Exclusive Portrait Series: Ken Burns' The War

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    Kashiwagi became the first scout in Company K of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a unit made up mostly of Japanese-Americans. In the following years, the unit pushed into Italy, through the northern Apennines and into southern France, where they rescued the “Lost Battalion,” a group of Texas infantrymen who had been trapped by German forces. Kashiwagi endured back and foot injuries caused by shrapnel blasts. He was honorably discharged in 1945 and got a job with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In 1947, he became the first Japanese-American hired by the state Division of Highways equipment department, now Caltrans. He retired after 32 years of service.
    “I want to forget it,” Kashiwagi says of the horrors of war. “It’s just something that had to be done, and I did it, and that’s all.”

Boston Floyd Jr., 84
U.S. Navy

It was a cold world in the 1930s and ’40s, and Boston Floyd Jr. found out the hard way. Growing up in Harrisburg, Penn., Floyd says he got into fights with white neighbors and had to walk four miles to an all-black grammar school battling bitter winds. As an only child, he worked various jobs at gas stations, grocery and drug stores to help out his mother, who raised him alone. After high school, he went to an aeronautics school, but he knew time was running out.
    “I felt it was coming,” Floyd says. “As long as you stayed in school, you weren’t going to get drafted. But it was too cold where they wanted to send me for more school. It was in Alaska.”
    It was 1943. Floyd knew nothing about the Navy, but suddenly he was off to boot camp. Most blacks in the military had been stewards and cooks, but the Navy noticed Floyd’s skills and sent him to school for communication and navigation. He became a quartermaster, assisting the navigator. Although he slept in the same compartment with the other quartermasters, who were all white, the duties were far from equal.
    “At one point, they didn’t want black guys on the ship with the white guys,” Floyd recalls. “They gave me small vessels. When you’re in a foreign country, all your trash has got to be put on a garbage scow, and you take it three to five miles out to sea and dump it. So I was the navigator of a garbage scow.”
    Floyd continued his duty with two more tours all the way through the Korean War. Now Floyd, a former motel and bar owner, lives with his wife, Rosa, in the Pocket area of Sacramento, where the weather stays warm.

Continued...

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