<Begin Segment 31>

MA: Were you able to correspond with your family back home?

GM: Uh-huh. Yeah, I, I wrote letters to my sister and she wrote to me.

MA: What types of things did you guys say in your letters? What did you talk about?

GM: Well, all our letters were censored, so you couldn't tell them too much, like you couldn't say where you're at. So to get around it, you tell 'em, "Well, the clouds look real nice down below us," that means you're real high, right? And, "It's very cold," and there might be snow on the ground, you say, "The food is real good, kind of cold, but good." And you might say, "I got to go on a pass," or something like that.

MA: What news did your sister write about camp, I mean, anything?

GM: Not a real lot, says what we're doing there, and, "Take care of yourself," and, "Do you need anything?" and things like that. But the letters were pretty brief.

MA: Where was your brother at this point? 'Cause he was in the army before Pearl Harbor. What happened to him?

GM: Well, he got sick towards the end of the war, and he had kidney problems, rocks in his kidneys or something like that, and the army and during those days didn't know too much about kidney stones, and so they went through -- I forget, he said something like thirty-eight surgeries, a number of 'em. He said, "I was like a guinea pig in the army." And by the time he got out, he had a third of a kidney left.

MA: But he stayed stateside? So he was in the U.S. the whole time?

GM: Uh-huh, he was always in stateside, yeah. And he was... I forget when he was discharged, before I got out or I think he was discharged after I got out. But he got out on a medical... he didn't go overseas.

MA: And then also, I was thinking about if you, did you correspond with your sister, your other sister in Japan? Did your family hear from her at all?

GM: No, we just paid no attention to that at all, basically, until after the war. It seemed like a different type of a war with a sort of lost cause, like. Well, she's over there and we're over here, and we didn't want to write back and forth because of the, Americans think you're always doing something wrong, so we were very careful about that kind of stuff.

MA: So in March, let's see, it's March 1945 that you moved out of the Champagne Campaign, and what happened after that?

GM: Well, we went to Marseilles, and we thought we were going to go home. Some guys said we were going to go to the Pacific, and the rest of 'em says, "No, we did enough, they'll bring us home." And they changed our clothes and everything, and gave us some new equipment, and then we got on the landing ship again, a bigger one. I said, "This thing will never go across the ocean." [Laughs]

MA: That's interesting, though. So you had no idea where you were going to be going?

GM: Well, the regular soldiers didn't know too much at all. And they didn't tell us we were going back to Italy until we got on those ships, and there's no place else to go but to Italy. And so we landed in Italy, and they briefed us not so much of the battle coming up, but briefed us on some more action. And they told us it's a, a secret, everything is in secrecy. They don't want anybody to know we're going back in Italy. And so we couldn't even go on passes, because this whole movement, in order to make it work, it had to be in secrecy. We didn't want the Germans to know we were coming.

<End Segment 31> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.