Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Fred Shiosaki Interview
Narrator: Fred Shiosaki
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Spokane, Washington
Date: April 26 & 27, 2006
Densho ID: denshovh-sfred-01-0039

<Begin Segment 39>

TI: Well, I want to try and get you back to the States. So was there anything else during the, those weeks or months that you were in, that stand out to you?

FS: Well, we, then we, they... there was nothing to do. What does a, what does a combat infantryman do when there's no war? So they pulled us back and they, we were stationed around an old German ration dump. And, of course, there were a bunch of German prisoners there who were supposed to be working this place, cleaning this up. So we were there, and part of the guys, you could get a pass and somewhere along the line, they came through and they said, "We have, we have trips to Switzerland for you guys." And so, you know, there were tours of various parts of Switzerland, and so we, some of us got to do that, and I went to Switzerland for four or five days. And Switzerland was a lovely, clean place with, with very friendly people who were happy to see us. It was just, it was just like night and day. Clean, they had not -- well, they had experienced the war in that things were rationed, they didn't have cigarettes and stuff like that. That was good trading stuff, by the way, cigarettes. [Laughs] So we did that, and guarded, guarded this ration dump, or guarded the prisoners who were cleaning up the ration dump.

And one of the things they had, they had a month's tour in Florence where you went, they had University Training Center, they called it, and it was, it was in an old university there. This had to be in, probably, September or so. And so I'd been going to college and I said, "Well, I've had a year of college, I'd like to go to this thing." And it was a good, good way to screw off. We're billeted right in town in the old railroad station in Florence there, and we would, morning we would go to class, and they, they brought academicians from the States, and they taught the classes. And it was a hell of a good deal for them, so they'd teach half a day and wander around the rest of the day, so it was a good deal for them, and it was fun for us. Good relief from, from the boring business of guarding and all this kind of stuff.

TI: That sounds fabulous. I mean, I love Florence, I mean, the art and the history.

FS: Yeah, and it was a wonderful place them. Florence had been an open city, so there was very little damage. You know where the Ponte Vecchio is?

TI: Uh-huh.

FS: Well, the bridge next to it was, was the, was the regular transportation bridge, and the Germans had, had mined that and blew it up. But the Ponte Vecchio they did not, but what they did was that they, they demolished all the buildings leading to the Ponte Vecchio from the south, so it was all rubble. And the city itself was intact, and so it was a lovely place to be, and we would wander around. Didn't have to study, you just went to, went to lectures and stuff.

TI: Oh, that sounds wonderful.

FS: It was, it was a great experience. Then that lasted a month, and then they said, well, the guys who had the higher, you remember reading, hearing about everybody got points for all kinds of stuff, you know, how long you're in the service, how many months you were overseas, how many medals you got and so on. So the guys from Hawaii, of course, and cadre got to go first. They were out of there right away. Then the guys from Hawaii got to go home. So then it was my turn and this was probably October. And so they shipped me to, they sent me to... they detached me from the 442nd and shipped me to this point of embarkation in, in Leghorn. And a couple of us, we sat there and sat there and sat there, and they were, really, they tried to get us home. They, they loaded us in just about anything that could, could float. That's what I got, that's what we got on. There were ten or eleven of us, and they put us on an old liberty ship. That was the smallest of the transports, and we bunked in with the crew and ate with the crew. And that was, that was the first of December, I know, the first of December. And geez, they took twenty-some days to get from, from Leghorn to Newport News, Virginia, and it was the time for the winter storms, and I thought that old tub was gonna tip over, oh, geez. But I, I must have gotten sea legs, because I didn't get sick. The food was terrible, some of that food had been in that, on that, aboard that ship for five years, I think. The crackers were full of weevils, you know, you'd crack it open and knock it and little black wiggly things would come out. [Laughs] Well, we did, we did get home, we did get to Newport News, Virginia, on Christmas Eve.

<End Segment 39> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.