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TI: Okay, so after that experience in Rome, what happened next?

VW: Then we moved on into, you might say, the combat area. And then they said, "Dig a subtrench but don't stand up." This is at night, too, now. Well, did you ever try and dig a slit trench lying down? It's almost impossible, especially if the ground is hard, which it is hard as a rock. And so I just stopped digging 'cause there wasn't any use in digging. And we'd be all night digging and then there's, we weren't getting sleep anyway. So I just lay on top of the ground, and hopefully -- and I could hear the, Long Toms, the shells going over. [Makes sound effect] And you could hear 'em, and they'd be firing way back and then they'd go over our head. And those were called the Long Toms or the 240s maybe, for all I know. And so then we moved into a, kind of a small city. And the buildings are made of hard material, like maybe, I don't want to say granite, but made out of ceramic or something, or brick or stone. And all of a sudden, the 88s started flying in on this building, and it was blasting the building around, and I was hoping it wouldn't come in the big windows that we had. It didn't, which I was a little surprised. And here it was, blasting off the corners of the building and so on, and, but it didn't come in the windows. [Laughs] And if it had, I wouldn't be here talking to you. And so that's when I asked the Captain Feibleman, I said, "When are we gonna get into the fighting?" And I said, "Before long," I said, "the war will be over." And he said, "Oh, no," he says, "it's gonna be a long time," he said, "Virgil." So he was right, too, I'll tell you. Yeah, long time. And then we went on, we set up and things like that, we fired at Leghorn and all that.

And then we fired at, we got a call from the 442nd, and they needed help because they were pinned down. And the Germans had 'em, they were up on the hill, and our unit was down below trying to get to them up on the hills, and they got pinned down. They were firing artillery and throwing grenades down there and so on.

TI: And was this at Hill 140, we're talking about?

VW: Yeah, yeah. And it was Hill 140 that the Germans were on up there. And so they asked artillery support right away. So we had to hurry up and get organized and get in there. And we did. And we also were the first unit to use the proximity fuse in Europe. And so the proximity fuse being that we would set the fuse on the, on the shell so that it would explode when it got around twenty to fifty feet in the air (above) the target, and then it would spray the artillery, shrapnel, all over, maybe about a hundred yards. And we fired on a bunch of (Germans) there. And I was instrumental in setting some of that stuff up, and it really affected me when I talked about it the first time, because we slaughtered that hill, we really did. Killed 120 Germans right up on that hill, and in about five minutes, six minutes. And they were the enemy, and, of course, we were the people who were trying to get him out of there. And in fact, it was, we were, we were scheduled to go right by that hill after, after they got it loosened up and softened up where we could go. They would not allow us to go by that hill. They said, "Don't let the artillery people go by that hill because it was slaughter." And so we were, we were, our route was changed to go around where we couldn't observe the devastation that we had put on the Germans there. They didn't want us to see it.

TI: So let me, let me make sure I understand this. So these proximity fuses were designed so you would shoot a barrage, and they would explode in the air above the enemy, that was the idea, and the shrapnel would hit them. And so this was really the first time used in the field?

VW: It was the first time used in Europe, that's the report that we got.

TI: And, and so you not only had to set the direction and altitude and all that, but --

VW: Also the timing.

TI: So you also did the timing, too. So you knew how long it would take before, then you'd calculate a few seconds before.

VW: It was a perfect situation. And we slaughtered them. I read later on about that hill, that was a message that my grandmother had put in her trunk from the hometown paper in Michigan from the Sturgis Journal, and it had an article about so big in it, and my sister found it in the trunk, grandmother's trunk about four or five years ago. And she passed that on to me, and it's in the book, by the way, somewhere. And talks about the artillery in the 442nd, and it said that the artillery is usually, creates about, or forms about seventy percent of the casualties to the enemy, that's inflicted on an enemy in a war. About seventy percent, that's pretty high. And so, and I have to believe 'em because that can be done.

TI: And so as the artillery person, you recognized how, how devastating your work was.

VW: Yeah.

TI: And yet, I've interviewed men who were infantry trying to take that hill, they were taking incredible casualties trying to take that hill. Because as you say, they had, they were on the low ground, pretty much pinned down.

VW: Pretty much pinned down, yeah.

TI: And they were taking heavy losses.

VW: Oh, they, once we fired, they were jumping up and down. They just couldn't believe that we had devastated that whole hill. So, in fact, one of the, I think it was the lieutenant colonel, he was just ecstatic about the devastation that we had sprayed on that hill.

TI: And so it sounds like you have mixed feelings. In one sense, you saved a lot of lives of the 442 guys, and yet, the devastation of killing, helping to kill those 120 men weighs heavily on your mind.

VW: Yeah. And it didn't hit me until, until Susan, the police officer, started asking me questions, and over a period of time, we came upon Hill 140. And that just broke me up because that was many years afterward, but it hadn't, I hadn't even thought about it much before that. Just didn't talk about the war.

TI: Now, if they, if they directed the artillery unit away from, I mean, so you didn't go by it, how did you find out later about what happened, what you did?

VW: Oh, they told us. They told us that we're advised not to go by the hill. That came right through to all of us. And we were not gonna go by that hill. We knew what we had done at the time, but you know, it was victory, so to speak, at the time. But I didn't think about it affecting me later on.

TI: And the command came through because they knew that if the artillery guys saw that it would, it would affect you?

VW: It might. It might, we might lose some of the guys.

TI: That they would maybe perhaps not want to do that anymore.

VW: Right.

TI: I see.

VW: Yeah, so devastating. It was really bad. But that's war.

TI: And then later on, the people just told you what, what happened? I mean, again, you didn't see it, but other people sort of explained to you?

VW: Well, the infantry knew right away that we had stopped all the enemy fire from there. And so they, they were ecstatic. They were jumping up and down really happy. But, of course, it probably saved their lives, somewhat, too. So that's war.

<End Segment 32> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.