Imagine bleeding for a country that has locked your parents behind barbed wire because of their ancestry. This episode tells the story of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Infantry Battalion, composed almost entirely of second-generation Japanese Americans who became the most decorated U.S. military unit for its size and length of service, earning over 18,000 decorations even as their families were interned in American camps.

After Pearl Harbor, Japanese American men were reclassified as enemy aliens, then later asked to register for the draft from inside prison camps via an infamous loyalty questionnaire. Adopting the motto Go For Broke, thousands volunteered. We follow their brutal campaigns from Italy’s Hill 140 to the freezing Vosges Mountains, where they suffered over 800 casualties rescuing the Lost Battalion, and their liberation of a Dachau subcamp while their own families remained imprisoned.

• Why Hawaii used martial law instead of mass internment for economic reasons
• The trap of loyalty questionnaire questions 27 and 28
• The Lost Battalion rescue and the devastating casualty mathematics
• Discovering the Dachau subcamp and the danger of refeeding survivors
• How veterans used the GI Bill to rewrite laws and win Hawaiian statehood