Just Americans: How Japanese Americans Won a War at Home and Abroad

Selected by the Washington Post Book World as Best Nonfiction of 2006. The moving tale of the most decorated (for its size and length of service) and least known U.S. Army unit of World War II—the Japanese American 442d Regimental Combat Team.

Within months after Pearl Harbor, 110,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly "evacuated" from the West Coast, losing their jobs, their property, and their homes. In less than a year, they were "relocated" and incarcerated in desolate camps throughout the West, Southwest and South. Yet, incredibly, thousands of young men from the camps joined the Army, to defend the country that had denied them their rights.

This is the dramatic story of the segregated Japanese American 100th Battalion/442d Regimental Combat Team—and what its soldiers did to affirm their full citizenship. During the fall of 1944, the combat team made headlines when it rescued the "lost battalion" of the 36th "Texas" Division. And while the soldiers of the 100th/442d were sacrificing their lives in Europe, the Roosevelt administration was debating whether to close the camps, and whether military necessity had truly justified the "relocation." Just Americans tells the story of soldiers in combat who were fighting a greater battle at home. As Gen. Jacob L. Devers put it, in World War II the soldiers of the 100th/442d had "more than earned the right to be called just Americans, not Japanese Americans."