<Begin Segment 11>

I: I'd like to ask Chet, could you describe, after landing in Italy, your impressions of Italy and the Italian countryside?

CT: We landed in Italy in spring of '43, '44. Italy is, Naples area, is very, it was rather sparse. It was not as rich and fruitful as we found later on, as the Po Valley area. But when we got there, we had nothing really to compare except from our memories of the areas back home. But Italy was sparse. The only trees they had were some lemon or some olive trees, and they were kind of, to me, they seemed to be scraggly and scrawny little trees. They had probably other crops, but I was not familiar with it.

I: How about the nights? Did it get very cold at night in the summer?

CT: Yes, the nights were quite cool. We were on the coast. Some of us had not experienced this, but from the mainland interior, but most of the Hawaiian group and the coast Japanese Americans understood this type of weather.

I: How about the winters in Italy?

CT: Winters in Italy are something like they are in the States. They can get pretty cold, but that's a... you need heavy clothes, mackinaws or whatever, wool blankets and so forth, if they were available.

I: Describe a typical bivouac in the Italian countryside. You would be marching all day long, let's say not during fighting conditions, and you would stop, what would be the conditions? What about the supper, the mess, the cleaning up, the routine activity, the guard duty? Describe a routine end of march, end of a marching period.

CT: Well, they varied. There's nothing routine, I guess, it depends upon the day. I guess on a non-fighting day, what you would do is you'd try to be moving up towards the area that you're to start the combat action in. But it would take you several days or maybe even a week to get near the area. Sometimes you moved by truck and sometimes you walked or hiked. Tried to get a kind of open area. Not open so that the enemy can see us, but a hilly area so there were some desolate valleys or chasms and things we can hide in. But preferable to a treed area, because tree bursts are something you can't protect against too well. So we bivouacked in areas like that.

I: Trying to explain is that the Germans designed shells that would hit trees and fragment so that they would just fall down on you? How did that work?

CT: Yes. The German had -- and we had 'em, too -- they were, we called them tree bursts. But what they would do is on contact with anything, when the shells hit, the shells would blow up. And they were designed so that when they hit treetops or twigs or branches, they were very sensitive shells and they would blow. It would blow the head of the shell apart, and the shrapnel would fly all over, and it would spray downward on the troops. This is the way the shells were designed. We had 'em and the Germans had 'em. These were called tree bursts.

I: In talking to other members of the 442nd and the 100th, that was probably one of the most feared weapons the Germans had, they could use. Is that true?

CT: Yes. Particularly when you're moving up, or moving into an engagement, or getting ready to lock with the enemy, they use all type -- we used the same things. We used tree bursts, material shells and so forth, and they had 'em, too. Mostly the Germans, I think, had .75s, but they had others. .88s were not a tree burst type weapon, .88s were more like a, they would blow, but they were more like a rifle fire, because it didn't have a trajectory as such like the Howitzers, they would just go straight line.

I: What is an .88, could you describe to us? Perhaps that is also one of the more feared German weapons, an .88 referring to the .88 millimeter. But it would be a very high-powered cannon, very, very accurate. Could you describe maybe some instances of the accuracy and the terrible casualties it would mete out.

CT: The .88 was a very sophisticated artillery piece. I'm not trying to speak as an authority, and I would rather have the artillerymen or the cannon company speak but a cannon or a Howitzer had no grooves in the barrel, where an artillery had a rifling or grooves in the barrel so that the projectile I guess would spiral. I think this was true of the .88, I don't know, but I think that's what an .88 was. The .88 was, I think, about four and a half to five inch diameter, which we had five inches or something like that. But our shell, our artillery, did not go as fast or as sharp as the .88. The .88s were, they could be SP or self-propelled, or they could be mounted on tanks, or they were sometimes just field pieces. They were versatile instruments. You didn't have to lob 'em in air and track the trajectory and wait for them to land someplace, you can aim 'em like an M-1 rifle and go right at the target, because they were that straight and powerful. They had tremendous power, an excellent weapon. Too bad we didn't have it. We used this technique, and it just passes on. We never shot a prisoner, but this was a technique. You bring 'em in one door, take 'em out the other, and if they didn't seem to be responding, then we would tell him, "Shoot him." But it was psychological warfare.

I: Would there be any other incidences that you can recall about the adversary, the German soldier?

CT: The German soldiers were amazed, I think, at the fact that they were fighting the Japanese Americans. As many other Germans had pointed out, they just looked at it. They were, they just looked at us. They couldn't understand who we were and what we were doing there. But I think near the end of the war, they really began to understand that there was a very good fighting Japanese American regiment, and word got around even to us, we heard it. We didn't hear it from Axis Sally or anything like that, but we heard that the Germans didn't want to come in contact with us. This is what we heard.

I: You told me you heard another rumor that was unsubstantiated that Hitler had given orders to the German army to "give it all they got to wipe this regiment out." It was a great irritation, and also a great irritation to the white supremacist Aryan view that the Germans couldn't be beat, particularly by Orientals. Did you hear that, too? Did you hear that from the members of your Company K, or was that generally throughout the regiment that you'd hear that rumor?

CT: I heard it throughout the regiment. Company K had it, but I heard it throughout the regiment.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 1980 The Center for Educational Telecommunications and Densho. All Rights Reserved.