UNDILUTED HISTORY AND FACTS

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, Hawa...

Learn Our History Today: On June 15, 1944, following a massive bombardment in which more than 165,000 shells were fired, American troops began landing on the Japanese held island of Saipan.  Saipan was a part of the strategically located Marianas Island chain. The United States’ seizure of it would sever Japanese communications with many of their other island bases farther in the Pacific, as well as provide a base for B-29 bombers heading for the Japanese mainland. Beginning at 7:00 am on June 15, more than 8,000 Marines landed on the western coast of the island, running into carefully prepared Japanese defenses laden with barb wire, artillery, and machine gun emplacements.  All were placed to inflict maximum American casualties. At the end of the day the Americans had established a beach head and were able to hold off a large counterattack, inflicting horrendous casualties on the Japanese. The next day, June 16, soldiers from the Army’s 27th Infantry Division began landing on...