With his fellow soldiers pinned down, he exposed himself to enemy fire, enabling him to locate enemy positions, and then continued to lay down fire until he was wounded by an exploding German tank shell. He attended part-time classes at the University of Hawaii while serving on the police force, hoping to become a physician someday.Ī sergeant in a heavy machine-gun platoon, he went into combat with the 442nd in June 1944 and was wounded a month later in the Rome-Arno sector. Yoshida worked after graduating from high school. His mother remarried, and his stepfather was a laborer for a sugar company, for which Dr. Yutaka Kochi Yoshida was born in the town of Waipahu on May 10, 1912. He was wounded during the Italian campaign and, in separate engagements, received a Silver Star and a Bronze Star for bravery under fire. Yoshida had cousins in California who were interned at a camp in the state.īut he volunteered for Army service and in March 1943 joined the newly formed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a Japanese-American unit remembered today for extraordinary bravery in fighting the Germans in Italy and France.

Japanese aliens, known as Issei, as well as Japanese-Americans born in the United States, referred to as Nisei, were removed from the West Coast of the United States as supposed security threats in the war’s early stages and sent to remote internment camps, most of them inland, where they were placed under guard. “It was a moment of tremendous conflict for him.” “It was a story he always told us,” his daughter, Ann Yoshida, said in an interview on Tuesday. Yoshida for “Unlikely Liberators”, a history of Japanese-American soldiers in World War II originally published in 1983. “Even though it was his job, he still cannot forget how sad it was to point his gun at the tiny old Issei priest,” wrote Masayo Duus, who interviewed Dr.

agents as they rounded up prominent members of the Japanese community in Honolulu, among them a Buddhist priest, whom he helped take into custody. 13 at age 104 in Honolulu, was 29 then and a veteran of nine years with the police, and he faced a wrenching task on the Sunday of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Yoshida, a retired surgeon who died on Sept.

(The edict remained in effect until October 1944.)ĭr. The Territory of Hawaii was placed under martial law that day, and constitutional rights were suspended out of fear of a possible Japanese invasion, sabotage or espionage. 7, 1941, plunging America into World War II. Yutaka Yoshida, a native Hawaiian and a son of Japanese immigrants, was working as a police officer in Honolulu when Japan bombed the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor on Dec. Yoshida attended medical school and became a surgeon.ĭr. After serving in the United States Army during the war, Dr. Yutaka Yoshida was a police officer in Hawaii when World War II erupted.

Unlikely Liberators by Masayo Duus