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For no other reason than their ancestry, 127,000 Japanese people, 80,000 of them born in the U.S., were forcibly incarcerated during World War II. But 33,000 Japanese Americans also served in the U.S. Armed Forces during the war. Daniel Inouye was one of them, and his battlefield heroics earned him the Medal of Honor. It took over half a century before they gave it to him, though.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: June 21, 2000--
Inouye was born in Hawai’i in 1924. His father had migrated from Japan and his mother was a second-generation Japanese American. He was only 17 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and he served as a medical volunteer to help those wounded in the attack. Two years later the U.S. said yeah okay I know we’re locking a bunch of you up in concentration camps but if you want to go fight for your country that doesn’t recognize your rights as citizens then I guess that’s okay. Gotta be segregated tho.
Daniel Inouye signed up, and within a year he was a platoon sergeant leading other Japanese Americans in the 442ndRegimental Combat Team. He first saw action in Italy, and then in France, where they rescued the “Lost Battalion.” The fuck is a lost battalion? A group of over 200 not Japanese American soldiers surrounded by Germans. Other rescue attempts failed, but the 442nd fought like mad, suffering horrible casualties, and rescued 211 fellow Americans. FYI, the 442nd is the most decorated unit for its size in U.S. military history.
Inouye was given a battlefield promotion to second lieutenant for his actions in rescuing the Lost Battalion, and then went back to Italy. During an attack his men were pinned down by three German machine gun nests. He went to attack and was shot in the stomach and said fuck it, ignored the wound, and charged one of the nests, blowing them to Nazi hell with hand grenades and his submachine gun. Then he rallied his men, and they took out the second nest. Then he collapsed from blood loss. Then shit got really fucking weird.
He fucking crawled toward the third nest, was about to throw a grenade, and got shot by a grenade launcher, which hit him in the elbow. The grenade launched at him was a dud, but the blunt force mostly ripped his arm off. His largely detached arm still clenched a grenade. So he said fuck this, used his working hand to take the grenade from the amputated hand, threw it at the third nest, and blew those fucking Nazis into bratwurst.
Inouye was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat in 1962 and never lost an election. In the 1990s, Congress began to look at records of Japanese American soldiers who were deserving the Medal of Honor but were denied it due to racism. On June 21, 2000, Senator Daniel Inouye and 19 other Japanese American veterans of the 442nd were awarded the Medal of Honor by President Clinton.
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