How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr

Both the all-Hawai‘i 100th and the mainly Hawai‘i 442nd, which absorbed the 100th, were sent to Europe. The men fought there with conspicuous valor—“valor” in this case being a euphemism for an extreme disregard for personal safety in the enthusiastic service of killing Nazis. One soldier, Daniel Inouye, exhibited near-inconceivable levels of valor in Tuscany at the war’s end. When three German machine guns pinned his men down, he stood up to charge. He was immediately shot in the stomach, but he ran toward the first machine-gun nest and blew it up with a grenade. He then, in his words, “lurched up the hill” toward the second emplacement, dispatching it with two grenades. On his way toward the third nest, his last grenade in hand, a German rifle grenade hit his right elbow and “all but tore my arm off.” But his right fist, hanging now from “a few bloody shreds of tissue,” still clenched an armed grenade. He pried the grenade free with his left hand and hurled it into the third machine-gun nest. As the few surviving Germans ran out, Inouye unslung his tommy gun and, left-handed, sprayed them with machine-gun fire. It was only after getting shot again, in the leg, that he finally collapsed. “Get back up that hill!” he berated his comrades as they rushed to help him. “Nobody called off the war!”