On December 2, George T. “Joe” Sakato died at the age of 94. Enlisting in the Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Sakato was assigned to the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a fighting force consisting of second-generation Japanese Americans that saw heavy action in Europe. The 442nd became the most highly decorated unit in the war thanks to soldiers like Joe Sakato.
In 1944, deep in the Vosges Mountains of France, Sakato and his platoon were tasked with finding the 1st Battalion/141st Infantry, what became known as the Lost Battalion. In the midst of a German counterattack, Sakato remembers a fellow soldier making the mistake of standing up and getting shot. He died in Sakato’s arms.
At which point Sakato got out of his foxhole and basically turned into Rambo. “I just charged up that hill thinking, ‘I’m going to get the SOB who shot him or die trying,’ ” he -recounted years later. By his own estimate, he took down “two or three guys.” In fact, he killed 12 and received the Congressional Medal of Honor (very belatedly) in 2000.
The citation reads, in part:
As Tod Lindberg, the author of The Heroic Heart: Greatness Ancient and Modern, noted previously in these pages, “Why soldiers fight is a question that has long vexed armies eager to improve their performance on the battlefield. One answer that stands out in the scholarly literature goes by the term ‘small-unit cohesion’—a fancy way of saying that soldiers fight because they believe the soldiers around them depend on them. They are part of a group; they are not alone.”
They are also humble. As mentioned in the Washington Post, Sakato, upon receiving his medal, said, “I’m no hero, but I wear it for the guys that didn’t come back.”
