<Begin Segment 11>

MA: Okay, so when... so they sent a number of you to Alabama, right?

GF: Yeah. Yes, ma'am.

MA: Was it the same group that had come from Fort Riley?

GF: No. They were all from, most of 'em, from Hawaii. See, they were regular GIs.

MA: And, okay, so you were sent to Alabama to guard, was it German, German prisoners?

GF: They were German prisoners that they got in Africa. They got a group of German prisoners in Africa. And they sent 'em up to the United States and they sent them to Alabama. In Alabama they had some peanut farms. And that's what we was doing, harvesting peanuts for the farmers in Alabama.

MA: So the, the prisoners were harvesting the peanuts?

GF: Yes.

MA: They were working?

GF: Yes, they were the ones working.

MA: And your duty was to guard them.

GF: Guard them.

MA: Oh, interesting. I never... that's, that's interesting that the Germans would be sent to Alabama. How, how many prisoners were there?

GF: The prisoners? I'm not sure how many. You know, really, I don't really know just how big of a group that was there or not. Because if I think right, I'm sure, I probably was not guarding prisoners for, not much, maybe a week when this accident happened. And, actually the accident, and I don't really know just exactly how it happened, what happened because after it all happened I was kinda laid up in the hospital. And when we had this 65th anniversary in Hawaii, I went there for that one purpose. To meet some of the people from the service company to see what I could find out from them. If there was somebody in that, at the time, our wreck or heard about it. But I didn't get to see the service company because I was registered in the medics. So they wouldn't let me in the service... I mean I couldn't sit there because all the seats were taken. So they said, "Well, go on over there. But you can sit here. We'd like to have you sit here for a while, until it started." And when it started, well then everybody from the service company come back over there so I didn't get to talk to them.

MA: So I wanted to ask you a little bit about, again, about the prisoners. Did you ever talk to them, talk to the Germans?

GF: Well, I got to talk to talk to one, really because he wanted to talk, I guess. But he was, talked pretty good English, fairly good English. He says, "Hey, so you're a Japanese. What are you guys doin' over here? You ain't supposed to be guarding us. We're supposed to be friends." I says, "Well, we're friends now, but we weren't then." Says, "You were in the German army and my relatives are probably in Japan. And you fighting against United States, that's a war, American soldiers." And they couldn't figure out us Japanese people being in the American army guarding them. And that's as far as I knew, got to know 'em for little bit of, short time.

MA: Yeah, that's interesting.

GF: Yeah. I wished I could have stayed there longer, or I don't know how long they stayed 'cause I'm sure... I didn't stay there much over a week or something like that. It happened too quick.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.