Sadao “Spud” Munemori: The First Medal of Honor of the 442nd

Sadao S. Munemori was born on August 17, 1922, in Los Angeles, California, the fourth of five children of Kametaro and Nawa Munemori, immigrants from Hiroshima, Japan. He grew up in the Glendale area and attended Fletcher Drive Elementary School and Abraham Lincoln High School, graduating in 1940. His family knew him as “Spud,” a nickname said to have come from his childhood preference for potatoes over rice. Beneath that lighthearted nickname was a young man growing up in an America where his ancestry could determine how he was treated. As a teenager, Munemori went with friends to a public swimming pool and was refused admission because he was Japanese. His father died when Sadao was sixteen, leaving his widowed mother and children to face an already difficult future without him.

After high school, Munemori attended trade school and trained as an automobile mechanic, but finding work proved difficult. With his father gone, he was especially conscious of helping his family. In November 1941, before the United States entered World War II, Munemori volunteered for the United States Army. The Army did not formally accept him until February 11, 1942, by which time Pearl Harbor had been attacked and the nation was at war. The distinction matters. Munemori had already offered to serve before Japanese ancestry became grounds for widespread suspicion, forced removal, and incarceration.

Only days after Munemori formally entered the Army, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. His mother and other members of his family were eventually forced from their California home and confined at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in the Owens Valley. Sadao Munemori was now an American soldier while his own family lived behind the fences of a government incarceration camp. His mother displayed a Blue Star flag in her Manzanar barracks to show that she had a son serving in the United States Army, while Sadao carried a photograph of her with him during his military service.

The Army initially had little idea what to do with many Japanese American soldiers already in uniform. Munemori spent months performing routine and menial duties at posts far from combat. In November 1942, he was selected for the Military Intelligence Service Language School at Camp Savage, Minnesota, where his Japanese-language ability could have placed him on a very different wartime path. By then he had attained the rank of technical sergeant. Yet the creation of a new Nisei combat organization changed his plans.

The 442nd Regimental Combat Team offered Japanese American soldiers the opportunity to serve as infantrymen. For Munemori, another complication made the choice especially personal. His eldest sister lived in Japan, and her husband had been drafted into the Japanese Army. Service in military intelligence could potentially have sent Munemori to the Pacific. He instead volunteered for the Nisei combat unit destined for Europe. Doing so meant giving up his technical sergeant rank and becoming a private again. He accepted the reduction without hesitation.

Before leaving for infantry training, Munemori visited his family at Manzanar. It would be the last time his mother saw him alive. From the confinement of the desert camp, Nawa Munemori watched her son leave to fight for the country that had imprisoned his family. Munemori went to Camp Shelby, Mississippi, for infantry training and eventually became a replacement for Company A of the 100th Infantry Battalion.

The 100th had already earned a fearsome reputation by the time Munemori reached it in Europe in 1944. The original Hawaiian Nisei battalion had fought through the Italian campaign from Salerno to Cassino and Anzio, suffering staggering casualties along the way. Munemori arrived not as one of the original veterans but as a replacement entering a combat-tested organization whose ranks had been repeatedly depleted by months of fighting.

He quickly became part of it.

Munemori fought during the Rome-Arno Campaign as the Allied armies pushed northward through Italy. In August 1944, the 100th formally became part of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team while retaining its historic designation. From then forward, Munemori's Company A belonged to the combined 100th/442nd whose wartime record would become legendary.

The regiment soon left Italy for France, where an entirely different kind of battlefield awaited it in the Vosges Mountains. Thick forests, cold rain, mud, steep slopes, concealed machine guns, and German artillery turned the autumn campaign into some of the hardest fighting the 442nd would experience. Munemori fought there during the battles that culminated in the rescue of the surrounded men commonly remembered as the “Lost Battalion.” The victory became one of the defining achievements of the 442nd, but it came at enormous cost.

Munemori's surviving letters to his family reveal a side of him that battlefield summaries cannot. He wrote of close calls, exhaustion, the terrifying effects of artillery, and his desire for the war to end so the family could be together again. He worried about his widowed mother and kept her photograph close. The young man called “Spud” by his friends did not treat combat as some grand adventure. He understood precisely how terrible it was and continued doing his duty anyway.

Those who served with him remembered Munemori as friendly, outgoing, and accepting. Despite joining a battalion filled with veterans hardened by months of combat, he apparently fit readily among them. He formed friendships with Hawaiian soldiers and hoped that after the war he might finally visit the islands and see the home of the men beside whom he had fought.

He never got the chance.

After the Vosges campaign, the 442nd eventually returned to Italy. By the spring of 1945, Germany was approaching defeat, but German troops still occupied the Gothic Line in northern Italy, a formidable defensive system anchored in the rugged Apennine Mountains. Allied forces had struggled for months against positions strengthened by steep terrain, mines, trenches, wire, artillery, and machine guns. In April, the 442nd was brought in to help break the western end of that line.

The attack relied heavily on surprise. Soldiers of the 100th and 442nd climbed steep mountain trails during darkness, moving toward German positions that dominated the approaches below. On April 5, 1945, Company A advanced near Seravezza. At first the surprise worked, but German resistance quickly stiffened and machine-gun fire swept the exposed American soldiers.

Munemori's squad leader was wounded.

Command of the squad fell to the twenty-two-year-old private first class.

Munemori did not remain behind cover directing others toward the German weapons. He went after them himself. Moving forward through direct enemy fire, he attacked one machine-gun position with grenades and destroyed it. He then attacked a second emplacement in the same manner, knocking out another weapon that had been holding down his company.

Despite Munemori's attacks, the Germans continued pouring fire into the area and the Americans were taking heavy casualties. Company A began withdrawing from the exposed ground. Munemori found himself separated near the enemy line and began working his way back toward his men through machine-gun fire and grenades.

Ahead of him was a shell crater occupied by two American soldiers.

Munemori was almost there when a German grenade struck his helmet and bounced into the crater.

The two men inside had almost no time to react.

Neither did Munemori.

He rose despite the enemy fire, threw himself toward the grenade, and covered it with his body. The explosion killed him instantly. The two soldiers beside him survived with comparatively minor injuries because Munemori had absorbed the blast.

Sadao Munemori was twenty-two years old.

His sacrifice occurred during a battle that helped break through the German defenses. The 442nd's attack shattered positions that Allied forces had struggled against for months and helped open the way through the Gothic Line. Germany's surrender in Italy was less than a month away.

For the Munemori family, however, victory could not restore what had been lost. The first memorial service for Sadao had to be held while members of his family were still confined at Manzanar. His mother had sent a son into the United States Army from behind the fences of an incarceration camp and received word there that he had been killed saving fellow American soldiers.

Munemori's valor was recognized differently from that of the other Japanese American soldiers whose Medal of Honor stories are now associated with the 100th and 442nd. He was initially recommended for the Distinguished Service Cross, but his actions were elevated to the Medal of Honor without waiting for the racial-bias review that would occur more than half a century later.

On March 13, 1946, at Fort MacArthur, California, Nawa Munemori received the Medal of Honor on behalf of her son. Sadao Munemori became the first Japanese American awarded the nation's highest decoration for battlefield valor. For the next fifty-four years he remained the only Japanese American World War II soldier so honored. Only in 2000, after a review concluded that discrimination had affected the wartime awards process, were twenty additional Nisei soldiers recognized with the Medal of Honor.

That distinction gives Munemori a unique place within the history of the 442nd. He is counted among its twenty-one Medal of Honor recipients, but unlike the other twenty, his recognition was not the result of the later review. His sacrifice had been judged worthy of the Medal in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

In December 1948, Munemori's remains were returned for burial in Los Angeles. He was laid to rest at Evergreen Cemetery, where other Japanese American veterans would also eventually be buried. His mother's Medal of Honor became one of the family's most treasured possessions and was later entrusted to an Army museum so that the story of Sadao and the Nisei soldiers who served beside him could continue to be told.

His name also traveled in a way that would have amused the boy once called Spud. According to family memory, when he was young and arguing with an older sister, Sadao once boasted that someday someone would name a ship after him. After the war, the Army transport vessel formerly known as the Wilson Victory was renamed for Private Sadao S. Munemori. His sister later had the opportunity to board the vessel bearing the name of the younger brother who never lived to see it.

Other memorials followed. A freeway interchange in Los Angeles bears his name. An Army Reserve facility was dedicated in his honor, and in Pietrasanta, Italy, near the countryside the 442nd helped liberate, a monument commemorates his sacrifice. Decades after his death, the community in which he grew up also formally memorialized him.

Yet the monuments are less revealing than the details preserved by his family. Sadao Munemori was the boy nicknamed Spud because he liked potatoes. He was the teenager who learned firsthand what racial discrimination meant when a swimming pool refused to admit him. He was the son of a widowed mother, the mechanic who struggled to find work, and the nineteen-year-old who volunteered for the Army before Pearl Harbor. He gave up rank to become an infantryman, visited his family behind the fences of Manzanar for the last time, and carried his mother's photograph through the battlefields of Europe.

He fought in Italy, survived the Vosges Mountains, and helped rescue the Lost Battalion. By April 1945, he had endured enough war to know exactly what enemy fire could do to a human body.

Then a grenade landed beside two men who depended upon him.

Munemori had only seconds.

The decision he made in those seconds became his legacy.

Sadao “Spud” Munemori did not live to see Germany surrender, his family released from Manzanar, or the 442nd welcomed home. He did not live to know that twenty other Japanese American soldiers would eventually join him on the Medal of Honor rolls.

For more than half a century, he stood there alone.

The first.