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MN: And then besides the guarding of bridges, what else did you folks do during your occupation duty?

KM: Every once in a while I recall there was an unannounced... we would, I remember once or twice that we went to one of the hamlets, those are real hamlets, German villages, not villages, hamlets, households of maybe ten or fifteen, tilling the land right around them. And even to this day, the same type of farming goes on in Germany. But we went looking for, I don't know what, but for all of the years in the war, the Germans were prohibited from hunting. And so all of these farmlands where they had wooded areas and preserved a lot of reindeer, little deers, and when we found out that there was deers all around the place, that's when we started to have a beer bust once a week. Our officer would not allow us to go out, only once a week we would go out and hunting for reindeer and have beer bust, a beer ration came once a week. And so we would have... a lot of us put on a lot of weight the seven months that we were there.

MN: Your beer, was it German beer?

KM: German beer. In fact, when we occupied, the little town that we occupied, we occupied the brewery house, which was a hotel as well as brewery that we occupied. And four years ago when I went back to Germany to look up my "laundry family," the house was still there, but converted fully to a hotel now, the brewery is no longer there. But I went back to Germany four years ago to speak to the 3rd Army Unit. The 3rd Army Unit happened to be the first American unit to go into Iran after 9/11, but just before they went to 9/11 I was up there giving them a talk about the Pacific, you know, this ethnic study group that we have, this month was Germany. Black month, last month, May is going to be Oriental ethnic studies and so I was invited over to go to Germany and give a three-day visit. And then I looked up my own "laundry family" who was not there, but I met up with a lady that used to be the daughter of the family. It's a story in itself.

MN: You called them your "laundry family"?

KM: During occupation, even though hostilities all ended, we were still attached to the 3rd Army, which was one of the requirements was they do have a very rigid once a week inspection. For inspection we had to put on a fully starched khaki uniform and spic and span, polish the boots and buckle and everything else. This is what you call a requirement by 3rd Army, Patton's. And so we couldn't do it with our quartermaster because they're far away. So we had to either do it our own self, or as we all did, we adopted a family, German family, to do our laundry. Because once a week, we had to have this stiff. And so all of us had a German family who would do our laundry, and we would pay them with cigarettes. So I adopted a family. And when I went back in 2001, I tried to look up the family. And you'd be amazed, the hamlet itself, the small little town was the same way it was in 1945. But I couldn't find the house because the bakery that I knew was no longer there and they had a little kiosk gas station where the bakery used to be located. And when I went into there and asked the lady over there, "Do you know," it was the Hirsch family. And she said, "There's nobody there by that name now." Over two thousand people maybe in that small... two thousand, two thousand five hundred. "No, there's nobody here by the name." And says, "Wait, wait," and she spoke a little English, she told me that she'd been to Hawaii ten years ago, and so she spoke a little bit of English. And so she picks up the phone and makes a phone call, and then she drops the phone and she makes another phone call. And then she gets through and she tells me, "Just the other day where you are standing, there was this man who had been visiting Mertingen," again, Mertingen's a small town where we were occupying. She says he was there visiting friends and he used to live in Mertingen. "And he tells me that he remembers his mother doing some laundry for some American soldiers right after the war." And so he gave this lady his sister's telephone number. And he talked to the this lady, that was the second phone call, and the lady says, "Oh yeah, my mother did some laundry for some Japanese American soldiers," and got a phone number. And she was living right below Munich now. And so the next day, this tour guide, sergeant of mine, we drove all the way down to this little town south of Munich. And sure enough, this is a lady who was a fifteen-year-old girl when my laundry was being done by the mother. Unfortunately, I was scheduled to leave the next day, so we spent, we had lunch with her before I had to go back to Frankfurt, and that's all the way from Munich all the way back to Frankfurt. So we had a nice visit. And in fact, the army news wrote up about it and a big article about it. It was a pleasant experience. And today, to this day, I still communicate with her, I send her Christmas things. But a very interesting reunion.

MN: It seems like, you know, even during the war years, you were able to make some contact with civilians. And I guess especially in this case, there is this tie that that continued, yeah?

KM: After fifty years, we got to see each other.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.