Chapter 18

A little more than forty-eight hours later, at 3:00 a.m. on October 27, Fred was sleeping soundly on the floor of a tavern when Rudy shook him awake.

Fred fumbled for his eyeglasses. “Hey! What the hell? Why you wakin’ me up?”

“No argue. Just get your gear . . . We’re moving back up.”[51]

All around him, other K Company guys were grumbling in the dark, groping for rifles and helmets, pulling on wet boots, stuffing their gear into packs.

An hour later, they shuffled out onto wet cobbled streets. It looked to Fred as if both the Third Battalion and the 100th were assembling, with K and I Companies out front, taking the lead. Behind them, he could hear tanks starting to move, and more men marching. Whatever this was about, it was big.

Up in the mountains, where the rain was threatening to turn to snow, more than two hundred men were trapped behind enemy lines, desperately trying to stay alive.

Four days before, on October 23, General Dahlquist had ordered some of the 141st Infantry Regiment of his Texas Division to push along a series of ridges north of Biffontaine. At first, the Texans met only light resistance, and, as evening approached, all was surprisingly calm.

Which didn’t make any sense.

Then, as darkness fell, the forest behind them erupted with gunfire. The men hastily set up a perimeter defense and dug in for the night.

In the morning, some of them tried to retrace their steps and came under heavy fire. Those who survived stumbled back into camp to report that the Germans had built a blockade on the road during the night.

There was no doubting it now. The Texans had been lured into a trap. Stuck at the end of a ridge, on a mountaintop behind enemy lines, they were sitting ducks, under nearly continuous artillery fire and repeated ground attacks.

For the next several days, by radio, General Dahlquist repeatedly ordered the stranded men to fight their way out. When those attempts failed, he ordered other companies from the 141st to relieve them, all to no avail.

Finally, growing increasingly desperate, he gave the order to wake up the battle-weary men of the 442nd and send them up the mountain. If none of his regular guys could get the Texans out, maybe the Nisei could.

Nobody had told Fred Shiosaki or anyone in his squad about any trapped Texans. As dawn approached, and the patches of sky above the trees shifted from absolute black to slate gray, he heard the sound of a battle up ahead—the rattle of machine guns, the cracking of rifles, the concussions of grenades, the growling of tanks.

He still had no idea where they were going, what their objective was, or what they were up against. All he knew was that they had come to an abrupt halt and their officers were suddenly screaming at them to spread out and take cover.

Kneeling behind a tree with a rifle in his hands and a mortar tube strapped on his back, Fred tried to make sense of the situation. The sounds of battle extended off to both the left and right of him. Judging from the amount of fire coming at them, there seemed to be a sizable enemy force somewhere ahead in the wet gray murk.

Advancing toward the Lost Battalion in the Vosges.

K Company started to advance. Fred tried to move up, tree by tree, toward the still mostly invisible Germans ahead as periodic bursts of machine-gun fire ripped through the forest around him. Dirt and stones and bits of bark flew in all directions.

Then 105-millimeter howitzer shells began to whistle overhead. George Oiye and Sus Ito had crept out in advance of the line. Using a forested ravine for concealment, they’d spotted some German tanks about a hundred yards in front of K Company and called in their coordinates.

Kats Miho and the 522nd guys began firing on the reported position of the tanks. However, because the terrain was so steep, they were having a hard time with accuracy, and the barrage had little effect on the tanks. By early afternoon, K and I Companies had advanced only a matter of yards in the face of the relentless tanks and machine-gun fire. Roughly three miles away, the surrounded Texans were almost entirely out of rations, completely out of medical supplies, and fast running out of hope.

At about 3:30 p.m., the Germans launched a full-scale counterattack. Fred and his squad frantically dug in wherever they happened to be.

Then someone shouted, “Tank! Tank!” A German Panzer IV tank rumbled out of the foggy woods ahead of them, firing point-blank into K Company’s positions.

Shells slammed into stout trees, shattering their trunks, toppling them over on men on the ground. Alongside and behind the tank, German infantrymen advanced steadily, firing machine guns. Within minutes they were within fifty yards of the shallow depression where Fred lay.

Kats Miho firing a howitzer at a high angle in France.

It was clear that the enemy was about to overwhelm them.

Out of the corner of his eye, Fred saw a friend, Matsuichi Yogi, stand up, a bazooka up on his shoulder, and run full tilt toward the tank.

Fred sucked in some cold, wet air and held his breath.

Right in front of the tank, out in the wide open, Yogi stopped and knelt. With bullets whistling all around him, he fired and scored a direct hit. Flames erupted from the underside of the tank, black smoke poured out of its hatch, and it ground to a dead stop.

By the time Yogi made it back to K Company’s lines, the German attack was tapering off. The gray-uniformed enemy was ghosting back into the foggy twilight.

Exhausted as they all were, nobody in the 442nd slept much that night. Nobody said much either. There really wasn’t much to say. When the sun came up, more of them were going to die, and they all knew it.

So they tried to imagine they were somewhere else. Home, maybe. A warm bedroom. With family laughing downstairs. Pots and pans rattling in the kitchen. The smell of ginger being grated, tea being brewed, bread being toasted. Anywhere but here. Any time but now.

When dawn came, the Nisei continued to push toward the stranded Texans. The only realistic option for reaching them was down the middle of a narrow ridge, through a series of heavily fortified positions while under constant fire.

All morning, General Dahlquist bellowed orders over the radio, demanding to know why progress was so slow, why they weren’t breaking through to his Texans.

Colonel Pence decided to go up to the front line to check on the situation for himself. Almost as soon as he arrived, his jeep came under attack. He suffered severe leg wounds and had to be hastily evacuated from the battlefield.

For the men of K Company who witnessed the incident, it was tough to see Pence go down.

It fell now to their other commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Alfred A. Pursall, to make Dahlquist understand the near impossibility of what he was asking for.

Pursall decided that he, too, needed to see the situation on the ground. He asked Rudy to go with him. It wasn’t the first time Pursall had sought out Rudy for a dangerous mission. He respected the younger man’s judgment, particularly in tough situations.

With automatic fire ripping through the trees above them, Pursall and Rudy worked their way forward a few dozen yards, out past the line, crawling uphill on their bellies through wet moss and rotting leaves to get a better view of what was throwing so much fire at them.

What they saw was chilling.

The entire hillside above them bristled with German machine-gun nests and dug-in infantry armed with heavy weapons. Higher upslope, they could hear tanks and half-tracks moving.

Pursall asked Rudy what he thought about trying to take the hill.

Rudy answered as he always did, honestly and bluntly. It would be insane. They needed to wait, to bring up more firepower first.

Pursall nodded.

But by the time they worked their way back downslope, General Dahlquist himself had appeared on the scene. The general looked around and saw exactly what he didn’t want to see: men dug in on all sides.

“I want you guys to charge,” he yelled. “Charge, charge, charge!”[52]

Pursall planted himself squarely in front of the general, standing closer than was comfortable for either man. Speaking slowly but firmly, he tried to explain the situation. That a charge now would be suicidal. That they needed to bring other units up first.

Dahlquist, red in the face now, didn’t want to hear it.

Finally, Pursall wheeled around and said to Rudy, “Okay, let’s go.”

Rudy hesitated. The last thing he wanted was to start back up that hill again. “Where’re we going, sir?”

“We’ve got to take the general up, to show him what we are up against.”

Rudy and Pursall began leading Dahlquist uphill. Bullets snapped into trees all around them. Rudy was horrified, but he wasn’t going to be the first to dive for cover, so he kept walking.

Pursall pointed out the German positions to Dahlquist—all in all, an impenetrable wall of resistance.

Dahlquist seemed unimpressed.

Rudy couldn’t believe what he was seeing: two senior officers standing in full view of the Germans, nose to nose in the pouring rain, arguing with each other as bullets whipped by.

Eventually, Dahlquist spat at Pursall, “I’m ordering you, you will attack! That’s an order!”

Pursall grabbed Dahlquist by the lapels of his shirt: “Those are my boys you’re trying to kill. Nobody kills my boys like that. Nobody.”

The two men stood for a long moment, seething at each other. Then, Dahlquist wheeled around and walked away, shouting over his shoulder, “That’s an order!”

Pursall stared grimly up the hill in front of him. Then he pulled a pearl-handled pistol from a holster, stood up, and yelled, “Come on, you guys! Let’s go! Let’s go!” He started up the hill, firing the pistol, and bellowing again, “Let’s go! Artillery, too! You charge, too!”[53]

Chester Tanaka looked up, saw Pursall, and thought, My God! If he is going to walk up into that fire, I guess we’d better, too.[54] He stood up and motioned for his men to follow him.

Fred Shiosaki stared at Pursall for a moment, disbelieving. Then, like Tanaka, he rose to his feet and started hobbling forward, his swollen feet throbbing with pain.

George Oiye heard someone next to him clicking his bayonet onto his rifle. To his right, his radioman, Yuki Minaga, got up and took a few steps forward. Even though he was scared to death and armed with only a pistol, Oiye got up and started running up the hill, too.

So did Sus Ito.

So did Rudy.

Charging uphill into enemy fire in the Vosges.

They all did. With their fathers’ words echoing in their minds, their mothers’ love beating in their hearts, one by one, then as one, the men of K Company rose and began to charge up the hill, shooting blind through the tangle of trees looming above them.

Down the line, in I Company, Private Barney Hajiro saw K Company go. He stood and began moving steadily uphill, spraying the terrain ahead of him with automatic fire.

The rest of I Company rose and followed him. Sergeant Joe Shimamura yelled, “Make! Make! Make!”—“death” in Hawaiian.[55] Others roared insults in Japanese or Hawaiian Pidgin, hurling them at the Germans. Most of them just gritted their teeth and ran, slipping and sliding in the mud, tripping over roots, getting up and running again, expecting to die at any moment.

A torrent of steel and lead descended on them. Mortar shells plunged down among them. Machine-gun fire ripped them apart as they ran. A bullet smacked into the head of the man running next to Fred. Howling eighty-eight-millimeter tank shells slammed into trees, shattering them, toppling them over onto the men.

A shell exploded a few yards in front of George Oiye. The blast blew him thirty feet downhill and deafened him. He staggered back onto his feet and started up the hill again. Another shell hit a tree next to him and fell right at his feet, spinning in the mud, but didn’t go off. He stepped over it and kept going.

Yet another shell slammed into a tree directly ahead of Fred. This one did explode, and something hard and hot sliced into Fred’s side. God, I’m hit, he thought as he went down.[56]

He rolled onto his back, pulled up his shirt, and found a jagged piece of steel shrapnel embedded in his abdomen. But there wasn’t much blood.

K Company’s medic, James Okubo, crawled over to him, pulled the shrapnel out, bandaged the wound, and told Fred he was okay, to get up and keep going. He did.

The higher they climbed, the steeper the slope became. Grabbing at tree roots and rocks, they hoisted themselves higher, drawing closer to the German tanks, which were pointing directly downhill, firing point-blank at them. Dust and smoke mixed with the fog in a dense yellow-gray soup that made it hard to discern friend from foe. The men crawled over logs, stepped over dead bodies, hurled grenades uphill.

And kept going.

Then, suddenly, just as Fred reached the top, the sounds of battle simply ceased. One moment there were explosions and shrieks and wailing and bellowing, the next near silence. Nothing but the crack of occasional rifle shots, the whumping of artillery off in the distance, and the moaning of wounded men. In the woods ahead of him, Fred saw something he had never seen before: Germans running away from him.

“My God,” he muttered to himself. “It’s done.”

Then he looked around and thought, But there’s hardly anybody left.[57]

Of the hundreds of men who had started up the mountain three days before, fewer than two dozen in K Company were still alive and able to walk. In I Company, there were even fewer.