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RP: So how long did you stay in Alabama before you shipped out?

RD: Well, I got there in June or July and we shipped out in November, went to Camp Shanks. And I had a furlough, and I was supposed to get fifteen days to go home on leave, and they decided I was missing a tooth, so I had to allot a couple, three days of my furlough because of that tooth. So I said, okay, when I went home, I'll just take those three days. [Laughs] So what happened to me was, lucky again, I got back to camp, and here I was on POR, Port of Replacement, supposed to ship out two days before I got back. And they canceled that order and decided to send the whole, whole division over. Otherwise I'd probably still be in the guard house. I lucked out on that. Made me so doggone mad, all that time for one lousy tooth, when I was on the boat on Atlantic Ocean, that's where the teeth are. Threw 'em overboard.

RP: So from... where did you actually disembark when you got to Europe? Where did you end up?

RD: Well, we landed, we went to England, and we were stationed at the little town of Henstridge. We were only about five or six blocks from the town entrance and then Stalbridge was down the road about a mile. And we were on some barren land there or some doggone thing, it was leased out to the government, and we stayed there and did our marching and training. We were there, what, well, from middle of November, we went up to Camp Shanks, and I don't know how long we were there, a week or so or something, I forget, or maybe two weeks. And then we shipped out, and we were on, I was fortunate I was on the flagship where all the generals and stuff were on there. And we had a pretty good convoy around us, and I signed up for KP for the night. The ones that worked got three meals a day, the ones that didn't work got two meals a day. So we get in there, we'd go to work at eight o'clock at night and get off about six in the morning. And heck, by the time we got off, we were so, we got in the fresh milk first eight to ten days out there, fresh milk. And they had that down there and I went to the officers' stuff, we found the ice cream, we got into that. We had these crates that the produce came in, and they had these steel decks down there and we'd get on those things and whenever the boat rocked, we'd sit on 'em and race to see who could get to the other end the fastest. And we had, we had a good crew there. We had this, this guy that was a navy guy that was in charge of the cooking crew, he showed us where the ice cream was and he says, pretended he didn't see us taking stuff. And then, of course, they only ate about one or two meals anyway, so it didn't make a difference. 'Cause I was always, well, I was going to get ready to go to bed when it got daylight and get on there, go down there and get in my bunk and sleep 'til it gets evening time, and have a meal and go to work. It took us fifteen days to cross the Atlantic Ocean. And we landed in... I don't know what port we landed in, anyway. But, then they took us to these camps, like I said, we were back in this one little area. And we first got off the boat and I got my new BAR and I had to clean off the carbines. It comes in...

KP: Cosmoline.

RD: Yeah. And Cosmoline or whatever you wanted to call it, and we'd clean that all off with alcohol and stuff. And then we got, we were placed with the, I said the 92nd, I guess it was the 94th. In fact, Corporal Arthur that I was telling you about, his brother was in that outfit that we relieved. And he got to see him, and then they went up to the outskirts of Liage and ran into a crack Panzer division there, and they had, I don't know, no more than sixty or better casualties up there. They had a heck of a time up there. And like we stayed there, we had a little, it was a hundred yards or so between each little dugout where we stayed in, laid there on the cold ground and had little, what they call "mummybags." And there was two, three, two, three, or four of us in a little dugout, I think, I can't remember. Took turns being on guard duty at nighttime, being awake. And then when we sailed out, we sailed out of Southampton, I think, landed in Cherbourg, France.

RP: And from there, where did you go?

RD: That's where we went to, I went to Lorient side, taking us there to Lorient, and that was Brittany, what they called Brittany, you know when they had the invasion on June? They had the Normandy beach and the Brittany beach. We were on the Brittany beach there where they had a pocket of 55,000 Germans in the pocket there, trapped in there. And that's where the two submarine bases were in there, the submarine bases were in there. And they were held in that parker until the war was over with. And how that happened or why it stayed like that, I have no idea why they wouldn't surrender and they didn't want to force the issue or what, but the deal was, I don't know. But they didn't try to get out.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2009 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.