Title: Since the Civil War, Asian Americans have served in the military with distinction
Headings: Since the Civil War, Asian Americans have served in the military with distinction
Since the Civil War, Asian Americans have served in the military with distinction
Pre-World War II
World War II
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Post-World War II

Content: Terry Shima, who served in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team during World War II, in 1946. Courtesy of Terry Shima
A little more than two months later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which set in motion the rounding up of more than 120,000 men, women and children of Japanese descent to be sent to incarceration camps in the interest of national security. Recommended
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Despite this, Japanese Americans stepped up to fight for their country. Around 19,000 served in the 100th Infantry Battalion, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the Military Intelligence Service. Terry Shima, 96, was one of them. He was born in Hawaii and spared detention in an incarceration camp. Because Japanese Americans were crucial to Hawaii’s economy, the FBI there detained only leaders of the Japanese, German and Italian American communities after Pearl Harbor. In 1944, Shima was drafted into the 442nd, a segregated Army unit comprised almost entirely of Americans of Japanese ancestry. ( The late Col. Young Oak Kim, a Korean American and winner of the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second highest award, joined as a second lieutenant.)