispose of their businesses, homes, and automobiles before reporting, with whatever belongings they could carry as hand luggage, to fifteen Army-run Assembly Centers, as they were officially designated.
    On arrival, the detainees were given medical examinations and identification cards and herded into hastily thrown-up barracks. They were penned in by barbed-wire fences and constantly watched by patrolling Army military police. At night, searchlights swept the bare ground outside the wire.
    Altogether, with brutal swiftness, 110,000 people—nearly the entire Japanese and Nisei community in the West—had been driven out of their homes and into virtual captivity.
    Incredibly, almost without exception, the young men endured the internment and its humiliation with their faith in the United States unimpaired. Many of the Japanese Americans insisted that they be allowed to prove their loyalty to the United States by serving in frontline combat. One of them behind barbed wire, Henry Ebihar, wrote Secretary of War Stimson: “I only ask that I be given a chance to preserve the principles that I have been brought up on and which I will not sacrifice at any cost. Please give me a chance to serve in your armed forces.”
    In response to the clamor from the young men in the internment camps, Congress authorized the formation of an all-Nisei combat unit, and on January 28, 1943, the Army announced it would accept volunteers. Some twelve hundred signed up and eventually joined the newly formed 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
    Meanwhile in Honolulu, another Nisei, seventeen-year-old Daniel K. Inouye, graduated from McKinley High School, where he was an honor student, only four months after the Pearl Harbor catastrophe. Perhaps because of his youth, he was not regarded by older Caucasians as a suspected subversive or threat to the United States, although he received his share of snubs and insults.
    The oldest of four children, Inouye was born in Honolulu. His father, Hyotaro, had immigrated to Hawaii as a child from a village in Japan, worked as a file clerk to support the family in what Daniel would later describe as “respectable poverty.”
    Shortly after receiving his high school diploma, Daniel enrolled in the premedical program at the University of Hawaii. But he dropped out of college to enlist as a private in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, whose motto was “Go for Broke!”

Twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant Daniel Inouye, who would receive the Congressional Medal of Honor fifty years later for an action in which he was seriously wounded. (Courtesy Senator Daniel Inouye)
    Mild-mannered, soft-spoken Dan Inouye proved to be a tiger in combat, a natural leader of men, and he was awarded a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant.
    In late April 1945, Lieutenant Inouye was leading his platoon in an assault to capture a heavily fortified German position that included several machine guns and a company of grenadiers (infantrymen) in the Po Valley of Italy. A blistering firefight erupted. Swarms of bullets hissed and sang overhead.
    Inouye began slithering toward three spitting machine guns. Moments later, a rifle grenade exploded next to him, and jagged chunks of red-hot metal tore into his right arm. Dazed, bleeding profusely, his arm hanging in shreds, the lieutenant continued edging toward the German force. Then bullets ripped into his stomach and legs.
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