U.S. Army Private First Class Kaoru Moto of Hawaii was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroic actions on July 7, 1944, near Castellina, Italy.


U.S. Army Private First Class Kaoru Moto of Hawaii was posthumously awarded the  Medal of Honor for his heroic actions on July 7, 1944, near Castellina, Italy.

Moto was born to Japanese immigrant parents and was a Nisei, which means he was a second-generation Japanese-American. 

He joined the Army in March 1941, ten months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He volunteered to be a part of the all-Nisei 100th Infantry Battalion, mostly made up of Japanese-Americans from Hawaii and the mainland.

On July 7, 1944,  near Castellina Marittima, Italy, Moto single-handedly silenced two enemy machine gun positions while acting as a scout and then destroyed a third despite being severely wounded. For his actions on this day, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, which was posthumously upgraded to a Medal of Honor in 2000.

Moto left the Army while still a private first class. He died at age 75 and was buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kristina Zhuk was 23 years old, her daughter Kira was 10 months old when they were killed in Gorlovka.

Image
Kristina Zhuk was 23 years old, her daughter Kira was 10 months old when they were killed in Gorlovka.  The young mother was buried with the baby in her arms.  A terrible tragedy then excited the world, the pictures spread all over the world, and the deceased Christina was then called the Gorlovka Madonna.  Two years have passed since the murder of the "Gorlovskaya Madonna"...    On July 27, 2014, the city of Gorlovka was subjected to massive shelling by Ukrainian security forces.  The Grad multiple launch rocket launchers were launched.  As a result of shelling Gorlovka from heavy guns from July 27 to July 29, 100 people were injured, 27 more died, four of them were children, the city council reported.  Among the dead were Christina Zhuk and her daughter.  A picture from the square on Rudakova Street, which depicts the dead Kristina and Kira, was posted on the Internet by blogger Oleg Zhelyabin-Nezhinskiy.    After filming at the s...
Read more

1852, a dark portrait now reveals a heart-breaking history

Image
1852, a dark portrait now reveals a heart-breaking history ....  A few years ago I was asked to restore, and colourise this portrait by someone who had a very nice, but dark, and gloomy print of it.  They had no idea who she was, but they'd fallen in love with this fragile, and very naturally beautiful young woman who lived over 170 years ago. Recently a friend in the U.S. had stumbled on the image with the family history behind it, and to be honest I was a little saddened to learn of her fate ... "When Anna Sullivan Waters was born in 1833, her father, Thomas, was 35, and her mother, Ruth, was 31. She married Zachariah John Waters on June 7, 1851, in Centerville, Tennessee.  They had one surviving child during their marriage a son William M Cornelius "Neal" Waters. She died as a young mother in 1853 in Centerville, Tennessee, at the age of 20. She is buried with her two new born daughters they all died due to delivery complications that occurred during the birth of ...
Read more

U.S. Army Hangman John C. Woods Intentionally Botched Nazi Executions To Ensure Their Agonizing Deaths.

Image
U.S. Army Hangman John C. Woods Intentionally Botched Nazi Executions To Ensure Their Agonizing Deaths. The  Nuremberg executions  took place on 16 October 1946, shortly after the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials. Ten prominent members of the political and military leadership of Nazi Germany were executed by hanging: Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and Julius Streicher.  Hermann GΓΆring was also scheduled to be hanged on that day, but committed suicide using a potassium cyanide capsule the night before.  Martin Bormann was also sentenced to death  in absentia ; at the time his whereabouts were unknown, but it is now thought that he committed suicide or was killed by Soviet troops while attempting to escape Berlin on 2 May 1945. The sentences...
Read more

Freedomite

Image
Freedomite The  Freedomite  movement consists of a split-off of the Doukhobors, a community of Spiritual Christians began a mass migration from Russia to Canada in 1898. The Freedomite movement first appeared in 1902 in Saskatchewan, and later in the Kootenay and Boundary Districts of British Columbia. Freedomites began to divide from Doukhobors in 1902 in Saskatchewan, Canada, self-named as "God's people" and  Svobodniki  (Russian: "sovereign people"). The faction, later called "Freedomites", opposed land ownership, public schools, using work animals, etc. and are mainly known for protesting nude. By 1920 the common English term for them became  Sons of Freedom . Of about 20,000 active Doukhobors in Canada today, ancestors of about 2,500 were Freedomites, and many descendants have joined the USCC Community Doukhobors. Doctrine Freedomite meetings were similar to other spiritual Christian folk-Protestants fr...
Read more

Directly from ancient Rome, Carvilio's ring: The excruciating pain of a Roman mother for the death of her son.

Image
Directly from ancient Rome, Carvilio's ring: The excruciating pain of a Roman mother for the death of her son. In 2000, during the removal of a high voltage pylon in a private property near Grottaferrata (a suburb of Rome) archaeologists found two sarcophagi, which contained the remains of the noble Aebutia Quarta and her son Carvilio Gemello, who lived in the first century after Christ. Carvilio died prematurely at the age of about eighteen, in mysterious circumstances (perhaps from poisoning). After losing the only male child, the roman noblewoman built a wonderful sarcophagus, with accurate finishing and refined inscriptions for his son.  Due to the floral ornaments placed at the entrance and inside, the archeological site today is known as the "Hypogeum of the garlands". When Ebuzia died (probably at the age of 40 or 50), she was buried in the same place of her son Carvilio. The two nobles were embalmed (probably because they were followers of the cult of Isis, which ...
Read more

The capture of brave Russian officer Rosinski

Image
The capture of brave Russian officer Rosinski This is a shocking image and I apologize in advance for sharing it, but here’s one that truly got to me… in Belarus, 1918, after WWI had already ended, the brave Russian officer Rosinski was captured by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks tortured the captain, likely to get information out of the man, which he bravely refused to give. After that, they simply continued with the torture out of some sick sense of innate cruelty. He was ‘the enemy’ and he was at their mercy, so they brutally murdered their captive. The brave captain was emasculated. And anally impaled on a tree branch. All this while still alive. Alfred Savoir, the man who published the picture and was an eye witness to the death of the brave military officer, described "M. B.", who ordered this atrocity, thus: I knew him not long ago; he was a charming teenager with an ironic wit and joker. He was rubbed with French culture, he admired the novels of Barres and he quot...
Read more

War crime hangings at Landsberg in May 1946.

Image
War crime hangings at Landsberg in May 1946. With special thanks to Traugott Vitz for his help with this article. Over two days at the end of May 1946, 28 German war criminals were hanged at Landsberg am Lech prison in Germany (US War Criminals Prison No. 1). The Dachau concentration camp was liberated by two divisions of the U.S. Seventh Army on the 29th of April, 1945.  40 members of it staff were tried at the camp by a US General Military Court, presided over by Brigadier General John Lenz. The trials lasted from the 15th of November to the 13th of December 1945.  36 defendants received the death sentence.  Eight of these sentences were reduced to terms of imprisonment by the Reviewing Authority, the remaining 28 death sentences being confirmed. The trial went under the designation “USA against Martin Gerhard Weiß (Weiss) et al.”, Case No. 000-50-2. Martin Gerhard Weiss was the camp commandant at Dachau.  This trial became the “Parent Case” for 488 other trials (a...
Read more

Execution by cannon in Shiraz, Iran, circa 1890s.

Image
Execution by cannon in Shiraz, Iran, circa 1890s. The prisoner is generally tied to a gun with the upper part of the small of his back resting against the muzzle.  When the gun is fired, his head is seen to go straight up into the air some forty or fifty feet; the arms fly off right and left, high up in the air, and fall at, perhaps, a hundred yards distance; the legs drop to the ground beneath the muzzle of the gun; and the body is literally blown away altogether. "Blown from a gun" was a punishment often used by colonial powers against locals who believed their body parts must be together to enter the afterlife. It was reserved as a special punishment when just death wasn't enough. Local feral dogs would usually eat the pieces of the dead that could be found. This photograph depicts the dreaded method of execution formally used in several parts of the world: death by cannon. Shiraz, modern day Iran. Circa 1890s.  This method of execution was used ever since at least the...
Read more

The Top 6 Deadliest Genocides.

Image
  The Top 6 Deadliest Genocides . Throughout human history, there have been several terrible genocides where millions of people lost their lives. These genocides were carried out with deliberate and systematic violence, targeting specific groups based on their ethnicity, religion, or politics. Even though these events are very dark, it’s important to talk about them so that we can prevent them from happening again. The top 7 deadliest genocides in history have left a lasting impact on the world and are still studied, discussed, and debated by historians and scholars today. From the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of 6 million Jews, to the Bengali Genocide, which resulted in the deaths of 3 million people, each of these genocides represents a harrowing chapter in human history. Here, we will examine the shocking reality of the top 7 deadliest genocides that shook the world to its core. 1 Moriori massacre The Moriori people were the indigenous inhabitants of the Chatham Islan...
Read more

Johann Pauls

Image
Johann Pauls Johann Pauls (born 9 February 1908 in Danzig – died 4 July 1946 in GdaΕ„sk), also John Pauls, was a German SS-OberscharfΓΌhrer in Stutthof concentration camp. Career Pauls was the third child of Johann August Pauls and Minna SteingrΓ€ber. He joined the NSDAP, along with the SS, in the Free State of Danzig on 1 April 1931.  From 21 July 1939 to 31 October 1941, he served in the reserve police force. From 1 November 1941 to 11 March 1943, he served in the Waffen-SS infantry and SS-Schutze reserve. Pauls was transferred to SS-Totenkopfsturmbann of Sachsenhausen concentration camp in April 1943.  Thereafter, as an SS-OberscharfΓΌhrer, he was commandant of the guards in Stutthof concentration camp until the end of the war in 1945. He was tried in the first Stutthof Trial by the Soviet/Polish Special Criminal Court, which was held in GdaΕ„sk (Danzig) from 25 April 1946 to 31 May 1946.  In the company of 12 other guards and Kapos, he was convicted of...
Read more