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MA: So you were, at this time, you said, in the Champagne Campaign, which was southern France, right?

GM: Yeah.

MA: Was it something where it was constant shooting between you and the Germans, or was it kind of random and...

GM: War is never like that. War is, is battles when you're fighting, the rest of the time is guarding your line, waiting for orders to advance or things like that. But there's more rest time, I think, than fighting. Because the way I believe is the human body can't stand the constant war. It's so nerve-wracking that you'll have a nervous breakdown, and that's what they call shell-shock, is because the pressure on you. And I think they had quite a number of cases of shell-shock in the outfit during the "Lost Battalion," but then they also had another thing that was worse than the shell-shock, it was trench foot. Being in the rain and your feet are wet for days on, your feet start rotting away. And then it turns into gangrene, and that's worse than some other cases. The shooting is, it's sporadic, it's, if you charge or make an attack, then the shooting starts, but then attacks and barrages don't last long, they just last... in the Champagne Campaign, K Company next to us used to fire the guns every night. And they had a gun that came out of the hill, pops up a shot at the Germans and then it went back down into the hill. It was part of the old Maginot Line. But that wasn't going to hurt anybody. The thing about it was that that gun was five stories high, and we had to go to K Company on a patrol and we had to look at the gun that they had. That was more interesting than the fighting itself. And every night, they had a gunfight around seven o'clock, the Germans will fire their burp gun and the, our men will fire their BAR. And it got to a point where we started betting who gets the last shot, because the German gun will go "blap, blap," and that's as fast as those shots will go off. Where the American BAR go "bo-bo-bo-bo-bo," it was a very slow gun. And it seemed that the BAR won every time. It would get, they would get the last shot off, but I don't think they were hitting anybody.

MA: So during the Champagne Campaign, you were just kind of stationed in one area, right, just kind of defending...

GM: Every hilltop.

MA: The hilltops, right?

GM: Yeah. And it stretched out about twenty miles.

MA: Can you explain a little bit about why they called it the Champagne Campaign?

GM: Well, the Champagne Campaign was, first of all, it was the easiest campaign to fight. It was in the Champagne country, the line was only, probably ten miles, maybe a little bit more, in front of the actual Champagne country, which was Cannes, France, and it's the only place in France that liquor was so free, freely available. In other parts of France, they had to go through a town or something and get it. But here, it was right there along the line. And our line was only less than a mile in front of Monaco.

MA: Did you ever go down into the countryside or down into Montecarlo or anything?

GM: I been on the edge of it when I first got there, but that's about as close as I got. Some of the guys used to take off at night and go down there, and bring back some chips, and that's the only proof that you've been in there, was those little Monaco chips. They looked like Las Vegas chips, but that was off-limits, strictly off-limits.

MA: How long were you in this area, in the Champagne Campaign? How long were you there, how many months?

GM: Let's see. Thanksgiving and Christmas, Thanksgiving to Christmas to March, yeah. But we're not in one spot all the time. We were way up, six thousand feet, and then we were down in a little town, then we were on the coast above Monaco, you know, they'd switch around positions.

MA: I see. So you're constantly moving areas.

GM: Yeah. So, but the guns are going off all the time. But down there by Monaco, it was kind of interesting.

MA: Why, what was interesting?

GM: Well, we used to watch the ships come in every, every day, and they'd, the land jutted out, Cape Martin came out into the Mediterranean Sea a little bit, and these ships will circle around behind it and get out in the water and then they fire at the Germans, and then the Germans will return their fire, and we could see this because we're on top of the hill looking down on it. And they'll fire and we see how they miss, and then the ships will lay down a smokescreen and come back into the bay again, and it was kind of interesting. In fact, one of the companies down there, they captured a German submarine down there that came into shore, you know. But one of my friends got his leg blown off on the beach down there, but, you know, it's, war isn't fighting all the time. For the amount of time they're fighting, it's not that long.

<End Segment 30> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.