Lawson Sakai may not like to be called a
”
hero
”
but the Purple Heart hanging from his lapel indicates
otherwise.
Gilroy
Lawson Sakai may not like to be called a “hero” but the Purple Heart hanging from his lapel indicates otherwise.
Sakai said he was selected as the Grand Marshall for this year’s Memorial Day parade because the city had run out of people, but his story of service tells the tale of a man determined to fight for his country, whether Uncle Sam wanted him or not.
The day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the 18-year-old Sakai headed down to the Long Beach Naval Station with his schoolmates to enlist in the Navy. While his friends had no problem signing up for military duty, officers classified Sakai as a 4-C or “enemy alien.”
“Why? I’m an American,” Sakai, having been born in southern California, asked the officers.
As the son of Japanese immigrants, Sakai was a “Nisei,” a threat to national security in the eyes of America.
“I was now an enemy of my own country,” he said.
Sakai moved to Colorado with his family to escape the American concentration camps President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law, but some of his friends weren’t as lucky. Bank accounts were frozen. Wives and mothers were left helpless when their husbands were imprisoned.
“Things got a little desperate,” he said. “It looked pretty bleak for us.”
But the tide turned about a year later when Uncle Sam began recruiting the same men who had been labeled “enemy aliens.”
“They came to the camps looking for volunteers,” Sakai said.
Again, Sakai volunteered his services and this time, he was shipped out to Europe as a member of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, one of the most highly decorated military units in the history of the United States Armed Forces, nicknamed the “Purple Heart Battalion.”
Composed of men whose families had been interned, the 442nd fought bravely under the slogan “Go for broke!”
This summer, Sakai will travel to eastern France to a town his regiment liberated 65 years ago. This will be the last trip for the 85-year-old.
“The whole city turns out,” he remembered from his last trip to Bruyeres and Biffontaine. “It’s not like it used to be during wartime when everything was pretty badly shot up.”
Only a few of the people Sakai met more than half a century ago are still alive. The first time Sakai was there, the towns were at the heart of some of WWII’s deadliest battles. The Nisei fighters liberated the two towns after a two-week battle with the Germans, Sakai said. From there, the 442nd forged ahead to rescue the “Lost Battalion” – a group of soldiers that had been surrounded by German forces in France’s Vosges Mountains.
Several days into the battle and bombarded by German artillery, Sakai received a direct hit – “I thought I was dead,” he said. But medics reached Sakai in time to inject enough morphine to ease the pain.
Sakai returned to the States a war hero, though the modest man shies away from such titles. A former Gilroy resident who recently moved to Morgan Hill, Sakai celebrated this Memorial Day by sharing his story with a crowd of veterans and their families at St. Mary Cemetery, followed by a ride down 10th street, waving and smiling his wide grin at children who ran alongside his shiny red Porsche.
“It takes a great country to apologize for its mistakes,” Sakai said. “The United States is the greatest country on this earth.”
