The 100th or “One Puka Puka Battalion,” rated by “Axis Sally” as the 7th U.S. Army’s “secret weapon,” boasts officers with the highest I.Q. In the Army, that it has lost only three of its soldiers as prisoners of war, that it has approximately 1600 wearers of the Purple Heart, and that never has one of its soldiers gone absent without leave.
This is how Catherine Coyne, feature writer for the Boston Herald, described the Nisei battalion in an article of March 26, 1945.