<Begin Segment 18>

MN: And then was it also at about that time that you folks were asked to do a demonstration?

KM: No. It was after we joined the 100th up in Civitavecchia, which is, a few miles north of Rome. You see, the 100th led the way, the 5th Army, from Anzio all the way up to Rome. They cleared the path, and when they were ready to march into Rome, they were ordered to stop on the roadside, and some other American outfit entered Rome as the conquering hero. And this is one of the things that the 100th were very mad about because they had endured so much, especially in the Battle of Cassino before Naples. Our first 442 replacement joined 100th in April of that year, the first replacement group, at a point when after Cassino, the 100th had, from original thirteen hundred, battalion, they were down to about five hundred able bodied rifleman. And from the group that came back from the hospital, the wounded and replacement from the 442, two or three groups of 442 replacement had joined the 100th. And this is before we left. We left, we joined up, the 100th and 442 in June. But this was early April yet. And so the replacement that came directly from Camp Shelby to join the 100th was early April, and April and May they had then come back to about a thousand able-bodied rifleman when we got together in Civitavecchia first day of battle for the 442 to Belvedere. The 100th had original 100th and replacement 442, they were not fully... they were a little less than, the normal strength of a battalion is about twelve hundred, but there were about a thousand. But they became the 1st Battalion of the 442, and the 2nd and 3rd Battalion of the infantry was combined and became a combat team again for the first time. And it was at Civitavecchia, this place just north of Rome, that the 34th Division Artillery Commander... and I don't know if it was the 34th Division Commander himself, wanted an exhibition of, to prove ourselves, the 522 who had come with such a fabulous record in training. And so the Artillery 34th Division Commander wanted to see for himself just how good we were and called for an exhibition.

MN: And how did that exhibition go?

KM: Okay. So as I explained once before, the battalion had three gun batteries. Four guns in A Battery, four guns in B Battery, and four guns in C Battery. And in the normal course of things, the B Battery number two gun would be the gun that was to register the entire twelve guns for the whole battalion. And we will be the ones to fire what is called smoke shells to see where the shells would land. Then the fire direction center would make the adjustments after the first round. And so when we got ready to set the guns, the sergeant who was in charge of the four guns, although he was in charge of number one gun, he came over to me and said, "Hey, Kats, this is a very important exhibition, so let me take over." So I said okay, so he sat down and he set the deflection. Well, you remember, on the ship, all of us went through morning and afternoon rituals of adjusting ourselves to the new panoramic sight. Well, the sergeant, as it turned out, came and took my place, but he set the gun according to what he remembered. And so when the call came, right so much, he naturally turned the knob left and set the sight and fired the first round. The first round came right near where the general and the observation crew was watching, you know. In any event, fired the second round, because they want to make sure your adjustments are correct. And so they went through and the sergeant was still sitting in my seat and he was still doing the second reading. Second round went, the second round came even closer to the observation. They had to duck. The shell came so near where they were, by the sound, you know. And so the general got so mad. He turned to our colonel, Colonel Harrison, said, "Colonel, you take your boys back to wherever you came from. I don't need them over here," he ordered them. And so the... basically, at that point, nobody knew what happened because it happened just between the sergeant and I. But two weeks, I think... no, no, it didn't last two weeks. One week thereafter, night and day, we had to go through the same ritual which we had done on the ship. But it so happened with the sergeant taking my place and he did what he did erroneously. And I never did tell anybody the reason why, until years afterwards when we decided to talk story. But that's exactly what happened. He moved me aside and set the gun himself the old fashioned way, and almost wiped out the general. So when we took over, there was no problem because we had gotten adjusted to the new panoramic sight.

MN: As a result of that, were you bawled out?

KM: No. I don't remember any inquiry afterwards as to what happened. I think... I think the sergeant must have realized, but besides that, that sergeant was a regular army soldier. He was in the regular army before World War II, before December 7, he was already in the regular army, and so his language was atrocious. His language was regular army, every other word starts with an F, and he would jump on our neck. You know, his primary duty during training was to clean the area. In other words, every morning before anything else, we had to clean our area that we lived, which meant picking up cigarette butts, picking up matches, every little speck of rubbish had to be picked up. And he was the one that would be in charge, and he would jump on our back. And that was his number one job duty, actually.

MN: I guess everybody was lucky that no one got hurt.

KM: Oh yeah, nobody got hurt. Really, that was really fortunate because it could have wiped out the general. That close it came.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.