Harry Abe, WWII Japanese-American GI, dies

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, many Americans became deeply suspicious of immigrant families living among them.

But a Japanese American who went on to practice family medicine on Long Island for nearly 60 years was so determined to prove those suspicions unfounded that he deferred his pursuit of a medical career to serve with the U.S. Army's segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

Dr. Harry Abe, a former medic with the mostly Japanese unit whose members earned two Medal of Honor citations for their actions during a single 1944 battle, died Nov. 19 at his Bay Shore home. Abe, who was 94, was president of the medical board at Mid-Island Hospital in Bethpage during the 1980s, and was a staff physician in the infirmary at Farmingdale State College for some 30 years before he retired in 1994.

"He would have wanted to be remembered as someone who gave of himself as a doctor and as a veteran," said his wife, Lynne. "He did not hold bitterness for the discrimination he faced before and after the war."

Born in Seattle to immigrant parents who ran a dry goods store in Portland, he was a 26-year-old graduate of Oregon State when President Franklin Roosevelt gave the 1942 executive order that allowed military leaders to round up Americans of Japanese descent and send them to prison camps. Although members of Abe's family were among the more than 120,000 held captive, he volunteered to join the U.S. war effort, even faking an eye test to disguise a bad right eye that would have barred him from service.

The 442nd he served with earned a total of 21 Medal of Honor citations for action during World War II, making it the most decorated unit of its size in military history, according to the GlobalSecurity.org website.

The unit's most storied battle occurred during an October 1944 rescue of the "Lost Battalion," members of the Texas National Guard who were pinned on a ridge in France, west of the German border. Braving five days of freezing rain and artillery fire, members of the 442nd inched their way up a steep ravine against dug-in Nazi troops.

SEE PHOTOSNotable deaths: Long Islanders we recently lost

"I think one of the things we really all wanted to tell was the story of the Japanese Americans . . . what they did and what they went through to show their faith in democracy," he told Newsday on the eve of Veterans Day in 1999.

After leaving the military as a sergeant with a Purple Heart citation, he earned a medical degree from Marquette University. Abe told Newsday he was turned away from one New York hospital because of anti-Japanese discrimination before he was allowed to complete an internship and residency at St. Mary's Hospital in Brooklyn.

He married his first wife, Fusako, before establishing a family medical practice in Wantagh in 1953. She died in 1992.

In addition to his second wife, Lynne, whom he married in 2008, survivors include two children by his first marriage: Douglas Abe, of Rockaway, N.J., and Carolyn Abe-Ishii, of Agoura Hills, Calif., and stepchildren Kerry Hotine of Cold Spring Harbor and Gerrit Ridgeway of Kenosha, Wis. A memorial service was held at St. John's Episcopal Church in Cold Spring Harbor.