FEATURED VETERAN

Willie Goo, 100th Infantry Battalion

On June 5, 1942, while the U.S. Pacific Fleet was busy on Midway Island defeating the Japanese Navy at Hawaii's front door, Japanese Americans were quickly being shuttled out its back. Niseis from the Hawaii National Guard were ordered onto a ship whose final destination only high-ranking officials knew. Willie Goo was exempted because his name was Goo and not Goto. His mother was Japanese and as he watched friends prepare to leave, he asked if he should join them. "It's up to you," the commanding officer said.

"I told him I gotta go," said Goo in a Hanashi Oral History Program interview. "So when the boat went, last minute, I decided right away. I went. I just went." That's how Goo came to be one of 1,432 men who eventually made up the segregated 100th Infantry Battalion.

The 100th's entry into the war came in September 1943 when, attached to the 34th "Red Bulls" Division, the unit landed unopposed on the shores of Salerno, Italy. The Germans were waiting for them inland, however. Their first encounter was in an olive grove. Unable to see the enemy, the 100th shot blindly into the trees while frantically digging trenches. Under constant fire, they quickly discovered the difference between combat training and the real thing. "We go training, they tell us dig the hole. Dig!" Goo said. "When you're up front, they don't have to tell you dig that hole."

They were pinned down for eight hours, some caught and exposed to deadly "tree bursts" of falling splinters and hot shrapnel. Goo, a C Company rifleman, said he doesn't believe people who say soldiers were unafraid. "I'm scared. I'm scared," he said. Word came that Sergeant Shigeo "Joe" Takata of B Company was killed, the first in the 100th to die in combat. "Then you know you're in the war," said Goo.

By January 1944 the 100th joined efforts to break the German Gustav line blocking the march to Rome. A keystone in the defense was Monte Cassino rising up 1,500 feet over the Liri Valley, crowned with a Benedictine monastery at its zenith and guarded near its base by Castle Hill. The 100th crossed the Rapido River through knee-deep mud in mined and flooded flatlands. As Goo neared Castle Hill, only four men were left in his platoon. Yet they attacked the machine gun nest entrenched on the hill.

Goo recalled the conversation between his lieutenant and Captain Mitsuyoshi Fukuda of A Company. "Mits tell him, hey, it's suicide to go up there," Goo recalled. "Mits, he said he not going."

The artillery was instructed to fire smoke shells to cover an attack. When they mistakenly threw high explosives dangerously close to their own men, the attack was delayed. The lieutenant then decided to attack under cover of fog, but as the fog approached they watched as it came within about 25 yards of their position, and then stopped. "The fog stopped!" Goo said, still amazed. "How can the fog stop, eh? That saved me and our lives."

Though Goo was saved by the fog at Cassino, he never made it to Rome. After wounds sustained at Lanuvio, he was sidelined until the war's end.

"War is bad," concluded Goo, a Purple Heart and Combat Infantry Badge recipient. Yet he does not regret his decision to stand with his friends in combat. "Good thing I went," Goo said. "I wanted to be with them, too, eh."

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