<Begin Segment 25>

TI: I was curious, your first impressions of, when you saw the men in the 100th, what, what were your impressions?

FS: Well, there's a certain amount of awe involved, because we already knew that they had done some great things down at, at Cassino, and that they were, and they, and the crossing of the Rapido out of Cassino. And so they had, they had already developed a, a fair reputation as really a good, good combat infantry outfit. So the first day for us anyway, we just, I don't know whether we were in reserve or what, but nothing happened. We just kind of, well, there was a dead German in a ditch or somebody, something like that. And then the next day, we moved into a little, towards the town called Sassetta, and we were, we were ready to move up, and our company headquarters was in a little farmhouse at the curve in the road there at Sassetta, and Sassetta was just a little village at that time. And we were sitting along the, moving along the road that goes out of town when the artillery barrage came in. And we heard, just then I heard the shells go off and pretty soon, here comes our captain, Captain Lazinsky, and two guys are guiding him out of there. And it turned out that the, the, Lieutenant Burt, who was the, the officer in charge of the headquarters, and two other guys, the first sergeant and (my) friend, who I went into the service with, went into the army with, Gordon Yamaura, were all killed in that barrage. And that was, this, this was a very traumatic thing. So we were still sitting there, and then word came down that the Germans had cut us off, and our, that our company or something was cut off at the moment. But there was no risk involved, the Germans didn't, didn't, that we're not in any imminent risk, but that we were cut off for the moment.

[Interruption]

TI: So, Fred, let's pick it back up. So you just had gone through an artillery barrage to your, your headquarters, and K Company is cut off. So then, then what happened?

FS: Well, then the 100th Battalion pushed through us, and they broke, broke through us, and then we were okay. So we were, we were then ready, we were ready to go. We just joined them and moved forward. It was, it was as simple as that, and I know that was the first night we were under machine gun attack, and we went, we were climbing up over a ridge, and it was approaching dark, and all of a sudden these German burp guns opened up, and I, I don't know how close they were to us, but I tell you, the first time you hear a German machine gun, you know, it was a burp gun. And they, they fired, I don't know, a hell of a lot of bullets in one, in a minute. And really did scare the hell out of you.

TI: When you think back to those early days of combat with K Company, do you think back of, like, how green you guys were? You were next to the 100th, you said, "Well, they pushed through," and, I've read some of the books where, yeah, the, the 2nd and 3rd Battalion were sort of left on exposed hills and were exposed to machine gun fire, and then the 100th kind of went around and surrounded them, took them out and then it was over.

FS: Well, I... well, combat is something just completely different. You say, "Well, I'm ready for combat," you're really not. And I guess the true measure of it is that hey, somebody's going to kill you if they can, and that you have to, you have to act, you don't want to get killed, but you can't, you can't chicken out, either. It's... and until you experience it and survive it, you can't describe what the hell goes on.

TI: Now, I'm curious, when you're on the, the ground like that, how aware are you of what the other battalions or companies are doing?

FS: You only know what the guy next to you and the guy over there and the guy in front of you is doing. You don't know -- the big picture of the war is right there in your slit trench. [Laughs] That's, that's the big picture. You know, the ordinary dogface, he's, to hell with strategy, to save his butt.

TI: So you're just trying to survive, and...

FS: Yeah, you survive, you're fighting the war, but you still survive. You're doing no good if you're dead, you know. So you survive, you push. When the platoon sergeant tells you, "Let's move," you move, and that's it. You're committed to that.

TI: But do you remember as you go through, that just through experience, you just learn little things? Like next time I do this or I don't do that...

FS: Yeah, or, you know, you hear a shell coming, you know, you hit the ground. And it's as simple as that, but, we had guys, replacement guys who when the shells came in, got up to run, and it's fatal. It'll get you every time. You just learned to dig your slit trench so it's deep enough so you can't get hit, and all these things. It's, it's on-the-job training, and it's a matter of being quick or dead.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.