MOST joined up despite being branded ''enemy aliens''; others volunteered from behind the barbed wire of internment camps to prove their loyalty to the United States. Thousands never returned.
The 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team saw action in the bloodiest battles on the killing fields of Europe. Some helped liberate the Dachau Nazi concentration camp as their families sat in internment camps in the US.
Fifty years later, about 3,000 Japanese-American combat survivors gathered for a reunion which ended with a service at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.
''I'm on cloud nine,'' said 74-year-old New Yorker Mr Roy Greene. He changed his name from Fukushima after the war because he did not know how people would react. ''We saw guys we haven't seen in 40 years. I'm all choked up.'' Like other veterans, the brothers-in-arms talked about grandchildren, remembered fallen colleagues and shared battle stories. But unlike most soldiers, they also remembered that after returning home, they were turned down for jobs, refused service and rejected by universities.
After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour in 1941, president Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order permitting the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, two thirds of whom were American citizens by birth. No similar actionwas taken against Italian-Americans or German-Americans.
Only in recent years has the US Government apologised and began making compensation payments of US$20,000 (HK$156,000) to survivors.