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TI: So let's move on to, you said you were assigned to the 106th?

LP: I went to the 106th Infantry in Indiana, Camp Atterbury.

TI: Now, when you think about... let me ask one question before we go. In terms of, you're in the army, was being at Tule Lake doing guard duty, was that something that you wanted to do or did you want to go fight in the war?

LP: No, I didn't want to go fight. I wasn't happy about being in Tule Lake, and I wasn't happy about what we had to do there. But I would have rather stayed there than go on to Indiana. I would have rather stayed up at the Summit. And even though we did have to pull a lot of hours of guard duty, but we had a good place to sleep, good food, couldn't beat it. The MPs were way better than the infantry.

TI: And so how did the army decide to move you?

LP: I don't know. All of a sudden on the bulletin board one day there's my name, and you're getting transferred, and that was it. Of course, they transferred mostly all the young guys, the guys that are like twenty, nineteen, twenty years old. And then we got transferred to the infantry.

TI: And so when you did that, was that additional training that you...

LP: Oh, yeah.

TI: So this was like infantry training. So tell me about that, so where did you train?

LP: When or where?

TI: Where.

LP: Right in Camp Atterbury. That's a huge military base there, a lot of acreage. That's a big place.

TI: And then after you were done training there, then where do you go?

LP: Then we got shipped to Europe.

TI: And where did you land in Europe?

LP: England or Scotland actually. And then we went over on the Apotenia, which probably was the largest ship in the world before the war, before the Queen Mary and Elizabeth, and it was almost the same size. And it went over by itself, no support.

TI: That's what I was gonna ask if you had, like I hear about these guys, sort of like armadas almost, just all these ships and destroyers...

LP: We went over alone.

TI: Now why was that? Because you guys were really valuable.

LP: Well, one reason is is that ship could go like forty-two knots, and the German subs could go only about twenty. But if a German ship knew where you were coming, they'd sit there with a submarine and sit there with the engines dead, and you could go right over the top of 'em and wouldn't even know it, and they'd come up and torpedo you. But we didn't get, nothing happened when I went over. Took seven days.

TI: Do you recall, did you guys zigzag a lot as you went across?

LP: Yeah, and they do kind of like a W all the way over. And I don't know what good that would do, but nothing happened.

TI: Any memories on that seven-day trip to Europe?

LP: One memory is we hit a storm over there, and this ship was like ten stories high, and the water was coming over the top of it. You couldn't be on the front half of the top deck, it'd wash you off the deck. That's the only excitement we had on the way over. The rest of it was just, that's it.

TI: But the ship is so large, though, it probably went...

LP: It was a big ship.

TI: So it probably was more stable than some of the other smaller ships that went across.

LP: Well, I don't know. I came back on a German ship after we were liberated from the prison camp, and I came back on a German liberty ship, it was a cruise ship. And we didn't hit any storms, and that thing actually rode better than that big ship.

TI: How interesting.

LP: We came back probably about fifteen or sixteen ships to build it coming back.

TI: Yeah, because you hear a lot of stories about seasick and all that, it was pretty rough.

LP: It was quiet.

TI: Okay, so you go to Scotland, and then what happens next?

LP: Then we went to England, and then we got, we got shipped across, I don't know what kind of ships we were on, but we went to France.

TI: And you say your... so most of your fellow soldiers at this point from Indiana? You said this is the Indiana 106th unit?

LP: You know, there was twenty thousand troops in that division and they were from everywhere, you know.

TI: Wow, so it was huge.

LP: But they didn't all go to the front lines, some of 'em were in reserve and I don't know exactly what the story is there.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.