<Begin Segment 11>

TI: So let's go back to the writing of the book, and we talked a little bit about the primary source materials that you used for the book, the diary, these letters that he wrote to his parents and other siblings.

JO: Right.

TI: And it was really from that, I guess, first wave of primary sources that you wrote the book because that was all that you had.

JO: Right. And my history that I had learned about the incarceration, I was able to write a little bit about that, because Stanley wrote so little about the assembly center, I was able to flesh that out a little bit because Frank wrote about the assembly center and how his degree was thrown on his cot and came in the mail, and what that was like. But I also had access to one of his classmates, I interviewed him. And then in the army section I knew what... I thought I was going to be able to find his army records. But lo and behold, the archives for the 442nd, many of them burned in Texas. So I couldn't even find out anything about the battles, I had to go look for information about the battles.

And one of the things that came up was that Stanley was killed in the battle for San Terenzo, which is in Italy. And as I was reading about that, there was something very familiar about the name San Terenzo, and I thought, "I read about this battle before." And sure enough, it came to me that I had read about it because Senator Inouye had been wounded in that battle, and I had read his account. Among the many accounts I had read his account of the battle in which he lost his arm. So I contacted some of the veterans that, many of the veterans I spoke to, and I said, "Isn't there anybody in Stanley's battalion who would remember him or who would have stories about him?" And someone told me that everybody in his group was dead, and that one person who had remembered it remembered it, but he was no longer alive, and there was no way I was going to get that story. And then I said, "Well, what about this battle of San Terenzo? Who was there? What battalions were there? What groups were there?

And then somebody said, the editor, who was working on the book with me at the time, said -- and he was a great World War II buff -- he said, "I bet that if you wrote to the Senator, he would know about it. I bet he knew Stanley." And I said, "Well, come on. That's not gonna happen." But the museum was giving me the material, I was in touch with them, and Irene Hirano was still at the museum. And I said, "My understanding is that Stanley was in..." and I gave her the company name and all of the rest. I said, "Is there some way I can contact the Senator and ask him about this?" She said, "Well, he's coming here this weekend," he was coming for a dinner. She said, "I'll show him the picture." And, of course, he saw the picture and he said, "Of course, I knew him." He said he recognized the smile on his face from the picture that we all had of Stanley at that time. And I should have pursued that further, but I asked if he would write about him, and he agreed to write the forward to the book and talk about the fact of... well, we knew the facts of his battle, we thought we knew all of it. And so he gave me that, and it was in the course of events that I discovered -- the book was about to go to press -- that I discovered that the Senator was the leader of Stanley's battalion. That's not a very large group, it's a rather small group.

TI: So I'm sorry, he's the platoon leader?

JO: The platoon leader, right, of the platoon. Thank you.

TI: A platoon's about twenty men.

JO: At the very most. He was the platoon leader, I was saying battalion, but platoon is correct. And that Stanley had to have been with him when he was injured, he had to have been with him in the first assault when they had to sneak up on the Germans to take the mountain. And the story of that battle has been written about at great length by veterans who were there, yet I could find no veteran who remembered Stanley. And one of them explained that so many people had been lost, that the old-timers as they called themselves, who were all of twenty and twenty-one, would not make friends with the replacements who came. I'm sure you've heard this before, that they had had such losses, they were afraid to make friends with anybody. So the young replacements were pretty much unto themselves. And it was not surprising that few of them knew Stanley.

Years later, in fact this year, after the Senator's death, there was a recording of an oral history -- again this is what makes these oral histories so important -- there was a recording made by the Senator late that told stories that are not told in other retellings of the events of his injury, which I had read at great length. There's a collection of all the people who won the Medal of Honor and their stories. But he tells the story of having been in the first wave of going up and surprising the Germans who were to be taken by surprise, so that men who fell had to be silent so as not to be overheard or give away their location and the surprise of their attack. And Stanley was there. I always thought that from the accounts I had heard from other people, that there was a second wave and Stanley's group was with that wave, but apparently not. And then in that interview the Senator recounted how the people of -- he went into the town, not San Terenzo but the town before San Terenzo, on their way to San Terenzo, that the people of the town, they took over the churches and military headquarters, and that the elders of the town came with food and with thanks to them that night, and offered them their daughters. And the Senator, who was then twenty years old, said, "I have sisters. I don't want your daughters." And the next day he recalled how they left the town and they were showered with flowers by the town, as they left the town. He tells the story better than I can tell the story, and it's not Stanley telling the story, but Stanley was writing letters. And at that same time, this story was not in my book because we didn't know the story. And I regret, I already regret not having interviewed him in person, but he was third in line to the President at the time and wouldn't have had the time to tell me that story, I'm sure. I wouldn't have presumed to ask him to take the time.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.