The Purple Heart Battalion by Top Shot Chris Cheng is a sweeping historical novel about love, honor, sacrifice, and the meaning of belonging in America.

After Pearl Harbor, Daniel Tanaka, a Japanese-American student at UC Berkeley, is forced into American incarceration with his family under Executive Order 9066. Despite losing his freedom, he volunteers to serve in the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, where he must prove his loyalty on the battlefields of Italy and France while his family remains imprisoned behind barbed wire at home in America.

Over the past six years, Cheng immersed himself in the history of the 100th Infantry Battalion / 442nd Regimental Combat Team through primary sources, military records, memoirs, and historical research. He traveled to Italy and France to walk the ground where these soldiers fought, bled, and died so as to describe those places as authentically as possible.

Inspired by the true story of the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in U.S. military history, The Purple Heart Battalion blends meticulous historical research with unforgettable characters to tell one of America’s greatest—and least known—World War II stories.