<Begin Segment 27>

TI: Okay. So after Hill 140, what happened, do you remember?

FS: The next, the next major battle that our company was involved in, as I recall, was Luciano. And K Company was the lead on that thing. And it, like all those Italian country towns, it's built on a hill, and there was always a road that goes up, goes up into the town, and the Germans, it was a German strongpoint for that line that protected, protected the Arno River. So we had, that was the key to them, and they, they fought really hard. We were there, God, two or three days. I just, my squad leader was a fellow named Harry Kanada, he was a, he was a Buddhahead from Honolulu. We set up our mortars in a grape arbor there, our mortar, our squad mortar. And it was not, there was nothing to fire at at the moment, but we were drawing fire. And so word came down that, word came down that they had captured one of our handheld radios, and "just be careful what you say." So Harry, I can remember, the Germans were sniping at us from the church steeple, and he didn't want to say it in English, so he said something in Japanese, anyway, that there was a German in the something or other, and he couldn't think of "church." So he, I can remember he said something like, "Oinori suru toko," you know, where you, where you go pray. [Laughs] And I don't know whether that solved the problem, but I could, I do know that every once in a while, somebody would, they'd be shooting into there, and they'd hit the bell and hear it go clang. [Laughs]

TI: That's interesting how they used Japanese, improvising, used Japanese to...

FS: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, that, I just remember him because he couldn't, he couldn't think of "church," anyway. [Laughs]

TI: That's, that's a good story.

FS: It was, that was, it was real sad, too. The Germans had big trenches and stuff like that, and they were supported by artillery. I just didn't... we went back there afterwards to look at the town, and it was completely different. They'd paved the street and they fixed the church up.

TI: When you, when you go back to -- this is after the war many years...

FS: Oh, this was, yeah, this was in 1994/1995.

TI: Do you, do you ever come across people who remember the fighting that happened during World War II?

FS: Well, in Luciano nobody was, but, but at that, in Sassetta, that house where our company headquarters, we went to there, and there was a woman -- I thought she was a really old-looking woman -- and she said, "Yes, I remember that. I remember the artillery shell that killed those men." She says, "I was sixteen at those, then," and she said she ran in and she grabbed some old curtains, and she wrapped those wounds up. And she said, "But," you know, "the guys died." It was an, it was an interesting story. Amazing that this elderly Italian woman, so we left a whole bunch of presents with her. But she had, other guys had been through there to talk to her.

TI: So you -- okay.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.