NOVEMBER ON A HILLSIDE FARM

            An author friend of mine described the month of November as “The Time Between”; summer has unarguably come to an end, but full winter has not quite arrived. In northern New England it is a time of cold nights, but often clear crisp sunny days. On a typical hillside dairy farm such as the one I grew up on in the late 1940s, the “time between” was crowded with a long list of things that had to be completed before the woods and fields became filled with deep snow. It was a time of hay-filled barns fortified with overflowing grain bins, barrels of molasses and sacks of feed-beets (mangles.)

            The time in which our family moved onto “The Home Place” was a time when electrification and indoor toilets had only recently arrived in rural, backroad Vermont, and many farms – like ours – had not yet transitioned from horse-power to tractor-power. Cutting, splitting and hauling firewood was more than just a necessity, but a matter of survival. In our case we required 20 cords for the largely un-insulated farm home, and another 20 cords needed to produce the maple syrup which was a key component of our income come February and March. Hundreds of man-hours (and boy-hours) were spent in the 126 acres of forest land carrying out this enterprise, and before the coming of chain saws, the tools included two-man buck saws, splitting wedges, Peavey cant dogs and double-bladed axes. While young age was no excuse from any of this hand work, I was usually the family member assigned to snake the fallen logs from the woods where they had been seasoning for months, always careful to walk on the uphill side of one of our Percheron work horses, (especially a skittish 2000 pound gelding named Dan whose fear of water often caused him to take a log-scattering leap over the smallest trickle crossing our path!)

            November also brought “pork chop day” to the Home Place, a time of special excitement for a teen age boy who had daily fed and eagerly watched the weight go on our pair of Chester White hogs. On a suitably cold late November day the split halves, looking very much like white shiny hollowed out canoes, would be slid from the processor’s pick-up and carried into the cold room off the kitchen, on whose paper-clad family dinner table the magic wrought by meat saws and razor-sharp knives would take place. For a day or two my hours would see the cutting of loins, ribs and roasts, and the separation of hams, hocks and sow belly, with “salt” pork and “head cheese sausage” to round things out. The hams and bacon would go into a sugar/salt dry cure before heading to our home-made smoker stoked with apple wood and corn cobs, later to hang in a dark corner of our cellar room right next to several wheels of our own Cheddars. Before the day when home freezers were common, our pork cuts were wrapped and stored on shelves in a small addition to our woodshed where nature did the freezing.

            Our cold, moist, dirt-floored root cellar was home to crates of newly-dug “Green Mountain” potatoes, onions, turnips and rutabagas, and heads of late cabbage hung by their intact roots from overhead beams. Removed by several feet from all those vegetables would be bushel baskets of apples from our hill-top orchards: Northern Spies, Wolf Rivers, Winesaps, Baldwins and Rhode Island Greenings. (By that time of course, the Yellow Transparents, Winter Bananas and other early varieties would be but a wondrous memory.)

            Winter squash, from huge Hubbards to Buttercups and Butternuts would be sleeping in upstairs bedrooms where it was warm and dry, while some of the best winter eating of all would not even have come indoors; left in the deep loamy garden soil would be carrots, beets and parsnip roots, covered with a foot of hay and straw which could be pulled back throughout winter, as snow cover made insulation complete in the coldest weather.

            It was a time of hard work and I would never have guessed that in just a few years, I would find peace and sleep in a tent surrounded by the sound of constant gunfire and uncertainty thanks to the deep satisfaction of those wonder-filled memories of the sense of security anchored in life on the November Home Place.

GO FOR BROKE! - ANNALS OF THE 442nd REGIMENTAL COMBAT TEAM

            The indignation of those 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent who found themselves imprisoned behind barbed wire in 1942 was only heightened by the knowledge that their patriotism was so arbitrarily dismissed simply because of their ancestry; especially when a much larger group of people who were of German and Italian ancestry were treated differently. This frustration is captured by a verse written by an anonymous internee at the Poston camp near Yuma City, Arizona:

            We all love life/and our country best/Our misfortune to be here in the West/To keep us penned behind that damned fence/Is someone’s notion of National defense!

            Well, National defense did come into play when Congressional leaders began to wonder if young Nisei shouldn’t be allowed to serve in the military. It began with 1,000 volunteers from Hawaii and grew quickly with volunteers from the Mainland camps, most of whom would eventually be organized into the 442^nd Regimental Combat Team of the U.S. Army Reserve. Although a few would serve in the Pacific as language and intelligence people, the bulk of the 442^nd  and 100^th, along with several associated artillery and support units would end up in Europe fighting Germans and Italians for obvious reasons.

            They would distinguish themselves in every campaign in which they took part receiving eight Presidential Unit Citations and sustaining some of the highest casualty rates of any infantry unit in WWII. In fact the original compliment of 4000 would have to be augmented two-and-one-half times in replacements, with a total of 14,000 men serving before it was all over. Commanded by white officers for the most part, those who led them would soon learn that the fighting Nisei – with their war cry GO FOR BROKE - possessed an unusual unit cohesiveness and absolutely refused to leave any individual behind, no matter the cost, and that the best way to handle them was to explain the mission but then stand back and allow the NCOs and their troops to work out their own tactical details.

            In late October, 1944, the 141^st Infantry Regiment of the 36^th Texas Division became encircled and trapped by German troops in the densely wooded Vosges mountains near the German border in Northern France. General John Dahlquist commanding the 36^th Division, selected the 442^nd RCT to go to the rescue of what came to be known as The Lost Battalion in what everyone realized was a “suicide mission” behind enemy lines; an operation which came to be one of the most costly but celebrated of WWII. On October 29^th and 30^th fighting became virtually hand-to-hand, or as one survivor wrote afterward, “tree-to-tree and yard-by-yard”. Incredibly, they finally broke through to the dwindling survivors of the Lost Battalion and led them back through German lines and “home” again.

            In that one contest, the 442^nd suffered more than 1,000 casualties including three companies which started out with a total of 200 and came back with only 20 still standing.

            By wars’ end, these American warriors of Japanese descent became the most decorated infantry unit in U.S. Army history for their size and length of service with 21 Medals of Honor, 52 Distinguished Service Crosses, 1 Distinguished Service Medal, 560 Silver Stars (with 28 Oak Leaves), 22Legion of Merit Medals, 15 Soldier’s Medals, and 4,000 Bronze Stars (with 1200 Oak Leaves); and as a testament to the cost involved, 9,486 Purple Hearts; in all, 18,143 decorations including in 2010, the Congressional Gold Medal.

            I wish I could say that these brave and courageous soldiers came home to a grateful and welcoming nation, but that wouldn’t be true. It would be years before the old prejudices would mellow enough to blur the color line with those who had suffered the ignominy of imprisonment and separation. Despite all that had been taken from them, the alumni of those internment camps produced more U.S. Congress members, mayors, poets, composers, playwrights, talented actors and actresses, college presidents and leaders of industry than perhaps any so-called “minority group” in American history. And high on that list of honored citizens-in-uniform who have marched off to all our wars, I hold my hand in proud salute to those whose story I can only briefly acknowledge in these two columns.

  Soldiers of the 442^nd Regimental Combat Team receive citations from a U.S. Lieutenant General in Europe.

                                                                                                                                                                         U.S. Army Photo

EXECUTIVE ORDER 9066 AN ACT WHICH WILL LIVE IN INFAMY

            Just two-and-a-half months after Pearl Harbor on February 19, 1942 at the urging of major newspapers, an erroneous intelligence report and in the face of a nervous public,(and it might be added, decades of an entrenched anti-Asian prejudice,)  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 giving the U.S. Military almost-unbridled power to place people of Japanese heritage in confinement. In the following weeks and months, 120,000 men, women and children, of whom 70% were U.S. citizens and most of the others residents of 20 to 40 years, would be removed from their homes, businesses and sidewalks of the American West and transported to dozens of so-called “assembly centers” before eventually being transported to ten hurriedly-readied but primitive “relocation centers” across the country – mostly in the west. They would be permitted to carry two suitcases each. Everything left behind would become the property of the U.S. government; homes, private possessions, some of the country’s most beautiful and productive farms, ranches and orchards, bank accounts, investments and savings. Some of the hardest hit would be the industrious commercial fishermen of the Pacific coast who would have no boats – the rewards of a life-long commitment to hard work and careful saving - to return to when the war was over.

            Ironically, Hawaii – the very place where Japanese sympathizers were believed to have aided the raid on Pearl Harbor with advance intelligence and secret radio signals – largely escaped the same kind of treatment as befell the mainlanders. Since they represented more than 40% of the territory’s population, it was decided that internment would be both difficult to accomplish and devastating to the local economy. (By the way, in 1943 Military Intelligence discovered that the Hawaii spies helping the Japanese attackers were in fact Nazi Germans; not Japanese Americans! In fact throughout the four years of WWII there was not a single incident of treason on the part of indigenous people with Japanese family ties.) No matter, Nisei living in Hawaii did not escape the same kind of racial prejudice and mistreatment as those residing stateside, and many did indeed suffer temporary incarceration.

            Most of the Internment camps were surrounded by barbed wire and towers manned by armed guards in remote desert-like locations. Housing consisted of blocks of long narrow tarpaper-covered buildings with the internees crowded together in units consisting of small family spaces with no more privacy than hung sheets separating them from each other, usually with single open rooms for showering and latrines with no dividers; Army cots with flat pads and army blankets for sleeping. Some had small coal stoves for cold weather, but not all. Meals were eaten in common areas.

            Each camp acquired a reputation of its own, from Manzanar situated in California’s Owens Valley which was especially infamous for harsh confinement measures, to Gila River southeast of Phoenix which was the least restrictive and enjoyed excellent relations with the local population. One of the most unfortunate incidents occurred in April, 1943 at Topaz near Delta, Utah, where a guard shot and killed a 65-year old internee who did no more than wander near a corner of the fenced yard. There is no record of any disciplinary action following the event. Tule Lake in northern California was the largest, with nearly 12,000 prisoners at one time, and Rohwer in Arkansas which housed only 8500, but of whom 2000 were school kids!

            Not often spoken of or written about is an eleventh camp located at the old Dalton Wells CCC camp near Moab, Utah. It was selected as a place to send “troublesome” internees (meaning Isei or 1^st-generation Americans, who having been born in the USA, refused to sign the insulting “loyalty pledge” at Manzanar.) Their deliberate isolation and cruel treatment is something which the Nazi Gestapo might have dreamed up! It was known by its prisoners as “a living hell.”

            And let’s end this short story with an observation about euphemisms – because that is what the terms Assembly Centers, Relocation Centers and Internment Camps are; Convenient euphemisms. Historians and language experts have finally agreed that when people who have committed no crime are seized and incarcerated behind barbed wire guarded by armed soldiers, and held not because of what they have done, BUT BECAUSE OF WHO THEY ARE, those places are concentration camps. And it happens only because good people allow it to happen.

            In all, 14,000 of those young Nisei volunteered to serve in combat for the country which continued to withhold the freedom of their families at home. Next week we will take a close look at the unparalleled service of those young AMERICANS.

  On August 10, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Reparation Act compensating internee families and apologizing for their unconstitutional treatment during WWII