<Begin Segment 18>

TI: Okay, so Nelson, I'm going to jump ahead a little bit here. Because I know you've been interviewed in the past by Go for Broke, so I'm gonna skip ahead to Europe right now.

NA: Okay.

TI: And so I'm gonna skip Camp Shelby.

NA: Okay.

TI: And so let's, let's talk about when you met up with the 100th Battalion. And so why don't you pick up the story there.

NA: Okay. In June of 1944, North of Rome, we finally caught up with the 100th Battalion. And the 100th Battalion had been fighting in Italy from the previous year, 1943. And so after we joined up with the 100th, and the 100th became our first battalion of the three battalions in the 442nd infantry. And so on June 26th, with the 100th Battalion, we were committed, committed into action. And June 26th happened to be one day before my birthday, so I'll never forget the first day of combat. I set up my machine gun, when I first went into Italy, I was a machine gunner.

[Interruption]

NA: And so I set up my machine gun, and we had four machine guns guarding the unit, one in front, one in the back, and one on each side, four machine guns. So that was my duty in the outfit. And a few days later, I saw the first Japanese American that was killed in action. It was just like in the movies, he was underneath the shelter half, and two shelter halves make one pup tent. But he was covered with a shelter half with a rifle stuck in the ground with a bayonet on it, with, capped with a helmet, and that was the first Nisei that I saw killed in action.

And then, then on, in another position, I was witnessing a shelling of a farmhouse. We were on a little hill looking down, and as we were watching the shelling, an Italian family was running toward three or four of us that were congregated. And the grandmother of that family, they must have been working out in the field where all the action was going on, because we could see the shell and the dust and everything in the olive grove, and I'm quite sure that's where they came from. And the grandmother, they were all running as fast as Grandma could run. And the grandma came to me and starting, started to hit me on the chest -- whoops, I better not hit the phone -- but started hitting me on the chest, and at the same time hysterically saying, "When is this war gonna end?" in Italian language, and she just kept repeating the same old thing over and over again and kept hitting me on the chest. And it didn't hurt me, hurt, so I just let her hit me. But the son, must have been his son, finally had to come and restrain her. But that was my other incident that I can remember fighting in Italy.

TI: And Nelson, how did that make you feel? What were you thinking or feeling when this woman, this grandmother, was pounding you on the chest?

NA: Oh, I was saying, "Oh, it doesn't hurt, it doesn't hurt. I'll just let her pound me." No, I wasn't thinking about anything else. But anyway, I was thinking to myself, after I thought about that incident a few months later or a few years later, I was there to end the war so that she could have peace.

TI: Okay, that's good.

NA: That's what I thought about that incident, but I also witnessed the, I'm quite sure it was the first presidential unit citation that the 100th Battalion received. And while I was watching that, I had butterfly feeling from head to toe when I heard the national anthem and the American flag being paraded in dusty old Italian field. And that was another experience I had. And another experience I had in Italy, there was a stream, just a trickle of water coming down the stream with holes in the rock with a water puddle in. And during combat, you never bathe. You don't have time to take a bath, so you're all filthy and dirty. Sometimes we never bathed for a whole month while we're in combat. And so when I saw that, I just stripped down right then and there, and we always carry, you know, everything in our backpack, so I got my bar of soap out and bathing, and all of a sudden, they said, "March order," which means, you know, "Pack up, we're moving out." And so there I was, naked, taking a bath, so I hurried up and finished my bath and put my clothes back on. And we're never supposed to take our ID tag off, so I had that, I had that laying on the rock, and lo and behold, I forgot to put that back on. And boy, did I ever get reprimanded when I went for a new, went to the supply sergeant for a new ID tag. He really reprimanded me up and down. [Laughs] But anyway, I didn't say a word, and he got me a new... but anyway, there's a, my name tag is somewhere in Italy, unless someone picked it up by now.

TI: Good, that's a good story.

NA: Yeah, taking a bath was a luxury in combat. And then aside from getting shelled and -- oh, and there was one incident when the searchlight was in the middle of the night, the army set up searchlights pointing toward the enemy. We could see, that way we could see them in the dark, but they couldn't see us because the reflection from the searchlight would blind them. And so I remember that, too, we had searchlight to help the infantry even in the evening. And that was probably when we were expecting a counterattack because it was one hill called Hill 140, where the Germans killed a lot of Nisei soldiers. And so I experienced that, too.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.