<Begin Segment 27>

MA: So going back a little bit, you were in Camp Shelby for about seven, eight months, then you started your journey to Europe, you're shipping out to Europe. What was your, what was running through your head when you were leaving the U.S. to go overseas and fight in the war?

GM: Excitement.

MA: So you were excited? Was there any sort of fear, or...

GM: No, there was no fear in it. You know, there's more fear than getting on the freeway with your car, you know. Going to war is, really, it's an exciting thing. It's only, that excitement goes away only after you get hit, and you get the real taste of a bullet, then you know that, hey, you can get killed in this war, like when I got hit. When I came back to the line, I was more cautious than I was when I got hit.

MA: But going over there initially, it was kind of a sense of excitement and adventure for you?

GM: Yeah. Otherwise, you couldn't get all these soldiers to go overseas today. They'd be so scared of going over there, that they'd run away before they even got on the boat.

MA: So when you arrived in -- where did you actually land when you got...

GM: Well, we left New York on the Queen Mary, a very fast ship, took only five and a half days to go across, no escorts. Other guys went across in convoys with a whole bunch of other ships, and they had escort, navy escort. But we, Queen Mary was so fast that it went across the ocean by itself, and it zig-zagged every three minutes, and that's what it takes for a torpedo to get sighted on you. So we went across, landed in Glasgow, Scotland, took a train to, through London to Southampton, got off the train at Southampton and got on a landing craft, went across the English Channel without any rest of getting off the train, got on a landing craft, as soon as we got loaded, we went across the channel into Le Havre, France, that's where they had the big landing, invasion --

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.