After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government ordered 110,000 people of Japanese descent into internment camps. Yet when offered the chance to join the Army, many Japanese-Americans jumped at the opportunity to prove their loyalty. Hundreds ended up in the 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team, a Japanese-American unit that saw some of the hardest fighting of WWII.
Perhaps their finest hour came in October, 1944, in the Vosges Mountains of France, where the Germans had surrounded 211 U.S. soldiers on a ridgetop. “Medical supplies low, no rations for three days … need ammunition,” the desperate Americans radioed. News reports called those surrounded soldiers the “Lost Battalion.” The 100th/442nd got orders to save them.
The men started into the hills in darkness so thick that each grasped the man ahead to keep from losing the way. As they climbed the steep, forested slopes, the Germans opened fire. “I had never seen men get cut down so fast, so furiously,” one GI remembered. They pushed forward a yard at a time.
Two days later, on October 29, the exhausted soldiers charged up the slope they dubbed “Suicide Hill” in a last effort to break the German line. “I didn’t think about dying,” a private later said. “I had a job to do.” On October 30, the men of the Lost Battalion saw Americans where Germans had been. The 100th/442nd had arrived … the Americans were saved!
“I had never seen men get cut down so fast, so furiously.” Those are haunting words, and they remind us of another battle in which not a few, but everyone, were cut down so fast; it happened in the Garden of Eden.
When Adam and Eve disobediently ate the forbidden fruit, they were spiritually cut down immediately … and like a slow acting poison, that sin ultimately led to their physical death as well. With Adam’s bite, sin came into the world and became a part of all people’s very nature. Indeed, David tells us in Psalm 51 that at the moment of our conception, all people are cut down by the inherited sin that brings spiritual and physical death.
All of humanity was trapped on the ridgetop, surrounded by sin and death, with no hope of their own of ever breaking free of their certain and eternal doom. But God, in His incredible love, took pity upon the lost, and sent the only regiment that could save mankind from an eternity in hell. And that regiment was made up of just one man, the God-Man Jesus Christ. God’s one and only Son came down from heaven on a mission: to live a perfect life, to die for the sins of all people, and to rise from the grave victorious!
Like the 100th/442nd, Jesus Christ also had a job to do! He served as the second Adam, who never once succumbed to the devil’s temptations, whose perfect life and innocent death, along with His resurrection from the tomb, brought forgiveness, new life, and life everlasting to all who would believe in Him!
Scripture is clear: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” and “the wages of sin is death, BUT THE FREE GIFT OF GOD IS ETERNAL LIFE IN CHRIST JESUS OUR LORD.” (Romans 3:23 and 6:23, ESV)
Repent of your sins! Believe in Christ for your forgiveness and salvation! Receive the life that He alone has to give!