442ND Honored with "Go For Broke" stamp and book

Описание: SEATTLE — The U.S. Postal service on Thursday released the Go For Broke stamp, an effort to honor and pay tribute to the Japanese American soldiers who served in World War II as part of the 100th Infantry Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team.

The fighting unit became known as one of the most awarded American fighting units during the war.

“Let me put it in terms of how they were recognized: 21 Medals of Honor recipients,” said Lt. Col. Michael Yaguchi, USAF (Ret), who now serves as commander of the Nisei Veterans Committee Memorial Hall in Seattle. “For its size and length of service it is the most decorated unit in the U.S. Army.”

The NVC Memorial Hall, located at 1212 S. King Street in Seattle, has become a museum for local Japanese Americans who served in the military, especially the 442nd.

The faces of those who died in combat greet visitors to the center via photos that hang in the main hallway as well as a room dedicated to the 442nd. It is filled with memorabilia donated by families of the soldiers.

“These are artifacts that they wore (and) that they carried into battle,” Yaguchi said.

At least 18,000 men served in the 100th/442nd, with most volunteering to join the 442nd even though their families had been taken from their homes and placed in one of 10 internment camps. The Minidoka camp in Idaho is where most residents from Seattle and Washington state had volunteered from. The 100th was made up of volunteers from Hawaii where most of the families were not interned.

“The largest number of volunteers from the 10 camps came from Minidoka,” Yaguchi said. “It is phenomenal that these men who were in these barbed wire camps would see fit to exercise that duty of citizenship and loyalty to go and fight cause their country needed them.”

The soldiers of the 442nd fought for more than a year during several battles in France and Italy.

They became most famous for the rescue of the Lost Battalion, a regiment out of Texas that was surrounded by Germans soldiers.

“So, after many attempts the commanding general sent the 442nd up the mountain and they broke through and got those Texas soldiers out of there,,” said Daniel James Brown, a Seattle author. “It was an absolute hellacious battle.”

That specific battle is one of the pivotal moments in the newly released book, “Facing the Mountain,” which was written by Brown follows the lives of four heroes, including Fred Shiosaki from Spokane. He was part of K-Company and one of only 17 to survive the rescue.

"Fred fought valiantly and was wounded,” Brown said. “And when I met him to interview him, I shook his hand and I said I am so honored to meet you, and he says, 'No, No I am honored to meet you.'”

Brown was introduced to Shiosaki through the Seattle archive Densho Project who helped the authorcomb through hundreds of interviews, transcripts and oral histories of the Japanese American soldiers and their experience.

“When Dan and I talked about this at some point we didn’t talk about this story as being a Japanese American story, but it was a great American story,” said Tom Ikeda, who founded Densho 25 years ago.

Ikeda hopes that Brown’s storytelling and the platform he has from coming off his best-selling novel, “The Boys in the Boat,” will help his new book, titled “Facing the Mountain,” will finally bring the story of the 442nd to a wider audience.

“Yes, I think this is going to be a different book," Ikeda said. "There will be other things coming from this book, like movies and TV series because of what Dan was able to do and the story he was able to tell."