Private First Class Kenji Tanaka was a Nisei soldier from Honolulu who served as a combat medic with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Italy. His parents were incarcerated at the Manzanar internment camp when he enlisted in 1943. He had volunteered for the Army knowing that while he was fighting for his country, his family was behind barbed wire in the California desert.
In April 1945, during the Gothic Line offensive, Tanaka found a German captain lying in a ditch with a shattered leg and a collapsed lung. The German officer, who spoke no English, gestured toward his helmet, inside of which was a photograph of a young girl. The officer was bleeding, breathing shallowly, and could not move.
Tanaka was ordered to advance to the next ridge. He looked at the German captain, then at his own unit, then returned to the ditch. He picked up the German officer, who was 40 pounds heavier than Tanaka himself, and carried him 300 yards to the American field hospital. He then walked another 200 yards back to his unit.
Tanaka was awarded the Bronze Star, but the official citation does not mention that the man he saved was German. It simply says he carried a wounded soldier to the hospital under heavy fire. The citation was written this way because, in 1945, a Japanese-American soldier saving a German officer was too complicated for the War Department to explain.
The German captain, whose name was Heinrich Weiss, survived. He found Tanaka in 1968 and flew to Honolulu to thank him. The two men had not spoken the same language in 1945, but 23 years later, they sat in a hotel room in Waikiki and spoke through an interpreter for three hours. Weiss had a daughter who was the same age as the girl in the photograph. Tanaka never told his mother what he had done. She died in 1991, still not knowing that her son had saved the life of a German officer.