On July 17, 1944, Norman was on point as his unit climbed up and down Tuscan hills when he felt “like somebody whacked me in both legs with a baseball bat. It turned out that both legs were shattered: compound comminuted fractures of the left femur and the right lower leg. My friend, medic Kelly Kuwayama, and another volunteer pulled me out of there just as mortar rounds were crashing all around us. I kept coming in and out of consciousness.”

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Private Ikari spent the next four months in the hospital in Naples. When he was finally released, he was classified as PLA—permanent limited assignment. No more front lines for him.

At about that same time, Pvt. Warren Tsuneishi had settled into Schofield Barracks in Oahu, where he and ten other Nisei were named to the 306th Headquarters Intelligence Detachment of the XIV Corps just being organized in the summer of 1944.

Warren was born in Monrovia, California, on July 4, 1921. “I always thought of myself as Yankee Doodle Dandy, though I obviously didn’t look like one,” he says. His near-sightless eyes twinkle in his Maryland office, where a widescreen computer and antique print magnifier (to compensate for advanced macular deterioration) crowd a table in a room bulging with books and papers—memorabilia of a lifetime in libraries. Warren retired in 1993 from his position as chief of the Orientalia Division at the Library of Congress.

His patriotic Issei father, Satoru, named him after President Warren G. Harding. Satoru Tsuneishi had emigrated from Kochi Prefecture to Monrovia in 1907; his wife Sho arrived in 1915. Satoru entered the University of Southern California to pursue a divinity degree. But illness and the financial obligations of a family pushed Satoru into truck farming in Duarte.

Warren was the Tsuneishis’ fifth of ten children. He attended Duarte Grammar School with non-Nisei students, some of whose families befriended him. As he remembers, “School and my friends constituted an intense Americanization course for me—the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, all that.” Though he graduated at the top of his high school class, “the school counselor did not encourage me to apply for college, because professional job opportunities for Japanese American graduates were not readily available.” His education-loving parents overrode that, and he enrolled at UCLA for twenty-seven dollars in fees, no tuition. In September 1941, he transferred to Berkeley to study political science.

After December 7, some 13,000 Japanese Americans from the San Francisco Bay Area were evacuated to the temporary quarters at Tanforan racetrack in San Bruno. While Warren managed to finish spring term at Berkeley, his friends and family found themselves further south at the Santa Anita racetrack and Pomona Fairgrounds. “They converted them to holding pens,” he explains. “Whatever we could carry we could take. People were angry and frightened. In the Western states, we were aware of the long history of discrimination, but we were brought up to be Americans, and therefore optimistic.”

In the camps, that combination of intensified discrimination and American-bred optimism created a volatile psychological mix. On August 4, a riot broke out at Santa Anita when military personnel searching for contraband became abusive, triggering mass unrest. Crowds gathered and harassed the searchers until MPs with tanks and machine guns shut the dissenters down. By year’s end, beatings, shootings, deaths, demonstrations, even mass uprisings were a recurrent problem in the camps. They would proliferate until the war’s finish.

The Tsuneishis were sent to Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming soon after it opened on August 11. Each family in the standard-issue GI barracks was assigned a single room; all ate in the mess hall. “It wasn’t home,” Warren, who joined them in October, says, “but it was not Dachau. There was no curfew. There were dances, ice skating, parties. These were not death camps. If you had a good reason, like a job, or family in another part of the country, you could get out.” He smiles slightly. “I took unconstitutional acts of government without fighting them. I guess, according to the stereotype, I was more Japanese than American that way. But America is in the heart.”

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