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MN: And then another thing men often mentioned in their rations were chocolates.

KM: Chocolate was candies, all kinds of candies was rationed. Yeah, we were well supplied with candies.

MN: So did the men just eat a lot of candy, or was it mostly for bartering?

KM: The boys all ate one or, they ate the candies, but once we got overseas and met up with these civilians, we found that candies was one of our best bargain merchandise, and so we kept it for that purpose. Most of us, lot of us, we were always souvenir hunting, whenever we had the time. Not only souvenir hunting but for bargaining for chicken, anything to eat, basically, other than the army food, other than the chow that we were fed. Anything other than the chow was desirable, especially eggs and chicken. And so the chocolate and cigarettes we used as...  money was, especially Italy, France and Germany, money was of no value in the countries that invaded. What was issued was American occupation money that was printed out and when it was Italy, we had this lira, and in France it was franc. And then in Germany we had the German marks, but these were American-printed, almost like a coupon. But that was the money used by the military, and supposedly the German people, the Italian people... but the reputation was that we were very lucky to get that money, although I'm sure it was of value.

Talking about this money, when we were in Germany, we had the occupation German marks. But when we first got there, I remember that one of our boys came across a cache of payroll marks. And I don't know how much it was, it was just a vast amount of German mark, printed German money that was being used at that time. But the talk was that, oh, those were useless. And so it was kind of used like a plaything, we used it among ourselves without any real value and we just, you know. But some, couple of the smart ones kept some of the marks to bring home and I even have some souvenirs of these. But the ones that I have is World War I mark, German mark. Somehow I got a cache of souvenirs that, a whole batch of German marks. But later on when we came back home, we were told we were foolish because international monetary, at that point, the German mark was still good, that we could have bought it back to the United States and turn it into the banks and get dollars in exchange. We didn't know that, none of us knew we had thousands of dollars.  This, like I say, was a payroll cache that one of our boys came across.

WN: To what extent was souvenir collecting, was it a big thing among the boys?

KM: Almost all of the boys. I had one partner, Flint Yonashiro, who was my regular souvenir hunting partner that we went all over the countryside.

WN: What did you folks consider to be desirable souvenirs?

KN: Number one -- not souvenir, one of our prime objective was to, something to eat. Invariably it was eggs, fresh eggs and chicken. And two big incident that Flint and I experienced was like that incident where we had these special prisoners of war, that town that we came across these girls, beautiful girls who had PW on their backs. But, and this was before Dachau so we didn't know about it. Except reflecting back to that incident, it must have been a special type of domestic servants that the Germans used during the war. But this was, at this time, town that Flint and I came across a bucket of eggs that I said was covered by water. I brought it back to the boys and we had a feast of eggs.

And the other incident was very early in our invasion of Germany. Germany, we found, hardly in the big cities, we got to the big cities, but we never did go through the big cities, we were always on the outskirts. And so on the outskirts we were in this little hamlet and Flint and I walked into this little hamlet which was not too far from where we were stopped by for a couple of days. And so we went in there and then we found that this hamlet was completely vacant, nobody was there. And so we've located a chicken coop full of chickens. So we looked around and we found some burlap bags. And we brought back, Flint and I brought back, I would say my recollection at this point maybe twenty chickens in two burlap bags, two or three burlap bags. And we brought back the treasure and I still have a picture of the barbecue that the gun crew had with this chicken. But this one picture was taken to remember the day that we had the biggest chicken barbecue. Other days we will have one or two chickens, people would come across one or two chickens. But that one we had about twenty chickens in a burlap bag, we bought back to the gun crew. So practically the whole battery had a chicken that day.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.