LM: Well, in ... about April of '44, we started for Europe. We came to Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia--I think that's in Virginia, Patrick Henry--and we were there for a few days and we sailed on a very, very large convoy. ... When the convoy got off England, it split. A small amount of the convoy went to the Mediterranean, through the Straits of Gibraltar, and the rest of the convoy went to England. We went through the Straits of Gibraltar and went to Oran, French Morocco [French Algeria], got off the ship, onto trucks, and they took us out ... to the east, past Arzew, which was a French naval base, to a little town called Port-aux-Poules. It's about one street, two streets, and that's it. ... Then, we went up in the hills and bivouacked there and there as an old French fort there, that must have been built about 1850 or '60, just four walls. In the back was three rooms and the center room had two rooms above it--so, that made it a tower--had a firing strip around the wall with just limbs, ... less thick than my wrist, stuck in the wall and two boards on it, and the wall was crenellated, whatever you say, you know, all the way around. ... The gates were locked on it. ... You could go there and look at it and see it, just that one entrance, and the entrance is only big enough for a cart, a (fom?) cart. It wouldn't take one of our vehicles. So, we were there for a while and they wanted an addition for the MPs [Military Police]. We had an MP detachment in the regiment at that time of about seventy men. ... The Commanding General's office had come over. They had flown over and they were there. They were guarded by these MPs and water supply had to be guarded by them, and they wanted more men. So, our platoon fit right in with it. All we needed was one more sergeant. So, they just brought a sergeant over from one of the other platoons, William (Roeback?), who was a pure-blooded Hawaiian, could swim like a fish, and then, we went down and worked ... with the MPs. We were with the MPs for duty and we were attached to a company on the beach. They were engineers handling DUKWs, those motorized amphibious trucks. [Editor's Note: Mr. Minch is referring to the DUKW, commonly referred to as a "duck," an amphibious truck used to transport supplies to shore.] So, we were with them for quarters and rations and with the MPs for duty, and the quarters consisted of a piece of sand with a big rock on it. I always got a rock that faced toward the east, so that it would warm up in [the] daytime and keep me warm [during] the night. That was a funny thing there. You know, a lot of stuff happens in the world that you don't know about. I saw about three or four women over at a creek washing uniforms. So, I said to the guy, "What are those women doing there?" He says, "Oh, the guys bought them and they use them for this and that and sleep with them. They do laundry and do KP [kitchen patrol] and these guys sleep with them, but they own them outright." The Arabs sell their women when they're fourteen years old, they sell their daughters, and these guys bought them. I don't know what they did with them. They moved--sooner or later, all military units move--but ... that apparently goes on even to this day in various parts of the world where women are bought and sold. ... One thing about that (Roeback?), ... there was one one-day pass into Oran. ... While we were on that pass, they had done a little amphibious operation and he turned a DUKW over and everything went down in the sea, down in the water, all the men's rifles, their ammunition belts, steel helmets, everything went down, and (Roeback?) skin-dived, brought every single thing up, except one man's rifle belt. ... The reason he didn't bring his rifle belt up is because the guy had an empty canteen and it caused it to float away. So, at any rate, after being there in North Africa for about a month even--and we got a very good course in mines and booby traps. The engineers gave us a course there, three, four days, and it was very, very good. ... Oh, when I was there in Oran on this one-day pass, I was in an off-limits area and I looked down the street and there's something going on and I walked down the street to see what was going on. Well, there was a big square open there, like the equivalent of about four football fields, and there was a straight line of people across there and a mass behind them. ... Between where I was and these people, I could see bundles of rags. So, looking at it, I saw why there's a straight line. You can't have people in a straight line, but there was a line of gendarmes [French policemen] with the batons and they kept moving them back, and I wondered, ... "Why don't those [people] just run over those gendarmes?" and I looked to my left and right and, every ... two or three yards, there was a rifleman who was a North African, ... the French Army. The French had two divisions of North Africans and these bundles of rags were people that these gendarmes had hit with their batons and knocked-out, cold-cocked. So, at any rate, we leave there and we go aboard the ship that was His Majesty's Ship Samaria and it had been a ship on the line going from England to India, a troopship. [Editor's Note: The RMS Samaria, a Cunard Line cruiser, was called to military service as a troopship in 1939.] ... We slept on the floor, on a dining table and on a hammock above it, and the whole crew were Lascars and these Lascars are black but with a different texture of their skin. ... The British used them a lot on ships and they used to serve us and we'd go in there, we had crazy food. We had British food. You know, they have fish for breakfast. We don't have fish for breakfast, but they did. ... These Lascars [would] be stirring up a pot of beans, sweating and dropping into it, big pots like that, and these beans were bigger than my thumbnail and every single bean had a weevil in it, every single bean. There's no beans that didn't have weevils in it. The whole top of the thing was covered with weevils. If you like cooked weevils, there's the place for it. [laughter] ... I think it was only three days from North Africa to Italy. We went into Naples and, in Naples, you know, they had a wharf open somewhere, but there were all these ships burned, turned over, blown apart, whatnot. ... We went from there up to a little seaside town; I don't know the name of it. I could look it up in that book. ... We were in this little town and there was--I guess it was going to be a college--and that was an assembly point and, at the time we were there, there was the, I think it was 334th Infantry Regiment. Now, that was the Nisei Regiment that was formed. [Editor's Note: Mr. Minch is referring to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, consisting of Nisei, American citizens of Japanese ancestry, which served in Italy.] It was formed of one battalion of RA Nisei that were in the Army when the war started and the rest of the regiment were volunteer draftees. ... They were volunteers. I was in Hawaii when they opened up the draft board for the Nisei in March and these young men would go to their draft board and the draft board would say, "Look, sorry, the quota's all full." They'd go to the next draft board, the next one, until they found a draft board without a quota, and then, they'd enlist. So, they were in there and ... we had an air raid alarm and this, they had a tunnel going, see. I don't know where the hell this tunnel went to. We had this tunnel open, big open mouth, and we're running in this tunnel and I had these little Nisei, like, coming up to my shoulder here and we were packed in there. I mean, we're packed in there, until it's over. So, we're all set to leave to go up to Anzio. [Editor's Note: In Operation SHINGLE, which lasted from January 22 to May 24, 1944, Allied troops fought on the beachhead at Anzio, Italy, for months before breaking out.] ... The advance party from the 517th Parachute Infantry [Regiment] comes in and it's fellows that ... we'd been with in moving from Hawaii to the States, (Howie Scanlan?) and Warse; I don't know what Warse's name was. They were both from New Jersey. So, we get aboard these LSTs [landing ship, tank] and it's just a night trip. We go up at night. We get onboard the LSTs at dusk and go up to Anzio during the night and pull up to wharfs up at Anzio. ... You know, there's not much tide in the Mediterranean and three-story buildings, which are mostly residential buildings, are built right up to the waterline, just a street there, and a lot of it was blown out. ... We go in to land at Anzio and we go up in the field above there, which has a lot of brush on it. ... The very next morning, we were assembled and Mark Clark is there in the back of a truck and he's telling us, "Well, I've got my eye on you and we will push you as soon as we can." Hell, he knew what he was going to do to us before he opened his mouth, because we were on line the next day. [Editor's Note: General Mark Clark commanded the US Fifth Army in Italy.] We were attached to--there was two American divisions--the 36th and the 45th that we were attached to. ... This particular time, we were attached to the 45th. We went from that area, that assembly area, up to the front. ... I would normally have been in the last vehicle, but, somehow or other, the column got turned around and I was in the first vehicle. ... Remember, I'm always the senior sergeant in this company out in the field and they go so far up that we see riflemen deployed in the field. So, they stop us, finally. They told us, CO told me, "Just follow that jeep, follow that jeep," ... but they didn't know where that jeep was going and that jeep was going way up front. So, we stop and the truck was about to turn around and drive in a driveway. I told my driver, "Don't drive in that driveway. It might be mined." [laughter] So, he was a cowboy from Montana. You could see the white of his eyes when I told him that. So, we had to disconnect the cannon, turn the truck around and reconnect the cannon. We went up. We went back a few hundred yards and we went into a field of--not a field, but like a forest--tall pine trees and we're sitting along the edge of the road. My whole platoon is strung out. The platoons were small--just, when the two cannons were there, it was only twenty men. We only had about twenty men there. We're sitting along the edge of the road, you know, and I'm the tallest one and a shot rings out and it goes over my head, and I know what it is from serving in the pits. You know, when a shot goes past you, close, it doesn't go, "Bing-bang," it goes, "Crack," like that. So, a shot rang out and I said, "Oh, somebody accidentally fired a shot." "Bang," another shot goes out, "Oh, shit, somebody's shooting at us. I've got to do something about this fast." So, I jumped up and I had this one sergeant, he was going to shoot me the first chance he got. I said, "Well, he can have his first chance today," and I told him, "You take four men on that side. You take four men on that side. Let's go." ... You know, your mind has to work fast then. Your mind really works fast, and I said to myself, "I'm going to get out there in front and lead them, because I'm going to have to send men out a lot of times and I don't want them thinking that I'm sending them out and I was afraid to do the job myself." So, we go up the hill after the sniper. Well, I guess as soon as a sniper sees enough people coming, he's gone, he runs. ... We get almost to the crown of the hill and there's another patrol on our left and, fortunately, we didn't start shooting at one another. ... They see us and, you know, our clothes are still pretty clean and our boots aren't scuffed. We had the leggings and shoes--they weren't scuffed, the shoes were still polished. So, it begins a big conversation, "Who are you? Where'd you come from? How long you been here?" and so on, so forth. So, this ends. We go back, and then, they take us back further and we're in a little cut in the side of the hill, the road, it's about one-and-a-half aisles wide and we park along it. ... There's a flight of stairs going up on my right and I'm curious as to what's up there . So, I get up this flight of stairs and there's a fence, and I'm conscious of booby traps. I lean over the fence, and then, I examine it very carefully. I examine the gate and it looks all right. I go in and there's a farm building on my left and, on my right, a house that looks like, possibly, a parking garage, like, one end of it is open and there's a door here and the door's ajar. So, I go over and look in and this place is the equivalent of--a open space--is the equivalent of about four parking cars, you know, about that size, and the whole floor is covered with dead bodies, dead bodies. There had to be anywhere from thirty to fifty dead bodies there. So, I don't push the door open, because, again, I'm afraid of booby traps. I'd go over and there's two or three steps up to this house and, again, the door is ajar. ... I look in and the floor has got about five or six dead Krauts on it and there's a table and on the table is a stretcher and there's a dead Kraut on the stretcher. So, I figured out that this was an aid point for Anzio. That's where they had collected their wounded, but they didn't make it, these Krauts. So, we go back to the ... trucks and some of the men want to go up there and see what's up there and I wouldn't let them go. ... I figured, "If they see all those dead Krauts, they're not going to be very happy about this business." So, we go and run through Rome--this happened just in the Appian Hills, just before Rome. We run through Rome and we get deployed on the other side of Rome and ... we fight into a place called Civitavecchia, "civita" being city and "vecchia" being old, "old city," and I didn't know it at the time, but ... deployed on the other side was this 334th Nisei Regiment [442nd Regimental Combat Team]. So, we go from there and we're more or less in the center of Italy and there's one small battle after another where we don't get engaged in them. ... A lot of places we deployed, we deployed one time and there was a big--it was the first deployment, I think--there's a big open field on our left, leading out to the sea, and the ground was very hard. ... We had three engineering tools on each truck, an axe, a pickaxe and a shovel, and I'd dig a slit trench about four inches deep and we got shelled there. Nobody was hurt. The only thing that happened was, when we were going to fire, somebody put a round in the cannon and they got it in a little crosswise and it jammed. So, to get that round out, what you had to do is open a breech, take out the propellant, stuff in a couple of empty sandbags, and then, go around the front and knock it loose with a ramrod. So, I figured, this is another one of those situations, "I'll do it myself," and I got a ramrod. ... See, if that shell would go off, it would just cut you in half, but I knew what the fusing was on the shells, so, I was pretty certain it wouldn't go off. So, I knocked it out and I gave the ramrod to the squad leader, the section sergeant, and I said, "From now on, you do it." So, we went many miles north without anything particularly interesting happening. The Germans fought a very, very good rearguard action. ... We would be on these little dirt roads and they'd open up with a few riflemen and a machine-gun and they'd deploy, and, when they deployed, the Krauts would have one mortar there and they'd shoot about six, seven shells, mortar shells. Meanwhile, we were trying to deploy around them and it would take us a day or so to deploy around--the regiment, not me--and, by the time they did that, those Krauts were gone and the same thing would happen later on. We got up to one section there and we were held up by a canal and we were in an olive grove in the morning and it was kind of wet. There was some rain coming down and you know that Italian soil is not like American soil. The topsoil is gone a hundred years ago and it's more or less very hard clay in the places. So, we're in this olive grove and the regiment is held up by the canal and there's some noise and I say, "Is that thunder or shelling?" and I get up in my slit trench a little bit and look around. Nobody's moving. I say, "Well, it's just thunder." So, I laid down again and there's some more noise. I looked up again--all I could see was asses. Everybody was running down. I ran down and jumped in a ditch there and, when you jumped in the ditch, it had about this much water. Well, within half an hour, it had that much water, water was up to my chest, and I was digging. I had the engineer's shovel and I was digging sideways into this trench and I uncovered a snake's nest. It's a big nest like that, full of dead leaves and a loose snake. That poor snake had some chance. I chopped him in half with that shovel right away and kept digging, and the water got up to our chest. Finally, the rain stopped and the shelling stopped and the thunder stopped and we got out and dried out. The regiment, meanwhile, had found an underwater dam and they went across, a battalion, single file, walking across. ... When the Krauts found them on their flank, they just took off again. So, we went our way up until--I don't remember the name of the river, the river that comes from Florence--the Arno comes from Florence? ... The Arno, I think it is, and we were there for quite some time. ... Well, we moved there. We got into the mountains and that was bad, because we deployed a number of times, firing, and we got up as far as the Gothic Line. [Editor's Note: The Gothic Line was a series of fortifications built in the Northern Apennine Mountains by Axis forces in August 1944.] The Gothic Line was one section of their line across Italy, which was fortified. They took about twenty thousand Italian laborers and they dug an antitank ditch and they dug holes and made bunkers. They had bunkers three levels deep and, ... when we would shell, they would jump down in their bunkers and wait until the shelling was finished, and then, they would come back out and deploy in the trench. So, this was Route 65--35, 65, I don't know which. I can't remember, my memory isn't so good on that, but they had, at one place, ... a tank turret, with a tank gun in it, over a cement mound. ... We never destroyed it, but we did capture it. Guess what happened? We encircled it and they pulled out. We were going through the mountains one place after another. ... You'd catch one mountain and there was another one; you take that one, there's another one, all the way up. We're going into one area and we're going to deploy. I had jumped off my truck and was ready to deploy and there was two tanks right up ahead of me and these two tanks are shooting across a valley and somebody on the other side with eighty-eights is shooting back at them. [Editor's Note: Mr. Minch is referring to the German eighty-eight-millimeter artillery piece, an antiaircraft and antitank weapon.] Well, when the eighty-eights were short, they were hitting on the far side of the hill and, when they were over, they were hitting right in the area where I was and I had absolutely no cover. ... All I could find was a drainage area, about that deep, and I got down into that. I made myself as flat as I could, but I was scared as hell. You know, you're caught out in the open with no trench. So, after five or six shells, or less, they stopped shooting and we didn't deploy there. We went somewhere else. We got up to a place near Loiano and it was very, very muddy and we had our guns more or less on a little bit of a ridge with a road right behind it. ... It was like a pocket, like that, and they were shooting and going into the pocket, like that. It was some kind of a light artillery piece and the Germans had seventy-millimeter infantry cannons. They also had hundreds, if not thousands, of seventy-millimeter field artillery pieces that they had captured from the Russians and they were shooting in the air. ... Sometimes, these shells were ten, twelve feet away from me, but they were going into the mud so deep, they'd just get a spout of mud. ... They were only shooting at night or when there was a heavy fog across the valley, that we couldn't see where the firing was coming from. So, this one night, this section sergeant wakes me up and he says, "Broedloe's been hit." I'm down in the muddy slit trench. ... We'd take these cases that the shells came in, put them down in the bottom, sleep on top of them. So, I say to him, "Is Broedloe okay?" Now, it's funny, this fellow's name is Rudolph W. Broedloe and the Regimental Commander has the same name. One is "L-O-E" and [the other] one is "L-O-W." [Editor's Note: Colonel Rudolph W. Broedlow commanded the 361st Combat Team.] So, when I get up in the morning, I find out that--I don't know if I found out that morning or the next day--that Broedloe was killed, and I felt bad about it, Broedloe. If I had known then what I knew later, I would've asked for Broedloe to be discharged from the Army as being an incompatible, because he was a very good kid, but he wasn't a soldier. I took him aside one time and I tried to teach him a little bit more about just plain the manual of arms. ... I'm talking to this kid with the [rifle], and not in a spiteful way or anything, and I see the kid start to shake and he's starting to sweat. I said, "That's enough of that. I'm not here to terrorize him. I'll just take him the way he is and let it go at that," but, if I had known [what I knew] later on, I would have asked the Company Commander to discharge him as incompatible. You know, you had funny things happen at different times and you can't phase them all regularly into a sequence. One time, when we were in Camp Adair, after we were on maneuvers--we went from Camp White to maneuvers to Camp Adair--we got in three sergeants who came from the Americal Division and had been fighting at Guadalcanal. [Editor's Note: Located north of Cornwallis, Oregon, Camp Adair was an Army training camp from 1942 to 1945. Camp White is located in the Agate Desert in Oregon. It was used from 1942 to 1945. Activated in May 1942, the Americal Division fought at Guadalcanal in October 1942.] All you hear about is the Marines at Guadalcanal, but the Army cleaned it up and it was the Americal Division that did it. ... This one sergeant didn't like me and I didn't like him, but ... I saw him with an attack of malaria and that's pretty horrible. One minute, he's shaking like hell and you pile on blankets on him, his overcoat, his raincoat, his shelter half, and, the next minute, his sweat is pouring off him. You're taking everything off him, taking his undershirt and dipping it in water and wiping him down. So, I don't know what happened to him, but he didn't go with us. Another one, a machine-gun sergeant, we started out on a march. We'd only gone about three, four hundred ... yards and he broke down again from malaria. The third one was a Sergeant (Holt?)--what was (Holt's) name? can't remember what his first name was--Normano. He was senior to me and he got sick and went into the hospital. ... Before he went into the hospital, he gave me the name and address of a girl. So, I looked her up, but we weren't very friendly. When I'd come back from that leave, I went to see (Holt?) in the hospital. He was in the hospital not for malaria but because he had VD [venereal disease]. So, (Holt?), again, disappeared. I don't know what happens when they disappeared. They get reassigned. ... Everybody who was in the Americal Division apparently got malaria, everyone. ... When they get attacks, it's real bad, real bad. So, I was at Loiana where Rudy got killed. We went up to another position and there's a town of Livergnano. Livergnano had these front of houses and there was a cliff and they were dug back into the cliff, the rooms. ... We went into one position over to the flank a little bit and, going in the position, there was three bodies there with shelter halves laying on them, American soldiers. It's the only time I ever saw dead Americans. We got into this position and we'd been advancing all these months, you know, and the Company Commander leaves us in this position, this big mountain over the side, Mount Adone, and they had a perfect view of us. ... There was a little mountain in front of them, (Mount delle Formiche?), and we're firing at (Formiche?). I could see my shells landing, which is wrong for an artillery piece. You're supposed to get indirect fire. You don't get up so [that] they can see you and you can see them. So, we were there for quite some time, long enough for us to build shacks between two of the guns. Two of my guns had shacks behind them, from the ammunition boxes. The ammunition come up, in some cases, in a wooden box, and, when they come up in a wooden box, we used that wood one way or another. So, we're there for, oh, a good time, three weeks or so. Once they hit this Livergnano, they couldn't move forward. They couldn't take this Mount Adone, they couldn't move forward. We stayed there over the whole winter, but this one night, they got some ammunition and they shelled our gun position with something big. It was 155s--well, no, they didn't have 155s--they had 150s or higher, and I lost both my guns. We had about twenty-eight men in the company injured and the way they were injured were flash burns from the shells exploding, not from fragmentation. I had a medic that had just come in and I only had him for three, four days. ... I never knew his name, I still don't know his name, and he was a broken bone. He was wounded. He never come back, and one of the fellows that had served in Hawaii with me, (Hendrickson?), from Jersey, he was wounded. He got a big fragment in his hip. ... You know, we had an outer jacket, field jacket, we had a sweater underneath that, we had a woolen shirt underneath that, we had a woolen undershirt underneath that. If it hit you right here, you had a woolen underpants and cotton underpants and your regular pants and your belt. He got all that shit blown into the side, blown into him, and he never come back. ... Sergeant (Bull?), the First Platoon senior sergeant, he never came back, but, later on, it's funny, we didn't know anything about it and, only a few years back, I think four years back, we saw an obituary for him. ... He had been, somehow or other, transferred to France, where he was a security [guard] on a prisoner of war camp. ... Well, I have to go back a little bit. ... In December 1944, I got an infection on my face. I had about three sores here. You know, we're living on the dirt all the time--it's easy to get a bad infection. So, I went to the medics and they scraped them off and they painted my whole face here with iodine, full strength iodine, and, the next morning, I had one big scab all across the face. So, I got sent back to a hospital, which was nice. It had a floor in it, had heat in it and you got three meals a day, and there were nurses, too. What more could you want? Well, the nurses came around on the 23rd of December and they said, "If you're discharged tomorrow, can you get back to your unit?" I says, "No, I can't get back to my unit. It's on line." So, they said, "Okay." So, they come around on Christmas Eve and, you know, all officers got one bottle of whiskey a month--nothing for the enlisted men, not even a beer. The nurses came around and gave each guy a shot of booze. So, on the 26th, I was discharged and started up. I was in the what you would call replacement area, but just for the division, and we had nice tents, no floors. We had a stove, with no fuel, and it was cold as hell up there. There was about three feet of snow on it. You know, it was up in the mountains, about three feet of snow, cold as hell. Then, there was a Kraut airplane that used to come over and harass us and there's a big moon, the biggest moon I ever saw in my life. It was like daylight when that moon was out and the snow reflecting it, and this Kraut plane would come along. [Editor's Note: Mr. Minch imitates the sound of the plane.] It was a Ju 88. [Editor's Note: The Ju 88 was a German Luftwaffe plane, predominantly used as a dive bomber.] ... That's where I was, in that repple-depple. I was there three, four days. I hated it. What happened to that plane is, they had taken the antiaircraft units in Italy--one was a regiment and there were two battalions--and they converted the regiment to infantry. One battalion was kept as MPs and one battalion was--what'd they do with the third one? ... Oh, one battalion was kept as antiaircraft and they brought up one gun and, you know, this airplane was ... flying down valleys, you know. So, this gun was up actually above the airplane and the airplane come down one last time [laughter] and the quad-fifty [M45 quad-mount, a turret that held four Browning M2 machine-guns] took it down. I got back to the company and they were in line and there's about eighteen inches of snow where we are. ... I dig through the snow and I dig a slit trench, but, unfortunately, I dug a slit trench--well, maybe fortunately--I dug a slit trench where there was drainage and it wasn't frozen underneath the snow. The ground was mud underneath the snow. So, I slept there part of one night and I got out. ... I used to get all the troublemakers in my platoon. I got them and it was simply a matter of handling them right, but they had, somehow or other, gotten a hold of a squad tent. I don't know where they got this squad tent from, and they got a fifty-five-gallon drum and there was a pipeline up through the mountains carrying gasoline from Leghorn and they got a section of this pipeline and they used the pipeline for a center pole in the tent. ... The drum, they drove some of these iron bars that we get with ammunition packs through for grates and cut an opening in it for the feed and another opening to take ashes out, so that this tent was quite comfortable, you know. The floor was made of the ammunition boxes and there was a shelf about that wide. So, I went in there and started sleeping on the shelf and this one kid, Bill (Slattery?), used to bring me breakfast in bed. He'd bring me a big dish, a big mess kit, full of oatmeal and a cup of coffee and a Spam sandwich. So, he'd bring me breakfast and I would wash the kit out and bring him supper. Lunch, we didn't have--maybe got a ... canteen cup of noddle soup, chicken noodle soup, which was very good. So, that's the way that went. (Slattery?) would bring me breakfast and I would bring (Slattery?) lunch, supper, and that went back and forth. A funny thing happened on (Slattery?). When I went to a reunion, they said, "We sent letters to (Slattery?), but they never come back, but you'd never get an answer." So, I said, "Oh, I'll check into it for you." So, I got information and got a telephone number and I called up. It was in Long Island City and I said, "Are you Bill (Slattery?)?" The guy says, "Yes, I am." I said, "Are you Bill (Slattery?) from the 361st?" He said, "No, I was in an artillery unit from Chicago." I said, "Do you know Bill (Slattery?) from the 361st?" "No," he says, "I don't have any idea who he is." I says, "Is there any other Bill Slattery's there?" He said, "Yes, there's another Bill (Slattery?). It's my son. He was in Vietnam," three Bill (Slatterys?) in the same place, but not the right one. So, at any rate, ... I'm in this tent, it's in the wintertime and I only get up in the morning to make sure that the two guns--they had two guns, each platoon sergeant had two guns--make sure the two guns are broken loose from the ice and that everything is in order. ... I see this executive officer coming across the field, "Now, what the hell does he want over here?" and he says, "The Company Commander wants to give you a commission." I said, "I'm not interested." He said, "All right." He goes back and he goes away. Meanwhile, I think, "Shit, this company commander, (Blissenbach?), he thinks God made West Pointers [graduates of the United States Military Academy] and officers." I said, "I'm likely to get myself transferred to a line company just for that." So, this executive officer comes back and he says, "He doesn't want to be commissioned." He said, "All right, okay." So, they forget about it. We go back. ... We're in Montecatini. That's a rest area that's a spa. Montecatini is a spa, a gambling spa, too, and it has the baths. ... This (Pearlman?) comes to me on Friday, I think it was a Friday, and he says, "You got any money?" I said, "No, I'm broke." He says, "What do you say we cut a game?" I said, "That sounds good to me, but I don't have any dice or [cards]." He said, "I've got dice and I know where there's a table. So, let's go cut a game." So, we go to cut a game and we can't get any game going, because it's about the third day after payday. So, Saturday morning, Jim (Brennan?), who was the mail clerk, comes in and says, "Hey, Minch, get up to regimental headquarters. They want you." I said, "What the hell they want me for, Jim?" says, "I don't know." All right, I go up there. I get dressed and walk up there and I walk in and somebody says to me, "Are you from Cannon Company?" I said, "Yes, sir." Someone else says, "He's got his chevrons on." Someone else says, "I've got a pocketknife. I'll take them off," and I'm going, "What the hell are they taking my chevrons off for?" and they say, "Okay, stand in line. The three of you, stand in line over here. Stand in line there," and they say, "Raise your right hand." I raise my right hand, and then, they start reading the oath of office. ... When they started reading the oath of office, I knew what the hell I was there for. [laughter] So, I go back to the company, take my bedding out of the enlisted men's area and go where the officers are. First time up as an officer, "Tell him to go to the Second Battalion OP [observation post]." So, I go up there to Second Battalion. Second Battalion is in a big castle. Now, castles were stripped of all furnishings. They're cold-ass places and nobody tells me a damn thing. They just say, "Go, go with this group. They're going over to the outpost." So, I have a radio operator with me and I'm carrying the battery and I start out with them. We're going through about eighteen inches of snow and I poop out halfway there. I don't know how close this is. It really wasn't very close. I poop out and sit down in the snow and, finally, get up and go over and it's a house and there's, like, a sort of lean-to in a back corner, broken away. ... The building itself had been bombed and there's a big wreck. I'm in there, first night, going to sleep and there's a rafter going across in front of me and there's a big rat on the rafter and this corporal ... picks up this carbine. I said, "Don't shoot that rat. I don't want any rats running around half dead," and there was a side of beef hanging up above. You know, the Krauts didn't have good rations and they used to kill cattle and butcher it. ... The rats used to come and they'd jump up and sink their teeth into this carcass, and then, slide down. They had the whole side of the carcass looking like a bunch of threads. So, there were plenty of rats there, plenty of rats. At nighttime, when you're sleeping, they'd run across your chest, and then, you worry, ... "Will those bastards bite you in the face?" You're in a sleeping bag, but they'd run across your chest like that. I mean, ... talk about sorry things--I'm in there and I pick up ... a Life Magazine and I'm thumbing through it. ... This soldier comes over to me and he says, "Let me see that magazine," and he opens it up and there's a story about two sailors on leave. ... This guy gives them a lift in their car and they murder him for the car and they're to be executed this particular week. They're going to be executed this week and he says, "You see that man over there?" He said that's his brother, his twin brother. So, here's his twin brother, he knows his brother's going to be executed that week, terrible situation. So, I'm in this place and there's a machine-gun down the valley. You know, the house is here and the valley runs that way and there's a machine-gun down there, a nest. You can see where the gun comes out. They were underneath a house and they come out underneath this little dirt road and into this area and the stuff comes right next to our house. So, I want to shoot it and ... the Commander says, "You can't shoot there. It's in the Italians' area." We had an Italian group on our right flank. So, "Okay." Meanwhile, I finished that tour; go back, I come up again as a liaison with Second Battalion, rather than as an OP. ... I tell this tank guy--he had two tanks on the other side of this little valley--and I tell him where it is and we go up this little humpback, where we can go, and I point it out to him and he says, "I'll shoot it." So, I says, "Well, when you shoot it, let me know." So, he said, "Okay." So, he has to stay in this castle during the daytime, and then, he can go back to his unit at night. He calls me up and says, "I'm going to shoot it." I said, "Okay, wait fifteen minutes." He waits fifteen minutes, I go up and ... he shoots it and he had a good gun. You know, when you fire a gun sight by sight, you fire it and the shell comes somewheres else. It doesn't hit your target, but, then, you lay your gun the same way, the same sighting on your sight, but you look at the ... etched scale in there and you sight the same, exact same, and then, you look on your etched scale where this shot had hit, and then, you moved that point onto your target and you hit your target. Second shot, he blew it out. That was a good place; they did some good shooting there. Nobody told me where, I never had a map, nobody ever told me where the frontline was, but the terrain sort of dictated it, that it was a long slope down from the German side. There was a cemetery at the top of the slope and ... in the front of the cemetery was a church and this church was a base point for all the artillery. You register on that and shift from there. So, I heard that a mortar had fallen into one of the companies. Well, you know, one of the things they never really pressed on you, you know, mortars have a limited range. They can't go forever and the longest range for a mortar is about four thousand yards, for a light mortar. So, you figure out about where the mortar hit and you make an arc--you can do it with your fingers, where they're about four thousand yards [away], two squares on your map--and you just make a half circle. You make that half circle, you look at your map and you look at the terrain and there's only [so many] places where you can hide a mortar. It can't be out in the middle of a field. So, there was a gully over on my right and, studying it on the map, studying those things, you could see there was a road that came over the hill there, one in front of this cemetery, one over to my left, but there was a little footpath that led down into that gully. So, I had to figure that's the only place that mortar's [crew] could be, is down in that gully. So, I had them fire one shot, white phosphorous. I never saw the shot land, but I saw that phosphorous come up out of the gully, fine. So, I had two guns and I just moved them twenty-five yards, fired a round, moved them another twenty-five yards, fired another round, move them another twenty-five yards, fire another round. ... Then, I extended the range twenty-five yards, fired another round. I worked it down and up, and then, I laid down and went to sleep, but, all of that firing, I never saw a shot explode, all down in that gully. I [was] laying down about a half-hour and the Corporal comes to me and he says, "They're carrying Germans out of that gully." I says, "Do they got a Red Cross flag?" He says, "Yes." He said, "It's two men carrying a stretcher. Somebody's on the stretcher and there's a man with a bandage around his head." I said, "Well, I can't shoot at them," and I went to sleep. That's where I made the mistake. I should have found out where the hell they went and I didn't. ... Coming on spring and we had this big Mount [Monte] Adone still on our left, big Mount Adone, and we're going to have this spring breakthrough, which was about [the] beginning of April 5th to 10th of April. ... I'm up in an observation point, a house, (LaRosa?). A lot of the houses have names on them and they have the name carved in a stone. What do you call those stones in the house? What kind of stone do you call it, you know, the stone that they build the houses around?
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