Thread by @UntoldWarFacts

In October 1944, more than 200 American soldiers from Texas were trapped in a French forest, surrounded by German troops, with no way out.

The unit sent to save them suffered more than 800 casualties doing it.

Those rescuers were Japanese American soldiers, whose own families were imprisoned back home in US internment camps.

This is the story of the 442nd..🧵1/6

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In the fear and chaos after Pearl Harbor, the United States made a decision that many Americans would later come to regret. Around 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast, most of them American citizens, were moved from their homes into internment camps for the duration of the war.

Among them were thousands of young Nisei, American-born sons of Japanese immigrants. They had grown up in the United States. They thought of themselves as Americans, and they wanted the chance to prove it.

In 1943 they got that chance. The Army called for volunteers to form a new all-Nisei combat unit. The response was overwhelming. More than ten thousand men stepped forward, many of them volunteering from inside the very camps where their families were being held.

They became the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. They chose a motto that said everything about them.

Go for Broke.

Bet everything.

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They trained at Camp Shelby in Mississippi and shipped out to Italy in 1944, joining the 100th Infantry Battalion, another Japanese American unit that had already fought so hard it earned the grim nickname the Purple Heart Battalion.

From the start, the Nisei soldiers fought with a fierce determination. They knew that every battle was being watched, and that they were fighting not just the enemy in front of them, but the doubts about their loyalty back home. They were determined to leave no question unanswered.

They drove the Germans through Italy, then into southern France. They earned a reputation across the Army as some of the most relentless, dependable soldiers in Europe. Where the 442nd was sent, the line moved forward.

Then, in October 1944, in the cold and fog of the Vosges Mountains in France, they were handed the mission that would define them.

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A battalion of Texans, around 275 men of the 36th Infantry Division, had pushed deep into the forest and been cut off and surrounded by German forces. They became known as the Lost Battalion. They were running out of food, water, and ammunition, and two attempts to reach them had already failed.

The 442nd was ordered in.

What followed was nearly a week of some of the most brutal fighting of the war. The Nisei soldiers climbed uphill through dense, freezing forest, into machine gun fire and artillery that the Germans aimed at the treetops, so that every shell sent a storm of shrapnel and splintered wood raining down on the men below. They advanced sometimes only a few hundred yards a day, taking terrible losses, refusing to stop.

On October 30, they finally broke through and reached the trapped Texans. They brought 211 of them out alive.

The rescue cost the 442nd dearly. To save those men, the regiment suffered more than 800 casualties. They paid that price without hesitation, for fellow American soldiers they had never met.

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By the end of the war, the record of the 442nd was almost beyond belief.

For its size and length of service, it became one of the most decorated units in United States military history. Its soldiers earned 21 Medals of Honor, thousands of Purple Hearts, multiple Presidential Unit Citations, and thousands of other decorations for valor and service.

Among them was a young lieutenant named Daniel Inouye, who lost his right arm leading an assault on a German position in Italy. He would go on to serve his country for half a century as a United States Senator from Hawaii.

These were men who had every reason to be bitter, and who instead chose to give everything. They fought, in a sense, two wars at once. One against the enemy overseas, and one against the doubt and prejudice they faced at home. They won both.

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In time, America recognized what these men had done.

In 1962 the state of Texas made the soldiers of the 442nd honorary Texans, in gratitude for the Lost Battalion they had saved. Decades later, a review of the war records found that prejudice at the time had denied many Nisei soldiers the honors they deserved, and in 2000 a number of their medals were upgraded to the Medal of Honor. In 2010 the entire unit was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the highest honors the nation can give.

The United States also formally apologized for the internment, and acknowledged that those loyal citizens should never have been imprisoned.

The men of the 442nd had answered the deepest possible test of loyalty with their lives, and in doing so they proved something timeless. That being an American has never been about where your family came from. It is about what you are willing to give for the country you call home.

This was the story of the 442nd, the Go for Broke regiment.

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