A Brother's Pilgrimage To France ... -- On Death & Remembrance -- A Japanese American Man Visits The Place Where His Brother Died A Hero In World War II

WE stopped, then saw that across the parking lot, up a few cement stairs, was the memorial we had been looking for. It was a plaque mounted on a modest granite slab, which had, in both English and French this legend: To the men of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, U.S. Army who reaffirmed a historical truth here ... that loyalty to one's country is not modified by racial origin. -------------------------------

"Who will remember my brother when those who knew him are no longer alive?"

The answer may have seemed obvious, but the question haunted me

as my family set out from the small Alsatian town of Riquewihr, in eastern France, to find the place in the Vosges Mountains where my brother had died in World War II.

My brother was a member of the U.S. Army's famed 442nd Japanese American Regimental Combat Team. He was killed near the town of Bruyeres during his unit's successful, though tragically costly, battle to rescue the 1st Battalion, 141st Infantry (the "Alamo Regiment"), 36th Division. The so-called Lost Battalion had been cut-off, its ranks steadily decimated by German forces for at least four days.

A special commission of the U.S. Army named the resuce mission one of the 10 major land battles in American military history. It has been ranked with the battles at Gettysburg and Guadalcanal.

My brother died on October 29, 1944 - a day before the rescue was accomplished.

My desire to visit Bruyeres, to remember my brother in this special way, does not mean we had especially strong sibling ties when we were growing up, together with our sister, in pre-World War II Seattle. He was much older than I - six years older.

I was only 12 when, soon after graduating from Broadway high school in 1939, my brother left Seattle to work at a laundry and restaurant in Anchorage. At age 21 - before Pearl Harbor - he was drafted into the Army and began his military career at Fort Richardson, Alaska.

When all persons of Japanese ancestry were forcibly evacuated from the West Coast early in l942, our parents, my sister and I were sent to the desolate, barbed-wire confines of the Minidoka War Relocation Center near Twin Falls, Idaho.

We didn't see my brother again until 1943, when he briefly visited Minidoka - in Army uniform. The joy of that visit and the reunion obscured for us the sheer incongruity of the circumstances. Here he was a G.I. on leave, visiting his family in an American concentration camp.

The "home" to which he had come was a single room, perhaps 14 feet by 16 feet, partitioned-off in a barrack-like structure, crowded with several cots, a tiny table, a chair or two, and a potbellied stove. We took all our meals in a communal mess hall.

That visit to Minidoka was the last time that my parents and I ever saw my brother alive.

Given the years and distance that separated my brother and me during our growing-up years, and his death, we never managed to narrow the age gap that adulthood probably would have closed.

The war aborted all that. And a lot more.

But even now he remains, in memory, my bespectacled, studious older brother, the one who had introduced me to reading Time magazine at a time when comic books were the vogue.

As eldest son, he had, for years, walked miles after school each day, without complaint, to our mother's lower Yesler Way barber shop to help her close up, and to escort her home. I later inherited that responsibility.

So the journey to Bruyeres became a pilgrimage of remembrance, a memorial and homage to a brother my memory of whom had become more blurred with passing time.

He never went to college, but I have not forgotten that the monthly payments from his GI life insurance (after my parents' death) made it possible for me to meet some of my expenses while attending the University of Washington.

Into the mountains

The visit to Bruyeres enabled my own family to know of a brother-in-law and an uncle that they never had a chance to meet.

Unlike the weather here in late fall, most of Europe was frigidly cold last November. When we started our trip to Bruyeres, it was well below freezing. The countryside was covered with a light crust of snow. The skies were a dull putty.

With map in hand, we headed west into the Vosges Mountains. Referring to them as "mountains" seemed a bit incongruous to me. When I think "mountains," I think the Rockies and the Cascades. The Vosges are modest in comparison, but they are steep and jutting and their slopes are covered, for the most part, with evergreens.

We drove through small villages that have defied change over time. Everywhere seemed at peace.

In the cold fog and rains of October 1944, however, it was undoubtedly a different story. It was up these precipitous hills that the 442nd charged on Sunday, the 29th, to dislodge the German defenders dug in atop them. It was inevitable that the casualties would be heavy. I will never know on which hill my brother died.

Now, one hill looks like another.

A historian, Pierre Moulin, a native of Bruyeres, has chronicled in his book, U.S. Samurais in Bruyeres - People of France and Japanese Americans: Incredible Story, the events prior to, during, and after the battle for his hometown and the Lost Battalion. In writing about the day on which my brother died, he notes:

"In a single day the Germans have left more than 350 men in this single (and small) combat area. As for the 442nd, alas, it will have lost more than half of its combat force. Companies I and K are practically wiped out. . . ."

Landmarks

Our trip to Bruyeres was occurring more than 55 years after the 100th Battalion and the 442nd combat team had liberated the town and had rescued the Lost Battalion. We wondered if any landmarks or other evidence would remain of what had occurred back then.

Our research indicated that Bruyeres had named a street in honor of the 442nd. It is also now a sister city of Honolulu, a tie that undoubtedly occurred because the 100th Battalion, also composed almost entirely of second-generation Japanese Americans (or Nisei), was from Hawaii. Bruyeres, in fact, has a road named "Honolulu." We also read that a 442nd memorial had been erected in some woods near town.

Bruyeres does not appear on most U.S. atlases of France. Although it has been described as a railway center of sorts, it is, in truth, only a small town, with a population of 3,800. The importance of Bruyeres to both the U.S. and German military was the fact that it guarded the approach through the Vosges to the city of St. Die, a vital industrial and communications center, and the focal point of the U.S. Seventh Army's autumn drive. From there, the Rhine and the Third Reich's border would be less than 65 miles away.

When we finally got to Bruyeres, we had difficulty finding the street named "Rue du 442 eme Regiment Americain D'Infanterie Librateur de Bruyeres October 1944." And we did not know where the memorial was, even whether it still existed.

On the main road through town, we finally saw a weathered sign that showed that to the right was the street named for the 442nd. We presumed that the memorial would be located on it.

It was overcast, windy and cold as we progressed up Rue du 442. An inch or two of snow covered the road.

After a block or two, there were no more houses, and we were engulfed in a forest. There was no evidence that any vehicle had ventured this way lately.

We traveled well over a mile on the woodland road, seeing no one and no sign of activity. Then we came to a small clearing alongside the road. Across the small parking area, up a few cement stairs, was the memorial we had been looking for.

A plaque mounted on a modest granite slab had, in both English and French, this legend: "To the men of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, U.S. Army, who reaffirmed a historical truth here . . . that loyalty to one's country is not modified by racial origin. These Americans, whose ancestors were Japanese, on Oct. 30, 1944, during the Battle of Bruyeres broke the backbone of the German defenses and rescued the 141st Infantry Battalion which had been surrounded by the enemy for four days."

Two bouquets of frozen, faded flowers lay sleet-covered just below the monument. They were to me reassuring evidence of recent local remembrance of those who helped liberate Bruyeres more than a half century earlier.

The memorial itself had been placed here by the Japanese American Citizens League, an organization, with headquarters in San Francisco, whose membership is largely persons of Japanese ancestry.

In 1994, on the 50th anniversary of the battle of Bruyeres, a second memorial, "Le Noeud De L'Amitie" (The Knot of Friendship), was placed near the first. The legend on this monument, only in French, states that it was a gift to the citizens of Bruyeres from the veterans of the 100th Battalion and the 442nd regiment. Its friendship theme is captured in the curved linking of two staffs at the top of the plaque.

On to Epinal

After we had lingered awhile in the cold, viewing the monuments and taking pictures, we made our way back to Bruyeres' main street, with plans to travel on to the town of Epinal, about 18 miles west.

We had read that the people of Bruyeres had prevailed upon the family of the first Japanese American GI from Hawaii killed in action in the liberation of their town to leave his remains buried in French soil at a cemetery in Epinal: a lasting reminder of their debt to the Nisei soldiers.

In contrast to the villages we had just seen, Epinal was more like a small city. As we approached its outskirts, we noticed a cemetery. We stopped to inquire of a workman whether a Hawaiian Japanese American soldier was buried in this cemetery. Although the gardner spoke neither English nor German, using the international language of gestures and a bit of fragmentary French, we succeeded in learning that there was an American cemetery not far from Epinal.

The Epinal American Cemetery and Memorial has 5,255 servicemen buried there, including the Hawaiian Nisei GI. The assistant superintendent of the cemetery said there were 13 members of the 442nd, including two non-Japanese American officers, buried at Epinal.

They all had died between Oct. 15 and Nov. 14, 1944.

We wanted to visit Epinal in part because, before my brother's remains were returned to the States, he, together with the numerous other Americans who died in the Vosges campaign, had been buried there. The scene of quiet tranquillity will remain long in our memory. The 13 whose remains will forever be in Epinal, along with the 5,242 others, lie in a place of simple and befitting beauty.

Remembrances

"Who will remember my brother when those who knew him are no longer alive?"

In two generations, perhaps

three, following a person's death, there will be no one alive with immediate, personal memories of that individual. But for those buried at Epinal, there is an institutional remembrance.

Still, in time, no matter whether his remains had stayed at Epinal or were moved to the cemetery in Seattle where they are now interred, no one alive will remember my brother or those who had died with him in the Vosges.

For many, if not most, of us, the only lasting earthly remembrance are names and dates etched in stone. My brother's grave marker at Seattle's Washelli Cemetery has this information:

Ban Ninomiya, Washington, U.S. Army Private. May 2, 1920-October 29, 1944.

But, otherwise, is his future to be one of forgotten anonymity?

Since we made the pilgrimage to Bruyeres, I am convinced that the memory of my brother and his comrades will live on - there in the evergreen forests of Bruyeres, in the floral tributes of a grateful people. And in the memorials erected and maintained here at home by municipalities and patriotic organizations.

There also is consolation in the belief that the rescue of the Lost Battalion was a symbolic event.

The 442nd and 100th Battalion suffered more than 300 casualties rescuing the remaining 211 members of the Lost Battalion. But, surely, American sacrifice is not a matter of numbers. The final measure is one of courage and value - in the defense of one's country and in the preservation of its ideals.

The Bruyeres rescue is not distinguished by the irony that Americans who had been racially segregated in military service had fought and died saving other Americans whose only segregation was being isolated in battle.

Rather, the effort in the Vosges provides imperishable evidence that the beauty and glory of America are found in its different faces and hues, in its varying faiths and beliefs.

We who now, or hereafter, bless this land and our good fortune to be Americans, inevitably bless all those who have sacrificed their lives in this nation's service to make our way of life possible.

The dead of the 442nd and of the 100th Battalion shall be remembered not simply by names etched in stone, but for providing ultimate testimony that being American is, in truth, a matter of the heart and mind.

Having lived - and died - for the American ideal there near Bruyeres in 1944, my brother and his comrades shall have remembrance that is immemorial - and far beyond Bruyeres.

Calvin Ninomiya lives in Chevy Chase, Md.