It was late October 1944. The autumn rain had turned cold in the Vosges Mountains of eastern France. Trees crowded steep slopes and narrowed the soldiers’ vision. The ground was wet, yet unforgiving. The German forces occupied defensive positions in thick forest where mines, artillery, mortars, and machine guns made advancing costly.
Somewhere ahead, in the rain, wet, and cold, American soldiers were trapped.
The 1st Battalion of the 141st Infantry Regiment, a unit with roots in the Texas National Guard, had advanced into the forest only to have German forces close behind it. They were now fighting an increasingly desperate close-range battle for survival. Attempts by other American forces to break through had failed.
Approximately 275 Texans were caught in the German encirclement.
For days they held their position. Food was running low. Water was running low. Ammunition and medical supplies were dwindling. The wounded were deteriorating. As temperatures fell and rations diminished, aircraft attempted to drop supplies to the surrounded men as the Germans continued to repel the American forces trying to reach them.
The men became known as the Lost Battalion.
The Army now turned to another group of Americans to bring them home—the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. The 442nd was exhausted. They had just come through brutal fighting around Bruyeres and Biffontaine, and had just pulled back for clean clothes, hot food, and badly needed rest.
The rest lasted less than two days.
For five days, from October 26 through October 30, the men of the 442nd fought toward the surrounded battalion. The battle was measured in yards. The hills were steep. Ravines and fields were littered with mines. Roads through the forest narrowed into sodden logging trails blocked by German positions. Artillery burst among the trees. German machine guns and mortars covered approaches through terrain that afforded the advancing men little room to maneuver. Soldiers encountered successive entrenched German positions blocking the narrow ridge that led toward the surrounded Americans.
The 442nd began the month of October with close to 3,000 fighting men. As dusk approached on October 30, 1944, that number had been reduced by 800. In individual companies, the destruction was staggering. Company I entered with 185 men. Eight remained in fighting shape. Company K was reduced from 186 men fit for duty to 16.
Still, they moved forward.
Exhausted from earlier fighting, the 442nd was being sent into these cold woods to rescue the Lost Battalion.
For five days, from October 26 through October 30, the men of the 442nd fought through German defenses toward their surrounded comrades.
Across the ridge, the Lost Battalion was running out of more than its supplies. It was losing its men. The word decimated comes from an ancient Roman military punishment that took one man in ten. The Lost Battalion suffered losses exceeding twice that proportion. The force fighting to rescue them was paying an even greater price.
As the sun began its descent on October 30, the distance between the American forces had almost evaporated.
But so had much of the fighting force struggling to close it.
Then, on October 30, 1944, the remaining men of the 442nd took the ridge separating them from the Lost Battalion, and the American forces linked. Of approximately 275 men who had been trapped, 211 were rescued.
More than 6,000 fresh German troops had been ordered to hold their positions in the forest at any cost. But they could not hold back the American 442nd from rescuing the Lost Battalion.
The American rescued and the American rescuers who met in the wet forests of the Vosges were wearing the same uniform. They fought beneath the same flag.
But their stories could hardly have been more different.
The men who had been trapped were Texans.
The men who bled their way through the forest to reach them were Japanese American.
I have often said that our greatest strength is not our diversity. Rather, it is those truths that bring people from a diverse background to a common understanding. Diversity tells us that the men who met in that forest were different. It does not explain why one group was willing to die for the other. For that, we need something deeper.
We need a truth that stands above them—that all men are created equal, that human dignity precedes government because it comes from our Creator, and that government therefore exists to recognize and protect rights it did not create.
That truth requires us to build a nation with room for difference, room for disagreement, room for conscience, room for faith, room for error and reconsideration, room to search for truth, room to live without first obtaining the approval of those who hold political power.
This is the American promise. And at times, the nation has not lived up to that promise. As the Japanese Americans of the 442nd fought their way to rescue the Texans of the Lost Battalion, many of their family members were in internment camps in the United States. That injustice cannot be removed from this story. Nor should it be.
For a nation formed to deliver the promise of liberty must be willing to acknowledge its failings. America is exceptional because its foundational proposition supplies the truth by which America’s wrongs can themselves be judged.
The Japanese Americans of the 442nd carried the weight of a nation’s promise and the weight of a nation’s failing. In doing so they rescued 211 men of the Lost Battalion.
From October 26 through October 30, 1944, the men of the 442nd bore the weight of America’s failing in their own flesh, so that the American promise might live. In doing so, they ensured that their fellow Americans would see their loved ones again.
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