Hartford Courant from Hartford, Connecticut • Page 3

Sunday, June 18, 2000 THE HARTFORD COURANT A3 The Nation Recognition, Finally, For Some Heroes The U.S. government on Wednesday will honor the courageous efforts of 21 Japanese-Americans during World War II, by awarding them the Medal of Honor. Vs ASIAN-AMERICAN HEROES, from left, Shizuya Hayaski, Barney Hajiro and Yeiki Kobashigawa, are together at the for the Army's 100th Infantry Battalion. They are among seven Asian American veterans who will receive the Wednesday at a White House Ceremony. back told him it was his responsibility to stop us," Hayashi said.

"But I couldn't shoot him." Instead, Hayashi said he yelled, "Get and they all came up and surrendered. One of them had the Iron Cross, and that swastika. I took that away from him, I was so mad." Tech. Sgt Yeiki Kobashigawa led his platoon in wiping out four German machine gun positions in fighting near Lanuvio, Italy, on June 2, 1944. "Give me all the pineapples (grenades)'," he recalled telling his lieutenant I was in a good position." He was wounded in the knee and chest two days later.

Tech. Sgt. Yukio Okutsu was leading a platoon in action on Mt Belvedere in Italy on April 7, 1945, when the unit was caught in crossfire from three German machine guns. After using grenades to knock out two gun emplacements, he moved through heavy fire toward the third. A bullet glanced off his helmet, stunning him momentarily.

Then he charged with his submachine gun, capturing the position and its four gunners. "I was one of the lucky guys in the infantry. I got scratched, but no heavy wounds. I didn't even get a Purple Heart," he said Pvt. George Sakato of the 442nd killed five Germans and captured four in his platoon's assault on two enemy defensive lines before the unit was pinned down by heavy fire Oct 29, 1944, near Biffontaine, France.

Sitting in his Colorado home, Sakato, now 79, spoke in a wavering voice as he remembered how a friend was killed by a German soldier after he tried to warn him. "Why?" he remembers crying out before picking up his gun and running toward the shooter. "I was just so mad, I lost control and charged that hill" said Sakato, a retired postal clerk. Staff Sgt Rudolph Davila's 7th Infantry artillery unit, moving in from the Anzio beachhead, came upon a U.S. rifle company of 130 men caught in the open by heavy German fire on May 28, 1944, at Artena, Italy.

He sprayed his machine gun at the Germans in the foothills and ordered his men to bring other machine guns into action. He then directed the fire to silence several German positions. Davila, despite a wounded leg, took cover behind a burned tank and continued firing on the German positions before crawling toward an enemy-held house, where he used a hand grenade and rifle to wipe out two machine guns there. "To this day, I can't tell you I killed. I don't want to think that I killed.

I think I scared them away," he said. Davila, of Spanish-Filipino descent said his wife, Harriet prodded the Army for years to recommend him for the Medal of Honor. She died Christmas Day 1999. "The experience has a lot of meaning to me but not as much as if she were here. She wanted me to have it so badly," Davila said.

For Akaka, the review of the Nisei combatants' records provided a special dividend. "The stories documented for each of the 104 DSC recipients," he said, "will astonish and humble all who read them." ''i 1 in W.ffe1 and placed in relocation camps "for their own safety." Meanwhile, when the Army allowed it in 1942, about 1,500 Hawaii Nisei joined the 100th Infantry Battalion being formed in the islands. Their "Go for Broke" training at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin so impressed the Army brass that the 442nd Regimental Combat Team was formed, taking thousands more Japanese-American volunteers from Hawaii and across the country for training at Camp Shelby, Miss. By war's end, 25,000 Japanese-Americans had served, rv. By BRUCE DUNFORD Associated Press Dive bombers, torpedo planes and fighters bearing the "rising sun" emblem of the Japanese military were hammering Oahu's military bases that Sunday morning, Dec.

7, 1941. High school senior Daniel Inouye was racing his bicycle through the narrow streets of the Makiki neighborhood in Honolulu, heading to the Red Cross station where he volunteered as a first-aid trainer. He remembers shouting skyward: "You dirty Japs!" As thegreat columns of black smoke rose from the wrecked Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Inouye knew there would be trouble for him and other Japanese-Americans, people who, he said, "had wanted so desperately to be accepted, to be good Americans." Barney Hajiro, working for 10 cents an hour in the sugar cane fields of Maui, quickly found his ancestry made him a target for other Americans after the attack that dragged the United States into World Warn. "When the war started, they thought we were the enemy," Hajiro, now 83, said recently. "I didn't like that." Soon he and Inouye were in U.S.

Army uniforms among the thousands of Nisei, or second generation DANIEL INOUYE Japanese, who joined up and proved themselves on the battlefields of Europe. Some, including Hajiro and Inouye, stood out with single-handed acts of conspicuous bravery in the face of enemy fire that left them badly wounded. Their heroism was never fully recognized. But Wednesday, in a White House ceremony, Inouye, Hajiro and five other Asian-American World War veterans will receive the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest decoration for valor. Fourteen other Medals of Honor will go to the surviving families of dead Asian-American heroes.

Those being honored mostly served in the segregated Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Infantry Battalion, which together became the most decorated combat unit for its size in the nation's history. The men emerged from seven major campaigns in France and Italy with eight presidential unit citations, 9,486 Purple Hearts and 18,143 individual decorations. The latter included 52 Distinguished Service Crosses, the second-highest Research i In THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Club 100, a gathering place in Honolulu Congressional Medal of Honor below fire from a German bunker on a ridge guarding a key crossroads near Terenzo, Italy. Wounded in the stomach, 1st Lt Inouye crawled up the exposed hillside, tossed a hand grenade into a machine-gun emplacement, then took aim at the fleeing defenders with his submachine gun. He staggered farther up the hill, threw two more grenades at a second machine gun and advanced to a third position with a grenade ready to throw.

Just at that moment, an enemy grenade exploded near his right elbow. Inouye threw his grenade with his left hand. He then was shot in his right leg and fell down the hill. He lost his right arm and his dreams of a medical career. Instead, he went to law school and into politics; Inouye has represented Hawaii in the U.S.

Senate since 1962. Until now, the only Japanese-American World War veteran awarded the Medal of Honor was PFC Sadao S. Munemori, a Los Angeles native who signed up for the 442nd after he and his family were sent to the Manzanar internment camp in California. After making a one-man attack on a German stronghold in the Po Valley in Italy, Munemori sacrificed his own life by falling on an enemy grenade, smothering its blast to save two nearby comrades. For each man receiving a Medal of Honor this week, the hell of war took a different form.

Shizuya Hayashi was cited for charging a machine gun position and killing 20 enemy soldiers while taking four prisoner at Cerasuolo, Italy, in November 1943. At one point, Hayashi recalls facing an armed boy, "12 or 13, 1 think. "He was crying. He was holding the burp gun, and the one in the including several hundred in Pacific intelligence units as spies, interrogators and interpreters. In 1996, Akaka persuaded Congress to direct the Pentagon to review the actions of 104 soldiers of Asian and Pacific ancestry who were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

That effort was patterned on a 1993 law that led to the upgrading of Distinguished Service Crosses and Navy Crosses won by seven black veterans to the Medal of Honor. After a three-year review, the Army last month recommended that 21 soldiers 19 Japanese-Americans, one Filipino-American and one Chinese-American be awarded the Medal of Honor. Hajiro earned his at a place the GIs called "Suicide Hill" in France's Vosges Mountains. It was Oct. 29, 1944, and PFC Hajiro's platoon in the 100th was under heavy fire from German machine guns, which had killed eight GIs and wounded 21 in the unit.

Suddenly, Hajiro picked up his Browning automatic rifle and charged. He wiped out two machine gun nests and killed two snipers before he was hit by a third machine gun, receiving wounds to the body, arm and face. His action came in the third and final push in the 442nd's breakthrough to rescue the "Lost Battalion," a former Texas National Guard unit cut off by the Germans. "It was 1 a.m. and we took a lot of heavy hits.

Some of the guys were only 18 or so and they were getting hit and were dying," Hajiro said. I was lucky to survive." Six months later, on April 20, 1945, Inouye's turn for heroism came as his platoon in the 442nd came under award for valor. As outstanding as these achievements were especially for units that had a total of 25,000 men during the war some felt the recognition was incomplete. Only one soldier received the highest award. "The fact that the 100th442nd saw such fierce and heavy combat, yet received only one Medal of Honor award, and then only posthumously and due to congressional intervention, raised serious questions about the fairness of the award process at the time," said Sen.

Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii. He decided to re-examine the process and concluded that wartime "bias, discrimination and hysteria" were partly to blame for the withholding of Medals of Honor. Distrust and even hatred of the traditionally clannish Japanese was almost immediate after the Pearl Harbor attack. Most islanders, and especially the military, believed an invasion was imminent and local Japanese might aid those invaders. Martial law was declared, short-wave radios and cameras owned by aliens were seized, nightly blackouts were ordered, Japanese bank accounts and income were restricted and two Japanese language newspapers were shut down.

Japanese families were ordered to move away from coastal areas. All Japanese-Americans were reclassified as "4C-enemy aliens." Japanese-Americans in the Army were disarmed and assigned to labor battalions; the Hawaii Territorial Guard and ROTC discharged 1,400 Japanese-American members. On the U.S. mainland, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered 120,000 alien Japanese and Japanese-Americans rounded up Shows Evangelical Christianity Has Wide Appeal Congregations Wealthier, More Diverse Than Commonly Thought written on the evangelical movement. "You find a lot of folks claiming there is a spiritual revival going on among young people, primarily in response to things like Columbine," he said.

"Barna really doesn't seem to confirm that at all The fact that the group is getting older and more affluent isn't all that good news. If they can't win the next generation, things are going to be difficult in the long run." Barna said he found the growth among Asian evangelicals most surprising. "There certainly seems to have been a lot of energy in the last decade toward planting new churches for Asian-Americans and giving them a spiritual experience that blends Christianity with whatever culture they're most comfortable in," he said. Much of the evangelical outreach has occurred on the nation's college campuses. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, which has a presence on 560 campuses nationally, reported an increase in Asian-American membership of 15 percent over the last five years and 84 percent over the past decade.

By JOHN RIVERA Baltimore Sun The common stereotype about evangelical Christians: they're poor or blue-collar, white, less educated, and from the rural South. But recent research is challenging that image. It shows that born-again Christians are increasingly well-educated, well-off, and from a variety of cultural backgrounds, perhaps most surprisingly, Asian-American. The latest survey, by California-based Barna Research, a respected Christian polling firm, compared data on evangelicals today and a decade ago and found: In 1991, only 13 percent of all born-again adults were from households earning $60,000 or more. Today, nearly twice that numbef, 25 percent, earn that much.

The number of born-again adults who are 50 or older jumped from 31 percent to 41 percent over the last decade. In 1991, only 5 percent of Asian-Americans described themselves as being born-again Jesus Christ is simply a good deal. Faith in Christ represents an eternal insurance policy for them rather than a significant change of heart about the ultimate meaning of life, or how to honor Christ through their decisions, behavior and resources." The survey also found that the evangelical movement isn't attracting increasing numbers of young people. In 1991, 28 percent of people surveyed under 30 said they were born-again Christians, a number the latest poll found virtually unchanged, at 26 percent. "Baby busters have proven to be the most gospel-resistant generation the church has seen in many years," said George Barna, who directed the study.

That flies in the face of media images of youths flocking to religion in the wake of recent well-publicized violence in schools and churches, said Justin Watson, who teaches religion at Florida State University and has congregations with an informal style, professional musicians and dynamic preaching that are attracting formerly un-churched professionals. "I would say our congregation is primarily white-collar, and there is a trend toward growth there," said Mark McGeever, a pastor at Bay Area Community Church, which meets each Sunday at Annapolis High School in Maryland. "We've been on a pretty consistent growth curve here in the last three years. We have doctors, businessmen and quite a few government-related engineers." This trend toward a wealthier flock does raise some concerns. Barna notes that earlier polls he conducted showed that the increase in wealthy individuals isn't necessarily accompanied by changes in lifestyle.

"You don't see their lives changing as a result of this commitment they've made," he said. "For many of these individuals, faith in Christians. Barna's survey found that their numbers have increased to 27 percent. The survey, which was conducted in February and included about 1,000 people, found that three-quarters of the nation's evangelicals are white, and about 45 percent do live in the South. But the trend appears to be toward diversity.

"The old stereotypes about education, income and socioeconomic status of evangelicals are slowly changing, because the facts are driving ignorance away," said Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals. "The reality as I understand it is evangelicals are indistinguishable from the rest of the public with regard to education and economics, which are two key criteria for status." Observers have attributed some of this shift to the growth of mega-churches, large.