The Varsity Victory Volunteers (Japanese: 大学勝利奉仕団,[3][4] Daigaku Shōri Hōshidan) was a civilian sapper unit composed of Japanese-Americans from Hawaii.
On the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States announced that all Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) students were to report for military duty, forming the Hawaii Territorial Guard (HTG).
These ROTC students were given a rifle with only five bullets and ordered to guard vital installations such as bridges, wells, reservoirs, pumping stations, water tanks, and high schools.
[6] Soon after a petition was written and signed by the ROTC students then sent to the military governor at the time, Delos C. Emmons, which reads, We, the undersigned, were members of the Hawaii Territorial Guard until its recent inactivation.
[8] In December 1942, the VVV would get a visit from Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy who would so happened to be escorted by Hung Wai Ching.
What followed afterward-the record of the 100th, the formation of the 442nd and its history of hard-won battles, the less publicized but equally important and impressive record of the interpreter groups, and the work of the civilians on the home front-was the natural result of the trend which was started in the early months of the war when a group of young men, who numbered at no time more than 170, demonstrated to a suspicious and skeptical community that the Americans of Japanese ancestry were every bit as American and every bit as loyal to this country and to her ideals as any other group of Americans, whether they were white, yellow, black, or brown.