Letters from the 442nd: The World War II Correspondence of a Japanese American Medic (review)

The man who wrote the letters collected in this book was not your ordinary soldier in "the good war." Born in Seattle in 1915, he was older than most, a college graduate and a married man when the Pearl Harbor attack occurred. He came from an ethnic group whose loyalty many doubted, yet he volunteered to fight in an army of draftees. He experienced the shock of segregation while undergoing basic training in Mississippi and served in an ethnically monolithic regimental combat team rather than GI Joe's "all-American" unit. He stayed in Europe about as long as most American combatants, but he enjoyed longer than usual periods away from the fighting fronts in northern Italy and eastern France from June 1944 to December 1945. He was a specialist in a war of generalists: a pharmacist turned combat medic. He waited seven months, more than most GIs, to go home. His postwar accomplishments – earning a Ph.D. and becoming a professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington Medical School – were extraordinary.

Americans have long since enshrined "Min" Masuda's unit in their national public memory of World War II. His fellow veterans told their stories to all who would listen. The 442nd became a prime subject of feature film and television documentaries. In displays at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, its heroism counterbalances the bitterness of internment. Two carefully researched scholarly works – first Masayo Duus's Unlikely Liberators (1987) and then Robert Asahina's Just Americans (2006) – offer a full account of the 442nd's war. Thus there are few "new" facts in this book.

It offers, however, a unique and compelling account of what the men of the 442nd experienced on and off the battlefield. Thanks to army censorship and concern for his wife's feelings, Masuda put little blood and guts in his letters. But they richly and movingly detail the medic's everyday life. One day Masuda ate "with blood on my hands, flies buzzing around my food, and with vomit in my sight," (p. 50), and on many another he went without washing, clean clothes, protection from rain and snow, and sufficient food. Away from the front lines, he ran into French children who hurled snowballs at "the Japanese Boche" (p. 121), chatted with Japanese students in Rome, and heard the most famous Japanese diva of the day sing Madame Butterfly.

I found "Min" Masuda's letters most valuable for what they revealed about the psychology of the Japanese American soldier. He understandably had an anger management problem. Like GI Joe, he disliked army routine and sometimes got "so damn mad and disgusted at this senseless conflict," (p. 195). He had to cultivate gaman, that refined Japanese combination of patience and stoicism in the face of adversity, when he recalled the injustice of his family's internment in an Idaho camp. Through these letters one can also see the men of the 442nd"s conflicted sense of national identity. They fought to prove their valor and loyalty to America by their deeds and sacrifices in combat. But they didn't want to fight the Japanese or be "shanghaied" into Military Intelligence Service duty in the Pacific. At war's end, their sense of triumph was conditional. Masuda buried his bitterness when FDR died, calling the president who interned his family "a good man" (p. 192). But reports that a VFW post back home had denied membership to a Nisei veteran prompted fears that only the enemy, and not racial prejudice, had been vanquished. "If only the people back home could have the same viewpoint as the GIs who shared our miseries" (p. 242), Masuda wished.

Editor Dianne Bridgman presents these letters with an eye to the general reader rather than the...