On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forced relocation and internment of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans -- two-thirds of them American citizens -- to camps scattered across the American West and Arkansas. Many of these families lived in California, Oregon, and Washington, states on the Pacific coast that military leaders claimed were vulnerable to Japanese invasion. Of the 120,000 interned, none were ever found to have committed an act of espionage or sabotage against the United States.
Among those forcibly relocated were the families of a group of young men who had already joined the US Army before Executive Order 9066. These were the Nisei -- second-generation Japanese Americans, American citizens by birth, raised on American soil, educated in American schools, and speaking English as their primary language. Approximately 1,500 volunteered for the US Army from within the internment camps themselves. The Army initially rejected them, but public pressure and the desperate need for infantry soldiers in the European theater eventually led to the formation of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
The 442nd RCT, composed almost entirely of Nisei soldiers from Hawaii and the mainland internment camps, became one of the most decorated units in US military history. In the 442 days of its existence, it earned over 18,000 Purple Hearts, 4,000 Bronze Stars, 4 Distinguished Service Crosses, 21 Medals of Honor (many awarded decades after the war), and 4 Presidential Unit Citations. It fought in Italy, France, and Germany. It suffered over 800 killed in action.
The most famous action of the 442nd was the rescue of a trapped Texas battalion -- the 1st Battalion, 141st Infantry Regiment of the 36th Texas Division, which had been cut off and surrounded by German forces in the Vosges Mountains in France in October 1944. The 442nd, despite suffering heavy casualties in the preceding weeks, launched a series of desperate assaults over four days to break through to the 211 Texan soldiers trapped behind enemy lines. The rescue cost the 442nd more than 800 casualties -- killed and wounded -- in four days. It remains the largest single rescue operation in US military history.
When the first Nisei soldiers from the mainland internment camps returned home after the war, many found that their parents had lost everything -- homes, businesses, farms, possessions -- and had spent years in camps that were, in some cases, little better than prisons. The US government formally apologized for the internment in 1988, and surviving internees and their descendants received $20,000 each in reparations. But the Nisei soldiers who fought in the 442nd had already rendered a verdict on their loyalty that no executive order could overturn.