In June 1942, the army, consistently inconsistent in its Nisei policy, formed the 100th Infantry Battalion (Separate) of Hawaiian Nisei. Partly this was due to Robert L. Shivers, the FBI agent in charge of Hawaii, who reported, “There was not a single act of sabotage committed…in the Hawaiian Islands during the course of the war. Nor was there any fifth-column activity.” Shivers’s testimony, plus the results of the Roberts Com-­mission—headed by a Supreme Court justice, it exonerated Japanese Americans in Hawaii of espionage—helped persuade FDR to let Hawaiian Nisei, at least, prove their patriotism. The 100th was the first result.

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The formation of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team was announced in February 1943, and since Nisei could no longer be drafted, the word went out for volunteers. More than 11,000 Hawaiian Nisei and over a thousand mainlanders responded. The new unit was made up of roughly twice as many Hawaiians as mainlanders, with a tiny handful of other Asian Americans. Most of the officers were white.

When Norman decided to join his brother Bob in the 442nd, he discovered it wasn’t easy. His commander didn’t want to let him go, but he eventually got a transfer—and was busted down to private to begin training. When he finally arrived at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, in November 1943, he was nonplussed. “I was the odd man out,” he recalls. “These units had been training together for months without me. I just had to try to fit in.”

That proved a bigger challenge than he had thought. Being Nisei didn’t make for automatic ethnic solidarity. “I couldn’t even understand the Hawaiian guys talking on the bus,” he says, “that pidgin of theirs. And they were making fun of us: ‘You guys talk like sissies.’”

Hawaiian Nisei were a very different breed from the stateside model: often physically bigger, more direct, and less likely to have encountered mainland-style racial prejudice thanks to the islands’ ethnic stew: Japanese Americans made up a full third of the population. Norman explains, “They were extroverted, loud, sure of themselves. They shared everything. They had money. They bought beer by the case. Mainland guys bought it by the bottle; we had no money; our families were in camps.”

Incidents between the Nisei groups flickered from the get-go, grew, and rapidly escalated into violence. Soon the mainland Nisei were walking guard with fixed bayonets around the perimeter of their part of camp to ward off marauding Hawaiians. Finally, the regiment’s CO assembled them on the parade grounds and lectured them about how they should behave toward the white girls in nearby Hattiesburg and toward each other. He boomed, “How are we going to fight together in combat after all this?”

Right about then came an incident that former senator Daniel Inouye, a soldier in the 442nd, often regales audiences with: a dramatic turning point that established Nisei brotherhood, thanks to a bus trip to a nearby internment camp that opened the Hawaiians’ eyes to the deprivations of their mainland cousins. “It’s a nice story,” Norman says, “but it’s not true.” The soldiers did indeed visit the nearby camp, but as Norman recalls, “incidents kept occurring until we shipped out. Of course, once we got into combat, there was no time for that BS.”

The 442nd left Norfolk, Virginia, on May 1, 1944, arriving twenty-eight days later in the bombed-out harbor of Naples. They rode LCIs and LSTs up the coast to Civitavecchia, where they joined the 100th Infantry Battalion, which been reduced from 1,400 men to a few hundred after seven months of fighting in Africa and Italy. The depleted 100th became the 442nd’s 1st Battalion, though Gen. Mark Clark, commander of the U.S. Fifth Army, argued, unsuccessfully, for dispersing Nisei throughout the army. When Rome was declared an open city and the Germans withdrew in June 1944, the 442nd followed: first to Belvedere, then to the mountains east of Pisa.

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