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Oral history interview with Billy Taylor

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1990.481.40 | RG Number: RG-50.062.0040

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    Oral history interview with Billy Taylor
    Transcript
    Are we ready?
    [INAUDIBLE]
    OK.
    You want to get some of my background first, you say?
    Yeah.
    What I'm going to do-- today is September 29, 1989.
    Right.
    And I'm Judy Weightman, here with Captain Billy Taylor
    of the 522--
    long ago, the 522 Field Artillery Battalion.
    And we're here at the Outrigger West in Honolulu, Hawaii.
    So we're just going to start off a little bit talking
    about your background and your address.
    I need your address, Capt. Taylor, and your telephone
    number, date of birth, and a little bit of your background.
    OK?
    So whenever you feel fine, just go ahead and start.
    OK.
    Well, I was born in October the 15th, 1912, in Oklahoma,
    in the central part of Oklahoma, actually
    on where my granddad had homesteaded in 1889.
    I was born on his--
    part of the section that he had homesteaded.
    And of course, statehood wasn't until-- that
    was Indian Territory up till until 1907, of course.
    Well, and my background was from a farm community.
    We lived on a farm until I was about 13--
    12, 13.
    And we moved up to Kansas and then back to Oklahoma.
    And I went to high school in Oklahoma City,
    where we are now, right close.
    Where do you live now?
    We live at Moore now, at--
    Moore, Oklahoma?
    --yeah-- at 1523 Hollow Oak, Moore, Oklahoma.
    And it's located-- it's kind of a suburb of Oklahoma City.
    it's in the greater medium area of Oklahoma City.
    And it's located about--
    it's between Oklahoma City property proper and Norman,
    where the university is.
    And is that where you went to school?
    That's where I went to school and university.
    I commenced there in '32, during the Depression.
    And of course, it was a lot cheaper,
    but it was a lot harder too because we
    didn't have any money, [LAUGHS] back then,
    during the Depression.
    Did you know you wanted to go to the university, when
    you were in high school, or--
    Yes.
    Yeah, I studied for it in high school.
    And I took the science and mathematics in high school,
    where I could get in fairly well, because I
    had in mind to be an engineer.
    Actually I was planning on being a geological engineer.
    But when I got down there in '32 and started my first years,
    I got interested in the petroleum end of it.
    So my Bachelor of Science degree is actually
    in petroleum engineering.
    And I got out in '36.
    But in the meantime, when I started to school down there,
    I took up a military--
    ROTC.
    And I'd taken four years of military ROTC.
    And it was horse-drawn artillery.
    You had horses, there?
    Yeah, we had horses.
    And that's one reason I got into it,
    because I liked to ride horses.
    [LAUGHS] And so we--
    when we trained at Fort Sill, had a brigade made up
    of horse-drawn artillery.
    And I got my commission--
    I received my commission in '35, as a second lieutenant.
    And when I got out of school, in '36, jobs were hard to find.
    And the government had offered me a job with the CC camps.
    They had--
    What was the CC?
    That's the civilian Corps, where they were putting men
    to work that were out of jobs.
    They had to build parks and--
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    The Conservation Corps.
    --the Conservation Corps is what it was.
    Civil Conservation Corps.
    And they assigned me to one in Oregon.
    But before they assigned it to me, before they could send me,
    I had a chance to get a job in the oil field
    with an oil company.
    So I tried to get out of my assignment to the Corps,
    to the service, and eventually I was able to.
    But I had a difficult time [LAUGHS]
    getting released from my orders.
    But anyway, after I got released from orders, in '37,
    I went to the Gulf Coast as petroleum-engineer trainee.
    And and I was stationed in Louisiana.
    Were you married, at that time?
    I was married when, after--
    about a year after I went-- we got married in '38.
    While I was down there, we got married.
    I came back to Oklahoma.
    And of course, Opal is from Oklahoma.
    Opal is--
    She's from a town--
    Bristow, Oklahoma.
    It's between Oklahoma City and Tulsa.
    And Opal is your wife.
    Yes.
    Of 51 and 1/2 years.
    You've been married for 51--
    Yeah, we got married February the 1st, 1938.
    Wow.
    We had our wedding anniversary, February the 1st in '88.
    And daughter and the boys gave us a celebration
    on our anniversary.
    So what happened after 1938, then?
    Well, 1938, we got transferred to a different location
    then, on the coast, over south of Houston, to an oil.
    Field and then in 1940, when the war broke out--
    or, rumors of war--
    I decided that, since I had a commission,
    I'd go ahead and go in.
    So in about March of '41, well, I
    signed up and went into service.
    And I was assigned to the Eighth Corps headquarters.
    It was a good assignment, because I went in early.
    And it was at Brownwood, Texas.
    And it was made up of higher-ranked officers,
    but there were a few of us that were lower-rank lieutenants
    in the unit.
    But when Pearl Harbor hit, we were riding around
    in civilian clothes, there, by the camp,
    when Pearl Harbor hit.
    And they quarantined us on what I call "the Hill."
    At our camp, they quarantined us.
    Why did they do that?
    Well, because they were going to send us over.
    And they were going to send us to the Pacific,
    after Pearl Harbor.
    But they decided that some of us lower-ranking officers
    were too low-ranking [LAUGHS] to be in the corps headquarters,
    so they told us we could go to any unit we wanted to
    in a combat unit.
    So I chose to go back to Fort Sill, to school troops.
    So I thought maybe I might not [LAUGHS] have to go very soon,
    by going back there.
    But I wasn't back there for just any time.
    They sent me back to go where I'd been in Brownwood,
    at Camp Bowie.
    It was a camp for the 36th Division, the Texas Division,
    and other troops.
    And I was assigned to a 155 howitzer unit.
    I had been commissioned in the larger guns than the 155 hows,
    but--
    and I became a captain of a battery there at--
    I was assigned to the 142nd, to an Arkansas National Guard
    unit.
    And I had a battery, a firing battery.
    But then, when they decided to form this combat team,
    the Hawaiian--
    Japanese-American Hawaiian team, they selected two officers
    from each army.
    And myself and another man there were
    assigned to go to Camp Shelby, under secret orders.
    We-- all we had--
    The wife and I, Opal and I and our boy--
    we had a son that was around--
    see, he was around five, wasn't he.
    He was five years old.
    And so we took off from--
    in Texas to Camp Shelby in Mississippi.
    And when we got down there, I went out to the camp,
    and it was just piney woods.
    And there wasn't any one there, just a few people around
    that I reported in to.
    And they told me what the situation
    was, that we were getting--
    going to get this unit.
    Did when you were in Texas that-- or before
    you arrived at Camp Shelby, did you
    know that they were Japanese-Americans?
    No, I didn't know any--
    I didn't even know what I was going to.
    I didn't know they were Japanese-Americans,
    and I didn't know what type of unit I would be in or anything.
    And I didn't know anything about it, till I got there.
    And the first ones we received, after I got there,
    was a few of the boys from the mainland,
    from California and Illinois-- just a few of the men.
    And then we waited for the main group from Honolulu--
    from Hawaii.
    What did you think about being in charge
    of these Japanese-Americans?
    Well, it was different.
    It was a different experience from having
    the battery of other type of--
    Caucasian soldiers.
    But it was interesting, and I enjoyed it.
    What did you first think when you were in charge of--
    Well, I don't know.
    I just enjoyed the idea of doing something like that with them.
    Had you ever met any Japanese-Americans, before?
    No, I hadn't.
    No, I hadn't met any.
    And when we were first formed, when the boys first showed up,
    we had a showdown inspection.
    And I recall--
    And one of the men in the unit, when I was here in '72
    recalled that he didn't know what I called him
    when I made the inspection.
    And they all was hard to fit.
    The uniforms was hard to fit and the shoes and everything.
    And as I went down the line, inspecting them,
    I asked one of them--
    He had on the tight pants.
    And I said, what kind of uniform you call that?
    And he said "a zoot suit!"
    [LAUGHING]
    And I don't recall who that was, but they reminded me that,
    later, that I asked them about having a zoot suit on.
    [LAUGHS]
    But after we got organized there,
    we were there a year to the day before we left in April of '44.
    And during that training, we had one big maneuver in Louisiana.
    And well, when they first got there,
    they had to build their own latrines
    and their own buildings and everything,
    because there wasn't anything there.
    It was just piney woods.
    So we had to start from scratch, building up,
    and picked out our own training areas and everything.
    What did you think of the men and the way
    they worked during that year?
    Well, it was tremendous.
    They were really an ambitious bunch.
    Of course, they were young boys and volunteers,
    and they were really out to show that they could do the job.
    See, I was about 11 years older than the good majority of them.
    There was a few of the older ones
    that they had, like Pete Sakamoto,
    a good friend of mine, was in the [INAUDIBLE] direction.
    He was a good friend, here.
    He passed away here about a year or two ago.
    He was older than I. But the majority of the men
    were just between 18 and 19 years old, from the islands.
    And they were all volunteers, and they were really loyal
    and wanted to show that they could do the job.
    It was really a very interesting situation.
    So at the end of that year of training,
    which was pretty fast training-- we
    had to go through a whole lot of training within that year,
    because there's a lot to take up from your basic on through.
    And they really hadn't had the basic training
    that other soldiers had had, because they just straight
    come to our camp.
    So we had to combine the basic training and the other training
    along with it at the same time.
    But they performed well, I mean--
    and even better in combat.
    Maybe you want to tell us about going over to Europe and--
    Yeah.
    At the end of that year, when we left,
    we left from Norfolk, Virginia, on in convoy
    of hundreds ships--
    Liberty ships.
    And we were 28 days on the water,
    going to the Mediterranean.
    And a lot of the boys got seasick, and some of them
    I've met, some of the officers got--
    I recall one officer.
    His lips would swell up, and he couldn't eat
    or anything, for several days--
    for most of the whole trip.
    But it didn't bother me.
    But it was pretty rough on those Liberty ships.
    They were small, and the men were pretty crowded--
    fairly well crowded on them.
    For 28 days.
    It was quite a ways.
    And we had the minesweepers and the different supporting
    groomers around the ships, on the way over.
    And we landed at Brindisi, Italy.
    And they didn't have a way to move us to Naples,
    our staging area, Naples [INAUDIBLE],, except by boxcars,
    so they put us in what we called the 48--
    40-and-8 boxcars, like they had during the war,
    World War I, where they had 40 men and 8 mules.
    [LAUGHS] I don't know what--
    some men remember that night, but it was quite crowded
    in these boxcars.
    And we traveled from the toe of Italy clear up to Naples
    in these boxcars.
    And then we had a staging area there,
    at the University of Naples.
    And after our staging area, we were called on
    to go into combat.
    But we moved from there up to--
    Now, this was the 442nd combat team
    plus the 100th Infantry, who had already been over there.
    They joined us as one of the battalions of our unit.
    They joined who?
    They joined our combat team, as one of our battalions.
    When we left at Camp Shelby, left the States,
    well, we left behind our third battalion.
    That is the combat team--
    What is the name of your--
    --that is the combat team, the combat team.
    I'm talking about the regimental combat team.
    They left behind their third battalion,
    and they picked up the 100th Infantry--
    which had been over there and been under severe combat,
    before, at Anzio and some of the other places.
    So-- And they had had a lot of casualties, and a lot of them
    were recruits from our outfit and from other replacements
    from Hawaii.
    And what was the name of the unit--
    your unit?
    The 44-- well, the 442nd combat team, but we
    were the 522nd field artillery.
    We were the closest-supporting artillery to the combat team.
    And when we went into--
    we went through Rome, Italy, in blackout.
    And we went into combat right above Rome,
    at a little town that seems to me like it was
    Talihina, something like that.
    And we've been told and trained--
    this is a little story.
    When we were trained, we were told
    to never pick a buildings or anything for headquarters
    or for facilities.
    We were told just to dig in.
    So when we first went into combat,
    the first night, when the Colonel Harrison,
    told me to dig in our quarters.
    And it was just in rock.
    So we had to get some dynamite.
    And we dynamited.
    [LAUGHS] We tried to dynamite in, to get cover.
    And it was almost impossibility.
    So I told him I was going to have to get out and find
    better quarters from then on.
    So, from then on, I was the S-2 and the reconnaissance officer.
    And I selected the positions and also selected
    where we would be quartered for our headquarters.
    This was your first combat experience.
    Yes.
    Mm.
    How did you know what to do?
    Well, I just studied it, beforehand.
    And I'd had quite a bit of experience
    in the recon part of it and the surveying part of it.
    I had studied surveying and that type of work in school--
    and engineering.
    So I was pretty well.
    And I actually taught some of that,
    and I taught the boys that, when we were
    in camp before we went over.
    And was anything ever said about this group of men that
    were all Japanese-Americans?
    Any of the other officers talk about them--
    before they started into combat-- your men?
    No.
    Our officers didn't.
    Our officers, as I say, were selected,
    a couple from each army.
    And most of them were Southern boys, Southern officers,
    from Southern units.
    And they were fairly well acquainted
    with what was going to happen, and they made
    good officers, the ones we had.
    Of course, we started out with just about 15 officers.
    Our staff and our battery commanders was our main--
    we had about four on the staff.
    And then we had the four battery commanders--
    the three firing battery commanders and the one service
    battery commander.
    We had four of those.
    And then they had junior officers that came to our unit.
    And there was about two or three of them with each battery.
    And they were all very accepting of working-- having all the--
    Yes, they were.
    --Japanese-American men that--
    They were, or they didn't show any outside of it.
    Now, in some cases, they probably resented a little bit.
    I imagine they did.
    But they didn't show too much of it.
    Did they never talk to you about it?
    No.
    No, I never did.
    You were over all of these men.
    You were the captain.
    Yes, I was over the--
    I was over the battery when it started,
    and then I was on the staff while we were
    training, the rest of the time.
    And then, overseas, I was on the staff
    as the S-2 and the reconnaissance officer.
    And the survey personnel, like Don Samazu and those boys,
    were more or less under me directly,
    because they went on trips with me-- went on recons with me.
    What did you do during the period of time in Italy, then?
    Well, that's mainly what I'd done,
    was get out and look for positions for our batteries
    and also for headquarters for--
    and got where I selected buildings
    with wine cellars or something like that, to get in,
    where we'd be more or less safe.
    But on several instances, we would be out--
    the reconnaissance group and the survey boys would be out--
    we would be out looking for positions, and the Germans--
    [AUDIO OUT]
    --try to just--
    Stay here, and we rolling.
    [INTERPOSING VOICES] let me a little bit before when the next
    one is going to be over, too, so--
    [CROSS TALK] one-minute warning--
    Yeah.
    OK?
    OK, so you were looking--
    Well, in selecting positions and during that type of work,
    we were subject to fire from the--
    we were going up the valley in Italy, along the coast,
    but it was in the valley, and the Germans
    were located above us.
    And they were zeroed in, what we call "zeroed
    in," on our positions and on locations on roads
    and everything like that, with their 88s, what they call--
    the cannon was an 88 the Germans had--
    very accurate.
    And at times, just a few of us, if we were looking for a place,
    they would start firing on us.
    And we'd have to get into ditches
    or somewhere to take cover.
    Of course, we didn't pick those positions.
    We tried to get positions where they couldn't see us.
    And then what would you do?
    Well, then we'd go back and get the battery commanders
    and the rest of the men to come up and show them
    what we had selected for their place to move to.
    And what would they do, when they--
    They'd go back and get their unit, get their whole battery,
    and move it up there--
    move their guns and everything up there
    in position to fire on the Germans.
    So what were their duties, basically, with the field
    artillery battalion?
    Well, our basic duties of the 522 battalion
    was the direct support of the infantry.
    And of course, we were behind the front lines,
    a certain distance-- maybe 1/2 a mile to 1 mile--
    something like that--
    but in close enough that we could give direct support
    to fire over them, to neutralize the enemy, where
    we could move--
    where they could-- where we could move our positions.
    And we gave support for the infantry
    to keep them from being able to move themselves.
    And then can you talk about a few of the battles
    that you can remember?
    Yes, well, in Italy our campaign was, like I say, above Rome.
    We went from Rome on up towards--
    and we were attached to the Fifth Army, under Gen. Clark.
    And the first units--
    first division we were attached to--
    I believe it was the 45th, the Oklahoma Division,
    or the 36th of Texas, but when we got closer up to Leghorn--
    that's the Leaning Tower of Pisa, on the coast--
    we were attached to the 34th Division,
    which was a regular division.
    And the other two I mentioned were National Guard units,
    but the 34th was a regular unit.
    And so we supported right at Pisa and taking
    Leghorn, which was on the Arno River and the coast.
    And one thing I remember there--
    when I moved in their guns there, there was 8-millimeter--
    I mean, 8-inch-- there was 8-inch guns and big guns
    in front of our 105s.
    And it was just a plain ground for about 3 miles
    before we reached that, so we had to get out in the open
    to fight, to capture Leghorn--
    which we did.
    And about the time we had--
    I got within about a mile of it, myself, out in front.
    But then we got orders to move along the Arno River
    over to Florence, Italy.
    So we finished up our campaign in Italy at Florence.
    And then we were pulled back to Naples,
    to go to southern France, to Marseille.
    And then, when we got back to Naples, that's when I got sick
    and had to go in the hospital there at Naples.
    What happened?
    Well, I started bleeding.
    And I was more or less shell-shocked, I guess,
    of fatigue.
    And I started hemorrhaging and bleeding,
    so they put me in the hospital there.
    And it was a large hospital there, by the university,
    and it was where Mussolini had fixed up for a world's fair.
    And it was enormous thing.
    It had swimming pools.
    And it was fixed it up nice for a convalescent hospital.
    And I stayed in there about a month.
    And in the meantime, our unit had already
    moved to Marseille by boat.
    And they were staged outside of Marseille.
    And I had heard about where they were.
    So when they released me from the hospital,
    well, they were going to send me to a replacement depot,
    and I didn't know what had happened there,
    so I just went out to the airport
    and hitchhiked a ride from Naples to Marseille.
    And then I sent word out to the unit that I was back.
    So they were glad to send me back.
    What happened when you got back?
    Well, we staged there for a little while,
    and then we left there for the Vosges Mountains,
    where we had the most worst fighting--
    in the Vosges Mountains.
    What happened--
    That's where the-- well, the 36th Division was in position,
    and they were fighting the Germans.
    The Germans had put up a stand along the Vosges Mountains, one
    of their stands, before they got to the Rhine
    at that part of the sector.
    And one of the regiments of the 36th got cut off--
    one of the battalions-- and they called it the Lost Battalion.
    And they assigned us to rescue that Lost Battalion.
    And that was around Bruyeres, France.
    And we lost a lot of men.
    We had to come on out of the woods
    and go down to the little town of Bruyeres.
    And then i went back on up into the mountains and wooded area.
    And the Germans, when we flushed them out of Bruyeres,
    they moved up there into the mountains
    and surrounded this battalion of the Texas
    Division-- of the 36th.
    So our job was to take Bruyeres and also
    get to the Lost Battalion.
    And that was quite an undertaking.
    It took us about, oh, two or three weeks.
    That was in the wintertime it was in October of '44.
    And I was one of the first ones in Bruyeres,
    to pick our position.
    And of course, I was looking for a safe place there in the town.
    And I don't know whether we put this on tape or not,
    but I'd run on to a--
    When I found this place, it was a brothel.
    It was a madam's.
    [LAUGHS] And the women there was in this madam's care in there.
    So we run them all out-- run them all out on the street.
    And of course, they had been with the Germans, you know?
    So the town people caught them and shaved all their hair off.
    And you could see them women stick their heads out
    of buildings, and they didn't have any hair.
    They'd been shaved-- their hair off.
    So they were collaborating with the Germans.
    They had been collaborating with the Germans.
    And the people of Bruyeres knew that,
    so they took that way of getting back at them.
    But we did get in some hard--
    our battalion was called on to fire over our own troops
    and not hit the Lost Battalion, because the Germans had
    them surrounded, and we had to select positions
    where we could fire over our own troops
    and not hit the Lost Battalion troops.
    And we had already--
    we had them pretty well--
    We had them located.
    We had the Lost Battalion well located on our maps.
    And we had fired in some candy and some food
    to them, with our shells.
    And the air corps had dropped some food to them.
    And of course, see, they were cut off for about three weeks
    or better.
    On one occasion, one of our worst occasions,
    was, we were called on from the division,
    the 36th Division commander, General Dahlquist,
    to go up there and survey--
    the 522 was called on to go up there and survey
    in the platoons, so we'd have accurate fire over them.
    And myself and some of the survey crew
    and, I believe, Don Samazu, I think, was with me.
    I'm not sure.
    One of the men was with me.
    And we went to the--
    First, when we got up into the woods--
    forest-- we saw a lot of casualties coming back out
    of there, of the 36th, that we were relieving--
    the battalion we were relieving.
    And at this headquarters, while we
    were being briefed on where to go
    and where to find the platoons, this General Dahlquist
    came up there and was there while I was in the headquarters
    there.
    And he had his aide with him, and his name
    was Sinclair Lewis, Jr. He was Sinclair Lewis's son.
    Wow!
    He was his aide.
    And the general said, oh, there's no one out there.
    He says, your men are not pushing.
    He told the colonel-- he said, the men are not pushing enough.
    And the colonel said, we're pushing all we can.
    And his general said, well, I'll go up there with you
    and see what we can do.
    So they left, about the same time we did, for the front,
    up there where the platoons were.
    And we'd done our job.
    We was able to survey men using maps and alidade.
    And when we came back to the regimental headquarters, which
    was in the combat zone-- well, while we were up there,
    we went through mines, and also we
    were subject to cannon fire and mortar fire, a lot of mortar.
    Them mortars come in, and they hit those trees,
    and they burst, and the shell fragments hit you.
    And there was one right in front of me.
    One of our own infantrymen from the 442nd
    got cut clear from neck to neck.
    But he was right in front of me.
    And it was pretty rough fighting, about that time.
    We eventually rescued them, about two days later,
    after that--
    the last of October.
    But when we got back to our regimental headquarters,
    the general was back there, and he was shaking and had blood
    all over him.
    And he had lost that--
    Sinclair Lewis's son had got killed.
    His aide had got shot.
    He got killed while he was up there.
    And that general, he left there, and he never did come back.
    [LAUGHS] He never did show back up with our regiment,
    while we were there.
    Geez.
    But of course, he commended us on being the ones that
    rescued that battalion.
    And we got a lot of commendations and awards
    from that battle, that campaign there in the Vosges Mountains.
    And from the Vosges Mountains, we had lost a lot of men.
    Some of them was from frostbitten feet--
    the ones that wasn't casualties.
    They couldn't stand that cold weather very good,
    and a lot of them went to the hospital with frostbitten feet.
    So we were in low well, we were low ebb of personnel.
    So they sent us to southern France and the Maritime Alps,
    down close to the Italian border, close
    to Nice and Monaco, over down there
    on the southern front of France.
    And so we fought there, up in the mountains.
    And in the valley down there at Nice and Monte Carlo,
    it would be summertime.
    And up in the mountains where we were,
    the snow would be hip-deep.
    And the boys--
    It was really cold, up there.
    And-- but the fighting wasn't really that bad of fighting,
    because the Germans were in the valley on the Italian side
    and we were on the France side.
    And we used a tunnel that they'd built, during World War I,
    through this mountain.
    And we used it for our observation.
    We'd go through it.
    And that tunnel had compartments all along the sides of it--
    concrete-- where they'd use for ammunition.
    Of course, we didn't use it for ammunition purposes,
    because we had ours outside.
    Who had been in there?
    The World War I soldiers, from World War I.
    And at the other end of the tunnel,
    they had slits in the steel where
    you could look out and see down on the Italian side
    where the Germans were.
    And that's what we used to observe.
    And if we'd see personnel moving down there,
    well, we'd fire on them.
    And that was the results of that.
    And then we were relieved by a French unit, down there.
    And that's when our unit split up.
    And the 442nd regiment infantry, they went back to Italy.
    They were called back to Italy, to Gen. Clark, the Fifth Army.
    And they took a 522 field artillery
    and sent us north, up into France and Germany,
    to make the push into Germany with our artillery.
    And that's when we separated.
    And--
    Who were attached to then?
    Well, before the Rhine crossing at Worms,
    we were more or less with a group--
    artillery group.
    And we were separate groups.
    And we actually was that way, more or less, all the way,
    even after we--
    well, when we crossed the Rhine in March, at Worms,
    before we crossed the Rhine we done
    a lot of firing on the east bank of the Rhine
    and around Heidelberg and all through there,
    because the Germans were putting up their last force,
    because they knew when they lost that there would
    be no stopping us from then on.
    So we had done a lot of firing there.
    And we crossed at Worms on a Bailey bridge at night.
    And Gen. Patton was to our north--
    the Second Armored.
    And they had crossed the Rhine ahead of us.
    That sector up to the north was in the Second Armored Division
    and the Second Armored Army.
    They crossed before we did.
    But when we crossed, we took Mannheim
    with quite a bit of fighting and then around Heidelberg.
    I got into the edge of Heidelberg, at the bridge,
    and they were firing quite a bit.
    And so I never did--
    [LAUGHS] I never did get right into Heidelberg.
    We bypassed it and went on.
    And we went in a southeasterly direction,
    towards Augsburg and towards Munich.
    Who were attached to then?
    Well, we was more or less attached to the 101st Airborne
    Division.
    But they were moving so fast, and everything
    was so flushable, that we were more or less on our own.
    And during that time, we were really actually--
    we were assigned, more or less, a sector,
    but we were more or less on our own.
    And we even came up on--
    One time, we even come up on some German soldiers.
    My group, my recon group, we captured six German soldiers.
    And after we had captured them, our battalion
    decided to stay pretty close together, on the perimeter of--
    of when we set up.
    Do you remember what point you captured the German soldiers--
    It was after we'd left--
    it was after we had left Heidelberg and on the way--
    probably about halfway, several kilometers or miles from--
    before we got to Augsburg.
    What happened, actually?
    Well, after that, well, we just sent those on back
    to the prison--
    to stockade.
    There was six people we had captured.
    Where did you find them?
    We found them outside of our area.
    They were more or less stragglers that
    had been left behind or lost or something,
    or they just hadn't moved away fast enough.
    And we just come up on them.
    Were there any Germans left in the towns, when you got there?
    No.
    I think, this little village that we occupied,
    there wasn't any.
    But several of the villages that we occupied,
    there was Germans--
    people living in the villages.
    And we had to, a lot of time, move them out.
    And of course, that was a bad situation.
    The women would be crying, and they'd take--
    you know, have to leave their place--
    their homes-- because we had to have a place to stay.
    And so we would take over the places.
    You had mentioned that you had come across a compound?
    Yes.
    During that time when we were more or less on our own,
    we came up on one compound that I had run into on recon
    and looking around.
    It was a compound where the Germans had trained
    16-year-old young boys, and they had
    these-- they were using these .22 Mauser
    rifles for training purposes.
    And when we found it, the equipment was still there.
    The Mausers and a lot of the small arms
    were still in this compound.
    And of course, we took a good bit of those.
    And then we notified the higher headquarters
    that we had found it.
    Where were the people?
    [INTERPOSING VOICES] stop.
    OK.
    OK?
    OK.
    We're ready.
    OK, so we were starting to talk about the abandonment
    of the compound, and what happened,
    how you happened to come upon the 16-year-old training camp.
    The military camp, or the German military camp?
    Yeah.
    Are we ready?
    All right, all set.
    OK.
    How did you know that the camp was empty when you arrived?
    Well normally when we just come up on some compound something
    like, that we would just break in, and see what was there.
    And they had vacated it, and of course they
    had vacated in such a hurry since we were moving them
    so fast at that time, all along inside the German line there,
    inside the Rhine towards Munich where
    they had left their equipment, their rifles and everything
    like that.
    How did that was a training camp for boys?
    Well, I'm not sure just how, unless there was evidence
    left there in the camp that it was for that.
    That's the only way I can recall that we
    knew that's what it was.
    But since he had the small rifles, the 22 Mausers,
    and equipment, we figured it was some type of training area
    rather than the main forces.
    That they were training these men to replace their others.
    The boys?
    The ones that had regular combat, Wehrmacht soldiers.
    With the young-- see the German army,
    they were calling everybody they could get.
    And towards the end, in '44 and '45, before the war war's over,
    they were short of everything.
    They were short of manpower a good bit as well as equipment.
    And as we'll talk later about jet fuel and things like that,
    they were short of that.
    And in that way we had air superiority
    because they weren't able to get their planes in the air.
    You had also mentioned you came across some other compounds.
    Yes.
    During that time, when we were moving so fast that way,
    we came upon a kind of a compound, a stockade
    deal where they--
    and I guess I was the first to break into it.
    They opened the doors.
    It was a wooden compound.
    And it was just stocked full of products
    from everywhere, food from all over the country--
    from Denmark, even Norway.
    And they had everything from cheese
    and lots of cheese and liquors, and sardines,
    and just all kinds of food.
    And they were stocked high.
    They were stocked up high in this compound.
    You had to get up on things to get to some of it.
    And after we had found it and opened it up,
    our trucks started hauling it to different ones, well,
    the other units in the area had decided they would too.
    So it was a wide open thing that everybody went to this compound
    and got the things, got the food and stuff out of it.
    And then what happened after that?
    Well, after we had left there, we went on.
    We just moved so fast that we more or less on our own,
    including when we got close northwest of Munich
    around Augsburg and in that area, which
    was still northwest of Dachau.
    We were still supporting more or less the 101st Airborne.
    But they were moving so fast that we
    had our own sectors of occupying,
    and we were more or less with the other artillery units.
    It was kind of a group, artillery group.
    And so that's the reason when I and this liaison sergeant,
    Shozo--
    Kajioka.
    Yeah, Kajioka.
    Kajioka.
    Kajioka.
    I have a little bit the pronunciation wrong problem
    from being from the Oklahoma and from the South, some
    of these names.
    A little different.
    But I was able to do pretty good during the combat,
    during the service.
    We was out ahead of the unit, and we came up on this--
    the best I can remember it was still snow on the ground.
    It was still cold, although it was in March.
    And actually it was in April.
    It was late April.
    It was around-- supposedly, from word that I have,
    the best I can remember, it was the last of April.
    Some say we liberated the camp or found Dachau
    on around the 29th of April.
    But it could have been a few days earlier, one way
    or the other.
    It wasn't later.
    But it could have been a little bit earlier,
    when we come upon this camp.
    And of course, it was a fenced compound.
    And we were at a gate.
    And the sergeant, I've been told I can't recollect for sure.
    But he was the one that shot the gate open, and opened it up.
    And of course, there was not too many prisoners there
    that were able to get around too much.
    Because they had left on orders of higher command of Himmler.
    They had taken 8,000 of the prisoners, political prisoners.
    Who took?
    And moved them out of the camp.
    Before you arrived?
    Before we arrived.
    Who took the--
    It was under Hitler's orders.
    But it was Himmler, one of the head SS men had given him
    that order.
    And I have seen papers where that order
    was given on the 14th of April.
    So they moved sometime between April the 14th
    and the time we got there, they had moved these men out
    of there, around 8,000 of them, and moved them south,
    through Munich and on south.
    So what did you find when you were there?
    Well, what we found was that just
    there wasn't any guard at this gate where we broke into.
    And we found several people on the ground
    in bad shape, and not able to get around.
    But there were some that were able to move around.
    And when we opened the gate, they left.
    But they didn't go very far.
    As I read later, one of our boys said they went to a barn
    not too far from the camp itself.
    Now this was just one section, or one gate of the Dachau
    concentration camp.
    And the best I found out, I didn't know at the time,
    just how I knew it was a large camp.
    And it covered miles or better.
    But I found out later that there was some other people that
    have said they had were the first ones to arrive at Dachau.
    But it was probably they were at some other section
    of the camp or the other gates, or maybe
    some of these outlying camps that were around Dachau itself.
    This camp had been there so long and had
    handled so many political prisoners,
    that it had become a big, big operation, and the big thing
    for the German people, and of the cruelty of the way
    they were treating Political prisoners, especially the Jews.
    Now, they had sections in the prison where
    they had other prisoners besides the Jews,
    like the Poles and the different ones.
    And like I was commenting to you here a couple of months ago,
    I read an article of a priest.
    I had the article.
    But I don't have it with me.
    I can't find it.
    He's still living he's a year older than I am.
    He lives close, about 150 miles from me there in Oklahoma.
    And he commented in his report to the reporters
    that he had left.
    They had taken him a prisoner in '40, in Poland, in Warsaw,
    and sent him to Dachau prison.
    And he said he got a number.
    You see, most of the political prisoners, especially the Jews,
    the political Jews and political prisoners--
    Well, the Jews weren't the political prisoners though.
    Well, yeah, they were political prisoners.
    The Jews were part of the political prisoners.
    They called them political prisoners
    because they were of Jewish ascent,
    of Jewish ethnic background, and they
    were trying to get rid of them.
    That's why they put them in a camp
    like Dachau which was a death camp where they actually
    gassed them and there was gas chambers there,
    and then furnaces where they cremated them.
    Did you see them?
    I didn't see it myself, but I was told about it
    because I didn't get in there.
    I was a little bit too squeamish to go right in there.
    But you saw something else?
    Yes.
    And in there, where they were doing all that, they had,
    of course, there were a lot of them had starved to death
    and had been gassed, and they hadn't cremated and then just
    corpses.
    And they'd put them in these boxcars.
    And they had just boxcar loads of corpses what we found
    that they hadn't got rid of.
    You saw that?
    Well, I didn't actually--
    [PHONE RINGS]
    OK?
    Go ahead.
    OK, so Captain Taylor, you were talking about the boxcars.
    And if you could use the sentence that when
    you said you found them.
    Along at the gate after we had broken in and saw these men,
    I can't actually recall seeing the boxcars.
    But I was told about them.
    And that was the reason--
    and being told the other things that I didn't see,
    was the reason for the next day I
    was called to go to a meeting of a higher echelon or group.
    And best I can recall, it was a group
    of mainly the units that had been around in that section.
    A good bit of them were artillery units
    and other units that were moving towards Munich
    and in that area.
    And that's one of the reasons I think
    there's some misunderstanding on who just liberated what
    at the camp.
    Because there were different sections and different gates.
    And it was so large that some of us found one part of it.
    And then maybe somebody else come
    in from a different direction, or came in later.
    What did they tell you at the meetings about the boxcars?
    Well, at the meeting, it was discussed
    on what to do at the camp, and what
    to do with the boxcars, and the people in general that
    were there.
    And on the corpses and the bodies,
    they decided to dig trenches with bulldozers.
    Have the engineers dig bulldozer trenches, and bury them.
    Just dump them over, just dump the boxcars over
    into these trenches and cover them up.
    Who told you to do that?
    This headquarters.
    The meeting that I was at.
    Whoever was in charge of the meeting, I don't know.
    It was someone from Seventh Army or the 101st Division, one
    or the other.
    It was probably someone from the Seventh Army echelon
    who were taking care of the rear of what we leave behind.
    And of course, after the meeting it
    was decided that the units in the rear
    would take care of all this, and take care of the personnel that
    was left at the camp.
    Because we had to keep moving.
    So we didn't stay in that area very long
    because we moved right on through Munich and right on.
    And as we left Munich, we were right on the Autobahn
    and we saw this hundreds of airplanes, German airplanes
    on both sides of the Audubon.
    They had one Audubon going through Munich at that time.
    And since then, as we know that you all been over there,
    there's several going every direction.
    But at that time they just had one main Audubon
    and it went south.
    What did you see on the Autobahn?
    On the Autobahn, we just saw all these planes
    on each side of the Audubon.
    And they had run out of fuel, and they
    couldn't get them in the air.
    So they had wrecked them where we couldn't use them.
    But before I left Munich after Dachau,
    I had seen just crates of jet engines
    which they had received that was going to use but they didn't
    have fuel to use them.
    So they just had to destroy their airplanes.
    I wanted to take you back again to Dachau.
    Because you had said something to me
    about seeing the prisoners afterwards,
    eating along the side of the road.
    Yes, well that was mainly down when we run into them down
    at [NON-ENGLISH].
    [NON-ENGLISH]
    Yes.
    Right there at Dachau, I was moving so fast around there
    and then I really didn't notice them doing that.
    But some of the--
    I noticed some of the boys saw some
    of them wanting to get something from their messes,
    and also eating some meat off the dead cows and things.
    But we run on the same thing when
    we got down south of Munich.
    OK.
    I'll talk to that, about that, in a little bit.
    I wanted to-- you had mentioned earlier in your tape
    about the smell when you first came across the camp.
    Yes.
    If you could talk about that a bit.
    Well, it was just kind of a deathly smell, just odor.
    It's a kind of a when you come up on something like, it's
    hard to describe.
    That it was a deathly odor.
    There wasn't no one around outside.
    And there wasn't any Germans in that area.
    So they had abandoned the camp?
    They had, well, yeah.
    Well, the Germans, the civilian Germans weren't near there.
    And of course, the ones inside that
    were able to be moved by the SS had been moved, like I said,
    in that group of 8,000 that they had moved
    prior to the time we got there.
    But it was an awful scene what we saw.
    But I really don't recall seeing too many
    of the people inside the prison that we liberated, that we
    opened up the gates for.
    What were they-- do you remember what they were dressed
    in when you opened the gate?
    Yeah.
    They were dressed in cotton gray uniform, gray clothing.
    Men or women?
    Mostly men.
    It seemed to me like most of the camp
    was men that was left there.
    Now later on, when we get down, describing the camp that they
    moved, I recall some women, some families in the slave camp
    down there.
    But at Dachau itself, it was mainly men.
    And this personnel that I ran into that said he had to--
    there were 1,500 of them in that section.
    He said there was guards at that gate.
    But they had put up their white flags when we liberated that.
    And this man wasn't clear just who was--
    I tried to ride him and find out before I
    left this past couple of weeks to find out if he
    knew it was some of our men.
    But I never did get an answer from him.
    Of course, he's right old and he's
    a priest in a rectory there over by Tulsa.
    And he said he'd been there five years.
    But the way he talked, he was treated--
    they were treated much better than some
    of the political prisoners, in particular the Jews.
    They were treated a good bit better,
    the Polish, some of the Polish ones.
    And did you yourself see any of the boxcars?
    No, not as I recall.
    I knew about them and I'm not sure whether I actually saw
    them in the compound or not.
    Because I didn't really go in the compound that much.
    I didn't see any of the gas chambers or the furnaces.
    I didn't see them.
    I was just told about them and knew about them
    before I went to the meeting and everything.
    But I didn't actually see them.
    OK, and you were with Sergeant Kajioka.
    Did you see?
    Well, best that I can recall that's what they say.
    And I'm not sure who it was that I was with.
    I used the different ones went with me on recons,
    and were with me at different times on moving forward.
    And I've been told by some of the men
    that he was the one that was with me,
    and was the one that shot the gate, the lock off the gate.
    But like I say, my memory kind of fails me there.
    As to who it was.
    OK.
    And then the next thing you remembered
    was going to the meeting and having the officers there--
    Discussion, yes.
    --tell you about what to do with the boxcars.
    And then what happened?
    Where did you men go then?
    We didn't stay there very long.
    We started moving through Munich and on south
    toward the Bad Tolz, and towards the south on the Autobahn.
    We were on the Autobahn.
    Because everything was so fluent then,
    and the war was just about over.
    See, because this was just about the 1st of May.
    And the war was just about terminating.
    And as we moved, there were just all kinds of Germans.
    [AUDIO OUT]
    Are we ready?
    In two, one.
    OK.
    OK.
    OK.
    You were talking about as you were
    going south then to Bad Tolz.
    Yes.
    As we left to Munich on the Autobahn,
    we were moving quite fast and we came upon the town of--
    it was not too many kilometers or miles south of Munich,
    town of Bad Tolz and [NON-ENGLISH]..
    I can't pronounce that name.
    [NON-ENGLISH]
    [NON-ENGLISH],, and as we came into the town,
    we were met by all these political prisoners,
    these enslaved people that had been taken from Dachau
    by the SS troopers under orders that I had stated that they had
    given for them to be moved.
    And I understand there was about 8,000 of them
    when they started from Dachau.
    But when we found them there was about 5,000 left.
    And they claimed the rest, the other 3,000,
    had been killed or died on the trip
    from Dachau down to the Bavarian Alps.
    How far is that about?
    Well, on the map.
    I have a map here.
    Am I able to?
    This map is in kilometers.
    And let's see.
    Where we are here.
    I don't think it'll pick it up probably.
    Yeah, OK.
    We're probably going to have to do it.
    Just-- we'll have to do it later, Captain Taylor.
    Because we're not going to be able to pick up.
    See, from here down to here.
    Oh, it's quite a distance.
    It's about 60km would be about 36 or 50 miles.
    It would be about 50 miles.
    50 miles on that trip.
    On that trip.
    And they had made it in--
    they said they'd made it in about 10 days,
    I mean about six days.
    Before we got there.
    And the soldiers had left, the SS
    had left them in this village.
    And what did you see?
    What I saw there, we was going in along the roads there
    was dead horses and animals.
    And these people were cutting off hunks of that meat
    and eating it.
    And they were very malnutrition, and you could count almost
    all the ribs.
    They were very malnutrition, I mean
    they were in very bad shape most all of them.
    Did they have clothes on at that time?
    They had clothes on.
    Some of them had clothes on.
    Some of them didn't have upper clothes,
    because I recall seeing the ribs and everything, and the bones.
    What kind of weather was it then?
    It was still kind of winter.
    It was still, it was still in early May.
    It was last of April or early May.
    See?
    It hadn't been long since we left Dachau.
    So what was the weather like then would you say?
    There was snow on the ground in parts around Dachau.
    There was still snow on the ground.
    And best I remember there's still snow there
    where we came upon these men.
    And they hadn't eaten for about three days, I understand.
    They just had been fed about half
    the time that they had been on the road from Dachau.
    They hadn't been fed about half the time.
    I guess they were short of rations,
    and the Germans were just starving them to death.
    And these boys would--
    these men would come to our messes in our batteries,
    and want food.
    And, of course, we had given orders
    not to feed them, because we knew they couldn't hardly
    stand that kind of food.
    But, of course, they got into the garbage cans and got
    and the men gave them some food.
    And some of them died because they
    couldn't stand that type of food, that rich food.
    Because they were in such a bad condition.
    Did you talk to any of these people?
    Yes, I talked to some of them.
    And we formed a kind of a camp.
    It was kind of a slave camp.
    We call it a slave camp.
    But it was from these prisoners.
    And we were more or less in charge of that camp
    there at the end of the war.
    And we had made arrangements, higher headquarters
    had made arrangements to send these people back,
    a good many of them to Poland.
    And I'm sure a lot of them were Jewish, Polish Jews also.
    And I had the job of getting them ready to be moved,
    and also taking them to the railroad stations down
    in Austria, to be moved to Poland.
    but by the Russians.
    The Russians were in charge of the trains,
    and was in charge of the moving of the prisoners,
    because they figured that more or less it was in their sector
    since it was in Poland.
    They were going to Poland.
    And the Russians were really strict
    along the border, the boundary between where
    we were along there at Berchtesgaden
    and on down there in Salzburg and Vienna, along that line.
    That's where we met the Russians.
    And they paraded up and down the river with rifles,
    and they wouldn't let us go over into their territory at all.
    They were pretty strict.
    And when we came to load these prisoners, these slaves,
    prisoners on the trains, they kind of objected quite a bit.
    And they were very--
    it seemed to me like very rough with them.
    They wouldn't let them take anything, hardly anything,
    but nothing on their backs, or anything hardly.
    They wouldn't then take anything they'd picked up
    or anything with them.
    Did the people want to go back to Poland?
    Well, yeah.
    They were glad to go somewhere to get free.
    I mean they-- but they didn't have much.
    I guess they didn't have much say so where they were to go.
    Because they were all from some place like that.
    They weren't many of them from around that part of Germany.
    Did you talk to any of them about how
    they came to be in Dachau, or how they came to be in prison?
    No, except the fact that they were
    Jewish, and just being sent to these camps, being persecuted.
    And before we had ever reached Dachau,
    even when we were in Italy, we had
    heard of a lot about these persecutions and things that
    had gone on in camps.
    And a lot of them was individual persecution,
    where they would hang people, and things like that,
    in towns and things like that.
    But this was nothing like that.
    I mean it was much more worse in my way of thinking in coming up
    on something like this.
    Then what you had been led to believe?
    Yes.
    Were you given any orders about these concentration
    camps and what to do when you came upon them?
    Now, I don't recall.
    I think we knew before we reached Dachau,
    we had been told by a higher authority
    that they were in that sector that we would probably
    come up on them in that sector.
    And of course, it was a surprise to me when I did get there.
    But in one way and another way, we were more or less expected
    and other units were too that they were located in that area.
    It was a pretty well known fact where
    Dachau was, since it was one of the oldest concentration
    camps in Germany.
    And what do you next remember about the prisoners,
    or about displaced persons, or anything else.
    Well, after we had placed them at the camp,
    after we placed them at the railroad station
    and turned them over to the Russians,
    well then shortly after that we were moved back north of Munich
    to at first to Augsburg, which is about oh,
    it's not too far northwest of Munich, northwest of Dachau.
    And we set up a checkpoint there to check
    the prisoners that were being released, the German prisoners.
    And I was told I was in charge of that checkpoint.
    And we were told to look out for the SS troopers, the special--
    the ones that were the most severe cruelty
    type people, of these special service people, the SSers.
    And we were told to let the regular Wehrmacht German
    soldier go on home.
    But we were told to turn back the SS
    and send them to a stockade, and send them to prison camps.
    And we found several.
    The way we determined whether they were SSers or not,
    was they had tattoos or cut marks of the swastika
    underneath their armpits.
    And we would have to strip them down and check to see
    if they had this mark on them.
    If they had that mark on them, then we
    knew that they were mean, should be kept in prison.
    And we maintained that checkpoint for I
    don't know how long, maybe two or three weeks.
    And then we were moved back to Donauworth
    on the Rhine, which is not too far from Augsburg
    from where our checkpoint was.
    And I don't think we held the checkpoint after we moved back
    to Donauworth.
    But we had it before we moved back to Donauworth,
    we had the checkpoint.
    And in checking these prisoners, the SS,
    we'd been warned that some women SS people, as well as the men,
    and our men, some of our men, I recall one of the sergeants,
    I don't recall him by name.
    But he was in charge of checking the women prisoners for that
    marking underneath the breast, and they
    resented it pretty much being they had to take off
    their blouses to be checked.
    But I don't think he minded it.
    That was just one of the occupations we
    had to do after the war ended.
    And then we were placed in the occupation
    there to look after the villages and the surrounding area.
    I remember hearing about after you had been there
    for a little while, that one of the duties that you had
    was to try to find people who attempted to pretend that they
    were not SS.
    And you would come across those.
    Yes.
    And I read not too long ago, I had heard one of our men,
    we had been warned that there was a high SS general
    or a big shot with the SS was loose,
    and was trying to get away.
    And one of our men had identified him,
    found him, and reported him, and they captured him.
    And the person that reported him got accommodation
    from the higher headquarters from our outfit
    for finding him.
    Yeah, that was one of our main duties, that
    and taking care of the civilian population,
    and controlling the organization of the towns,
    and stuff like that.
    See, we were in charge.
    Of the villages and of the area.
    And you noticed a lot of the people that
    had been imprisoned by the Nazis still there
    in other camps or what was done with all those people
    that you found, those 5,000 that were left?
    Well that 5,000 is the ones I said it was in that slave camp
    that we sent back to Poland.
    All 5,000?
    Yeah.
    All of them was removed from when the war was over,
    which was just about that time, around May the 5th,
    the early part of May.
    They were released to go back.
    And they were more or less sent back in groups as a whole.
    And I remember the camp.
    It was pretty sickening to see them slaves and the way they
    had been living, and especially the ones that had
    come from Dachau themselves.
    They were in bad shape.
    Where were they kept in the meantime
    before they were sent back?
    There in a village and in that area, close to Austria
    by Bad Tolz, there by--
    Were they living in houses or what were--
    No, we just had them in a camp.
    There was just a big camp.
    You mean they were put back in a camp?
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    That's about the only way we had to take care of them
    was in a camp.
    We had no facilities to put them in any barracks or anything,
    because there wasn't any.
    They just had to live out in the open, like we did.
    I mean we were the same way.
    Was there any-- sorry.
    We were on our way to Berchtesgaden
    in Austria and Salzburg, but there's
    some difference of opinion.
    I didn't think we ever got to that part of Austria
    before the war ended.
    But now later, before we left down there
    and before we moved the enslaved people,
    I did take a trip down to Berchtesgaden on my own.
    And I went from there, from Berchtesgaden
    on over to Salzburg in Austria, and then on over to Vienna,
    to Linz on the Danube to see.
    I had a cousin that was in the infantry there.
    And I looked him up while I was down there.
    And then when we got back, when we got back to occupation
    at Donauworth, I'd done quite a bit of traveling on my own.
    I went up to Brussels, Belgium and Luxembourg.
    And well Luxembourg is on the way to Belgium
    from where we were.
    And I traveled quite a bit on my own,
    just looking, seeing what I could see.
    You still like to travel.
    I did get to Paris before I came home for three days.
    And then how long were you at Donauworth?
    We were Donauworth from about the latter part of July.
    I have a high angle on some of our magazines that we put out,
    the 522 put out, of August the 3rd.
    So I know we was there before August the 3rd.
    And I left the unit at Donauworth in September.
    And they said I had enough points or more than enough.
    And so I could go back home.
    So I left the unit at Donauworth in September.
    And the unit stayed there I guess till sometime in November
    or December, when they went to join the rest of the combat
    team.
    So they still say separately all that time they were separate,
    the 522?
    Yes, we were separate.
    All the time we were in Germany, we were a separate unit.
    And we were a separate unit all the way through Germany.
    Because the 442nd regiment, infantry regiment
    had gone back to Italy, when we left the Maritime Alps.
    And what would be your overall man of your men?
    Greatest.
    They really were.
    They were the best soldiers I've ever seen.
    Yeah, they were really good.
    And I'm not saying that just because I'm here with them.
    They've always known that I felt, a lot of them.
    They were good men.
    Of course, I was just one person myself.
    But it was a good fighting unit, and they
    performed the duties the best.
    And we were recognized all over the Allied armies had
    been one of the best units in the Allied armies in Europe.
    We got more commendations and awards
    than any sizable any unit in the Allied theater,
    European theater.
    We had a lot of casualties.
    But in our unit, as an artillery unit,
    I figured we were exceptional in getting the recognition that we
    did.
    And I wanted to ask you a little bit too
    about what happened when you came back to the United States
    and what you did with your life after.
    Well, I came back in September.
    And I came back to Norfolk, Virginia,
    the same place we had left.
    And I stayed there about a week or two.
    And they sent me to Camp Chaffee, Arkansas,
    which is close to Oklahoma, to my hometown,
    where the wife was staying with her parents during the war.
    And I got released there at the camp.
    And rather than take any claim or anything at that time,
    I stayed in the reserve.
    And I remained in the reserve for a number of years,
    well actually to 1954, I stayed in the reserves.
    And I've done some teaching in the schools
    in the reserve schools in Texas.
    And as well, but not too much of it, because I
    wasn't hardly able to do too much and my other activities.
    I went back as a petroleum engineer,
    doing my engineering work along the coast,
    working from Houston to New Orleans, about 300
    or 400 miles.
    And I was working inland as well as offshore.
    And then we have just a few more seconds.
    I wanted to just bring up about your Bureau of the Indian
    Affairs work too that you did.
    Less than a few seconds.
    Oh.
    OK.
    He said we're going to talk back about what
    it was after the war, your job?
    After the war?
    Yeah, OK.
    Well, I might say a little bit more
    about the war and the Lost Battalion in Vosges Mountains,
    a number of us received a Bronze Star for our work there.
    And I also received a Croix de Guerre
    from the French army, the French.
    I didn't receive the medal until after I got back
    in civilian life.
    But I received it.
    It's a large medal with a cross and a star in the center of it.
    And it's equivalent to our Silver Star.
    But I was quite proud of that medal.
    You still have that?
    Yes.
    Yes, I have it.
    My daughter fixed a frame for all my medals.
    And I have it at home.
    Was there ever any question about the loyalty of the men
    that served with you?
    Not at all.
    Not even when they were in camp before we left for Europe,
    and definitely not after that.
    We had a little misunderstanding with one of our officers.
    He ordered the men, one of our fort observers
    to do something they shouldn't have done.
    And there was a-- they were enforcing it.
    But he left the unit.
    And so, but as far as the loyalty of the men,
    there wasn't no doubt whatsoever.
    In fact they went overboard, I think,
    trying to prove themselves with what
    they were trying to accomplish.
    OK.
    Anything else that you think--
    Well, now after I'd done quite a bit
    of consulting work along the coast for myself, but in '63,
    I took a job with the Department of Interior
    with the government.
    And we moved back to Oklahoma with the Bureau
    of Indian Affairs.
    It looked after the affairs of those where I was sent to,
    in the Muskogee region, looked after the five tribes,
    which were made up of the Cherokee, and Choctaw,
    and the Seminole, and the Creek.
    And they were from the Trail of Tears from Georgia.
    They moved back in the 1800s there
    to the Indian territory in Oklahoma.
    See Oklahoma was all Indian territory
    back before the government opened it up in 1889 when
    my grandfather made the run.
    Well prior to that, it was all Indian land.
    But the five civilized tribes, rather than have
    tribal reservations, well there was one tribe,
    the Osage tribes in Oklahoma.
    They kept their tribe as a reservation, as a whole.
    But they were the only ones in Oklahoma.
    The rest of them were given allotments, 160 acres or so,
    different allotments according to the amount of blood
    they were and so forth of the Indian blood.
    You're part Indian yourself?
    Yes, I'm part Cherokee.
    My mother's side of the family was Cherokee.
    And my daughter's husband, my son-in-law is Indian.
    He's a Cherokee Indian also.
    And he's probably almost half-blooded.
    His mother is full-blooded Indian
    on his side of the family.
    And my grandchildren are on the road
    where they can get protection for health reasons and things
    like that.
    And I suppose I could, if I would trace my ancestry
    back far enough.
    But I'm unable to trace it.
    Back then, it was hard to trace back, your ancestries.
    My grandmother and grandfather both had left home
    when they was right young.
    My grandfather Taylor had made the old Chisholm Trail,
    running cattle from Abilene, Texas, to Abilene, Kansas.
    And when I was right young, he would tell me
    the stories of meeting up with the Indians and all
    that kind of things.
    And he was quite a character.
    But after I was with the bureau there,
    in their headquarters in Muskogee for about three years,
    and doing oil and gas work, and leasing the Indian land.
    And we took care of the leasing and the selling of the land
    to protect the Indians' rights.
    Because the courts and everything
    was more or less in favor of the white man
    who would buy them out.
    And a lot of the Indians were not really educated enough
    to protect their own rights.
    And so that's the reason the government had
    stepped in and formed this Bureau of Indian Affairs
    to take care of their rights.
    And it was a good thing because otherwise they'd lost a lot.
    And some of them that had kept their--
    we insisted that they keep half their mineral rights.
    And in Oklahoma, there was a lot of oil discovered
    in the early '20s and '30s, and then on up to
    at the present time.
    And so a good many of the Indians
    were helped quite a bit from holding onto their land,
    especially the mineral part.
    A lot of times they would sell the surface.
    And they would sell all the minerals, if we had let them.
    But we wouldn't let them sell them, except half of them.
    Sometimes we wouldn't let them sell any of it.
    But it depended on how good it might be.
    And I was transferred over to the Oklahoma City area
    where I still am in '66.
    And then I looked after--
    I was with the Geological Survey which was
    doing the same type of work.
    We looked after Indian land as well as federal land
    that we needed to supervise.
    And I've done that till '74.
    And I retired in '74.
    So since then, we've been traveling a good bit,
    and enjoying the retirement.
    You do a lot of traveling.
    But I prior to that, while I was still
    on the Gulf Coast around '54, when I got out of the reserve,
    I had this ailment I had there in Naples come back on me.
    And I had a bad operation, emergency operation
    over in Louisiana.
    I was over there on the well and I got sick,
    and started hemorrhaging blood.
    And they rushed me to the hospital.
    And I guess they thought they'd going to lose me.
    But I had two good surgeons.
    One was a Frenchman and one was an Italian that operated on me.
    And they went in my stomach and they found some ulcers,
    but they couldn't stop the bleeding.
    And they had to go up to my esophagus,
    and I had busted in my esophagus.
    And they figured it was an old break that I
    had got over there in Italy.
    Were you shot in Italy?
    I wasn't shot.
    I was just taken ill, and hemorrhaged and bled
    over there.
    And I just convalesced over there in that hospital
    there really.
    But these doctors that operated on me in '54,
    they seem to think that it was from this same break,
    same thing.
    And so after I got out of that hospital in Louisiana
    in '54, in '61, I was rushed to the hospital in the VA hospital
    in Houston.
    And they wanted to operate on me again.
    But I didn't.
    The wife didn't want me to.
    So we got out of that operation.
    And then I been in another VA hospital
    back in Oklahoma a time or two, but overall I've
    been fairly lucky that I've done as good as I have.
    Well, you've done beautifully.
    There are a few other questions that several people
    would like to ask.
    And other than that--
    I'd be glad to--
    --you've done a beautiful job today.
    Well, thank you.
    You were wonderful.
    Don, I just wanted to go back to the question about--
    You can sit back.
    Andy will--
    I want to ask you, go back to Judy's question
    about whether there was any question
    about the loyalty of your men.
    For the purposes of this film, we need you to say--
    Say there was no question in my mind there was loyalty.
    Well, there wasn't.
    There never was--
    You need to say that.
    Because, you said yeah, no there wasn't.
    That's all you said.
    We need to have you say the whole statement.
    In other words, you need to incorporate Judy's question.
    In other words, we need you to say there was never
    any question in my mind.
    Well there wasn't never a question in my mind.
    Now, when we were first formed in Hattiesburg,
    when the unit was originally formed,
    there was some question.
    That is there was some censoring done in the combat team
    as a whole on the personnel.
    What kind of censoring?
    Well they censored some mail, and also checked individually,
    asking people questions about it.
    Which people?
    And they were a very small number
    that were sent from our camp that
    left our organization in the early months of our unit.
    But as far as I'm concerned, there never
    was any question in my mind about them.
    And I was the S2 of the battalion on the staff.
    And I had quite a bit to do with the checking of the personnel.
    And I will definitely say that they were very loyal.
    Well, it goes to show that they're
    loyal if they volunteered in the first place
    for that type of thing.
    And they've been showing a good example
    from the 100th battalion which when it had gone in earlier,
    I think maybe in '42, had gone in
    and fought in Africa and lower Italy, before we got there.
    And they really had shown their loyalty, the 100th battalion.
    And after they became part of our regimental combat team,
    well they still were very good.
    Yeah, they were the best soldiers
    I've ever been up with.
    I'll put that up against any of them.
    Thank you so much, Captain Taylor.
    I thought maybe--
    I just had one more question, Judy.
    I don't recall.
    This is many months ago but Don Shimazu
    was telling us about the capture of the general.
    Oh, he already--
    Oh, he already did?
    Well, that was a different--
    I think that was a different.
    That might have been a different general.
    The one Don was talking about I think
    was right at the end of the war.
    And it was down there close to Berchtesgarden on our way
    to Berchtesgarden, is when he found that one.
    Now, I don't know too much about that capture
    of that one, that general.
    But the one I had referred to later
    was after we were in occupation.
    But we did run on to a lot of German soldiers, both SS
    and Wehrmacht, right at the end of the war on our way
    to Berchtesgarden there.
    And best I can recall, it was about two weeks
    before we really knew the war was over.
    Now, the war was actually over I think around May
    the 5th, the early part of May.
    But we were still moving and the Germans
    were surrendering and moving back, and passing us.
    But as far as we had never received orders to stop.
    And that's when we came upon this general
    that Don was speaking about.
    Do you want to tell us a little about that general?
    We didn't get that on tape.
    Well, I don't know that much about it.
    Don knows more about that than I do.
    Because I don't recall it, that much about it.
    OK.
    I don't know if Judy's asked you this question.
    But if there is one instance that stands out
    in your mind about the 522nd, if you could
    you tell us about that.
    Yeah, well I'll have to say that was in the Vosges Mountains
    when we were fighting.
    Could you say, if there's one thing that
    stands out in my mind is--
    One thing that certainly stands out in my mind
    that about the 522nd in combat was our campaign in the Vosges
    Mountains, when we were called on to rescue that
    Lost Battalion of the 36th Division, Texas 36th Division.
    And that was one of the hardest campaigns
    that we were in battles that we had during our time.
    Now the 100th battalion had had maybe worst conditions
    at Anzio and in Italy before they joined us.
    But as far as our unit as a whole was concerned,
    both the 442nd and the 522nd was in the Vosges Mountains,
    there in the French sector.
    And the Germans were holding out there along that line
    before they crossed the Rhine.
    And they knew that once we got to the Rhine
    and got them whipped on the other side of the Rhine, well,
    there wasn't no stopping.
    Because they didn't have any defenses
    built up that they could hold.
    And that's why it became a fluent affair.
    And we just moved as fast as we could move.
    Sometimes, we'd just stay in our vehicles.
    I mean we wouldn't hardly set up to do
    any firing at all, because we didn't have anything
    to fire on.
    And that 101st division that we were following in Germany,
    they were called the Battling Bastards of Bastogne.
    They had got caught in that Bulge, in France.
    And they were completely cut off at one time.
    And you probably read or heard about them.
    And they were a cocky outfit.
    So when we got with them, when we crossed the Rhine,
    well they were still pretty cocky
    and really wanting to go and get the war over with.
    So other than that in the Vosges Mountains, well
    I suppose that one thing that brings out
    in my mind besides the Dachau liberation,
    would be along the Rhine River there at Heidelberg
    and Mannheim, when we'd done all the firing across the Rhine
    River.
    Of course, we had some pretty good battles
    in the first six months we were in combat in Italy.
    And I recall one time I don't know whether--
    we were told in training to always dig in on positions.
    And when we got over there the first time
    we tried to dig in the rock and everything,
    and we had the dynamite.
    And I told the colonel that we couldn't do that.
    He didn't want to get in buildings.
    But I told him, well, we tried to find
    wine cellars or some kind of thing to get in.
    So that's what we done from then on.
    But the campaign around Leghorn along the coast
    up along the Arno River, it was a pretty big battle
    of taking Pisa and Leghorn.
    And when we got there and in position,
    we put our 105s, which was close support artillery.
    We had them behind some of the 8-inch and the bigger guns,
    and the 155 guns.
    Well that was one time we were farther away from the enemy
    than they were.
    But that was a kind of a plain there about three miles
    between where we were in and Pisa.
    And I got out in the open there about a mile from there.
    And as far as I got on observation,
    and I would call back and then we
    were called to go over to Florence.
    And we went over there along the river in the mountains
    at night, blackout.
    And on these blackout trips, all we
    had was a little spotlight on a little strip
    on the vehicles, the vehicle behind us.
    And I would normally in the first vehicle.
    And on that trip I remember, I don't know who was driving.
    But we upset.
    We didn't see where we were going.
    And we upset on the mountainside.
    And we turned our Jeep over.
    And it landed down the mountainside the other way.
    And I went down a little bit and hung on to a tree.
    And got up and we left the Jeep.
    I believe the driver might have stayed with it.
    But I got in the command car with the colonel with the staff
    car, and we went on.
    But there was quite a few incidents
    like that, the things that happened.
    Captain Taylor, was there any particular instance or thought
    that really stands out in your mind,
    or feeling that you had about the liberation of Dachau when
    you saw those prisoners?
    Well, yes.
    It brought to mind there was an awful atrocities of way
    to treat people.
    I mean like I said, I had heard of things like that before.
    But I never realized that they had a camp and death
    camps like that, and treated people that bad, that cruel.
    I mean that was just uncalled for, for that type of treatment
    of people.
    They just starved them to death, and then gassed them,
    and cremated them.
    Thank you so much, Captain Taylor.
    That was really wonderful.
    Well, thank you.
    Beautiful.
    I hope--
    Thank you so much.
    That was beautiful.
    Just probably-- wow.
    Now that was-- we'll take it.
    Yeah that was wonderful.
    Did you enjoy that?
    I did.
    You see?
    Judy, did you want to tape the--
    Well, I did.
    But now we-- they have to go to the dinner.
    [AUDIO OUT]
    OK, you can start.
    All right, after we had come through part of Germany here,
    we came up on the Rhine River at the town of Worms,
    which is right here.
    It's northwest of Heidelberg, Mannheim and Heidelberg.
    And we done quite a bit of firing, of course,
    across the Rhine there, as I have stated before.
    And we took Mannheim and Heidelberg.
    And then we headed in a southeast direction
    through here, coming down to Augsburg
    and into Dachau and Munich.
    And then after we had left Munich,
    we went south down about, oh about 50,
    60 kilometer to Bad Tolz and Waakirchen,
    where we found the prisoners from Dachau
    that had been left when the SS had to move on down
    to Berchtesgarden.
    Now Berchtesgarden was on down here,
    is south of here, of the map and in Austria.
    And it was Hitler's hideout.
    And I visited that Eagle's Nest right after the war.
    And our Air Corps had just flattened everything
    on the surface.
    But his tunnel was still there where his hideout was
    in that tunnel in the mountain.
    And those have been over there since then have seen that area.
    And after the war, right after the war,
    I visited from Berchtesgarden, I went over
    to Salzburg in Austria, and then on over to Linz.
    Let's see where Linz--
    Well, I can't even find Salzburg.
    We can pretty well understand where that is.
    This is [PLACE NAME].
    Where I traveled is from over here from Berchtesgarden,
    from Berchtesgarden I went to Salzburg.
    And we have traveled that route since the war.
    I was over there, and we went the same route
    that we had traveled during the war.
    And then from there, at that time I went on this Audubon
    to Linz, on the Danube.
    And I had a cousin that was in the infantry there.
    And I looked him up.
    And right across, he had the job of protecting the border
    from the Russians.
    And across the river here at Vienna and at Linz
    was the Russian sector.
    And the Russians were very strict there.
    They patrolled the area with their rifles
    and they wouldn't let any of our troops
    over there in that part of the country after the war.
    They were very strict.
    Maybe we can look a little bit at the pictures that you have.
    Who is that now?
    That's our survey crew, recon boys, Don Shimazu
    with the Lieutenant Langsdorf.
    He was head of the survey boys directly.
    They were directly under him.
    And I was in charge of them.
    And here's a-- is that all right there?
    Yes.
    This is a picture of I think it's battery
    C, some of the boys and battery C unit, battery.
    And this is a picture of a gun crew.
    Let me get the battery C.
    OK.
    OK.
    And this is a picture of a gun crew and the guns.
    I'm not sure what battery that was.
    And you took all of those?
    Yes, I've taken these.
    And this is a picture of a gun by a building
    at a high elevation.
    You can see the elevation of the barrel
    was at the highest point.
    That's a high angle.
    Here's another one.
    This may have been the same building.
    I'm not sure.
    But this is another picture of a building with a high angle
    fire.
    Is this where you got the name high angle?
    Yeah.
    That's right.
    Would you talk about what high angle is?
    This is the first I realized that call your [INAUDIBLE]
    at a high angle.
    Yeah.
    They got that from the angle of elevation of our guns.
    This is a tent in the snow, showing the condition
    of the area in the snow.
    And here's--
    You may think that's pretty large.
    But that doesn't hold too many men.
    This is a picture of the mountains, probably
    the Maritime Alps, or in the Vosges Mountains.
    And it shows the snow on the ground,
    and shows the Jeep stuck.
    Then I have a picture here that's back in Italy.
    At Leghorn, before we went into combat along the coast line.
    A group of us, this is a group of the officers,
    but a group of the service men too.
    We would dig up the mines, mines in the water.
    Those are mines?
    These are mines here.
    Well, see you got a picture over there.
    Yeah, this is the same.
    Actually you should be looking at it,
    so you can frame it right?
    Yeah that's-- and then I have another picture here
    of the survey crew, Don Shimazu, he got into all kinds
    of pictures.
    And here's a picture of Chaplain Yamada.
    Is he still alive?
    No ma'am.
    He passed away several years ago.
    When we were here in '72, he was too sick to see me.
    But he got me in touch with the other men of the unit.
    He was a good soldier as well as a good chaplain
    and a good person.
    I have here a picture of them getting
    a haircut, some of the boys.
    I call them boys, they were older than me.
    But--
    They call each other boys.
    They were men.
    And here's another picture of our camouflage around the gun.
    See that, the gun?
    See, they camouflage the guns so the airplanes couldn't
    see them, or they couldn't spot them from the air.
    Here's a picture of at the mess.
    I think they're eating here.
    This is a picture of my friend, Captain Kimura of the medics.
    He and I and Captain Johnson of battery B
    run around quite a bit together.
    What's his name?
    That's Captain Kimura.
    Is he still alive?
    I don't know.
    I've never been able to--
    he's on the mainland, but in Los Angeles in some area,
    but I'm not sure whether he's still living or not.
    This is a picture of some citation that we got.
    Not the parking kind.
    No.
    And here here's one, little nicer buildings down
    at the Nice when we were in the Maritime Alps.
    We would come back two or three days
    out of the week from the snow hip
    deep back down there where they would be swimming
    in the beach around Nice.
    And it was very warm and they had beautiful houses.
    And we took over some of the places, the big parcels.
    We had a service battery, the whole battery 160
    or 120 or so men, we had them in one house, one yard.
    One home?
    Whose home?
    Yeah.
    [BACKGROUND CHATTER]
    I have a lot more pictures of mountains and so forth.
    I don't know what that picture over there.
    This might be of interest.
    This is a cut of air photos.
    And these photos, this photo maps
    is a map we used to locate the enemy
    and locate the places where we might occupy.
    Oh, so you used this during the war.
    We used the air photos and topographic maps altogether.
    That was the means that we had of doing our recon.
    There is something that's circled here.
    What is that circled?
    I'm not sure just what that is.
    It's some type of a building.
    I really don't recall what I circled that for.
    Here's another place down there in Nice
    where we had another citation.
    OK, hold on.
    Let me get that citation.
    This is a picture of--
    the best I can tell this is a minefield in the background,
    and we had a picture taken of that.
    I believe that fencing in the background, there is possibly
    could be a minefield.
    Now some of the minefields we went through,
    they still-- we went through them so quick there in Italy,
    that they still had their signs up, men and signs that they
    were mine signs.
    And we were in one I recall some of the recon boys, survey
    boys and myself--
    Are you getting a little tired there, I think?
    We, well no.
    I'm all right.
    We got in this minefield.
    The sign was still up.
    But they started firing on us.
    They started shelling us.
    And we had to hop around them in the minefield.
    And the shells were coming in on us
    and it was quite an ordeal to getting out of there.
    Trying to play hopscotch.
    And I had some pictures here.
    Who is that in the picture right there?
    Here?
    That is Captain Johnson of battery B.
    He was a good friend of Captain Kimura and myself.
    Is he the one whose wife was the nurse?
    Yes.
    And he's the one that died of polio just after the war.
    He was 29 when he died of polio.
    And he was going to make a career out of it.
    He was quite a athlete in Illinois.
    He went to University of Illinois.
    And he starred in basketball, I think, and football.
    He was quite an athlete.
    Who are these?
    This was an early picture at Camp Shelby.
    And it shows our officers.
    At that time now our colonel, this
    is Colonel Baya Harrison, Colonel Harrison, and right
    next was Major Wright.
    Now our S-3 at that time was Major Moye.
    There was one colonel, and two majors.
    And Major Moye is not here.
    I don't know why he's not in this picture.
    And the rest of us here were captains.
    Can you point yourself out?
    Well, that's my picture right there.
    That's Captain Taylor, just a few years ago.
    And this is-- yeah, just a few.
    And this is Captain Kimura here.
    And I think this was Captain Johnson,
    and this was Captain James, that was the headquarters
    commander during the war.
    And he was a regular army sergeant
    and became an officer before he came to our unit.
    He was a good soldier.
    I wanted to ask you too about before,
    because this time is running out.
    We wanted to say a few things about your family.
    Yes, I did.
    When I came back from the service, of course,
    I never talked about anything about the war.
    And I would have, you might say nightmares and pretty bad
    thoughts about the war.
    I wouldn't talk about it.
    I couldn't go to any war movie or listen
    to anything about the war.
    And loud noises bothered me.
    Firecrackers even bother me.
    And the wife all through that had
    to raise the children and she's the one
    that suffered through all the--
    and I have to give her a lot of credit for what she'd
    done after the war was over.
    Thank you so much.
    I know your wife wanted us to get that on as well.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Billy Taylor, born October 15, 1912 in Oklahoma, describes growing up on a farm in a suburb of Oklahoma City; attending the University of Oklahoma and studying petroleum engineering; joining the ROTC, working with the horse-drawn artillery; receiving his lieutenant's commission in 1935; working for the conservation corps in Oregon; getting married in 1938 and going to Texas; joining the armed forces in March 1941; going to Fort Sill to be an instructor; going to the 155 Howitzer Battalion; briefly being the captain of an Arkansas unit of the National Guard; being selected for secret duty at Camp Shelby, training Japanese American soldiers; how the men were loyal and they wanted to prove it; going to Italy; forming units at the University of Naples; going to combat north of Rome; his duties as well as the technical and logistical details of their campaign; going to Florence; how the unit was sent to Marseille, France but he got sick and was sent to the hospital; hitching a ride to Marseille a month later; experiencing their worst fighting in the Vosges Mountains; being assigned to rescue a battalion (131st Field Artillery, 2nd Battalion) in October 1944; emptying a brothel of women, who had been collaborating with the Germans; details about the rescue of the lost battalion and sustaining great casualties; the split of the 442nd and the 522nd; crossing the Rhine River at Worms, Germany; taking Mannheim, Germany; coming across a training camp for German youth and a compound of imported food; being northwest of Munich and Dachau and supporting the 101 Airborne; going to the Dachau concentration camp, which had been emptied of many prisoners; going to a meeting of units to discuss what they should do with the corpses; not staying at the camp for very long; the smell of the camp; heading south and finding a group of former Dachau prisoners in a village where they had been abandoned by the SS; seeing the survivors eating dead horses; the physical condition of the prisoners and their orders to not feed them; forming a camp for these people and sending many back to Poland; how the Russians were rough with the refugees; going north of Munich to search for SS troops; remaining in the reserve until 1954; receiving the Croix de Guerre from the French; working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs; how he is part Cherokee; how he never questioned the loyalty of his men in WWII but that at the beginning there was censoring of individual mail and some men were taken out of the unit; and his feelings about Dachau.
    Interviewee
    Billy Taylor
    Interviewer
    Judy Weightman
    Date
    interview:  1989 September 29
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, acquired from the Hawaii Holocaust Project

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    3 videocassette (U-Matic) : sound, color ; 3/4 in..

    Rights & Restrictions

    Conditions on Access
    There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
    Conditions on Use
    Restrictions on use. See collections release form for details regarding restrictions.

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Taylor, Billy, 1912-

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Judy Weightman, of the Hawaii Holocaust Project, conducted the interview with Billy Taylor on September 29, 1989 as part of a project to interview Holocaust survivors and concentration camp liberators currently living in Hawaii. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum received a copy of the interview in March 1990.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:10:22
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn511111

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    Time Coded Notes (English)

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    Also in Oral History interviews of the Hawaii Holocaust Project

    Contains 34 oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors and concentration camp liberators all currently living in Hawaii

    Date: 1987-1991

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    Oral History

    Michael Akamine, born August 15, 1922, describes his parents; moving to Oahu, Hawaii when he was six years old; graduating high school in 1942; working for the as a carpenter and construction worker; working on a poultry farm when Pearl Harbor was bombed; how his parents were from Okinawa, Japan; volunteering for the U.S. Army in 1943; going to Camp Shelby; not knowing anyone who went to a relocation camp; being a battery agent in the 522nd; how his father had told him about the Dachau concentration camp; going to Dachau and the conditions in the camp; meeting up with his friends from the army every year; how he has not talked about his experience before this interview; and why he decided to volunteer in the army.

    Oral history interview with Stanley Akita

    Oral history interview with Stanley Akita

    Oral History

    Stanley Akita, born in 1923 in Hawaii, going to Honolulu to vocational school; how he volunteered for the 442nd; going to training at Camp Shelby; being picked to join the 100th and being sent to Southern France; being captured by Germans and asked why a Japanese man was fighting with the Americans; being sent to Koma, Strassburg, Stuttgard, and the prison, Starlite 70; being forced to clean the streets of Munich; bribing guards for food with cigarettes; being liberated by American troops; and being taken to Königsberg, Germany (Kaliningrad, Russia) then France and Boston.

    442nd Banquet

    442nd Banquet

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tana Basa

    Oral history interview with Tana Basa

    Oral History

    Tana Basa (née Hecht), born April 18, 1940 in Berlin, Germany, shows pictures of her family from before the war. She discusses her father’s role as a cantor during WWI; how her first memory was of Theresienstadt; staying in the camp until the end of the war in a single room; having all her hair cut; being hungry a lot; having her leg in traction; her mother’s death; how two of her sisters went to Auschwitz and one sister went to Bergen-Belsen; how her father hid her under the tub when the guards came for her; how her father got a Jewish doctor to take her to a tuberculosis sanatorium, where she stayed until they were liberated; how she reunited with her two sisters, who went to Bergen-Belsen; the death of her aunt and uncle; being in a displaced persons camp; how her father remarried and she and one of her sisters were put in a German Jewish orphanage, where she stayed for five years until her father took her back; and immigrating to the United States with her father when she was 11 years old.

    Oral history interview with Carla Chotzen

    Oral history interview with Carla Chotzen

    Oral History

    Carla Chotzen, born in Weimar, Germany in 1924, describes her family; going to England; moving to Berlin, Germany in 1935; going to school in Berlin and getting kicked out soon after; going to a Jewish school and then Switzerland; how her father had read Mein Kampf and knew that they would have to leave Germany; how her father left them in Switzerland and met her mother in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); immigrating to the United States when she was 11 and stayed with her grandparents in Buffalo, NY while her parents were in England; going to the University of Rochester; and working for the American Jewish Committee in New York; the fate of her extended family.

    Oral history interview with Walter Chotzen

    Oral history interview with Walter Chotzen

    Oral History

    Walter Chotzen, born May 17, 1911 in Ziegenhalt, Germany (Glucholazy, Poland), describes the small town where he was born; attending the University of Berlin and quitting after a few semesters; working for a manufacturing business, where he was fired once Hitler came to power; working for his father; being socially shunned for being Jewish; being called up by the draft board; smuggling money past the border into Czechoslovakia and being questioned by the Gestapo about this activity; how his father sold his factory in 1938; going to Holland; how his parents hid in Berlin for a year then fled to Sweden; how he lived in Seattle during this time; his family history; his education in Germany; the antisemitism before the war; his experiences in Berlin between 1933 and 1935; going to a Nazi Party parade on Unter der Linden; the fate of his extended family; how he became socialist as Hitler became stronger; his thoughts on the internment camps in the U.S. for Japanese Americans; and his thoughts on the liberation of Dachau by Japanese-American troops.

    Crystal Night oral history interview

    Crystal Night oral history interview

    Oral History

    Five individuals who lived in Germany and Austria before, during, or after Kristallnacht discuss their experiences. The interviewees describe the Nazi Party in Austria; growing up in Berlin, Germany and being persecuted for being Jewish; life in Frankfurt, Germany, where there were boycotts against Jewish stores; a parade of storm troopers (Sturmabteilung); a torchlight parade in 1933 on Under Der Linden in Berlin where 100,000 storm troopers marched singing; how the Nazis took most of their possessions; seeing a synagogue burning in Austria during Kristallnacht; how they all left Europe; and their thoughts on preventing the Holocaust from happening again.

    Oral history interview with Anne Flagg

    Oral history interview with Anne Flagg

    Oral History

    Anne Flagg (née Flagenheimer), born September 17, 1910 in Germany, describes how Hitler invaded the Rhineland when her children were infants; her father’s factory; how Jews were forbidden from going to concerts or to the opera; how the synagogue was burned during Kristallnacht; how the Nazis destroyed their house and the French governess saved her husband; the first pogrom in 1934; how some of her relatives got out of Germany; how she went to their summer home in February 1938; how she went to Stuttgart to get visas and how they did not have passports; finally getting passports; how the train she was on to Holland, the Netherlands was searched by the Gestapo and they stole her watch; meeting her husband in Holland; taking a ship to the United States; how her parents got out soon after; how the maid saved their silver and the bookkeeper took accounts receivable and buried it and collected for her parents for later; how her friend rescued many Jews by posing as a Nazi; visiting Germany in 1952; life after WWI; how the Nazis stole their possessions; the fates of her aunts and uncles; and how she believes the Holocaust could happen again.

    Oral history interview with Royce Higa

    Oral history interview with Royce Higa

    Oral History

    Royce Higa, born in 1920 in Honolulu, Hawaii, describes leaving school early to work; working as a dishwasher in Okinawa, Japan; being Japanese and the difference between Akin and Japanese; organizing a labor movement at age 16; graduating from the University of Michigan; becoming the director of a tuberculosis organization; joining the army in 1945; his brother’s death in Italy; training at Camp Shelby; getting the measles and suffering depression; going to Germany where he was a forward observer; crossing the Rhine River and not meeting any resistance; seeing a death march from Dachau and how they did not know at the time that they were Jewish prisoners; going to Augsburg, Germany; meeting a Lithuanian Jew and helping him find his family; getting his master’s degree in public health after the war; his life in politics; seeing the attack on Pearl Harbor, which were close to his home; and the Japanese who were loaded on to ships and taken to the mainland.

    Oral history interview with Fred Hirayama

    Oral history interview with Fred Hirayama

    Oral History

    Fred Hirayama, born in Hawaii, describes living on a plantation; volunteering for the army; the discrimination his brother experienced as a Japanese American; how his parents were proud of him for serving; how no one in his family was sent to a relocation center; going to Camp Shelby and never experiencing any discrimination; serving in the 522nd in France and Germany; his experiences with the concentration camps; going to Dachau where he saw the atrocities, gas chambers, and the inmates; returning to Germany in 1984; his memories of the Pearl Harbor attack; and some pictures he has of the state of Texas honoring the 442nd regiment.

    Oral history interview with Hazel Ishii

    Oral history interview with Hazel Ishii

    Oral History

    Hazel Ishii, born December 15, 1917, describes her Japanese parents and how she identifies as American; being in Maui, Hawaii during the attack on Pear Harbor; not having experienced any prejudice; how conditions changed for Japanese Americans after the war; a friend’s experience in a Japanese American internment camp; her daughter’s pursuit of archeology and Hebrew studies; and her family’s efforts to remember the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Susumu Ishii

    Oral history interview with Susumu Ishii

    Oral History

    Susumu Ishii, born on January 2, 1918 in Hawaii, describes being a second generation Japanese American; being 24 years old when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred; being drafted a few months before the Pearl Harbor attack; how the commander told the Japanese Americans that they could not be trusted; how he identified as an American; attending a Japanese school; training at Camp Shelby and in Wisconsin; visiting a friend at a Japanese American relocation camp and his view on the camps; not experiencing any discrimination when he was in Mississippi but witnessing discrimination against black Americans; attending annual Holocaust memorial services; his daughter’s pursuit of Hebrew studies; and his view that those who were relocated to camps in the U.S. should be compensated.

    Oral history interview with Stanley Kaneshiro

    Oral history interview with Stanley Kaneshiro

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Richard Kuba

    Oral history interview with Richard Kuba

    Oral History

    Richard Kuba, born in March 1921 in Kailua, Hawaii, describes being a first generation Japanese American; living in Kailua when Pearl Harbor was attacked; volunteering to serve in March 1943; his non-Japanese friends and their views of the Japanese; how he heard nothing against Americans in the Japanese community; being stationed at Fort Shelby (probably Camp Shelby) in the infantry; being a radio operator when he went overseas; being in combat; feeling like his battalion was treated differently because they were Japanese Americans; his views on Hitler; how he did not know anything about the concentration camps other than what he read in the papers; and his first contact with the liberated prisoners.

    Oral history interview with Borys Kusne

    Oral history interview with Borys Kusne

    Oral History

    Borys Kusne, born in Vilna (Vilnius), Lithuania on August 17, 1918, describes growing up in a middle class Jewish family; the antisemitism in Vilnius; being the only Jew at his college in 1938; being inducted into the Polish army in 1939; how both the Russians and Germans were taking Polish prisoners of war; walking back home; the Nazi invasion in 1941; the new rules established for Jews; working at the railroad then moving to the ghetto and working in a hospital; being in the ghetto until 1942, when he was deported to Estonia to a liquidation camp; never seeing his mother again; conditions in the camp; and marching all night and leaving the group for the forest.

    Oral history interview with Hedy Marmorstein

    Oral history interview with Hedy Marmorstein

    Oral History

    Hedy Marmorstein, born in Vienna, Austria November 18, 1921, describes her parents; going to school until she was 16; finishing high school in New York; leaving Vienna in December 1938; her Jewish education; how they accepted antisemitism as a part of life; experiencing antisemitism in school and protesting; her non-Jewish friends; being sponsored by her father’s nephew to come to the United States; corresponding with her parents until the attack on Pearl Harbor; learning later that her parents were deported to Riga, Latvia (Kaiserwald concentration camp); how when she arrived in the U.S., Americans did not realize how sinister Hitler was; her experiences during Kristallnacht; antisemitism in the U.S.; how her experiences have affected her life; living in Hawaii versus New York; her views on the internment of Japanese Americans; how when she left Austria some of her possessions were destroyed and strip-searched in France; returning to Austria in 1959; and being in an Austrian club.

    Oral history interview with Katsugo Miho

    Oral history interview with Katsugo Miho

    Oral History

    Katsugo Miho, born in Maui, Hawaii, describes his Japanese parents; graduating high school in 1940 and beginning his university studies in 1941; being a member of the ROTC; volunteering for the army on December 7, 1941; being part of the Hawaiian Territorial Guard; how they were gathered in a school one morning and told that all Japanese Americans would be discharged because an American officer did not like the idea of Japanese Americans serving for the U.S. Army; working as a carpenter’s helper at the airfield; volunteering for the army in 1943 with his brother; going to Schofield and Camp Shelby; being in the artillery while his brother was in the medical section; how his father was picked up as an enemy alien in 1941, taken to a prison, then shipped to Sand Island, Honolulu, and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Alabama; the death of his brother in a bus accident when he visited their father; training until April 1944; visiting camps (possibly Japanese American internment camps); going to France and losing many men while trying to rescue a lost battalion from Texas; joining with the 7th Army and the 3rd Army; fighting battles in the German cities of Mannheim, Frankfurt, and Heidelberg; seeing civilians with yellow stars on their clothes in Aachen, Germany; and witnessing a death march from Dachau and not knowing at the time that they were Jewish prisoners.

    Oral history interview with Yuzuru Morita

    Oral history interview with Yuzuru Morita

    Oral History

    Yuzuru Morita, born in Hawaii on May 8, 1917, describes his Japanese American parents; being age 24 and in the army when Pearl Harbor was attacked; working on a sugar plantation and factory, where there were Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese, Korean, and Chinese men working together; being assigned to the 395th Battalion at Diamond Head; handling all the outgoing military goods for the army; being at home during the attack on Pearl Harbor and having to get back to the base; his response to seeing Japanese flags on the attacking airplanes; staying in the army throughout the war and becoming a sergeant; how both of his brothers entered the army when the 442nd was formed; going to Camp Shelby; not encountering any racial prejudice, but how Japanese-American soldiers had their allegiance continually doubted; his daily duties in the camp; becoming part of the 527th Artillery; how his brothers also fought and survived the war; how his parents were proud of them for fighting; going to Germany and Italy; how German soldiers surrendered to them; seeing Jewish prisoners for the first time at Dachau and how he did not even know it was called Dachau until 1988 because no one ever talked about it; going to Bavaria, Germany after the war, where they remained as occupational troops; how his service in the army was appreciated by people when he returned to the U.S. and how he did not experience any racial prejudice; and his outlook on life.

    Oral history interview with Neil Nagareda

    Oral history interview with Neil Nagareda

    Oral History

    Neil Nagareda, born May 2, 1924 on Hawaii Island, Hawaii, describes living on a plantation with a mixture of Filipino, Portuguese, Japanese, and Spanish families; how there were no anti-Japanese feelings; hearing that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor; how his parents were from Hiroshima , Japan; joining the army in 1943; being trained at Camp Shelby; how he was supposed to go to Camp Jerome but missed going; how his unit went to Europe; having no idea about the concentration camps when they came across Dachau; the conditions of the Jewish inmates; meeting up with the 522nd; how there were no orders as to what they should do at the camp nor with the prisoners; being a communications unit; leaving Germany in December 1945; the racism he experienced in Camp Shelby, Hattiesburg, MS, and New York; not talking very much about his war experiences; and his advice to his children.

    Oral history interview with Barton Nagata

    Oral history interview with Barton Nagata

    Oral History

    Barton Nagata, born in Maui, Hawaii, describes his family; going to Grinnell College in Iowa; being drafted in 1942 and sent to Arkansas for basic training; asking to be transferred to the 442nd Battalion; being sent to Camp Shelby attached to the headquarters battery as a clerk; working in radio and in the foreign observatory team; seeing some action in Italy with the infantry; being Colonel Harrington's radio operator; his education at Grinnell College, where he did not experience any discrimination; being on guard duty when he was not needed as a radio operator on the Riviera in France; being detached from his unit and made a MP, guarding German prisoners and AWOL American prisoners near Nice, France; liberating French prisoners in Germany; seeing a death march near Munich, Germany, not realizing the prisoners were Jews, and giving them some food; going to Dachau; speaking about his experiences when he was a high school history teacher; the importance of education to prevent racism; being an active protestant; going to a British university; and telling his children about his experiences.

    Oral history interview with Armin Nagel

    Oral history interview with Armin Nagel

    Oral History

    Armin Nagel, born June 1920 in Breznov (possibly Brașov), Romania, describes his early life; learning Hungarian and attending Hebrew school; moving near the border of Romania; moving to Bucharest, Romania with his siblings; finishing high school in 1938; working as a photographer; working as a dentist’s assistant until 1940; how the Romanian Nazis became active in 1939; how his brother, who was a printer, secretly printed material against the Nazis; being mistaken as his brother and taken to a train to go to a concentration camp; going with 2,000 other Jews and non-Jews to Terazu, a work camp; conditions in the camp and making teeth out of bones to aid eating; how in 1942 all the Jews in the camp were taken to Varnecka (possibly Varnikai, Lithuania); learning later that experiments were being conducted at the camp, where prisoners were given poison in the food; how, as a dental assistant, he was able to smuggle medicines to the prisoners; being able to survive because he ate with the dentist; being in the camp from May 1941 to August 1944; being taken to another camp in Groslovo (Velyka Mykhaĭlivka, Ukraine), where he worked as a dental assistant for one year; walking 80 miles towards Romania and ending up in Tagena; how his brothers survived and went to Israel; joining his mother in Bucharest, where he worked and went to school for engineering; immigrating eventually to the United States and settling in Honolulu, Hawaii; and the number of Jewish Romanians who left for Israel.

    Oral history interview with Hideo Nakamine

    Oral history interview with Hideo Nakamine

    Oral History

    Hideo Nakamine, born in Paauilo, Hawaii and raised in Honokaa, HI, describes being in Honolulu, HI with his brother when Pearl Harbor was attacked; enlisting and joining the 442nd; going to Camp Shelby for training; being put into the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion; fighting in Italy and France and going into Germany at the end of the war; how the first camp he saw was in Bad Tölz, Germany; seeing approximately 5,000 prisoners being marched away from Dachau and how the German soldiers scattered when they saw the U.S. troops; how some of the soldiers gave food to the prisoners and how they had been ordered not to give food to anyone because they needed their rations; going through other German death camp areas in Horgau, Augsburg, and Munich; visiting the museum at Dachau during the 40th reunion; going to a gathering of Holocaust survivors in Philadelphia, PA in 1985; how his parents had been driven off the plantation where they worked for being of Japanese descent; and his views on freedom and prejudice.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Obayashi

    Oral history interview with Joseph Obayashi

    Oral History

    Joseph Obayashi, born on April 18, 1924 in Maui, Hawaii, describes growing up in a community called Whalo; how his father grew pineapples; how he felt that Japanese Americans were not discriminated against even after the attack on Pearl Harbor; enlisting into the 442nd; how he trusted the U.S. government when they relocated Japanese Americans to camps; training at Camp Shelby; being in the 3rd and 5th Divisions during the war; being shot down when he was in the 3rd Division; the captain of the 442nd, Captain Fiberman, and his squadron commander, James Harrison; landing in Italy in 1944; how his job was to carry a radio on his back to help with the intelligence of the 1st Division; how the 442nd and 100th (rifle company) never drew back; going through France then Germany; hearing rumors about the concentration camps; seeing a concentration camp and prisoners eating a dead horse; meeting former inmates in Germany in 1984; encountering inmates in other areas of Germany in 1945; and his outlook on life.

    Oral history interview with Otto Orenstein

    Oral history interview with Otto Orenstein

    Oral History

    Otto Orenstein, born in Vienna, Austria on July 16, 1921, describes his parents and their ancestry; his education in Vienna; not experiencing any antisemitism when he was young; how his family observed some holidays but was not very religious; leaving Vienna on December 28, 1938 for Cologne, Germany; making it across the Belgian border; how some Belgian farmers smuggled them to Brussels, Belgium and gave them money for railroad tickets; arriving in Antwerp, Belgium, where a relative lived; getting a visa to the United States, and arriving in the U.S. in April 1940; how the rest of his immediate family arrived in the following few months; how in July 1927 there had been riots at the Ministry Building in Vienna; his memories of political events and backlashes in 1932, 1934, and 1938; being a member of the Austrian boy scouts and being kicked out for being Jewish; his memories of the Anschluss and seeing Himmler and Goering; conditions during the Nazi occupation; getting kicked out of the apartment where his family had lived for 30 years and going to live with his grandmother; how his uncle committed suicide; getting rounded up with other Jews on November 11, 1938 and taken to an SS barracks; seeing a Portuguese temple burning; how he was let go because he was only 17 years old; his journey to Antwerp and his difficulty crossing the border; going to a detention camp in Belgium September 1939 until his visa came in March 1940; how his parents left from Norway; going to Honolulu with his family in July 1940 and how his parents had brought artifacts from Norway and were featured on the front page of the Honolulu Advertiser on July 16, 1940; how when he first arrived in New York he stayed at Stephen Weiss’s house, which was a temporary shelter for refugees; how his family was interned on Sand Island, HI as enemy aliens; how his mother ended up being the leader of the women’s side of the camp; the things he brought with him (birth certificate, train ticket from Brussels to Antwerp, student card, and passport); how he has talked to his family about his experiences; not experiencing any antisemitism in Honolulu; and some of his memories from 1938. The interviewee also shows a picture of his birth certificate and his student card.

    Oral history interview with members of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion

    Oral history interview with members of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion

    Oral History

    Members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion discuss their experiences as Japanese Americans when Pearl Harbor was attacked; deciding to join the army; the anti-Japanese sentiment in the press and the reactions of their peers; being evacuated from the west coast and waiting for Japanese American detainment camps to be built; people they knew whom were detained; the experiences of their families before the war; how many of their possessions were taken by the federal government; training at Camp Shelby; the status of family members as enemy aliens; Holocaust denial and Holocaust education; going to the military camp in Arkansas (possibly Camp Jerome); the confiscation of their diaries; their views on reparations for the Americans who were detained during WWII; their activities on the Western Front, including the detachment of the 522nd, how the artillery was often ahead of the infantry, and going through many towns; arriving at Dachau; seeing the prisoners and Reverend Martin Niemöller; not staying long at the camp; being ordered not to feed the camp survivors because they could not eat the food; passing a camp outside of Munich, Germany while they were scouting; seeing two dead horses and later seeing a group of prisoners gathered around eating them; feeding the survivors at their camp and speaking to some of them; seeing the gas chambers, crematoriums, and shooting sites at the camp; going to the displaced person camps and attending a wedding at one of them; going to a survivors' meeting in Philadelphia, PA; the irony of being a persecuted minority in America then helping a minority during the war; and the presence of prejudice organizations in the U.S.

    Panel discussion with Holocaust survivors and members of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion

    Panel discussion with Holocaust survivors and members of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion

    Oral History

    Holocaust survivors and members of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion discuss the internment of enemy aliens in the United States after the Pearl Harbor attack; learning about the concentration camps in Europe; the experience of being a Japanese American after the bombing of Pearl Harbor; the experiences of Sarah Rozenberg, who lived in the Warsaw ghetto, was sent to the Majdanek concentration camp on April 23, 1943, worked in the ammunition factory, and was liberated by the Russian Army on January 15, 1945; Rozenberg’s experiences with the Germans and the brutality of the Jewish police as well as the underground activities in the Warsaw ghetto; and Holocaust education.

    Jewish/552nd Panel

    Jewish/552nd Panel

    Oral History

    Punchbowl Memorial

    Punchbowl Memorial

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sarah Rozenberg

    Oral history interview with Sarah Rozenberg

    Oral History

    Yom HaShoah

    Yom HaShoah

    Oral History

    The recording includes a service for Yom HaShoah during which Mayor Frank Fasi of Honolulu, HI; Chuck Freedman, director of communications in the office of the Hawaiian governor; Jacob Liebermann of the Jewish Federation of Honolulu; Gerald Clay, president of the Jewish Federation of Honolulu; and Judy Weightman honor the millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust and thank those who helped save Jews and work to fight present-day Holocaust denial. The recording also includes a musical performance.

    Oral history interview with Gerda Samuel

    Oral history interview with Gerda Samuel

    Oral History

    Gerda Samuel, born in Hamburg, Germany in 1921, describes her father, who was a printer; attending a Jewish school for girls in 1931; how her father was taken by the SS in 1934 and she never saw him again; being sent to the ghetto; conditions in the ghetto; being sent to England in 1938; being adopted by a Jewish family in Belfast, Northern Ireland; never seeing her mother or aunt again; being raped by the son of her adopted family; joining the British Army in 1941; not hearing about the concentration camps until after the war; going to London, England to work as a waitress after she left the army; moving to Singapore in 1948; immigrating to the United States in 1952; her conversion to Catholicism; antisemitism in Hawaii; and her memories of the Depression.

    Oral history interview with John Sato

    Oral history interview with John Sato

    Oral History

    John Sato, born in the state of Washington in 1921, describes experiencing some discrimination as Japanese American when he went to a university in 1939; how his family was evacuated from their farm; living in the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho; conditions in the camp; volunteering for the army; going to Camp Shelby; being in the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion; joining the air force intelligence; visiting his family in the camp; being transferred to the Hawaii Air Force Base for nine months; being sent to Guam; going on a bomb trip to Japan with scientists; and his life after the war.

    Oral history interview with Rudolf Schmerl

    Oral history interview with Rudolf Schmerl

    Oral History

    Rudolf Schmerl, born in August 1930 outside of Berlin, Germany, describes his family; moving to Berlin in 1935; his family history; experiencing antisemitism as a child from his peers; his view of Germans; wanting to leave Germany and having difficulty; how Germany defined his family as stateless; how his father went to the United States in1938 to work as a doctor; going with his mother and grandmother on a train illegally to Czechoslovakia; being beaten at his new school; going to Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic) on August 31, 1938; getting measles on the ship heading to the United States; being detained on Ellis Island; living in Harlem, NY; how his grandmother never became a U.S. citizen; leaving New York in 1941 for Louisiana; seeing racism in New Orleans; moving to Toledo, OH, and seeing the segregation; the fates of his relatives in Germany; and the lessons of the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Jedidah Shashai

    Oral history interview with Jedidah Shashai

    Oral History

    Jedidah Shashai, born in Vienna, Austria on May 19, 1924, describes growing up in poverty in Vienna; having no Jewish school education; experiencing antisemitism; her father’s death when she was 12 years old; how the Nazis took many of their possessions; the uniforms of the women Nazis; how she had no connection with Judaism; wanting to be part of the mainstream and not being accepted; how the Nazis took her family’s business; how she went to Belgium and her sister and mother went to England; antisemitism in newspapers; wanting to go to Hawaii; getting out in a transport of children and feeling guilty because she was not a child; going to Belgium first then England; staying with different families in Belgium; being placed in a small village in England in 1939 by the Rotary and experiencing antisemitism; not experiencing antisemitism in Hawaii; and her approach to life.

    Oral history interview with Don Shimazu

    Oral history interview with Don Shimazu

    Oral History

    Don Shimazu, born in Punei, Maui, Hawaii, describes his role as a staff sergeant in charge of the 522nd Battalion survey section, with the responsibility for accurately locating targets; growing up on a plantation on Maui, where there was a subtle discrimination against all minorities; beginning ROTC at the university in September 1941; his memories of the attack on Pearl Harbor; experiencing some animosity for being Japanese immediately after the attack; how he had been schooled in the Japanese samurai tradition, which taught him to have loyalty to his country (the U.S.) first and how this tradition led to the success of the 442nd and 522nd; enlisting and the disbanding of his first unit; becoming a carpenter’s apprentice; learning about the Japanese internment camps; volunteering for the army on March 24, 1943; going to Camp Shelby; being made second in command of his cadre; how his division was known for being the most accurate artillery division; his combat experiences in Italy in the towns of Grosseto, Livorno, Castellano, Pisa, and Florence; going to Marseille, France; joining the 7th Army and traveling through the French Riviera, Dijon, and Lyon; crossing a minefield without realizing it; saving the lost battalion (131st Field Artillery, 2nd Battalion); staying in Southern France until March 1945; serving with various battalions, including the 63rd, 45th, 44th, and the 101st to assist in the Allied crossing of the Rhine; travelling through Mannheim, Germany and the Siegfried Line; entering Dachau; being told not to feed the camp survivors as they would be unable to cope with the soldier’s food; going to Munich, Germany; returning to Dachau in 1984; the similarities and differences between the German and American internment camps; his memories of the concentration camps in Germany; and ways to prevent the Holocaust from happening again.

    Oral history interview with Ignace Speiser

    Oral history interview with Ignace Speiser

    Oral History

    Ignace (né Yitzhak) Speiser, born January 5, 1908 in Warsaw, Poland, describes his second wife; studying in Paris, France after WWI; learning to play the mandolin and the violin; going to the consortium in Warsaw; being age 21 when he attended the Ecole de Musique in Paris; officially leaving Warsaw in 1931; his siblings and his parents; trying to leave France for the United States in 1939 but being prevented by the beginning of the war; being taken by the Germans from Toulouse, France in 1943; being sent to a concentration camp in Danzig (Gdańsk), Poland; being asked to play his violin; how the inmates dug a tunnel, which was discovered; how all the imamates were deported to Auschwitz; being on the train with his friend, a cantor, who sang one symphony the whole ride; how people jumped off the train; how his wife was still in Toulouse; being separated from the others at Auschwitz because he was a musician; playing Ernest Bloch’s Baal Sham; going to Fürstengrube to work in a coal mine, but being separated as a musician with his opera singer friend; being beaten once; being in Birkenau for a few weeks; how a dentist would bring him food and ask him to play Mozart; having a birthday party in 1945; how he had been in Auschwitz for two years and Fürstengrube for one year; giving concerts once or twice a week in Fürstengrube; how after awhile he was not afraid of dying; selection processes; being removed from Auschwitz in January 1945 at which point they were walking and on the train; going to a place near Lübeck, Germany and being taken by the Red Cross to Sweden; the conditions on the train and the deaths during the journey; and his tattoo.

    Oral history interview with Louise Spitzer

    Oral history interview with Louise Spitzer

    Oral History

    Louise Spitzer, born December 6, 1916, in Vienna, Austria, describes her parents and childhood; going to Brussels, Belgium to perfect her French and graduating from hotel management school in 1938; life in Vienna and the intermingling of Jews and the Christians; how she had no antisemitic experiences in her childhood; wearing a three arrows patch to present herself as socialist in protest of Nazism; the death of her father; having boarders in their home beginning in 1938; being picked up by the Nazis to clean the synagogue; how the Nazis took all their linens and silverware, she went to the Nazi headquarters to demand it back, and they gave it back; going to work as a servant and later a nanny for a family in London, England; leaving on November 10, 1938; the deportation of her uncle to Dachau and the death of her mother in 1939; being beaten at the German border; staying with the English family’s children in Wales when the war broke out; returning to London to work in a secret factory until the end of the war; volunteering to help the Americans because she spoke German and being stationed in Germany in the censorship division; visiting her aunt and uncle in Vienna after they were released from Dachau; her interactions with the Russians upon her return to Germany; applying to go to the United States after she received British citizenship; leaving the army in 1948 and immigrating to the U.S.; working for American Express and Sabena; receiving some money from the Austrian government for confiscated belongings; and her views on antisemitism and Holocaust denial.

    Oral history interview with Richard Strauss

    Oral history interview with Richard Strauss

    Oral History

    Richard Strauss, born in Mainz, Germany in 1924, describes growing up in Germany and Italy; working for most of his life in the hotel food industry; attending a German public school; hearing antisemitism on occasion from his classmates; how his father was active in the Social Democratic party and was warned to leave on the night of the 1933 election, which he did; the camps near his town where dissidents were taken; how laws preventing Jews from attending high school began in 1935; his uncle’s wine exporting business, which he was allowed to continue operating despite the limits on Jewish businesses; his parents’ divorce; being socially shunned by non-Jewish friends in 1935; being sent to Besel, Switzerland to his father when their business was being reviewed; being placed in a boarding school in Italy from 1935 to 1938; returning to his mother in August 1938 when Mussolini enacted antisemitic laws; how his father went to Cuba and then Australia in 1940; how his mother’s attitude about remaining in Germany changed after Kristallnacht; how shop keepers would allow them to purchase items even though they had signs up banning Jewish customers; being hidden by a family friend who was a member of the Nazi Party, in a park the night of Kristallnacht; seeing the destruction of the city the next morning; how the thugs who committed the atrocities were brought in from another city; taking in homeless families because their home was intact; being on the English Rotary Club’s transport that got children out of Germany; going to Portsmouth, England and working as a window dresser’s apprentice; how his mother left Germany in November 1941 and went from Portugal to the United States; being interned on the Isle of Mann; being sent to Glasgow, Scotland and then transported to Australia; the conditions on the ship and the maltreatment of the refugees; being placed in an internment camp in Australia; sending a postcard to family friends in Australia, where his father also happened to be; being given the choice to return to England or join the Australian Army, and choosing the latter; joining in 1942 and becoming an interpreter at the rank of sergeant; guarding prisoners of war captured in North Africa that were interned in Australia; getting out of the army in 1947 and immigrating to the U.S. in December 1947; getting an apprenticeship at the Biltmore Hotel; going to California, Utah, Hawaii, and New York; his experiences guarding Italian and German prisoners and not telling them he was Jewish; witnessing some antisemitism in the U.S.; and his reflections on the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Ted Tsukiyama

    Oral history interview with Ted Tsukiyama

    Oral History

    Ted Tsukiyama describes the shock of the Pearl Harbor attacks, especially by Japanese Americans; being in the first ROTC unit to enter the war; being assigned to St. Louis to find paratroopers; becoming part of the territorial guard; never having a problem being Japanese American; being honorably discharged because of his Japanese heritage; going back to school; volunteering in a labor battalion, building defenses and serving for 11 months; how a few months later Japanese Americans were allowed in the armed forces; how his wife grew up in California and was put into a camp; being given intelligence training in Minnesota; being sent to Northern Burma Jungle as an intelligence translator for the Air Force; spending over a year, until end of war, in Northern Burma; going back to Hawaii; how he feels that the war experience countered prejudice towards Japanese Americans; and becoming a lawyer in labor relations.

    Oral history interview with Harold Ueoka

    Oral history interview with Harold Ueoka

    Oral History

    Harold Ueoka, born in Lawai, Hawaii in 1919, describes his Japanese parents; serving with the 526th Artillery Battalion; working in Honolulu before the Pearl Harbor attacks; how there was no real discrimination before war, except for his summer job working for a plantation; volunteering for the army when the war started; his memories of the Pearl Harbor attack; being head of the baseball team and how four of his teammates decided to join the army; how he felt that if he did not volunteer he would shame the people in Hawaii; how when his unit was in Europe, his destination was Hitler's home; seeing the crematoriums at Dachau and the places where people were shot; and how during the war he heard from other soldiers what was going on in the camps.

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