Nisei in World War II: The MIS, 100th and 442nd

The 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team were segregated units for soldiers of Japanese descent that were created during WWII. The story of these units is closely intertwined with the Military Intelligence Service as well. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Back when
we did our podcast on Executive Order nineties sixty six
and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War Two,

(00:24):
we've very very briefly mentioned the segregated units for soldiers
of Japanese descent that were created during the war, and
those were the one Infantry Battalion and the four forty
second Regimental Combat Team whose name we mangled as for
twenty second thanks to a typo on my part. So

(00:45):
I had been planning to do an episode on the
four forty seconds. Since then, we've gotten a lot of
requests for it. We had gotten requests for it before that.
When I finally got into the research, I realized you
really cannot cover the four forty second without also talking
about the one hundred, and then I realized that their
story is also connected into the story of the Military
Intelligence Service. All of those things have multiple common elements

(01:10):
in their background and like multiple connecting points between them.
So today we're going to talk about all three of
those and how they played a critical role in American
involvement in the war. Also, I just wanted to note
that today's show is really about men, but there were
also Japanese American women who served in World War Two,
including in the Army Nurse Corps and the Women's Army Corps.

(01:31):
Those began accepting Japanese women in February and November of
nineteen forty three, respectively. So we're gonna start with the
Military Intelligence Service. Although the United States initially tried to
avoid becoming involved in World War Two, by nineteen forty
it seemed increasingly likely that a war with Japan was coming.

(01:51):
The American military had a clear need for military personnel
who were fluent in Japanese, and such service members were
in really short supply. Japanese Americans participated in the U. S.
Armed Forces going back to the Spanish American War in
eight and there was an all Japanese regiment of soldiers
from Hawaii during World War One, but by the start

(02:13):
of World War Two, there weren't many Japanese Americans in
the U. S. Military in general, and even fewer actually
knew how to speak Japanese. In ninety one, the War
Department realized the situation was dire. On top of the
lack of Japanese speakers in the military, the war was
approaching so quickly that there just would not be time
to train people as linguists unless they were already very

(02:36):
familiar with the language. So a small group of officials
started advocating for the military to look to the children
of Japanese immigrants to fill the gap. Known as nissa.
These were citizens of the United States who officials assumed
would already be fluent in Japanese thanks to speaking Japanese
at home with their parents and other family members, and

(02:58):
sometimes having been educated in Japan. This was a really
controversial idea. Nissa were viewed with suspicion long before Japan's
attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December seventh of ninety one,
and this was particularly true of Key Bay, which was
the term for nissa who had been educated in Japan.

(03:20):
Some people objected to Japanese Americans being allowed into the
service at all, while others objected to the idea of
the children of Japanese immigrants being allowed to handle really
sensitive tasks like translating captured documents and interrogating Japanese prisoners.
The idea also just wasn't as feasible as officials originally

(03:40):
had hoped. After serving thousands of NISSA about their knowledge
of Japanese, it was determined that only about three percent
of them were fluent enough to actually do the work.
So in late nineteen forty one, the War Department allocated
two thousand dollars to establish the first Army Japanese Language
School in a small aircraft hangar at the Presidio in

(04:02):
San Francisco, California. Nie Salman, between the ages of twenty
one and thirty six, had been required to register for
the draft under the Selective Training and Service Act of
nineteen same was true of all other men at the
same age living in the United States. When the language
school was established, Nie Salman were conscripted and screened before

(04:23):
being sent for training, and the first training class began
on November one, one, a little more than a month
before the attack on Pearl Harbor of the sixties. Students
enrolled in that first class fifty eight were Japanese and
two were white. Some of these students had some familiarity
with Japanese already, some of them were even fluent speakers,

(04:44):
but even so This training was grueling. Even those who
were fluent in Japanese didn't typically know any Japanese military
vocabulary or the military concepts and tactics that those words represented.
The students who were already the most depth at Japanese
helped the students who were struggling, but overall everyone struggled

(05:04):
with the military knowledge and terminology. In addition to the
language and the military education, the students learned Japanese law
and social customs. They learned about interrogation and interpretation, as
well as as techniques for intercepting communications. And then on
top of all of that, they had to learn two

(05:25):
other styles of written Japanese. One was a formal writing
style called sorobun, which dates back to the Edo period
and was used among Japanese royalty. The other was so show,
which was a style of Japanese cursive writing that was
apparently really difficult to master for this first group of soldiers.

(05:45):
Classes began every morning at eight am and they ran
for ten hours. Lights out was at eleven PM, and
many of the students studied from the time. Classes adjourned
until lights out. Some kept studying well into the night,
either hiding under their eats with flashlights or studying in
the latrine, which was lit at night. A handful of

(06:06):
these students were ready to go overseas after about five
months of training, and as for the rest, a quarter
failed the program. The course of instruction was so demanding
that only forty five of the initial sixty students actually
graduated and went on to serve with the Military Intelligence Service.
After President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order ninety sixty six,

(06:28):
which removed Japanese Americans from the West Coast to concentration
camps in other parts of the country, the Military Intelligence
Service School moved from the West Coast as well. It
relocated to Camp Savage, Minnesota, and classes began there on
June one, ninety two. In nineteen four, it moved once again,
this time to Fort Snelling, Minnesota, which had more room

(06:51):
available for classroom facilities. The Military Intelligence Service Language School
was at its largest in early nineteen forty six, with
one sixty and actors and three thousand students. By June
of that year, six thousand people had graduated from the program.
The Military Intelligence Services of work was absolutely critical to

(07:11):
the American military effort in the Pacific and Asia. Before
the end of the war. These men translated more than
eighteen thousand captured Japanese documents, and they interrogated more than
ten thousand prisoners of war. They wrote propaganda, they tried
to convince Japanese soldiers to surrender, and they worked with

(07:32):
civilians as the Allies took over territory that had previously
been colonized by Japan. General Douglas MacArthur said that the
niss A work in the Military Intelligence Service shortened the
war by two years. Some of this work took place
in combat on the front lines, but aside from the
dangers of combat, this work before the end of the

(07:52):
war came at a huge risk to their lives. Japan
considered them to be Japanese nationals, which made them traders
for working with the American military, which meant that they
would be executed if they were captured. The m I
S continued its work in Asia after the end of
the war as well. Soldiers from the m I S
were some of the first people on the scene after

(08:14):
the surrender of Japan. They provided some of the first
reports of what conditions were like in Japan, including the
near starvation conditions among its civilian population and the massive
destruction from Allied fire bombing campaigns and the bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the occupation of Japan. After the war,
NISSA members of the m I S made a cultural

(08:35):
and linguistic bridge between the occupying American troops and the
civilian population of Japan. They also served as translators during
war crimes trials, and they worked in the Civil Censorship
Detachment and the Counter Intelligence Corps, as well as the
Allied Translator and Interpreter Service and the repatriation program. And

(08:55):
all of this, the Japanese American soldiers were in a
really complicated social position in the United States. They were
the targets of suspicion and racism, including from other members
of the military, especially after the signing of Executive Order
ninety six. They were criticized by some of the other
Japanese Americans for working with the same government that was

(09:16):
incarcerating them on mass There's also the like the basic
mental gymnastics to work around with the idea that Japanese
Americans were so dangerous that they needed to be moved
away from the West Coast. Except for this group of
Japanese Americans also being moved away from the West Coast,

(09:36):
specifically to do very specific work that was very sensitive
for the military. Being deployed to Asia added its own
layer of complication. Unlike the hundredth Infantry Battalion and the
four Regimental Combat Team who served in Europe, the m
I S was serving in a place where they were
likely to see people who were known to them and

(09:57):
their families who sometimes were their family. As one example,
taka Jirohega, who was born in the United States but
educated in Japan, reported encountering childhood friends and a former
teacher during the Battle of Okinawa. During the latter part
of the war, new members of the Military Intelligence Service
were conscripted, conscripted, or they were transferred in from the

(10:20):
one d Infantry Battalion or the four forty two Regimental
Combat Team, and we will start getting into those units
stories after a sponsor break. As we briefly mentioned earlier
in the episode, President Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and
Service Act on September sixteenth, ninety and this was the

(10:43):
nation's first peacetime draft legislation. It was passed in anticipation
of American involvement in the war This Act required all
men between the ages of twenty six and thirty five
who were living in the United States to register for
the draft. Starting on October sixteenth of that year, people
were also enlisting, including significant numbers of Japanese Americans living

(11:05):
in the territory of Hawaii, were almost of the population
was of Japanese descent. Thousands of niss living in Hawaii
joined the Hawaii National Guard. By late roughly half of
the two and two hundred nine regiments of the Hawaii
National Guard were Japanese American men. There were also many

(11:25):
Nisse among the reserve officers training corps at the University
of Hawaii. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, some of
these men were the first ones on the scene. The
r OTC cadets were ordered to report report for duty
in the afternoon of the attack. They were invited to
join the Hawaii Territorial Guard. The h t G had

(11:46):
been formed to replace the local work of the Hawaii
National Guard, which had been ordered to active service or
federalized for the war effort. Many of the second Battalion
of the two Infantry of the National Guard were on
duty in Oahu when the attack happened, and they actually
witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor. All of these men

(12:07):
immediately came under suspicion because of their Japanese ancestry. For
three days after the attack, the National guardsmen were disarmed
and put to work doing things like digging trenches and
stringing barbed wire while under guard. Although their weapons and
ammunition were later returned. They spent most of the next
few months doing manual labor and construction in the Hawaiian Islands. Then,

(12:29):
on January five, two, the War Department issued a directive
that classified Japanese American men as four seats or aliens,
not acceptable to the armed forces, even though they were
citizens of the United States, and even though there were
Japanese Americans already serving in the military, and there had
been since the late nineteenth century. At about the same time,

(12:52):
commanders were giving the option to either discharge Japanese soldiers
who were already reporting to them or to reassign them
two so called harmless duties. More than six hundred Japanese
American soldiers who were already serving at that time were discharged,
most of them honorably, and others were sent to Camp Robinson. Arkansas,

(13:13):
where they were assigned to do menial labor. On January
twenty one, General Dalos Emmons, who had become Hawaii's military
governor when it was placed under martial law, ordered the
HTG to be disbanded. A day later, it had reformed
without its former NISSE members, effectively excluding them from serving.

(13:35):
The next month, these ousted members, along with other NISSA
went on to form the Varsity Victory Volunteers or Triple V.
The Triple V volunteered to do manual labor for the military,
which included rock breaking, road resurfacing, and assembling prefabricated buildings
in furniture. They also cooked for military units, and they

(13:55):
arranged all kinds of community involvement, from buying war bonds
to donating blood, and they participated in all these efforts themselves.
On February nineteen of that year, President Roosevelt signed Executive
Order six, which was the first of several actions paving
the way for the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese
Americans from the West coast of the United States. We

(14:18):
mentioned that briefly before the break. We're not going to
go over all the details because there's a two part
podcast on this in the recent archive, but more than
a hundred thousand Japanese Americans were held in concentration camps
for years. About two thirds of the people who were
incarcerated were citizens of the United States, and more than
half of them were children. In Hawaii, where we're talking

(14:41):
about right now, the Japanese population was too large to
incarcerate everyone, So while there were people who were incarcerated,
everyone else was subject to things like really strict curfews,
movement restrictions, and the closure of all Japanese language schools.
Like Hawaii was under martial law, and to some extents
of this affected everyone, but the restrictions on Japanese Americans

(15:03):
were a lot more strict. Simultaneously, the United States still
had thousands of Japanese Americans serving in the National Guard
and didn't quite know what to do about it. General
Emmons and General George Marshall were convinced that they were
a massive security risk, especially after receiving intelligence reports that
the Japanese Navy was headed towards nearby Midway A toll,

(15:26):
so they transferred all niss A personnel out of the
Hawaii National Guard and into a newly created Hawaiian Provisional
Infantry Battalion. This battalion, made up of one thousand, four
hundred six enlistes and about thirty officers, about half of
whom were white, was secretly sent to the mainland on
June five. People may wonder whether the Nie How incident

(15:49):
that had happened after the bombing of Pearl Harbor was
part of this. That really comes up a lot more
often today with people trying to like retroact to ly
justify Executive Order ninety sixty six. Then it was an
actual massive concern people at the time. It was like
a much There was a lot more going on that
was not about that one incident. After arriving in San Francisco, California,

(16:13):
on June five, nine two, the Provisional Infantry Battalion was
designated the one hundred Infantry Infantry Battalion Separate. That separate
signified that they were essentially on their own. The one
wasn't connected to any other units. They didn't have a
parent company that they were reporting up through. They were
sent to train at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin, with the

(16:35):
men divided up among three different trains traveling along three
separate routes for the sake of secrecy. In January of
nineteen forty three, they moved to Camp Shelby in Mississippi
for further training, in part because the military still hadn't
figured out what to do with them. The men had
experienced some racism in Wisconsin, including the white officers who

(16:58):
were criticized and ridiculed for their support of the Japanese troops,
but for most of them, Mississippi was their first experience
with the racial segregation that was entrenched in the American South,
and they occupied an odd place in that system. They
were typically considered white in terms of being able to
access things like restrooms and restaurants, but at the same

(17:19):
time they were definitely not white, and not far away,
other Japanese Americans were being held in concentration camps under
armed guard. Yeah, this is the first time most of
them had been in that type of segregated environment. It
was also the first time that a lot of the
people that were living in this part of the country

(17:40):
had seen a lot of Japanese Americans like there was
a whole unfamiliarity with one another's uh social norms. And then,
as we have discussed on the podcast, before race is
a social construct. It's not a thing like it's not
a biological imperative. And the Japanese trade knees at this

(18:00):
point where in this nebulous space that was like with
outside of the bounds of of what had been entrenched
in the south for so long. After spending about four
times as normal and training, and this in a wartime
atmosphere where people were being rushed to the front without
a lot training, the one Infantry Battalion finally left for

(18:24):
North Africa on August one. Before they left, they chose
remember Pearl Harbor as their motto. Once they arrived in Africa,
their initial assignment was to stay in Algeria and guard
German prisoners of war, but their commanding officer insisted that
they be allowed to join the force that was advancing
through Italy. They were allowed to do so, resulting in

(18:47):
them becoming part of an advanced guard as the Allies
moved northward and facing enormous casualties. When they arrived in Italy,
the one hundred had one thousand, three hundred men. After
taking Monte Casino to the southeast of Rome, only six
hundred were still ready for combat as a result of
these massive numbers of casualties, the one infantry Battalion was

(19:10):
soon nicknamed the Purple Heart Battalion, and it needed replacements
for all those killed and wounded members. Since it was
a segregated unit, those replacements had to be Japanese Americans,
and they came from the four hundred forty two Regimental
Combat Team. We will get to their story after another
quick sponsor break. As we mentioned earlier in the show,

(19:37):
the War Department directed that all Japanese Americans be classified
four C or aliens not acceptable to the Armed Forces
on January five, two, and that direction stayed in place
for more than a year. On January twenty ninety three,
the Secretary of War issued a press release that described
the right to serve in the military as one belonging

(19:59):
to every citizen regarding regardless of their national origin. And
this was the first step in reversing the policy that
had barred Japanese Americans from enlisting and were the one
hundred were all people that had been in the National
Guard before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and then there
was this long period where Japanese Americans were not allowed
to enlist. The next step was to create a segregated

(20:22):
unit for those newly eligible Japanese soldiers. This unit was
the four hundred forty second Regimental Combat Team, which was
activated on February one three. The four incorporated the five
hundred twenty second Artillery Battalion, the two hundred thirty second
Combat Engineers Company, along with an anti tank company, a

(20:43):
cannon company, a medical company, and the two hundred six
Army Ground Forces Banned. This decision to allow to allow
Japanese Americans into the military came about after months of
advocacy on the part of civil rights organizations and Japanese
Americans themselves, particularly the Japanese American Citizens League. The existence

(21:05):
and the diligent work of the Triple V remember those
are the people that had been kicked out of the
Hawaii Territorial Guard and responded to that by volunteering to
do manual labor for the army was brought up as
evidence that NISSA were loyal Americans who should be allowed
to serve. The nation of Japan was also using the
mass incarceration of Japanese Americans and its propaganda, basically using

(21:29):
that as evidence that the United States was targeting Japan
because of its race. So allowing Japanese service members was
kind of a pr move. All of this together influenced
the decision to start allowing NISSA to enlist and serve,
and this service was, at least in the beginning, voluntary,
because Japanese Americans were allowed into the military, but they

(21:52):
were still excluded from the draft. These volunteers were to
come from both Hawaii and from the concentration camps for
the Spanese American population of the West Coast had been
incarcerated for about a year, and the response from those
two places to the call for volunteers was completely different.
In Hawaii, where most of the Japanese population had not

(22:13):
been subject to mass incarceration, the response was huge. A
call went out for fift hundred Japanese Americans to enlist,
and more than ten thousand volunteered. Many NISA men were
eager to serve and eager to demonstrate their loyalty to
the United States. The Triple V disbanded as most of
its members joined the service, but that was overall not

(22:36):
how a lot of people in the camps felt about it.
They had been incarcerated for more than a year under
the blanket suspicion that they were a threat to the country,
and now that same country that had been incarcerating them
was asking them to risk their lives in its service.
Another issue in the camps was a loyalty questionnaire more

(22:56):
formally known as the Application for Leave Clearance, that the
War Department and War Relocation Authority required adults to fill
out starting in February of nineteen forty three. We talked
about this questionnaire more in our two part episode on
Executive Order ninety sixty six, but in general it was
viewed with intense suspicion. It included questions about willingness to

(23:18):
serve in the military, which some people were afraid would
commit them to serving. Another question asked people to forswear
their allegiance to the Emperor of Japan, but many of
the people taking it had no such allegiance to forswear,
and this contributed to the suspicion about the idea of
joining the military. When the four hundred forty two began

(23:40):
training at Camp Shelby on March nine, there were two thousands,
six eighty six volunteers from Hawaii and about fifteen hundred
from the mainland. The one battalion was actually still training
at Camp Shelby as well, and a lot of them
knew the recruits from Hawaiis. They were made a lot
of friendly connect shans from reconnecting with old friends. At first,

(24:04):
there was a stark division between the new recruits from
Hawaii and the ones from the Continental US. The soldiers
from Hawaii were nicknamed Buddha Heads. There are a couple
different theories about the origin of this name. It might
have been a reference to the Buddhist religion that many
of them followed, or it might have come from the
Hawaiian word for pig. Because they were stubborn, the Buddha

(24:26):
Heads gave the recruits from the Continental US the disparaging
nickname could talks, which was supposedly from the sound their
heads made when hitting the concrete. As that nickname suggests,
there were a lot of fights, and many of them
were instigated by the Buddha Heads. In general, the troops
from Hawaii thought that the troops from the Continental US

(24:46):
were stuck up and too serious and too worried about
what other people thought about them. And then the troops
from the continental part of the country thought that the
troops from Hawaii were loud and course and ignorant. There
were also language barriers. Many of the troops from the
Continental US spoke Standard English and might also speak Japanese,

(25:07):
while a lot of the troops from Hawaii were speaking
Hawaii Creole, which people in Hawaii often call pigeon. The
two groups were so at odds with each other that
officers worried that they would never be able to work together.
Numerous accounts report that what finally brought the men together
was several recruits of Hawaii visiting the concentration camps that
were nearby in Arkansas. Before that point, the Hawaiian recruits

(25:31):
hadn't understood what conditions that those camps were like, or
what it really meant to be incarcerated there. In the
words of Daniel in Away, who would later become a U.
S Senator from Hawaii, quote, overnight, the situation and camp
shall be changed. Because the word went out like wildfire.
The experiment worked. I went back and said, I gotta
tell you guys about these Mainlanders. You won't believe what

(25:54):
I'm going to tell you. And this must have gone
on in every hut throughout the camp. The next day
you thought you were visiting a new regiment. We were
blood brothers. The regiment was not formed when we volunteered,
nor when we arrived at Camp Shelby. It was formed
after this visit in late nineteen forty three. In early
nineteen forty four, members of the four forty seconds First

(26:16):
Infantry Battalion were leaving Camp Shelby to replenish the one
in Italy. As we've said before earlier in the show,
they had been experiencing huge casualties. By the time the
rest of the four forty second was ready to depart
on May one, four, the First Infantry Battalion was nearly depleted.

(26:36):
The rest stayed behind to help train the next wave
of men. When the four and the one met up
in Italy, the one Battalion took the place of the
four forty seconds First Battalion. Because the one hundred had
been serving with such distinction so far in their time
in Europe, they were allowed to keep their original name,

(26:56):
which meant that the four forty seconds Infantry Battalions were
the one hundredths, the second, and the third. After incorporating
the one hundred Battalion, the four hundred spearheaded the Fifth
Army's push toward Rome in ninetto like the one hundred.
They fought with immense valor and developed a reputation that
was befitting their motto of Gopher broke the Their most

(27:20):
famous and most devastating engagement took place in October of
nineteen forty four. The hundred forty one Regiment of the
thirty six Infantry Division, which were originally part of the
Texas National Guard, was deep in the woods of the
Voges Mountains and had been surrounded by German troops. Major
General John Dalquist ordered the four forty second to go

(27:40):
rescue them, even though they were supposed to be recovering
from intense fighting that they had participated in while liberating
the towns of Briere and Beefontaine, and The four hundred
forty second did rescue the hundred forty one, but they
incurred heavy losses while doing it. Most of the fighting
took place in dense woods and free weather, with visibility

(28:01):
affected by heavy fog and freezing rain. Reaching the hundred
forty one required five days and nights of NonStop combat,
and in the end more men were killed from the
four hundred forty second than rescued from the onety one.
The four hundred forty seconds saw eight hundred casualties and
one hundred twenty one deaths while rescuing two hundred and

(28:22):
eleven men. Douquest has actually been criticized for exactly one
of the things that people in the camps were afraid
would happen if they joined the military, and that was
for seeing the four is expendable and for forcing them
into really lethal situations that would never have been demanded
of white soldiers. Many of these and other losses were

(28:44):
filled through conscription. The draft reopened for Japanese men on
January nine, four. As had been true for the idea
of volunteering for the four hundred forty second, the reinstatement
of the draft for Japanese men was enormously controversial, particularly
in the camps. Although many men did report after being drafted,

(29:05):
there were draft resistance protests at nearly all of the camps,
with hundreds of men serving time in federal prison for it.
About a third of the draft resistors came from Poston, Arizona,
which was the largest camp, with Heart Mountain having the
most per capita. Go back to that loyalty questionnaire for
a minute. People that answered no to both questions about

(29:26):
serving in the military and for swearing loyalty to the
emperor were nicknamed the no No Boys, and a lot
of times the no No Boys get conflated with the
draft resisters, like there were surely many people that answered
no to both questions among the draft resisters. But they're
sort of two different but interconnecting groups. More than half

(29:48):
of the eligible niss A men served in the one
or the four forty second during World War Two. That
was about twenty two thousand men in total. Together, these
two units served in seven major military campaigns in Europe.
They became the most highly decorated unit of their size
and length of service in the American military history. Members

(30:11):
received thousands of Purple Hearts, twenty nine Distinguished Service Crosses,
five hundred eighty eight Silver Stars, and more than four
thousand Bronze Stars. The unit itself earned seven Distinguished Unit Citations,
and individual members also earned twenty one Congressional Medals of Honor.
Nineteen thousand Japanese American World War two soldiers were awarded

(30:34):
the Congressional Gold Medal on November two of eleven. On
July fifty six, during a review of the four hundred
forty second, President Harry Truman said, quote, you fought the
enemy abroad and prejudice at home, Andy one. But this
wasn't exactly so. As was true of the Japanese civilians
who had been incarcerated during part of the war, returning

(30:56):
Japanese American veterans found themselves to be the targets of
scrimination and prejudice. This was particularly true among the veterans
from the Continental US who were scattered around the country.
The situation was somewhat different in Hawaii, where thousands of
veterans were living much closer together and where like we
said earlier, of the population was of Japanese descent. In Hawaii,

(31:20):
Japanese veterans made a lot of use of the g
I Bill, which is still on my list for a
future episode, and they became an increasingly active part of
its society and government. Hawaii had been working towards statehood
for decades before the war, which is its own complex story.
It's been touched on a little bit in previous episodes,
but like the statehood battle was, it went on for

(31:42):
ages and territorial delicate, delicate. Joe Farrington reintroduced the subject
again after the war was over, but the Senate was
really opposed to the idea and just didn't vote on
several statehood measures that had previously been passed by the House.
In the end of the four forty Seconds, valor and
rescue of the lost Battalion became one of the factors

(32:05):
that swayed the Senate in support of admitting Hawaii as
a state. One of the things that comes up a
lot when talking about these UH and the four forty
second is the idea that they were all so dedicated
to prove to the rest of the country that they
were loyal citizens, that they could be trusted and did
not need to be feared. That that was um partially

(32:30):
responsible for how so highly decorated their unit was. And
then simultaneously with that is the fact that they were
often being put into situations that were inherently more dangerous,
and so that also was playing a part in all
of that. UM. There is a painting representing the battle
where they rescued the lost battalion that is apparently hanging

(32:50):
on a lot of officers offices in various military sites
around the country because it is so emblematic of the
dedication and valor that soldiers are UH expected to adhere
to you. That is kind of a heavy story. It is,
but super important and I'm really glad that you picked
this one. Yeah, I have been things I've been meaning

(33:13):
to do for a year. Could be a whole category
of episodes, but by the time we got through them,
we would then have more things we have been meaning
to do for a year while we were so many.
There's no win. I also have plenty of things that
I've been meaning to do for a lot longer than
a year. I've probably still have things that I've been
meaning to do since you and I came on the
show in Oh Yeah, do you like me have a

(33:35):
folder that are like it's barely started? Yep, They're like
things that I have a few hundred words written about
and I'm like, I'll come back to it. Yeah, I
more have I have more more have folders of research,
but like the actual outline is not starting yet. Yeah,
do you have listener mail? Is my following question. This

(33:56):
is actually a listener Facebook post which tells you how
charmed I am by it, because it is rare for
me to go try to find something somebody previously said
on Facebook, because it is much easier to search the email,
uh than to scroll through Facebook. So this is from Josh.
Josh says, I just finished listening to your two parter

(34:17):
on Wendell Scott and loved it. He sounds like he
was an amazing fellow. I'm a car guy and don't
really follow NASCAR all that much now, but having the past,
I actually had heard of Wendell Scott, but unfortunately not
until relatively recently. And Disney's Cars Cars three Lightning McQueen
ends up meeting some legendary racers from the early days

(34:39):
of the sport, and one of them was inspired by
Wendell Scott. As Disney slash Pixar is good for, they
did their homework and all the old timers are based
on actual drivers. There's a truck named Smokey who was
inspired by legendary mechanic in previous Car Stuff Car Stuff
episode subject Smokey Unich, and a word coope named Junior

(35:01):
Moon who was inspired and actually voiced by Junior Johnson,
who was mentioned in your piece on Wendell Scott. And
looking into these cars. These two, these two names that
I had heard of. The other two I had not
at the time. Character Rivers Scott was inspired by Wendell Scott,
the aforementioned first African American to race and nap NASCAR's
top tier, and character Louise Nash was inspired by Louise Smith,

(35:25):
who was one of the first women to race in NASCAR.
I was glad to see them, including Homage's two lesser
known but equally important folks from the history of motorsports.
Thank you so much, Josh. I have only seen the
first Cars movie and not any subsequent Cars movies. I
had no idea that there was a car in one
of those movies that was patterned after Wendell Scott much either.

(35:47):
I saw the second one, but I have not yet
seen the third one, so we were both in the dark.
We super were so Thank you so much. If you
would like to write to us about this or any
other podcast, where at History Podcasts at how Stuffworks dot com.
We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash missed
in History, Our Twitter and our Instagram and our Pinterest
are all also at the name Missed in History. You

(36:09):
can come to our website, which is missed in History
dot com, and you will find searchable archive of all
the episodes we have ever done. You will find show
notes for all the episodes that Holly and I have done,
which includes links to all the research that we used,
and you can find our show and subscribe to it
on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and wherever else you find podcasts.

(36:32):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
it how staff works dot com,