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MN: And I know when you folks were like, you're in Naples, you're moving north of Rome. And then sometime around there, you folks were also at Anzio. And there's a story about how someone wanted a demonstration of the 522 --

KM: Well, not at Anzio, not at Anzio.

MN: Not at Anzio.

KM: Anzio was the beachhead before Rome, where the Americans would bypass Naples and then landed in Anzio. And when we got into Anzio, we were quickly sent out to the outskirts up on the hillsides. We spent one or two nights there. But the last German air raid, as it turned out, was in Anzio where we experienced. Because thereafter, we never had any, throughout the Italian campaign, we never had an air attack like they did in Anzio. And one other thing that was scary in Anzio was that Anzio was a port where Allies were trying to establish a landing spot. The Germans had the port zeroed in on a railroad gun. We found out that it was a railroad gun up on a hillside where during the day, it'd be hidden in the caves. And nighttime, the railroad gun would come out. And the railroad gun is a 16-inch gun, which is, you could fire it maybe 25 miles away. But we would be up on a hillside, the port would be one more two miles in front of us. And in the back, the railroad guns would fire. The shells would fly overhead, over us, and the shells, the noise of the shell, we could never forget. It was like a washing machine being thrown in the air, it would be flying all overhead and it would land in the harbor. But we were already evacuated up on the hillside.

MN: And that was the first time you folks were sort of...

KM: "Under the gun," so to speak. Yeah. And at night, the two or three nights that we were there, the "Midnight Charlie" would come out. The "Midnight Charlie" was a German airplane that would harass the Americans by flying around and fire machine gun down, you know, aimlessly just at random. And so we had to jump into a foxhole because you couldn't take a chance being out in the open. But then they had a, well, not big air raid but the German army air force raided Anzio. But that was the last, as it turned out thereafter, all the way up to Florence, we never were confronted with the German air force.

MN: And you know, when this is happening, that's your first time, you know, really being in danger.

KM: We were scared stiff, scared stiff. But of the unknown, basically. And none of us got hurt, so you kind of got used to the idea. Of course, the unknown was a very scary thing. But there was nothing you could do about it, other than stay deep in your foxhole.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.