<Begin Segment 5>

MN: And then, so you folks moved from Italy to France. And I know that you were in Marseille for a while, and the last time when we were ending our interviews, off tape, you mentioned something about stevedoring in Marseille.

KM: We were in Marseille for I don't know how many days, staging area, and the distinct experience we had was that one day we got orders to get on the track there, and we ended up at the docks. And lo and behold, we were ordered to do some stevedoring and we ended up hauling cargo and the ordinary stevedore was hard labor, for which I remember I think each of us got one can of corned beef, I think it was. [Laughs] But anyway, it was in the midst of this war, before we got into Bruyeres area. That couple of days that we spent in Marseille, the French stevedores went on strike. They were the ones who were unloading the American cargo ship and whatnot. But they went on strike and they had to call upon us to do the stevedoring. And this was in Marseille and the other.... I remember we had one day off, then we went to... some of the boys knew they were there, had this Aix-en-Provence is, we understood that was a very famous small little town, the home of Gauguin, I think, and when we went there, sure enough, is all this... and then this town was completely untouched by war. Marseille was untouched by war completely. Most of, like Nice, Menton, France, was completely untouched by war. Was just a normal everyday as if there was no war around there. And so this small little town, Aix-en-Provence, was wide open and we went there and we enjoyed... although orders were, "Don't eat in the restaurants," the French restaurants, we jumped at a chance to get in and the French food that was available.

MN: What kind of foods did you enjoy?

KM: The best... my recollection of French restaurants, even in Nice, there was that as soon as you get into the restaurant, there would be, on the table, the soup of the day would be in a pot like on the table. And you help yourself with the soup of the day and then you order whatever entree you... and almost always it was very little, menu, difference in menu was either stew or... in Italy it was spaghetti, naturally what everything was, was spaghetti. But in France there were some, very few meat dishes but I enjoyed the soup of the day. I thought that in and of itself was a meal, but almost every restaurant I remember had this big bowl of soup of the day right on the table as you sat down.

MN: And how was your French?

KM: You learn the very minimal. Because when we were in Italy we learned... even to this day I remember, the phase that we initially learned was, "Do you have any chicken?" We started out with, we would as for pollo. Very soon we found out pollo is chicken. Then I remember the response by the Italians, "Niente, niente." Niente means "we don't have it." "tedeschi tutto potare via," meaning all of the chickens were taken away by the Germans. There was the standard response we got from the Italians. But very often in the farmlands there will be chicken and we would have a chicken fry.

So we went to France. And I don't know about France... France was, see, we didn't have much except when we were in Menton. It was more the French people speaking English than we were speaking French because it was a tourist town. Nice was completely... and it was as if nothing happened. The bars were wide open, the shops were wide open. We had a one day pass or three day pass, not more than one day usually. We were allowed one day passes. We were there from November of 1944 to... was it March of 1945, I think, during the winter period. But we did have the opportunity to go to Nice every so often. But it was what we called the Champagne Campaign. Because Champagne was... well, figuratively speaking, champagne, but we learned to drink green cognac. It's what they call green cognac. Cognac has to be aged x number of years, but the French people learned that American GIs didn't care about aged cognac. As long as it was liquor, it would satisfy us. So we were always provided with what we learned later on was called green cognac. The Champagne Campaign was after the Lost Battalion episode.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.