By Joe Kirwin

Soon after the surprise Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii when Japanese forces destroyed much of the U.S. Navy and Air Force Pacific Ocean presence, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the arrest of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans living in the United States. They were forced from their homes, farms and businesses and locked up in internment camps in the deserts of the western United States. Yoshio Nakamura and his family were among those that lost everything. They were considered national security threats that could not be trusted.

Two years after the mass incarceration, the U.S. War Department, entering the third year of fighting WW II fronts in the Pacific and in Europe, faced a troop shortage. Suddenly imprisoned Japanese American men 18-years and older who were born in the United States were seen as a solution instead of spies. So the U.S. government allowed the Japanese-Americans men 18 and over to leave the prison camps but only if they agreed to join the U.S. Army and fight the Nazis in Italy or the Japanese in the Pacific. The injustice and hypocrisy was too much for many of the imprisoned Japanese Americans men and they refused . But for others it was an opportunity to prove their allegiance to the United States. Yoshio Nakamura was one of the latter. Even though his family members remained locked up in the desert until the end of the war, he would join the 442nd Japanese American regiment. It would go onto become one of the most decorated U.S. Army units in WW II.

The first Japanese American infantry troops arrived in Italy at Salerno in September of 1943 as part of the 100th Infantry Battalion. They would go on to engage in combat at Monte Cassino and suffered significant casualties and were subsequently referred to as the ``Purple Heart'' battalion. In the summer of 1944 the Nisei 442 Combat team would arrive in Italy north of Rome and were joined by the 100th Infantry Battalion and helped drive the Germans and Italian Fascists up the coast and into mountain-top fortifications on the Gothic Line. The Japanese American troops were then transferred to southern France and helped free territory that would allow American troops join Allied forces that had landed in Normandy. U.S. General Mark Clark, impressed by the Japanese Americans - or Nisei troops as they were known - by their short time in Italy - requested their return for the final Gothic Line thrust in western Tuscany. Their task was to scale the steep, white-marble Tuscan mountains overlooking the sea where German and Italian Fascist troops were hunkered down in artillery bunkers and had used the strategic redoubt to block Allied Forces from moving north up the Mediterranean Coast.

Now living in southern California, where he was born and raised, 100-year-old Yoshio Nakamura explained why he decided to join the U.S. Army and also recounted in vivid detail a crucial nighttime climb up Monte Folgorito to destroy one of the enemy mortar and artillery bunkers as if it occurred recently instead of 80 years ago. Yoshio also recounted how a half century later the U.S. government apologized for the gross injustice imposed on Japanese Americans during WW II.

For more information contact Joe Kirwin at joekirwin@compuserve.com or 00 32 478 277802