Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Masao Watanabe Interview
Narrator: Masao Watanabe
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: June 19, 1998
Densho ID: denshovh-wmasao-01-0025

<Begin Segment 25>

TI: Okay, I'm going to back up just a little bit. Going from Camp Shelby and then going to Europe, you took some ship transport across the Atlantic. And as you were getting close to, to docking in Europe, what kinds of things were going through your mind as you were getting closer and closer to Europe?

MW: Well, from my viewpoint, I guess the experience with the 100th Battalion pretty well spelled out where we were going and when. So nothing caught me off guard, or caught us off guard.

TI: Because you had the experiences of the 100th, to sort of give you sort of, advance thinking.

MW: A preview of where they were going to use us and how.

TI: And how did you keep track of what the 100th was doing?

MW: Because there were so many relatives between the 100th and the 442, and the 100th took a severe beating the first couple of months in Italy. And they broke up -- to the point where they broke up a part of 442 to replace those that were in the 100th. That's where your uncle and some of the Seattle boys preceded the rest of us. They were replacing those that the 100th lost.

TI: And when you landed in Europe, what was the scene? I mean, was it -- what was going on when you guys first landed in Europe and you first set foot in Europe? What was that like?

MW: Well, it was, I would say, quite a baptism. We didn't have much free time. We landed in Naples and we took subchasers up to Uverta Anzio, right before Anzio, and we set foot right on the upper reaches of Anzio. And before we knew it, we had planes swooping down on us. It was quite a dramatic introduction to war. It was rough.

TI: So right away you started fighting? Was that...

MW: No, it was more air. So there wasn't like ground-to-ground fighting. But we knew there was some bad guys up there trying to shoot at us. It was pretty depressing.

TI: I imagine frightening, also.

MW: Oh, yeah.

TI: This was not training anymore, this was the real thing.

MW: We got a quick introduction as to what war is about.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.