<Begin Segment 12>

MN: And then I know that after France, the 522 was detached from the group. And then you folks went to southern Germany. If you can tell us about...

KM: Not southern Germany, we went to what was called Dusseldorf, right near Dusseldorf, which was on the western edge of Germany. From there on it was what we call Bavaria of Germany, and we broke through the Maginot Line in that area of Kleinblittersdorf, Kleinblittersdorf I think. And from there we got into the battles of Mannheim, and I think also Frankfurt and Heidelberg and Stuttgart, Ulm, Augsburg. And then in the vicinity of Munich, we got into what we think was the main camp of Dachau where we opened the gate, one of the forward observer group opened the gate to one of the... we think it was the main camp because there has been testimony by so many others. But I have to explain the nature of battle in that, at that period. Once we broke through the Siegfried Line, it was a rat race. In fifty-five days, we traveled some six hundred something miles. Remember in Italy was yard by yard, also in France, but in Germany, in fifty-five days, from March 12th to May 6th, when officially in our area, the war ended, we traveled how many?

WN: Forty towns.

KM: We traveled, fifty-five days, we traveled 617 miles, actually. And during that time, we fired some fifteen rounds. fifteen thousand rounds. And so the type of battle was... and we followed General Patton's 6th Armor, we followed them all the way, basically all the way through Germany. Once the breakthrough was done, what happened was that the armor would pursue the retreating Germans, and the fighting invariably would be at the outskirts of various small towns or cities, whatever, along this route, as we mentioned. And because the armor was chasing after them, the artillery was depended upon to come in the vicinity where the Germans were pinned down by the armor, the tanks, we would come over and take over the armor by pinning the Germans down. Invariably the defensive, what you call, was very restrictive, small areas. And then our trucks will go back and pick up the infantry, pick up the inventory and come back to where our guns are located, we will drop off the infantry, and the infantry would wipe out the resistance, and then we'd catch up the armor again. And this is indicative, because in that fifty-five days, we had fifty-two displacements. Let me explain what a displacement is. In fifty-five days, we had fifty-two occasions when we had to set the guns, then move again. So indicative of the kind of happening, almost every day, we were moving from one area... and as I said, we traveled six hundred, over six hundred miles in that fifty-five days. So we were constantly in front of the infantry. Because the infantry had to walk, unless we went there to pick them up, to bring them over there to wipe out the resistance. It was always small pockets of resistance. Patton's armor would come, locate, get in touch with the resistance and pin them down. They would make contact again, but in the meantime, we would take their place and pin them down without guns. And our truck would go back, pick up the infantry, and then we'd drop them off, and they will catch up with armor again.

And so looking back, the 42nd Division and the 45th Division claimed that they were the first unit to liberate Dachau. But Dachau was a major camp. The main camp of Dachau had about thirty or thirty-five thousand inmates. Alongside of Dachau, along this highway, what we called "Death Corridor" on the outskirts of Munich, were about eight or nine sub camps, sub camps where they had five thousand, normally five thousand inmates per camp. And there was what we call a feeder camp to the extermination camp, which is the main camp of Dachau. But the diary kept by one of our boys indicated that on April 28, 1945, which is supposed to be the same day that the 42nd and 45th Divisions claimed that they liberated Dachau, was the day that we opened the gates to a camp of Jewish inmates. And we were so involved with moving from... and in that area, I think we stayed about two or three days. But until... from Dachau to where we ended up, further down south of Munich, there were eight or nine other sub camps, and thousands of these inmates were on the road, starving, dying. This was our experience just at the end of the war. And we kept quiet because the word was we had violated orders in opening the gates, as I understand it. And so those who opened the gates were under orders to keep their mouth shut. And we were not... most of us who only saw the freed Jewish inmates didn't know about the opening of the gates. What we saw, we saw these decimated zombies walking the streets and dying on the streets. And this was our experience with Dachau, for the majority of the artillery boys. But we've had testimony, various testimony from different individuals. One significant one is that he was in Dachau, definitely in Dachau, and was rescued by soldiers, Oriental-looking faces. And this is in the testimony by our Hawaii Holocaust video that Judy Weightman did, and quite significant, that. But I guess it's recognized by the Jewish Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian, but beyond that, our own boys, individual records. And then there's just a few of them who went into the camp per se, at that point. We saw the results of the liberated, the bulk of us, only the liberated inmates, but just a handful of them actually went into the camp at that time on that, before the end of the war.

WN: And what did you folks know about the concentration camps?

KM: Very little. You see, we didn't know what it was. And besides, they didn't speak English, none of them. All we saw was these zombies on the road, and some of them dying, and we did whatever we could. Against the orders, we gave them all the c-rations that we had. And then for a few days, for about one week thereafter, wherever we moved from, there were these group of starving people who would wait at the end of our chow line, waiting for the scraps. And, you know, we had difficulty eating because we see these starving faces waiting for us to come to the end of the... at the end of the chow line, we have a little sump and into this sump, it's a garbage sump, we would dispose of our uneaten food. But these people were already there waiting for us to discard the food into their hands and whatever they had to catch the food from. But it was really an awful sight.

WN: So you weren't aware of what Dachau was?

KM: Very few of us. I don't think we knew about it. Even the Germans didn't, supposedly, even the Germans didn't know about the existence of, you know, the camp nearby where they lived. Because one of the first things the American general did was to order the German civilians to walk through Dachau and the camps, especially Dachau, before it was all cleaned up. And I think in some places, they ordered some of the civilians living in that area to come in and clean up the camps. I think the Americans had done that, but we weren't ordered to do that. Except the Stars and Stripes showed pictures of what was found. Tadashi Tojo, who lives in Waianae, is, I think, of those who really went into the Dachau camp. He's still around. He should, maybe you should get his oral history because Tadashi is one of the few boys who recall vividly what he did. He was one of those forward observer groups from A Battery.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.