I don’t know how it got started, but pretty soon our pidgin English expression, ‘Go for broke!’ became the combat team motto. What did it mean?
To give everything we did, everything we had; to jab every bayonet dummy as though it were a living, breathing Nazi; to scramble over an obstacle course as though our lives depended on it; to march quick-time until we were ready to drop, and then break into a trot.
– DANIEL K. INOUYE
From “Journey to Washington,” on the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Published 1967.