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I: Chet, this is the end of your training, and after training, did you directly go overseas?

CT: Yes. We went over right after training to, we went to Newport News where we debarked. We went on, got on board liberty ships, these were the old liberty ships that were built in a hurry, little bitty boats, that the think the top speed was about twelve knots an hour, ten knots, that's about thirteen miles an hour. It took us twenty-eight days to get across. We were in a huge convoy, there must have been literally a hundred ships in that convoy, and it could only go as fast as the slowest ship, and the slowest ship was, I think, the one I was on. It just seemed that way, of course, it was a liberty ship. We had cruisers, sub chasers, submarines, everything that you can name we saw floating alongside of us, zooming in and out on the way over. It was a, twenty-eight days is a long time on board ship. I was not seasick to the point of throwing any of my meals away, but I was really bilious or nauseous quite a bit of the time. The good friend of mine, Kobe Shoji from I Company --

I: How do you spell that?

CT: K-O-B-E was the first name, Shoji, S-H-O-J-I. He had just graduated, he had his bachelor's, and he was interested in education. I think he went back later and became a principal of the school, something like that. But anyway, he had broken his arm in training, just before we were supposed to leave. And he could have been left behind, but he did not want to be left in the States, so he came over with his broken arm and all. And we became good buddies going over, and for the first two days he wouldn't eat at all, broken arm or no broken arm, he wouldn't eat, he was just violently ill. And I would try to give him soup or something, just to get him some nourishment. Then after about a week he started to eat, he still couldn't move his arm very well. But two of us went over together, I was trying to feed him and not get ill, and he was trying to eat and not get ill, and between the two of us, we were, I guess, representative of the seasickness of the landlubbers going over to Europe. We ended up in Naples twenty-eight days later, all kinds of gambling and so forth went on. One enjoyable experience coming up at night out of the hold where we were sleeping, you sleep in bunks five tiers high, and I was on the fifth bunk. I decided if I'm going to get seasick, I'm going to get seasick on top. I don't want to be in a bottom bunk until I got sick, so I grabbed the top bunk. But any rate, the story I want to get to is very brief and really not a great story, but it's about coming on deck where you can get a little fresh air at night. Because you got all this foul air down in the hold where you've got hundreds of guys, GIs down there being transported over in these five-tier bunks one after the other. Of course, you can't smoke because the smoking lamp isn't on, that's what they called it on board ship, and it was never on, practically never on. So you'd go up on deck and you couldn't smoke, but you'd get fresh air at night. And what was so interesting at night, for landlubbers, you look over the side of the railing in the middle of the ocean, and suddenly you see all these fluorescent forms floating by, like lightning bugs in the bottom of the ocean there, underneath the ship going by. To us it was just amazing. We didn't realize that all that plant life had lights and things in them. The sailors would tell us about these various things, of course, I've forgotten most of it. But the thing I remember is looking over the side of the railing and seeing these phosphorescent life forms, marine forms floating by. And every now and then -- this was during the day, of course -- huge jellyfish and things were being pointed out, and of course the porpoises and things of that nature, whales. I don't know what they were, whales or what, but we'd see some huge things off in the distance, and then they would sand or go down when the ships would come roaring by. We assumed they were large fish and friendly. But this was the trip going over, and mostly we played cards and told tales and just got to know each other pretty well. And there was twenty-eight days of this, and all the time the ship was rocking and rolling and pitching. And we finally hit Naples on the twenty-eighth day. We had a couple of alarms about being attacked, but we really did not run into a single attack by the enemy.

I: Did a lot of the people in the 442 get sick?

CT: Yes. Quite a, I would say at least two-thirds of them were sick. But not everyone left their meal at the side of the rail. [Laughs] You can get sick without doing that. You just, you really don't feel like eating when, say, breakfast or lunch or supper comes along, but we were told by the veterans, the sailors, that you should really eat. You don't have to eat a lot of the gooey stuff or spicy stuff, but just eat bland food and solids, keep it going down, and it's better for you. And so I kept doing that, it was good advice. But essentially a lot of us were mildly seasick going over, and about a third, I guess, were...

I: Any other incidents that you can remember? Did you go over with another regiment or another group on the ship?

CT: I don't recall the groups that we were with, it was rather a blur. All I knew is there was a whole slew of GIs on board ship with us. We may have been in with another company or two, in fact, on our ship. We know that one company, I think a 2nd Battalion group was on another ship. And whether they had, I think they had to dock in Oran, Africa, and that, as we got near there, we heard rumors that they were gonna go to North Africa. The first rumor was that they were gonna fight with the remnants of the 100th Battalion, or the 34th, but then that was quickly quelled when they said, well, hell, those guys are out of there. They're over in Italy now. So another rumor came up that they were gonna be on guard duty or something. We never knew really what happened, we knew they did land finally in Oran, and they stayed there for about a day or so, and then they headed up and rejoined us in Naples. After the war we found out that what they had to do was deliver certain supplies off the ship, had nothing to do with the troops. But rumors flew fast and furious during war.

I: Okay, where did you land and do you remember when you landed?

CT: We landed in Naples. Naples was a beat-up port, it was terrible. The Germans had left it, they had sunk ships all around. Of course, the navy and the army engineers had cleared as much as they could, and so we got in very close and landed. And this had been cleared for some time, couple months.

I: When would that have been?

CT: I guess sometime in... gosh, I'm trying to reconstruct the time, I guess it was in March or April, March of 1943, '44, I guess, '44.

I: And from Naples, where did you go?

CT: We went right outside of Naples, about ten miles, six miles out, to a little town, I've forgotten it, and it was a staging area. In other words, it was a chance to get our land legs back together, to check on our supplies, clean our weapons, get the sea air out of it, make sure everything was in working order, and just to regroup and get our units together, make sure everything was in, that we were all organized and together. And we were in the staging area from, I don't know how long, but it seemed to me like a week or so.

I: So you were the first wave of the 442 essentially to hit Southern Italy before the actual link-up with the 100th Battalion.

CT: That's right. We had come with two battalions minus our first battalion. Our first battalion had been left behind in Camp Shelby.

I: Which two battalions were they?

CT: The second and third battalions came over.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1980 The Center for Educational Telecommunications and Densho. All Rights Reserved.