442nd/100th two-for-one movie review - Part I

This weekend I received my copy of "Only the Brave". I ordered it directly from the linked website, since it's not in wide release.

The 100th and the 442nd were made up of Japanese-Americans who fought in the European Theater. Their story is incredible and inspiring. They fought in some of the fiercest battles in WWII and were the most decorated unit of their type. And they would have received even more medals were it not for the racism of the time.

For example, Senator Daniel Inouye did not receive his much-deserved Medal of Honor until 2000. He should have received it 55 years ago. I was absolutely mindboggled when I read exactly what he did, because if I'd seen it in a war movie I'd have thought it was ludicrous and physically impossible.

Back in Italy, the 442nd was assaulting a heavily defended hill in the closing months of the war when Lieutenant Inouye was hit in his abdomen by a bullet which came out his back, barely missing his spine. He continued to lead the platoon and advanced alone against a machine gun nest which had his men pinned down. He tossed two hand grenades with devastating effect before his right arm was shattered by a German rifle grenade at close range. Inouye threw his last grenade with his left hand, attacked with a submachine gun (emphasis mine) and was finally knocked down the hill by a bullet in the leg.

The Japanese-American history of internment and WWII is not really my family inheritance, because I'm the first Japanese-American in my family. Nevertheless, I feel a strong connection to the events.

If your family had all their land and goods and businesses and home stolen by neighbors, had your children pulled out of school, and then you were rounded up and forced to live in a shack in a desert surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards... how hard would that make you want to fight for your country?

After learning more about this history, one interesting thing I came to understand was that the root cause of internment was not racism. It was simply greed, aided of course by racism. To explain this, there were three basic groups of Japanese-Americans at the time: Hawaiian, West Coast and East Coast. The ones in Hawaii were very numerous and had been there for several generations already. Many started off at the very bottom as sugarcane cutters, but they had become integrated into the island economy. On the East Coast, Japanese-Americans were few, scattered and diverse. On the West Coast, there were more, and many had achieved economic success in fields like strawberry farming and running small grocery stores.

It was this success that got them into trouble. There weren't enough East Coast Japanese to bother stealing from, so they were mostly left alone. In Hawaii, interning all Japanese-Americans would have caused an economic crisis. But on the West Coast, people starting looking at their neighbors and seeing dollar signs. They grabbed the stores and farms and land and sent their neighbors off to the camps.

The soldiers of the 442nd were divided among Hawaiians and mainlanders, and their culture and backgrounds were very different. Originally the 100th was Hawaiian and the 442nd was from the camps, but because of massive casualties they were eventually combined into the 442nd.

After giving all this background I'm a bit tired, so I'll have to postpone the actual movie reviews to Part II, which I'll post either tomorrow or the day after. I'll review Only the Brave and Go for Broke, the only other movie about the 442nd that I'm aware of.