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MN: And people always talk about the battle for the Lost Battalion. What was the artillery's involvement in that?

KM: It was... October 21st, I think it was, something like that. That winter had just started to set in, but it was a wet, wet type of winter, a lot of rain, mud, and then winter had just started. The snows just started to fall and so it was terrible conditions. But anyway, the story of the Lost Battalion is that the 442 had been up there, and so they were relieved and the 141st came in to replace where the 442 had been. But remember I told you that you have to have your flanks protected at all times? Well, the 141st was, took over where the 442 was. And as in the usual case, the 442 is the leading attacking unit. But somehow, the 141st did not, were not adequately protected on the flank. So they got quickly -- after they replaced the 442 -- they quickly got surrounded by the Germans, who made an encircling movement and the word got out that, oh, there was an outfit out there in trouble. And if you recall any of the testimony by the infantry boys, they had only come back three or four days, I think, after they had come back and been relieved, that they were ordered to go back again. I remember Joe Shimomura's video saying that, "Yeah, we went out there three days and they wanted us to go up again, we said, 'How come? We're entitled to one week rest." Joe, in the video, he says that, but they were ordered to go back again, and rescue or get the 141st out of the predicament that they got into. And this is the so-called Lost Battalion episode in the forest of what we call the Vosges Mountains of Bruyeres.

And Colonel Hanley, the 2nd Battalion commander tells us that he was involved as a very young lieutenant during World War I. But that during World War I, there was no fighting in the Vosges Mountains because the pine trees were so thick that there were no battles in that area. In the old days, warfare was trench warfare, wide open fields along there, but the Vosges Mountains was just pine trees. And I don't know if today the lumber industries have recovered from, because when you had all this firing and all these projectiles and all the shrapnels hitting the trees, the lumber industry has a reluctance to go into there to harvest the trees because of the metal content in the trees that would ruin the saws and whatnot. But this was one big aftermath of the war that the French people had to live with. But the warfare was such that... and we constantly gave protective fire to the Lost Battalion group because we were giving them protective fire from preventing the Germans from encircling them any further. So that was our number one task of the artillery because we were still in emplacement and the 36th Division artillery had not come into play yet. So we were constantly supporting the Lost Battalion. And this is the episode where General... what was his name now? I forget his name, the general of the 36th Division.

MN: Was it Dahlquist?

KM: Yeah, Dahlquist, who was right up there directing the 442, and so near the front that his military aide, as you may have heard, was killed by a sniper because they were too much upfront. And the military aide happened to be the son of Sinclair Lewis, a famous writer, novelist, but that's how near the front the general was up. And he had, on his own, had gone to the artillery fire direction center, and looking at the maps, he ordered -- this is a story by Don Shimazu -- he ordered the artillery to fire at a certain location on the map and that's where they need to be protected the most. And Don Shimazu says the lieutenant, I think it was... I forgot which lieutenant -- our battery forward observer anyway, I suppose, had told the general, "General, wait, that's where the Lost Battalion is located." And so they did not obey the command of the general to fire in that sector, which turned out to be very accurate that that was where the Lost Battalion was located. But had they, had we shot in that vicinity, we would have probably wiped out the Lost Battalion itself. They call it "lost," but they weren't lost, they were just encircled by the Germans up on the hilltop.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.