Interviews

1. Growing up in segregated schools

2. Feeling prejudice while looking for jobs

3. Joining the army

4. Generosity of the Italians

5. Animosity between the Hawaiians and the mainlanders

6. Being scared during combat

7. Never feared that he wouldn’t come back home

8. On saving the Lost Battalion

9. Coming home to his mother after the war

10. Getting a PhD under the G.I. Bill

11. Invited to teach at Harvard by his boss

12. Feeling at peace with himself

Ito,Susumu “Sus”

(1919 - 2015) Nisei who served in World War II with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team

Being scared during combat

There were times when I was — must confess — scared shit-less. For instance, when you hear a German machine gun who had ambushed us in our advance. It was so dense forest that you couldn’t see them, but you could hear them. He would say, “Hands up! Hands up!” and we look around at each other, are we gonna surrender to these guys? No way, no way. I didn’t have a rifle — I just had a pistol in my hand — and what to do under these circumstances? We weren’t face-to-face. We were just with voice contact. But I felt that we’re going to survive this intact, and as it turned out, unlike today’s war, when it gets dark everybody just digs a hole as deep as you can and crawl in it to avoid tree burst shells that come running down. And in the morning the fighting doesn’t start till dawn again.

Date: January 3, 2015

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Lily Anne Y. Welty Tamai

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

Susumu “Sus” Ito was born in 1919 in Stockton, California, to Japanese immigrants, Sohei and Hisayo Ito. Like many other Japanese American families in their community, the Itos worked as tenant farmers, sharecropping to harvest celery, beets, and asparagus. Sus Ito grew up with few luxuries.

In 1940, at twenty-one years old, Ito was drafted into the military—before America’s direct involvement in World War II. Initially, he was assigned to a non-segregated Quartermaster truck and vehicle maintenance unit at Camp Haan near Riverside, California. During the war, he served as a Lieutenant in the “C” Battery of the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team’s 522nd Field Artillery Battalion while his family was held in the American concentration camp in Rohwer, Arkansas. After World War II, he studied Biology with the help of the G.I. Bill and later received his PhD in Biology and Embryology. A pioneer in his field, Dr. Ito joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School in 1960, and has been professor emeritus since 1991.

He passed away on September 2015 at age 96. (September 2015)