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SF: So that particular battle of the Lost Battalion, in the kind of continuous sort of sequence of battles and sort of confusion and moving and all of that, it just seemed like a tough thing, but not extraordinary or anything like that.

SI: Right, right. It obviously was tough because we lost so many men, we had no officers left, a sergeant was in charge of the company, and I was virtually... I suppose in retrospect somewhat ashamed to say that I was virtually, I was not very helpful, not at all helpful in this effort. They sent us along because the attack company with the forward observer can bring in any artillery within range behind you toward the enemy, but the forest, the Vosges Forest, were thick dense pine forest that even in mid-day is mostly cloudy, drizzly rain then, was like twilight or early dawn. It was quite dark and you could not see more than 50, 100 yards. If you saw 200 yard, that was great. And we knew there were enemies nearby. At one point a classmate of mine, Dick Hayashi, who died just last year, was in I Company and the captain, Captain Byrnes, who was killed on this push, sent him off to reconnoiter a ravine to advance. He had a map out. He called me over, he looked and said, "Well, this is where we go. The Lost Battalion is there. Why don't you reconnoiter this ravine to see if the pathway is clear." He says, "You take a patrol up and check this out." So he said, "Yes, sir." He took his patrol, he went up, and came back oh, thirty minutes, forty-five minutes later and says, "Well, it seems to be clear. We met no Jerrys on the way, and I think we can go up to such and such point without any resistance."

So captain, we were all sitting on our butts waiting, so he got the company up and then he alert other companies to your flanks. And we started up this ravine and no sooner than we got a couple hundred yards further and -- I don't know how familiar you are with infantry advance, but the CP and two attack platoons and the reserve sends out scouts up ahead, couple of them, who rotate every few hundred feet or yards depending on the terrain with fresh scouts. And we got not more than a couple hundred yards or maybe even less, when a damn machine gun to the left starts firing. Wounds -- I don't know whether he was killed or not -- one of the scouts. He called out for medics, then they came rushing by with their armband and so forth and stretchers, and they're fired upon because they can't see us. At the same time we could hear the Germans who saying, "Hands up," in English, shouting at us and machine guns, and the shells are landing near us. The limbs are falling down on us and we're flat on our bellies. And all I had was a .45, so what are you going to do if they charge? They weren't going to charge us 'cause we had the whole company. But I envision later that if they had sufficient forces then -- they had caught us in an ambush where they let the scouts through and back and drew the whole company in. And this is only my thought, I have seen no official recording of this, and I don't know if you know the book Lost Battalions -- plural -- of the Second World War. It might be a book that you might be interested in. It's written by a chap in Santa Cruz. His name is -- I loaned the book so I can't -- Schroeder or something, an Austrian who interviewed both American and Japanese. You maybe have heard about it and he has two close versions of the third battalion attacked, the Lost Battalion, and at the same time when the German battalion was surrounded by Americans, and so there was a comparison at about the same time.

But you can see how the 141st Division, 1st Battalion got surrounded because you get sucked into a place like this and you're overrun and surrounded, and you can't fight your way back. So it would seem to me -- not being an infantry more a tactician, realize or know -- but if it could be a similar situation when if they had sufficient forces they could have surrounded us, and we would have been another surrounded battalion, too. But we lay there for what seemed like hours. I'm sure it wasn't that long, but orders came to retreat up the other bank or you leap frog back. The most forward ones run past you and cover you while you do this and go back up the hill. And we went and spent the nights up on the hill, and had... I think we only had cold K rations there up on the hill. But this, to me, in this push was the closest contact. They couldn't have been more than 150 yards or so because you could hear this chap clearly yelling at us to give up, but again I thought this was not unusual to sacrifice one for the other.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.