On March 9, 1945, the 522nd
Field Artillery Battalion left the 442nd
Regimental Combat Team at the Maritime Alps. The 522nd was
sent north to the Lorraine region of France to provide artillery
support for the Allies’
final drive into Southern Germany.
From March 12-21, 1945 the 522nd joined the 63rd Division in
an assault on the Siegfried Line between central France and Germany.
Once the men broke through the Siegfried Line, the front was very
fluid. The U.S. combined firepower was tremendous, but the 522nd
worked so quickly that often the Nisei
completed the mission before any other artillery could fire a
round.
The 522nd became a roving battalion, shifting to whatever command
most needed the unit. The Nisei fired more than 11,000
rounds, accomplished every one of their 52 assignments and supported
more than seven different army divisions and units. They traveled
1,100 miles - racing through 40 towns in 60 days and chasing the
quickly retreating Germans from the Saar and Rhine Rivers in the
west to the Austrian border in the east
The 522nd joined the 45th Division when it crossed the Rhine
River. Then, it joined the 44th Division where it provided supporting
fire in the attack on Mannheim. It then returned to the 63rd for
the Neckar River crossing and the fall of Heidelberg. On April
1, the 522nd traveled 90 miles east to help with the 4th Division’s
drive on Aub. On April 26 the men supported the 12th Infantry
on the Danube River crossing.
In the last four days of April, the battalion displaced its guns
14 times during the 4th Division’s drive south toward Munich.
Often the 522nd’s advance scouts were racing up to 25 miles
ahead of the rest of the battalion.
On April 29, 1945, several scouts were east of Munich in the
small Bavarian town of Lager Lechfield when they saw a sight they
would never forget. The Nisei came upon some barracks
encircled by barbed wire. Technician Fourth Grade Ichiro Imamura
described it in his diary:
Holocaust historians conclude that the Nisei liberated
Kaufering IV Hurlach. This camp housed about 3,000 prisoners.
Hurlach was one of 169 subordinate slave labor camps of Dachau.
Dachau, like Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mathausen and Ravensbruck,
was surrounded by hundreds of sub-camps. In Germany alone, there
were 956 sub-camps.
In the spring of 1944, the Nazis built Hurlach and 11 other camps
around Landsberg and Kaufering. More people were killed in these
camps in less than a year than were murdered in the main Dachau
camp in more than 13 years of operation. Fifteen thousand people
were worked to death building jet fighters for the German air
force. The slave laborers were Jews from Hungary, Poland and Lithuania.
Most survived less than four months in the camps.
On April 29, Charles Feibelman, a Jewish Captain and forward
observer in the 522nd witnessed the liberation of Hurlach. Feibelman
had left Europe in the 1930s and studied law in the United States.
He found out later that several members of his family were murdered
in Auschwitz.
The Nisei found Hurlach mostly deserted because Hitler
and Himmler had already ordered the concentration camp commanders
to march the prisoners south to the Austrian border, away from
the advancing Allied armies.
On April 24, the brutal death marches began. Jewish prisoners from
the outer Dachau camps were marched to Dachau, and then 70 miles
south.
Many of the Jewish marchers weighed less than 80 pounds. Shivering in their
tattered striped uniforms, the “skeletons” marched 10
to 15 hours a day, passing more than a dozen Bavarian towns. If
they stopped, their brutal guards shot them and left their corpses
along the road. By the fifth day, fewer than 6,000 of the original
15,000 were still alive. On May 2 the death march was outside Waakirchen,
Germany, near the Austrian border.
On May 2 soldiers from the 522nd were patrolling near Waakirchen.
The Nisei saw an open field with several hundred “lumps
in the snow.” When the soldiers looked closer they realized
the “lumps” were people. Some were shot. Some were
dead from exposure. But hundreds were alive - barely.
The 522nd came across hundreds of prisoners with black and white
prison garb, shaven heads, sunken eyes, and hollowed cheeks. Some
roamed aimlessly around the countryside. Some were too weak to
move. All were severely malnourished. One soldier gave a starving
Jewish prisoner a candy bar, but his system couldn’t handle
solid food. Then the Americans were told not to give food to the
prisoners because it could kill them.
For the next three days, the Nisei carried the survivors
into warm houses and barns. The soldiers gave them blankets, water
and only tiny bits of food.
The soldiers left Waakirchen on May 4. The 522nd, along with
the 101st Airborne Division, participated in the capture of Hitler’s
rest and recreation hideout at Berchtesgaden. In November 1945
the 522nd went home to America.
Many Japanese American soldiers returned to American concentration
camps, like Manzanar, Minidoka and Poston. They helped move their
parents and siblings out of the barbed wire camps. They found
work and housing and tried to pick up their lives. But they would
never forget the sight of the starving Jewish prisoners.
In the spring of 1945, the men in the 522nd had participated
in one of the greatest ironies of World War II. Members of a persecuted
minority, the Japanese Americans reached out to members of another
persecuted minority, the European Jews. These two minority groups
were victims of the most blatant disregard for civil liberties
and human rights that a government ever perpetrated against its
people - one for being of Japanese ancestry, the other for being
of the Jewish faith.
Lieutenant James Kurata said:
“What I saw. . . was too horrible
for words to describe. It was pitiful. How could anyone be that
cruel to human beings? We didn’t know how important what
we were doing was in liberating the death march of Dachau.”
