World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseSadao S. Munemori was born in Los Angeles, California, United States in 1922. He was the fourth of five children of Kametaro and Nawa Munemori who had immigrated from Hiroshima, Japan to the United States in the early 1900s. His father passed away in 1938. He graduated from the Abraham Lincoln Senior High School in Los Angeles in 1940 and became an automobile mechanic. He signed up for the US Army in Nov 1941 and was officially inducted into military service in Feb 1942. Distrusted due to his ethnicity, he initially performed menial labor for the US Army, while his parents and siblings became incarcerated at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in Inyo County, California. He was later chosen for the Military Intelligence Service Language School in Minnesota, United States, but in Mar 1943, he volunteered to join the 442nd Regimental Combat Team consisted of Japanese-Americans. In May 1943, he visited his family at Manzanar; it would be the last time his family would see him. He received combat training at Camp Shelby in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, United States in Jan 1944. On 5 Apr 1945, Private First Class Munemori's company launched an early dawn surprise attack on a German position near Seravezza, Italy. He single-handedly silenced two German machine guns with grenades during the attack. When a thrown German grenade landed in a ditch where two of his fellow American soldiers were located, he dove onto the grenade, absorbed the blast with his own body, and saved his two comrades. He was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for this action. He was buried at the Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles. His Distinguished Service Cross was soon upgraded to the Medal of Honor, the highest honor of the US military, and the medal was presented to his mother at Fort MacArthur in Los Angeles on 13 Mar 1946; Munemori was the first Japanese-American to be awarded the Medal of Honor.