<Begin Segment 20>

MN: You know, I was just wondering, you have these accidental deaths, like this one is an exhibition of mines and people got hurt. You know, what do you remember about instances of boys getting hurt or being killed by, you know, our own men, friendly fire?

KM: Well, the 522 Field Artillery, in all of the three years that we were in, we had two casualties in the front. One casualty was this fellow who was on duty at night, sitting in front of a little cottage or whatever. It was the headquarters of the headquarters battery, our field artillery headquarters battery. It was outside the house, where the headquarters was located, sitting on a chair. And one of the non-coms was inside, working late and cleaning his pistol. Pistol went off, shot the man who happened to be sitting in front of the, right in front of the office. That was our number one casualty.

And the other casualty was from my battery, from a Lanai boy. He was a forward observer group. But he was one of those real meticulous forward observer. You know, forward observer, you have the lieutenant, then you have a radio man who carried the radio and another man who helped to carry the radio. So they were a group of four, basically. Well, Tomita was one of the forward observer troops. And he had built a foxhole, and they had some time, so he had built a very sturdy, complete foxhole. The danger at that time in in France was the tree bursts. The trees were so thick that when a round, instead of going through the trees and landing on the enemy, could hit the trees and hit our own troops before it gets to the enemy. So what he did was he built one with a good cover on the top with only one entrance in the rear. From the backside is the only entrance where you can get into the foxhole. Now he got wounded and practically, basically, bled to death actually, but he got killed from what the best we could gather from our 155 further back of us, because the only way he could have gotten wounded was from tree bursts from behind, not from the front. Front would have been less, you know, but evidently, it wasn't enemy fire. So our only two casualties we had was the two casualties throughout the campaign. Artillery was very lucky because... because we had the infantry in front who took good care, guarded us so carefully that none of the enemy infiltrated through, were we discovered by the Germans. Our worst fear would be counter batteries from the German artillery firing at us if they locate our location. But we never got any so-called counter battery by the Germans, nor did the German infantry infiltrate through the infantry to come at us. Because they would have loved to find the artillery because we gave them such close support.

MN: The infantry did a good job, then.

KM: The infantry protected us as much as they could because they knew how valuable our firepower was.

MN: I think we'll end here.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.