George T. Sakato

George Taro Sakato was born on February 19, 1921, in Colton, California, a small city in San Bernardino County nestled in the agricultural heartland of Southern California. The son of Japanese immigrants who had crossed the Pacific seeking opportunity and a better life in America, Sakato was a Nisei, a second-generation American citizen of Japanese descent. Known to his friends and fellow soldiers as “Joe,” he grew up in a community shaped by the values of hard work, family loyalty, and quiet perseverance that characterized Japanese American neighborhoods throughout the West Coast during the early twentieth century. Nothing in his modest upbringing in the citrus groves and railroad towns of the Inland Empire could have predicted the remarkable acts of battlefield courage that would eventually earn him the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military decoration for valor.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, turned the world of Japanese Americans upside down almost overnight. Suspicion and fear swept across the West Coast, and on February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forced relocation of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes to internment camps scattered across the desolate interior of the American West. Sakato’s family was among those uprooted from their community and stripped of their property, their livelihoods, and their constitutional rights based solely on their ancestry. The internment of Japanese Americans remains one of the most shameful episodes in American history, a stark reminder of how easily the promise of liberty can be betrayed when fear overwhelms reason.

Yet despite this profound injustice, Sakato and thousands of other young Nisei men responded not with bitterness but with an astonishing act of patriotism. They volunteered for military service, determined to prove their loyalty to the very country that had imprisoned their families behind barbed wire. Their willingness to lay down their lives for a nation that had wronged them represents one of the most stirring chapters in the story of American courage and speaks directly to the deepest meaning of citizenship.

In March 1944, Sakato enlisted in the United States Army and volunteered to join the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the legendary all-Nisei unit composed primarily of Japanese Americans from Hawaii and the mainland. Assigned to the Third Platoon, Company E, Second Battalion, Sakato shipped out to the European Theater of Operations, where the 442nd was engaged in fierce combat across France, Italy, and Germany. The unit’s motto, “Go For Broke,” a Hawaiian gambling expression meaning to risk everything, captured the fearless determination of men who were fighting not only against the Axis powers abroad but against the prejudice and suspicion they faced at home. The 442nd would go on to become the most decorated unit of its size in the entire history of the United States military.

Sakato’s defining moment came on October 29, 1944, on Hill 617 near the town of Biffontaine in the Vosges Mountains of northeastern France. His platoon had been tasked with assaulting heavily fortified German defensive positions that commanded the surrounding terrain. In the initial phase of the assault, Sakato distinguished himself through extraordinary individual combat, personally killing five enemy soldiers and capturing four more as his unit systematically destroyed two successive enemy defense lines. When the platoon’s advance was halted by concentrated enemy machine gun and rifle fire that pinned the Americans down on the exposed hillside, Sakato made a decision that would alter the course of the battle. Disregarding the hail of bullets, he launched a one-man charge directly into the teeth of the enemy strongpoint, an act of audacious bravery that electrified his comrades and inspired the entire platoon to surge forward and overrun the German position.

The fighting was far from over. As the platoon reorganized on the newly captured ground, the Germans launched a vicious counterattack on the exposed left flank. During the savage close-quarters fighting, Sakato’s squad leader was killed. Without a moment’s hesitation, Private Sakato assumed command of the leaderless squad and rallied his men to hold the line against the surging German assault. Armed with a captured enemy rifle and a German P-38 pistol scavenged from the battlefield, he directed the defense with tactical skill and relentless aggression, personally engaging the enemy at close range. By the time the fighting finally subsided, Sakato had killed twelve enemy soldiers, wounded two more, personally captured four prisoners, and assisted his platoon in taking an additional thirty-four prisoners of war. His actions that day were instrumental in securing a critical tactical objective and demonstrated a level of individual heroism and leadership rarely witnessed on any battlefield in any war.

For his extraordinary valor on Hill 617, Sakato was initially awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest decoration for combat heroism. However, in the 1990s, a comprehensive review of the service records of Asian American soldiers who had received the Distinguished Service Cross during World War II revealed a pattern of racial discrimination. Many Asian American soldiers who had performed acts clearly worthy of the Medal of Honor had been denied the nation’s highest award because of their ethnicity. Sakato’s award was among those upgraded, and on June 21, 2000, President Bill Clinton presented him with the Medal of Honor at a White House ceremony alongside nineteen other Asian American veterans whose courage had been belatedly recognized by a grateful nation.

After the war, Sakato settled in Denver, Colorado, where he went dancing with a friend and met Bessie “Bess” Sachiko Saito, the woman who would become his wife and lifelong companion. He built a quiet civilian life far from the battlefields of France, working for the United States Postal Service, but he never forgot the brothers-in-arms he had fought beside in the forests of the Vosges. In his later years, Sakato became an active and passionate advocate for the recognition of Japanese American veterans, speaking publicly about the 442nd’s extraordinary legacy and reminding younger generations of the sacrifices made by Nisei soldiers who fought for a country that had questioned their loyalty.

George T. Sakato passed away on December 2, 2015, in Denver at the age of ninety-four. His life embodied the very best of the American spirit: a willingness to serve and sacrifice for one’s country even in the face of grave personal injustice. The story of Sakato and the men of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team stands as a powerful and enduring reminder that true patriotism is not defined by ancestry or appearance, but by the content of one’s character and the willingness to stand in the breach when freedom itself is imperiled.