Go For Broke: They Volunteered from Behind the Wire

They Volunteered from Inside the Wire

Here is the sentence that still stops people: they volunteered from inside internment camps.

When the War Department in 1943 called for volunteers to form a segregated Japanese American combat unit, the mainland Nisei men they were asking had already lost almost everything. Their homes had been seized. Their fathers' fishing boats were in Navy hands — requisitioned in the weeks and months after Pearl Harbor and pressed into patrol service while the families watched from behind wire. Their mothers had been loaded onto buses and trains and dispatched to the desert. Some of their families had built San Diego's fishing fleet from nothing over forty years, and that fleet, too, was gone. And approximately 1,500 of those men said yes.

The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, together with the 100th Infantry Battalion formed earlier from Hawaiian Nisei, became what the U.S. Army would later formally recognize as the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in American military history. They earned 9,486 Purple Hearts, more than 4,000 Bronze Stars, and 21 Medals of Honor. Their motto — Go For Broke — was a Hawaiian dice term for gambling everything on a single roll.

Italy and France

They fought in Italy and France, in terrain that had stopped larger units. In the Vosges Mountains of France, the 442nd drove through German positions that American commanders had begun to believe could not be taken. When a battalion of Texas soldiers — the "Lost Battalion" — was cut off in the French forest and surrounded, it was the 442nd that broke through to reach them, fighting uphill through dense timber and sustained fire at enormous cost to their own ranks.

One more thread belongs to this story: the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, originally part of the 442nd and detached from it in March 1945, was sent into Germany under the Seventh Army. While the main regiment kept fighting in Italy, soldiers of the 522nd came upon survivors of a death march from the Dachau subcamp complex near Kaufering, Bavaria — gaunt figures left in the snow, many weighing barely eighty pounds. They freed approximately 3,000 people. These were Japanese American soldiers liberating Jewish prisoners in Bavaria while their own families sat behind wire in the deserts of Arizona and the swampy Delta lowlands of Arkansas, and the cities where they had grown up continued without them — their Japantowns emptied, their businesses shuttered, their futures officially deferred by the same government that was now asking them to fight for it.

Fifty-Five Years Late

Many of those original citations were not for Medals of Honor. The Army had issued Distinguished Service Crosses — its second-highest award. In 1996, Congress mandated a formal review of Asian American veterans' cases from World War II. The review found consistent evidence of racial bias in the original downgrading of honors. The Army corrected the record. On June 21, 2000, President Clinton held a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House: twenty-two Asian American veterans received upgraded Medals of Honor. Twenty of them were from the 100th and 442nd, nineteen holding Distinguished Service Crosses that were upgraded, and one whose Silver Star was elevated to the Medal of Honor.

The men who received those corrected honors were in their seventies and eighties. Some had already died. The correction came 55 years late, which is not a footnote — it is the point. The most decorated unit in Army history had its decorations systematically reduced by the same government it had served, and those men waited more than half a century for the country to finish what it had promised.

What This Bay Carries

San Diego Bay is ringed with monuments to military service: carriers at their quay walls on Coronado, grey hulls at 32nd Street, white headstones on the Point Loma ridge at Fort Rosecrans. Those monuments tell true and important stories. But the Japanese American story of this bay — the fishermen, the cannery workers, the Nihonmachi families who built a city within this city — is woven into those military stories in ways that tend not to be marked in bronze.

The 442nd fought in the same war whose Pacific operations launched from this harbor. They crossed the same ocean their fathers had fished from these docks. They earned more decorations than any comparable unit, in the name of a country that had, months before they shipped out, decided their families could not be trusted to remain on this coast.

JADA is a classic wooden yacht, built in Stockton in 1938 and sailing these waters for nearly twenty years. There is no better place to feel the full weight of what this harbor witnessed than from her deck, moving slowly past the waterfront these families helped build — and sitting with what it means to go for broke on behalf of people who had not yet gone for you.

Sources: National WWII Museum, "Going For Broke: The 442nd RCT" (nationalww2museum.org); Densho Encyclopedia, "442nd Regimental Combat Team" (encyclopedia.densho.org); Go For Broke National Education Center (goforbroke.org); U.S. Army, "Key Military Unit: The 442nd Regimental Combat Team" (army.mil); U.S. Department of State, "The 522nd Field Artillery Battalion — WWII Liberators of the Dachau Death March" (state.gov, 2025).

Come sail with us aboard JADA, and hear the full story from the water where it began.

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