When bombs rained down on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese American college students were among the many young men enrolled in ROTC and called upon to defend the islands against invasion immediately after the attack. In a matter of weeks, however, the military government questioned their loyalty and disarmed them.

In this book, Franklin Odo places the largely untold story of the war-time experience of these young men in the context of the community created by their immigrant families and its relationship to the larger, white-dominated society. At the heart of the book are vivid oral histories that recall the young men's service on the home front in the Varsity Victory Volunteers, a non-military group dedicated to public works, as well as in the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team that fought in Europe and the Military Intelligence Service. Odo shows how their war-time experiences and their post-war success in business and politics contributed to the simplistic view of Japanese Americans as a model minority in Hawai'i and glossed over significant differences in their lives and perspectives. No Sword to Bury is a book about a critical moment in ethnic identity formation among the first generation of Americans of Japanese descent (the nisei) as well as a history of their community during the war.