<Begin Segment 33>

TI: So after, so you're, you're off line now, then what happens?

FS: Well, we're billeted in this barn, you know, what's left of us. And to Colonel Purcell's credit, he came down, called us all together, and he said, "You did a hell of a thing," he says. "I'm going to make sure that somebody hears about it. You're gonna get a medal for this." And that was, 3rd Battalion got a presidential citation, but he was just one of those kind of guys. I don't remember going to the review for, for General Dahlquist. By that time we were all numb enough that I don't remember a damn thing. And then, but I do remember these guys, we got back there, they took their shoes off, and their feet got about this big around and turned red and purple. We didn't have good, good shoes, and from the cold and the wet, and some of those guys finally had to go back. They couldn't, they couldn't walk, they couldn't do anything. That was, that was the, geez, that was bad. I can just see those guys'... my, my feet to this day, of course, can't stand cold, but not like those guys. I'm sure they're permanently, were permanently crippled from that.

TI: And so you guys were then, what happened after that?

FS: See, well, then, then what, what few of us were left, they loaded us in trucks and took us south to the south of France, there down around Nice and Menton, and the Italian border. And it was there that we started to get great numbers of replacements. And it was there that we were, we were training. For a while we -- have you ever been to France?

TI: Yes, I have.

FS: Have you, well, you've been, have you seen remnants of the Maginot Line?

TI: No.

FS: But anyway, the Maginot Line also had fortresses between Italy and France, and they were these, these huge, they dug tunnels through the mountains and put these big gun emplacements and pointed 'em towards Italy, pointed 'em towards Italy. And so when we sat on these defensive perimeters, we would occupy these forts, and then they would send out patrols and stuff. But it was pretty static; the Germans weren't trying to do anything, and we didn't, we really didn't know what the hell we were doing there, but, except that we were resting and training. But we would sit in these, these big forts, and the Germans had had the presence of mind to blow the turrets, the gun turrets off so that they were open. You could look around, and occasionally you'd send a patrol out and nothing would happen. So it was, it was a, just a strange thing. Except -- and I still, for my life I don't know how this happened -- but our, our company headquarters was in a town called Sospel, and it's right close to the border up in the mountains. And one day an artillery shell landed in the courtyard, and the supply sergeant and the company clerk were standing out there, and he got killed. And we, we didn't lose hardly anybody -- that's the only guys we lost there. But it was the damndest story.

TI: So it was almost like a fluke, that they were shelled.

FS: Yeah, but I don't know how the Germans put that shell in there, to tell you the truth. But they did, and it was right in the courtyard, right where the company headquarters was. And of course, if you're the supply sergeant or the company clerk, hey, that's a safe job, you know. We were there, oh, back in the '90s, and the French, the French have put up, the people of Sospel have put up a little plaque honoring these two guys. Anyway, so we, we sat, we were up there, and then we, for a while we were billeted right along the Riviera coast looking out over the ocean, and they said Germans were coming in there and doing this and that, and of course it was... [laughs] it was pretty good duty. Going to town and getting into trouble, and all that kind of neat stuff.

The story I was going to tell you was that when we first moved down there and we were billeted in, in an old farmhouse, and we got a, we got a new captain -- the officers died out fast, as fast as the enlisted men, got a new captain. And God, a runner comes down and he says, "Hey, Rosie, Captain wants to see you." "Oh, God, now what did I do?" "I've got a letter from the American, from the American Red Cross, and your sister says she has not heard from you in umpteen months, and she wanted to know what had happened to you." [Laughs] He says, "You go back to that whatchamo and you write a letter to your sister." [Laughs] I was embarrassed more than anything else. But it just, it was one of those things; I'd intended to write moving north, couldn't do that, couldn't get mail. When they pulled off for rest before "Lost Battalion," I was gonna write a letter. So, God, it was, it was about three months before I got any. But anyway... I got mad about it. "What the hell?" [Laughs] But... shoot.

TI: Oh, that's a good story.

<End Segment 33> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.