Bradley Briscoe Summers

A son’s perspective.

Bradley Briscoe Summers  was born in Artesia New Mexico on 11 June 1919.  New Mexico had only been a state for 7 years.  His father, John Robert, farmed with some of his brothers in the Pecos river valley.  In the early 1920s John  decided to go west.  There was homestead land available in Oregon. It took them 2 years of travel and working along the way there and eventually they were granted 160 acres in the Coos River Valley.  They lived a pioneer life style there, having dirt floors and no running water.  They worked odd jobs for various farmers as they were all skilled in mechanical things and building.  There was no road in the valley.  Everything came by boat.  Every morning a boat would come up the river and collect milk from the dairies.  It would make the same trip every afternoon for the evening milk.  Bradley and his brothers rode that boat to school everyday.

Brad and his brother, John, joined the Oregon National Guard shortly before World War  II.  As the world went to war, they were mobilized and sent to Ft. Stevens (at the mouth of the Columbia River) and were there when Pearl Harbor was Bombed.  Dad was able to transfer into the Army Air Corps and became a copilot in a B-17.  He was shot down over Germany and spent 22 months as a prisoner of war.  When he got back to the US, he purchased a 1941 Ford convertible with some of his back pay from when he was a POW.  He had met Rachel Weller in Salt Lake City before going over seas.  He would eventually marry her and move to Oregon where they raised 8 children on a small farm in the Sherwood area.  His father, John Robert Summers would also live with them on that farm.

Growing up on that farm offset the humble wages our dad received working in a battery factory.  We ate very well from the produce and animals we raised and we lived a life of freedom that most people do not experience.  The road past the house was gravel and many day fewer than 10 cars past by.  Dad was very resourceful and was able to fabricate things from whatever he could find.  One year we tore down a house and for years we used those materials for an addition to the house and many other buildings around the place.  He used some of the wiring to bring power to the barn so he no longer needed a Coleman lantern when he went to milk the cow in the short days of winter.  We always had a milk cow and as the family grew we started milking two cows.  As I got old enough to help, we would do the milking together every morning and every evening.  This is where I remember getting to know my dad.  We talked about everything.  He had a rather pragmatic nature which made it easy to talk about anything.  I knew that he would never get over excited no matter how controversial the subject.  That said, he had very strong feelings of patriotism, the ethic of work and honesty.  But he could speak very logically even when the subject was opposed to his way of thinking.  He loved and respected Rachel and that was a great example to me and my siblings.  We knew that if there was a “pecking order” we all fell somewhere below that of our mother’s place on that list.  He was always doing things for others.  He helped neighbors with various projects for which he had the skills.  He always served in our church.  If there was a family in need of service, he would be there.  I remember accompanying him to our church farm on weekends to help do maintenance on machinery.  He always maintained our vehicles and taught me how to do the same.  There was a lot of opportunity for this, because all of our machinery was old and well used.  

My father was not one for appearances.  He typically wore denim pants and a white tee shirt.  He very rarely wore a tie.  I would say that his strongest character trait was his honesty.  He would always say what he felt was true.  (Sometimes to our embarrassment). I have come to love and respect this about him.  I believe he always went to bed with a clean conscience.  All of his friends were true friends, there was nothing pretentious in him.  Perhaps it was his experience of growing up with very little that gave him a certain confidence that  didn’t require having to  prove anything to anyone.  Anyway, this is a glimpse of him that I remember.  I am proud to have had such a great example of a father.

BJ Summers

Before reading Brad's story of being imprisoned at Stalag Luft III, below you can see some of his earlier experiences in the military.

MEMOIRS OF MY GERMAN PRISON CAMP YEARS

By B. B. Summers 

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In all of the histories of the 384th bomb group, they never mention that Crew 41 was one of the best crews up until the time it got shot down. We were the nucleus crew for the 544th Squadron. The rest of the squadron was formed around us. We were Crew 41, the first crew in the squadron. We were a good crew, always made our appointments, always where we were supposed to be when we were supposed to be there, until we started overseas. I joined the squadron as the first co-pilot in the 544th Squadron. When I joined them, the squadron CO and K. J. Hall were the only two pilots in the squadron, and the other squadrons - those three squadrons in the 384th bomb group, were about the same. 

Our CO was Captain Alfred Nuttle. CO of the 545th, I believe, was Lt. Kettleson, and I believe, the - I don't remember 546th; 547th was Captain Dillingham. I believe he was a captain, but I know that Kettleson was only first lieutenant and he was squadron CO, so we were pretty young. We were an embryo combat group. 

We trained there at Wendover, we received more crews. They just kept coming in, from training command or from wherever they came from, until we were pretty well up to strength. I believe we had ten crews in every squadron before we left there. We went to Sioux City and trained there for a while and while we were there, we received some brand new B-17s, fresh from the modification depot. Among them was several - or enough for a whole squadron of Boeing built B-17s, which the air crews favored. They thought the Boeings were better airplanes. And so, squadron CDs cut the cards or drew straws or whatever to see which squadron got the Boeings. And our squadron was lucky enough to get them. Among those B-17 s was one with a serial number of 0041. Because our crew number was 41, we asked the squadron CO if we couldn't have that airplane for our airplane.  Well, we got it, but it was not what we had hoped. We made more three-engine landings with that airplane. It was just an all the way around lemon, I would call it. The men on the crew dubbed it the "ramp rat" because it spent most of its time sitting  on the ramp having some work or another done on it. We were always having to do some work on it. I think we made more three-engine landings with that airplane than we did four-engine landings. Every time we went up something went haywire. 

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Well, we finally headed overseas. We went to Kearney, Nebraska to jump off. We were late getting away from Kearney because we had to put some time on our engines. We had an engine change and had to put some time on it. We went up to Bangor, Maine. We stopped at Bangor, Maine for a day or two and then went on to Gander Lake. At Gander Lake we were weathered in. This was along in May, I believe, in 1943. When the weather lifted so we could take off, we went out and fired the airplane up and oil was pouring out of the bottom of the engine in a stream as big as a pencil. So, the mechanics took a look at it and said they couldn't do anything for it, pulled her up to the ramp for an engine change. So, after we got the engine changed, we had to put, I believe it was ten hours on it, before they would let us start across. 

We finally got started across. We got out about four hundred miles flying at 15,000 feet and, if I remember right, the temperature was at -15. It was cold. This was in June - no, it must have been - probably about the first of June, yeah. Of course, at that far north latitude, the days were really long that time of year and nice clear weather. We got out about four hundred miles and we began to have a little trouble with the engine manifold pressure fluctuating back and forth. We monkeyed around and monkeyed around and couldn't figure out what was the matter. We tried the enter-cooler. We tried feathering a propeller, we thought we had carburetor ice. We got her going again and I was jockeying the turbos to try to get warm oil into the turbo regulators. We thought they were stuck, and in the process, we blew up two engines. They started pumping oil. They pumped oil right out over the wing, number one and number two engines. Number 70 weight oil that we were using and at -150 temperatures, that oil congealed on the top of the wing just like butter. 

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We continued on course for a little bit and we'd lost about 2,000 feet in our fooling around feathering props and trying to get the carburetor ice out, which we didn't have, I guess, but we decided that the oil was not going to quit pumping out and we were going to have to go back, because we would never get across the ocean with two engines like that. So, we turned around and headed back. We threw out all of our loose cargo we had that we could get out handily. Our baggage was stowed in the bomb bay. We let every man select one piece of luggage to save and we dumped the rest overboard. It was kind of sad to see your belongings dropped out into the ocean, in the middle of the ocean. So, we were headed back toward Newfoundland. Our radio operator, we supposed, was in contact with Newfoundland, telling them what the trouble was. So, in about ten-fifteen minutes, maybe less, I don't know, one of the engines - the oil pressure started fluctuating, indicating that we were about out of oil in that engine and we were pumping air bubbles. Well, we feathered it. We had to. If you ran out of the oil, you could not feather the prop, so then your engine would windmill, and a windmill engine caused more drag than a dead engine that was feathered. Actually, it caused more drag than a propeller that was not feathered as long as it was stopped. Anyway, we feathered the engine before the oil pressure was gone. In another few minutes, five or ten minutes, the next engine - the same thing happened to it. So, there we were with two dead engines - both on the same wing, which threw the airplane pretty much out of rig - out of trim. It wanted to go in circles. We had to crank in a lot of rudder control to compensate for the two engines on the one wing. We had to use aileron to help hold that dead wing up. It didn't have as much lift as the other without the engines. So, all the correction trim that we had to put onto it to make it fly straight, added drag, which slowed us down. We were slowed down to about 135 miles an hour, just about as slow as we could fly without flaps, and, of course, we didn't want to use flaps. We wanted to get as much speed as we could and take it as far as you'd go. After we feathered the second engine, we started losing altitude, about 100 feet a minute. Well, from 12,000 feet that gave us two hours flying time, but we were out about 400 miles and we were only indicating about 135 miles an hour, so that's hardly enough time to get back to land. However, we continued on. 

We got within sight of the island, probably about twenty miles off shore, and we were right down on the deck by that time. We had to miss icebergs. There were a lot of icebergs coming down that Labrador current, and they break off up there at Greenland and come down on the Labrador current. We had to swerve and change our course to keep from hitting an iceberg. We had everybody in the radio room except KJ and myself. We were on the flight deck. I was co-pilot, KJ was the first pilot. So we dropped her in and you can imagine, you'd probably hit a water puddle in the road when you're doing fifty or sixty miles an hour - you can imagine what it'd do when you hit her at ninety, which we did. What happened - all the way through flying school and everywhere in training, they always drilled into you to always land into the wind because then your ground speed is slower, you know, but out there when you land in the wind, you're also landing into the swells. When you dive into one those swells doing 90 miles an hour, it's a pretty sudden stop. It pretty near tore our airplane apart. The ball turret just kind of ripped back through and broke the fuselage in two. We dumped her in and it looked like we had gone right underneath, because it got so dark in there. 

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The impact of the ball turret in the water forced it back through the fuselage and broke the fuselage right there at the ball turret. The main section laid fairly flat in the water. The rear sections and ball turret were cocked up to about thirty-five or forty degrees in the air. KJ and I both crawled out the side windows on the flight deck, went back down to see how the crew was fairing and they was doing pretty good. Our bombardier, he was a Jewish fellow and kind of curious, always had to know what was going on. Just before we hit the water, he decided he was going to get up and look out the window and see how high we were above the water - that's where we were when we hit. He went through the door into the bombay when we hit - just a sudden stop, and he went right through the door into the bombay, banged his head up a little bit, skinned him up. Both life rafts were out and were inflating. The guys on the leeward side got in their raft without any incident. The boys on the windward side, the wind was kind of drifting them down against the airplane and they were anxious and afraid that they would get snagged by the broken ragged metal and loose antenna wires and all that, and then they all got on the same side of the raft and turned it over. So, then they swam and pulled it out free. Well, meanwhile, after checking them out and deciding that the life rafts were doing okay, I went back down to the front because I had thrown my little overnight suitcase out which had some candy bars and chewing gum, things like that in {it}, snapped a parachute through it to make it float. I'd thrown it out the window, so I went back to see if I could get it and it was out there bobbing all through the waves. Without using my head, I jumped off to get it. By this time, the airplane had sunk 'til the water was up even with the top windshield. The whole nose had broken out. The front edge of the wing was all busted open, pretty bad looking. When I jumped off, I looked back and the airplane was kind of trying to follow me as it slid through the water kind of sinking, sliding forward. So I took off, forgot about the suitcase, swam clear out around the end of the right wing with my leather jacket on and my flying boots, fleece lined flying boots which probably held ten pounds of water apiece. I had half the Mae West popped. I figured I only needed half because I was somewhat of a swimmer anyhow. 

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I swam clear around the end of the wing and I looked over there and here were the men over on the other side trying to get their life raft turned right side up. So, I swam over there, probably was about another fifty yards. By that time I was almost pooped out swimming with those boots on and that leather jacket. Anyway, we turned the raft right side up and got the men all in. We were all wet - every man in our life raft was wet. The temperature of the water was 39° which is pretty chilly, so we got in. We took my belt and tied the two life rafts together. I couldn't get in by myself. The wet rubber on my Mae West and the wet rubber on the side of the life raft just wouldn't slip, and I just didn't have enough poop to kick my legs enough to kick me over. The other raft came up and they just got me by the feet and threw my feet over in the raft and I was in. 

Well, we set there all night. We saw a light which we assumed was on shore and tried to paddle toward it, but after an hour or so paddling, we just give up because we couldn't tell if we was making any headway at all. So we quit that. We sat there. Several airplanes came over and we fired the flares at them, but they didn't understand. One of them even altered his course so as to go around us. I think he thought we were giving him a challenge. At any rate, we didn't get any answer from them, so we sat there all night. The radio operator reported that when he dropped a Gibson Girl out, it was supposed to float, but it sunk, so we didn't have any radio. All we had was our flares. 

About 5:00 o'clock in the morning it was beginning to come daylight. 

Incidentally, we hit the water about 10:00 or 10:30 in the evening, but because of the northern latitude, it was still pretty light. The glow in the western sky - of course, we didn't know what direction it was, we assumed it was west when we landed - apparently, it moved on around to the north and clear on around and the sun came up out of it in the morning. It never did get quite dark. The splitting and breaking up of the icebergs sounded like thunder and we were sure we were going to get rained on, but we didn't. 

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We sat out there in that life raft and we heard thunder, sounded like thunder. The crew on this boat that picked us up told us that was the iceberg breaking up. They get into the southern - that warmer water, just like glass, you know, when they warm up on the outside, they crack. It sounded like thunder. We thought, oh, we're going to get rained on out here. 

About 5:00 in the morning we saw smoke on the horizon, so we fired a flare. It was a convoy. There was a coaler and a merchant ship being escorted by a Canadian J -boat up the coast. They were headed for Lewisport, Newfoundland. The J-boat pulled out and came over where we were and circled around to make sure there wasn't any submarines, because it would happen that if the German U-boats saw survivors, they'd hang around waiting for a rescue vessel which they would gladly torpedo. There wasn't any submarines, so they came along side and I said, "all ashore". I was so cold, I don't believe I could have climbed that Jacob's Ladder by myself. And I think the other guys in the raft were about the same. The other raft, I believe, was all in pretty good shape. They didn't get wet. Everyone in our raft was wet. Incidentally, there were five men in each raft. Two big Canadian sailors came down, one on each side, and grabbed us by the arm and hoisted us on board. As soon as we went around into the cabin, here was a steward there with a coffee royale - hot cup of coffee with a jigger of rum in it. Well, I didn't feel like drinking very much of that kind of stuff. 

My stomach was sore. During the night I thought I was getting seasick. It seemed a little strange because I had been around boats and on the water an awful lot in my life, having rode to school on a boat all the way from first grade through high school. Water didn't bother me. But I was getting sick, so I leaned over the side and let it go, and when it came up, it was all gasoline and salt water which I'd been gulping unknowingly. So, my stomach was a little sore and the coffee royale didn't set with me, so I had to abstain. However, our navigator, Jim Crary, took full advantage of it and by the time we got to Lewisport that afternoon about 4:00 or 5:00 o'clock, he was about three sheets to the wind. 

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We stayed all night there. There was a Canadian contingent there, we stayed with them. There was only, I think, one American and one GI from the Quartermasters Corp that stayed there just to represent the US when any of our shipments came in there. That was the port where they came in and they went from there down to Gandor Lake on a narrow gauge railroad. We stayed with the Canadians that night, and I'm not sure if it was the next day or after that that we got on this little trolley and went down the narrow gauge track. It was like a school bus setting on railroad wheels and it stopped many places as we were going down through these woods. There were certain stops, crossroads and things, and people would be there, people to get on, people to get off. One man got on with a GI cot, a full size cot, one of those iron spring cots. He got on and brought the cot with him. Then on to Gandor and it was in the afternoon - late - after the evening meal, so we went over to the club to see if we could get us a bite to eat, and, of course, we were challenged immediately. The man says to me, "Are you an officer?" I says, "Yes, sir." And he says, "Well, what are you doing in the club this time of day dressed liked that?" Our dress was pretty sloppy because we had - there was no press whatever in our clothes - my pants had shrunk until they hit me about halfway between my ankles and the knees. We looked pretty bad. Our navigator was just about as bad, Jim Crary, had gone on an economy kick and he'd just bought a regular GI uniform, put his insignia on it and that's all he had. Well, these Canadian sailors wanted our insignia for souvenirs, so we didn't mind - we let them have them. The only thing I wanted back was my wings, which the captain got back for me, but all the rest of the insignia we could buy in the PX, so we didn't care. We didn't have any insignia on at all, so we were challenged. But when they found out what had happened, their attitude changed and everybody wanted to buy you a drink - we hadn't even had supper yet. 

So, we - I don't know how long we stayed at Gander - we went back to Presque Isle, Maine and got re-outfitted. New uniforms, everything. We got the whole bit. And then they put us on a C-54 AFC send us across air transport. I guess they figured that our crew had already muffed our chances of flying across, which was a big disappointment to our navigator, old Jim Crary. He wanted to make that navigation across and, anyway, we landed in England - about a month behind our group. Then we had to go through the war school - I believe it was at Bovington - to learn all about what combat was like. I guess they give us a fair idea, but it wasn't like combat either. However, we were told at that time that our losses for the daylight raids amounted to about 10%. One airplane in ten failed to return. So, you figure in ten missions, you had 100% turnover. 

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By the time we caught up with our squadron and our group, it was about a month late. They had gone on several missions, they had lost several crews. One of the crews from the 544th was Howard Bergoon's. He was the pilot and Cuttyback's - Lt. Cuttyback's crew was gone. Funny thing about it, Cuttyback was shot down over Ville Cuble, which is a suburb of Paris, I believe, and when they had the critique after the mission, everybody reported no flack. However, after we were shot down and got to see these bandaged men in our squadron, Cuttyback reported that flack was the one that got him. He said they got a lucky hit in the wing and the wing collapsed and come around. Of course, they had two engines on it still going. It come around and knocked the nose off the airplane. The bombardier/navigator just went out through the nose. And while Lt. Cuttyback was trying to get his parachute on - we just wore the harness, we had to snap the parachute on with a couple of big snaps - and apparently, he got it on all right, but he says he didn't know what happened because the next thing he knew he was out in the air and he thought the airplane must have blown up and thrown him out. But he was out there and he didn't know how long he'd been there, so he decided he'd better put the ripcord, which he did, and he said it made about two swings, two oscillations and hit the ground. If he'd been ten seconds later he'd just have been a grease spot on the ground himself. Then, he said he thought he was going to get killed by the junk that was falling out of the sky - airplane wheels, propellers, all kinds of airplane parts coming down all around him. He got out of it okay and the Germans got him and shipped him up there to Stalag Luft 3 where we were. 

Anyway, we took off - we'd only been in England just a little while taking a few orientation flights around and trying to get the lay of the country and our first mission was to Norway and an aluminum plant. It stuck out on a little spit, sand jet out on the shore and _______???_________. And we went up there, the first pass we didn't drop our bombs - I don't know why. The group bombardier and I believed the turnover had beaten us. Anyway, we went across the target and turned around and came back and went across it again, which is not a healthy thing to do. It's like poking a stick in a yellow jacket's nest. You just get them mad at you. You could look down and see the flash from the muzzle blast from those .88mm as they was shooting at you. Of course, you'd alter your course just a little bit and there they'd go. 

You didn't see any fighters. They were nowhere at all - just the flack. We were flying at fairly low altitude - 18,000 feet. We got back to England and took a look at our airplane and then one of the men reported that we had - I believe he said eighteen holes in our airplane, just from the fragments. There was a pretty good size fragment in one of the fuel tanks. So, they had to pull it off, do some repair work on it before we could fly it again. 

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The Mission 

We took off that morning, probably about, I don't know, 9:00 or 10:00 o'clock to bomb Hamburg. Our group put up about twenty-one airplanes. That's seven planes in each squadron. The way they flew was what we called "javelin formation." That would be three planes in the lead element, three planes behind that and down just a little bit, and then the seventh plane would be filling in what we called the "diamond" behind that. This is what we called a "maximum effort." We put up every plane that we could. Although there were four squadrons in a group, we only put up three squadrons on a mission at a time. However, the other squadron would probably be taken and put in with some other that they called a "composite group" to fly a mission also. 

There were three squadrons. I was going to say three groups, but we only had three squadrons in our group and we were to bomb Hamburg, turn north and rendezvous with another group that had bombed Keil, which is in the southern end of Denmark. After they bombed Keil, they turned south to meet us and we would all go back out together. The reason for doing this was the fact that we had eleven or twelve .50-caliber machine guns on each airplane and the more of those you could get together, the better you could fend off the fighter planes. So, group formations was the order of the day and the larger the group, the better. We took off for Hamburg, climbed up to the altitude, and cruised on out. 

Before we got to the target we had one hit, knocked all the glass out of our top turret. The engineer, who managed the turret, his oxygen mask, I think, protected his face quite a bit. There was some little splinters in his neck and shoulders, but he went back to his gun. He couldn't put his head out because of the wind blowing through the turret, so he huddled over down inside trying to shoot by tracers, which is not a very accurate way to shoot on a full deflection shot anyway. We stayed with the group and the squadron until we crossed the IP and dumped our bombs. Then our groups turned north to rendezvous with a group that had bombed Keil and the two of us were going out together. We got back out there aways. Of course, we were still being pounded. In those days, we had no fighter escort of our own. 

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Shot Down

We got out over the target and, man, it was like staring at a bunch of yellow jackets. There was fighters and there was flack everywhere. The only fighters we saw were Messerschmitts and Fokwolves with everything else up too, they had DO-217s and JU-SSs up there and maybe 110s and 210s were flying against us. It didn't take much to be able to fly us back in the B-17s. If they could fly faster than B-17s, they were up there. The Germans called their twin engine fighters "destroyers". The others were "yaegers" or "chaser" planes, hunters. Yaeger was a hunter. 

We got several hits. The first damaging hit that I knew that really caused any damage, knocked out all of the glass in our top turret. Now this happened shortly after we had crossed the target. We had already gone over the target and we had turned north to meet with the other group. We were flying at about 26,000 feet, as I recall. It was kind of chilly. When glass got knocked out of the top turret, the wind, of course, came whistling in. The top turret gunner, who was our engineer, his name was Kenny Harlan, came tumbling down out of there. Of course, he had his oxygen mask on and then goggles. I believe he had the goggles on. Anyhow, his face was fairly well protected, but his neck had a lot - like a rash with fine pieces of glass and shrapnel, I suppose. It skinned him up quite a little bit. However, he crawled back up into the turret. He didn't have any sights left, but the turret still operated, so he would swing it around from side to side and fire as best as he could with tracer bullets to try to do his part to fend off the enemy fighters. Tracer bullets were a difficult thing to use, to aim with, particularly when we're firing a full deflection shot, because the tracer would look like it would go out and make a big sweep and come in and almost go parallel to you. You couldn't tell where it was really going, it just looked like it made a great big loop out there. The reason for that was when you're traveling through the air at better than 150 miles an hour and you fly straight out from them, the projectile not only is going out, but it's going the same direction that you are, so it's hard to really tell what you're doing. The sight that we had on the top turret was a computing sight, computer for defection {deflection?} and everything like that. All you had to do was get the target in the reticle and fire. The computer computed the distance, it computed the range and it computed the speed the aircraft was going, and all that. It was pretty accurate, but Kenny didn't have any of these. He didn't have any of these left, so all he could do was try to fire with the tracer bullets, which he did. 

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We proceeded on and we got several other hits. I recall seeing a flash out my window and I looked and here was a rip in the skin on the top of my wing. It must have been about eight or ten feet long, opened up there about four or five inches wide. The skin was peeled back where apparently a 20-mm. shell from a fighter plane had gone in and ripped it out. As I looked, I saw another hole open up and the wing looked like, to me - the only thing I could figure it was, was a 88-mm. shell had gone right on through the wing without exploding. In a little while, our airplane began to get pretty ragged. We took a shot off an aileron. They could get torn and ripped and one of them had quite a few ribbons hanging out of it. We got some hits in the tail that knocked out our trim tabs and we had to hold the nose down with the stick. In the B-17, the models that we flew were quite tail-heavy and flying in level flight, the elevator would be cracked down probably three or four inches on the training edge in order to hold the tail up and hold the plane in level flight. So, when we lost our trim tabs, we had to hold that with our wheel and it was a little bit difficult. 

The tail gunner reported later, after the whole thing was over and we met him again down at La Havre, France, that he got blown out of his position twice. The tail gunner sat back there in like a bicycle seat and you had to reach around a piece of armor plate in order to fire his guns. He said he got hit in there and a concussion from the explosion, threw him back through the door. It didn't hurt him particularly, so he crawled back out to see what he could do. He had one gun that would still operate, so he kept firing away with that, and in a little while, he got another hit that blew him back through the door, and when he crawled back out to see what was going on and how to operate his gun, he didn't have any guns, they were gone. So, he crawled back into the airplane, nothing for him to do then. 

Page 12

We could tell we were getting a lot of hits in the tail. We know they were coming from the fighters that were coming in on us. We were flying the low squadron and we were leading the second element in it, which was pretty vulnerable to the fighter, because they always came in on the low squadron. That was the easiest one for the fighters to get at. We could tell we were getting hit there by these fighters. You could look back and see these fighters coming up on us and you could see the little puffs of smoke as they fired at us. The puffs of smoke looked like they went right back over the fighter's wing because the fighter, of course, was traveling probably 250-300 miles an hour and the puff didn't come but then it went back over the wing. And, of course, we did some of the basic, what we called "evasive action", to try to dodge their shots. When you'd seeing 'em flying at you, why you could pull back on the wheel a little bit and it was kind of interesting to see these 20-mm. explosives shells come popping right through underneath right where we had been. If we hadn't lifted or pulled our plane up a little bit, it would have gone right through us. It just came out there just as even as if it had been sewed with a sewing machine, just "pop, pop, pop" even in spaces, little puffs of smoke. 

Now the trouble is, while you were dodging the bullets from one plane, there might be another one pulling a bead on you and, you know, you can't dodge them all. We maybe got several damaging hits in that tail, and then, finally, we got a hit and the stick just came right back in our laps and the nose came up on that plane. For any of you that might know a little bit about flying an airplane, they only climb at a certain speed and if you try to climb too fast, it'll stall. When the nose comes up and you don't have enough power to pull it, it'll stall, so the idea is to get the nose down again, keep the nose down. K. J. Hall, who was flying first pilot, pulled the power off and the nose came back down, and I, being very anxious to stay with the squadron and the group and go back home with them, just kind of hated to see those other airplanes pulling away from us, so I reached up and shoved the throttle forward and put the power back on again. We had our feet on the wheel and held it forward to try to hold the nose down, but when I put the power back on, the nose came right back up again. There wasn't enough stabilizer left to control it, hold the nose down. K. J. pulled the power off and he grabbed my parachute strap on my shoulder and gave it a big tug, meaning to pull me out of the seat if I hadn't had the seat belt fastened. He pointed down at the escape hatch. Down between the two seats there was a hatch that went down into the forward  compartment and also there was an escape hatch just below that. He pointed down at that and I looked and the escape hatch was gone. I hadn't heard anything on the intercom; I guess my intercom might have been out, because I never heard the emergency bell. I never heard any bail-out signal or command or anything like that. The first time was when he pointed down and the escape hatch was gone. So, I crawled out of the seat and hooked the parachute onto my harness. 

Page 13

The pilot and copilot flew with what we call a "chest pack." We wore a little harness, but the parachute we had stowed back behind, we had to hook it on with a couple of big harness hooks, harness snaps. So I hooked my parachute on and I got my hat. I put that on, then I decided, well, heck, I'd probably lose it anyhow, so I threw that away and got a bailout oxygen bottle. When I backed out of the seat, my oxygen became disconnected. Of course, it just pulled loose, so I didn't have any oxygen. We did have these little bail-out bottles that we could use to bail out with. I decided to take that, then I decided, to heck with it. I don't know why all these silly thoughts went through my head, like wanting to get my hat, but anyway, I was beginning to feel the effects of the lack of oxygen -anoxia, we called it, getting a bit lightheaded. The biggest problem with anoxia is that it comes on to you and you may realize what's going on, but as you become more of a victim to anoxia, the less ability you have to do anything about it. And so a person can just perish without - and he knows what's going on, but he can't do anything about it because his faculties - your coordination - doesn't work, you just can't get things to do what you want to do. So I decided I'd better get out of there right away, so I got down and I just did a somersault right out the door and down I went. 

I do not recall being able to orient myself in the air at all. I couldn't tell which way was up and which way was down or what, but I thought that because I didn't have any oxygen with me and because I was a little lightheaded, that I probably would have dropped as far as I could before I opened the parachute. Besides, up there where we were, there were a lot of bullets whizzing around, empty shell cases, all kind of scrap metal that was chipped off those airplanes in the fracas. I figured, well, the lower I got, the better off I'd be, and besides I'd get down in a lower altitude where there was more oxygen. Then because of the way I felt, I decided pretty soon I'd better pull that ripcord before I passed out, because I didn't want to pass out before I opened my chute. So I pulled the ripcord. I never did pass out. I figured I must have been down close to 12,000-10,000 feet, something like that before I opened the parachute, which is down in pretty safe air. I was very high, because it must have taken me a half an hour to get to the ground after that, or it seemed to me that it did. Man, it was a long time. I sat out there and looked around, kind of muttering under my breath some uncomplimentary things about the Germans and about my situation. I didn't know what to do about that. But when I reached the ground, there was a man standing there with a double barrel shotgun and I didn't even ask him whether it was loaded or not. 

Page 14

Captured!

When I hit the ground I was kind of blown backward a little bit, drifting in the wind, and I thought, well, I'd just kind of ball up and do a backward somersault, but you hit the ground at a pretty good speed. They tell me it's about like jumping off something twelve feet high - you get an awful jolt when you hit the ground. When I rolled backward, I hit my head on the ground so hard that I could hardly see. I didn't know it was that hard, but I sure did see stars and I couldn't get up for a minute. This guy was standing there with a shotgun. The only weapon I had was a hunting knife, so I gave that to him. I looked around and here, the whole village was turning out.  

The Village

Germany was quite a bit like the old - well, I guess it was a holdover from the feudal days.  Everybody lived in the little village and they went out and worked the land from there. Nobody lived on the Land. They didn't live out on the farms. They lived in the village and they all went out from there to farm their lands. I landed about 100 yards from this village. Now the definition of "village" is pretty defined. I mean, the village comes right up to the line and that's the end of it, then you got an open field. 

Now I landed in an open field just outside the village. It looked to me like there was a thousand people running in my direction when I managed to get up and look around. They came out there and one guy was going to make me take off all my clothes, so they could search me. But the man with the shotgun seemed to have a little bit of authority and he prevailed. He took me into his house and there he checked out the escape kit that I had in my jacket pocket and he took my jacket. I never did see it again. I guess he must have kept it. I don't know what they did to the parachute.

Page 15

Communications Problems

I did manage to make him understand that I was thirsty. Now, we had been in the air since, I don't know exactly, but it couldn't have been much later than 10:00 when we got off and when I hit the ground it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 5:00 o'clock in the afternoon, and I was thirsty. I hadn't had anything to eat or drink since we had taken off, since breakfast that morning. Incidentally, the combat crew had gotten pretty good feedback on the bases there and the morning we took off for our mission, we had fresh eggs. All the ground crew had to get along with them dehydrated eggs. But the combat crews got real eggs and I think I ate five of those eggs before I took off that morning. Probably a good thing, because I didn't get anything to eat until the next night. Anyway, I got this fellow to understand that I was thirsty, because I guess our word "water" is close enough to their word "wasser" that he could understand that I needed some water, and our word "drink" is pretty close to the German word "trinken" which means the same thing. So, anyway, he didn't give me any water. I don't think the water up there in that country is really good. Those are low flat lands and I think the water is pretty well polluted. Streams are sluggish and more like sloughs than they are rivers and streams. He gave me this black stuff he called coffee, but he laughed when he said coffee, because it wasn't coffee. It was black and cold, maybe left over from breakfast. But being as thirsty as I was, I drank it. I think it was made probably from parched acorns and probably had some chicory in it, stuff like that. I don't know - grain. I think they use a lot of parched grain to make their drinks, too, their hot drink. 

Page 16

The Bürgermeister's House

So, anyway, after he got through searching me, they took me over to the bürgermeister's house and here was another member of our crew, a kid named Reandeau, who was a replacement for our ball turret gunner. Our ball turret gunner was kind of a goof off and he got himself courtmarshaled and they made him a permanent KP. When we were scheduled for a mission he reported out to the airplane drunk and nobody wanted to fly with a drunk guy for a gunner, so anyway, Reandeau was his replacement. Reandeau was there and there was another fellow, a Lt. Henley. He was not from our squadron. He was in our group, but he wasn't in our squadron. He was a navigator, or bombardier, and, I think, the 547 Squadron. Our squadron was the 544th. Henley hadn't been hurt much, but Reandeau had been wounded considerably. That 20 mm. stuff when it explodes - it's not a large projectile - when it explodes, it makes a lot of pretty fine shrapnel, almost like coarse sand or real fine gravel. His whole side was just like a rash - like a terrible rash, almost like hamburger, you might say. Just skin wounds, barely penetrated the skin. None of them were very deep, just skin deep. But the side of his face, his arm, neck, his leg, that whole side was full of that stuff. He could hardly move. There were some ladies there, bandaging him up with crepe paper bandages. So, we waited around there for a while, until they got him bandaged up. Then they had the parachute there. 

In kind of an easy way, these ladies would walk in. Of course, I couldn't understand anything they were saying, but they would walk in there. It seemed like everybody had free access in and out of the place. It wasn't like a military deal. I think it was their burgermeister's house or the city hall. They'd walk in and look at those parachutes and they pick them up and feel them and, man, they would chatter. I suppose they were thinking, boy, those would sure make nice dresses or petticoat or something. They sure did talk about it anyway. 

While we were there, there was a young guy who could speak some English and he talked to us a little bit. He wanted to know who we were. He was really surprised to find that we were Americans. They didn't seem to know that America was in the war. I suppose maybe they hadn't even been told that. I don't know. At any rate, they were surprised that we were American, and then they wanted to know if we flew all the way from America over there to bomb them. Of course, we didn't tell them what we were doing or anything like that. 

Page 17

He had a basket full of some stuff that we used to call "window." It was little ribbons. They were black on one side and they had a silver, aluminum foil on the other side. Usually, the strips were probably about a foot long or so. And the crew would carry those up in their airplanes and - especially the English did that at night. They'd throw that out so the radar that was tracking on them would pick up just metal on the surfaces. It would reflect back to the radar and the radar would think they were tracking on the airplane when they were tracking on this window stuff. So the airplanes would fly on off and then, probably a few seconds later maybe - I don't know how long it took the crew radar tracker to determine that they had lost the airplane - that their radar wasn't moving, that it had stopped. Then they would have to search around and pick up the airplane again. He had a whole basket full of this stuff and he wanted to know what it was. Well, I told him I didn't know what it was. He got a little irate and he was going to make me eat one of them, but he didn't, he backed off from that. As it turned out, when I told him I didn't know what it was, I was telling him the truth, because I thought it was a incendiary device that I had seen, strips that instead of aluminum had magnesium on one side which burns real hot, on the other side they had phosphorus compound, which, when it got wet with the dewar even if the back side would have stored enough heat from the sun, it could ignite the magnesium and cause a fire. I thought that's what they were, but I wasn't going to tell him that. Therefore, he didn't like it when I told him I didn't know what it was. It was kind of bad, I was telling the truth anyhow, because it was a case of mistaken identity. 

Transported

After they got Reandeau bandaged up and they decided we could move out, they put us in a wagon. Now this was a kind of old hopper shape wagon, kind of like they used to use in this country for covered wagons. It had sideboards that stuck up there, probably eighteen inches or two feet high, kind of like a hopper. They put the three of us in here and it was pulled by a team of horses. They had a guard and somebody driving the thing, and I think the guard walked along behind, if I remember right. And they'd stop and show us off every time they met anybody, you know, we got some American prisoners here, you know. Everybody wanted to see - curiosity. 

We went down the road probably a mile or two and they stopped in a barn lot, and they had our top turret, Kenny Harlan. He had been pretty severely wounded. They had him propped up against a board, because he couldn't breathe when he laid down and he was too weak to sit up. He couldn't sit up by himself. They put him in the wagon there and I had to hold him on the rest of the trip. That's kind of, well - I don't - well, that's kind of a bad situation. But I knew he was pretty badly hurt, because he wanted water. He kept wanting water, but I didn't want to give him any water, because when a person has internal injuries, it doesn't help. The water gets in there and then he starts to vomiting, he vomits blood. But the guards, after a while, they gave him water anyhow and that's what happened, he started vomiting blood. Those little spasms in vomiting don't help his wounds or his situation a bit. I wanted to use a morphine serrate that we had on our first aid pouches on our parachute and the guards wouldn't let me. I don't know what they thought I was going to do with it. I guess they didn't understand. 

Page 18

I kept telling them that we needed a doctor, needed a doctor for this man. I didn't realize that in Germany anybody that has a doctor's degree is a doctor, they call him "doctor". They go by the title "doctor". If you're a doctor of psychology, you're a doctor; if you're a doctor of botany, you go by the title "doctor". You might be anything, entomology or anything else. If you hold a doctor's degree in it, you're called a doctor. So, what I needed to ask for, I didn't understand, was that we needed a physician. That's what they call them in Germany. What we called a doctor here, they called a physician. So, apparently, they didn't even understand English - probably didn't have anybody available anyhow. 

So, we went down the road and it was just about dark, I guess. Well, somewhere along the road we went by this smoking wreckage of an airplane laying off there about a half-mile away. They told us it was our plane. I doubt if they knew whether it was or not, but it was probably an American plane. That's probably what they meant. We went down the road, probably just about dark, we came to another little village. They took us in there. It was kind of like a police station or something and K. J. Hall was in there. That's the first I had seen of him since we hit the ground.

Our engineer died that night on the ground. One of our waste gunners died in the airplane. One of our other crews reported seeing the flack right in the window and then the gun went "whup" and nobody ever come back to man it again. 

Page 19

Backing up a bit, as I was coming down in the parachute, I kept watching. Of course, the first thing I did after my parachute opened, I tried to look around and see how many other parachutes I could see, but I don't recall seeing any. Of course, like I say, I dropped a long ways. I must have dropped ten to fifteen thousand feet before I opened my parachute and I must have been going down head first when it opened, because when I pulled the cord and the parachute came out, it looked like it went right out between my legs, right out between my feet and blew out there. I just swung in there as nice and easy as you please. Coming down, I recall seeing pieces of metal coming down, some of them pretty good sized pieces of sheet metal, like off the airplane. And they would snap and buckle like a bucket lid, you know, a can lid does when you snap it back and forth. They would flutter back and forth, go swinging back and forth like a leaf does when it comes down, making these buckling sounds. I was a little concerned that one of those might come down and snag my parachute and chop a big hole in it, but it never did. 

Also, a couple of messerschmitts came down and investigated me. They never bothered me, they just flew around to take a look and went away. We'd heard weird stories about how they come in and try to chop your parachute up with a propeller, but I think those were just stories, because I know if I was flying an airplane, I wouldn't want to take a chance of getting my prop tangled up in some parachute chords or anything like that. I'd steer clear of anything to keep that airplane. It was much more important than harassing some guy that's hanging in a parachute. 

On The Way to Prison Camp 

At any rate, we must have stayed in this police station until darn near midnight. I don't know, it seemed like a long time. Finally, they took us out and there was the three of us officers. There was K. J. Hall, Lt. Henley and myself. They put us in the back of one truck and they put Reandeau and Kenny Harlan in the back of another one, and we drove off. Now we never saw Kenny anymore. They took us - we drove, oh, I don't know, it must have been a couple of hours or so, meanwhile, you could hear the air raid sirens. Now and then you could look up in the sky and see a little white flashing up there as they fired at the airplanes. Sometimes you could see the airplanes when they'd pick them up in the searchlights. They'd be fighting away or flying away. 

Page 20

They finally took us and lodged us in - I assumed it was a guardhouse or like a jail. They had individual cells. Anyway, they lodged us in this guardhouse or jail - a masonry building. The walls were like in a cave. The walls echoed. You'd find yourself just creeping around trying to make no noise at all, because the echo was so loud, and I don't know, it seemed like you were afraid of your sounds. So, we stayed there, and like I said, I didn't get anything to eat until the next night, but in the meantime, there were several visitors that had come by. They had these damn cells - they had a hole in the door, a peek-hole, with a little door on the backside, so that we couldn't see out through it, but anybody could come up, they'd slide that thing to one side and peek in at us. There was always some joker, eyeball sticking to the door, looking at me. 

In the Guardhouse 

A young fellow came in who was a pilot. He said he was a pilot. He talked like he thought I ought to be an old buddy or something, he'd spent a lot of time in Detroit. I didn't feel so inclined. I thought, man, anybody that did several years in Detroit then come back over and fight for that bunch was out of his tree. I didn't get very friendly with him. I think it was the same guy, at least there was one fellow asking me about my wings, my pilot wings. He said, "maybe you make me a present of your wings", and I declined. I wasn't going to let anybody have my pilot wings unless they took them. That meant more to me than any of the other things, the rank or any of the other things - those old pilot wings. They meant a lot to me. So, it kind of embarrassed him, of course, he being an enlisted, talking to an officer. They were always taught to have a lot of respect for officers and it seemed like they did, whether they were enemy officers or their own officers. They had a lot of respect, and so I kind of embarrassed this young man, but I didn't give a darn. I wasn't too happy about being there anyway. 

My First experience with German Food

The first meal that they gave me, it came in along about five or six o'clock in the afternoon. They had a - I'd call it an urn, one of those things that was a big old crock pot. It had a narrow neck at the top and kind of flared out again. Must have held a gallon or two, full of delicious boiled turnips. Had a spoon sticking out of the top of it. He brought that in and gave it to me and so I sat down there. I can hardly stand boiled turnips, but beings how I hadn't had anything to eat and I didn't know when the next meal was going to be served (their schedule didn't seem to be too regular), so I ate, I don't know, maybe one or two of them darned things. And then, in about fifteen or twenty minutes, he came back and took it out. I suppose he took it down to the next cell for the next guy to have his supper. 

Page 21

In a little while he came back and he tossed me a piece of bread, just a chunk. It wasn't sliced or anything like that. It was just an end off of a loaf, about two inches long. And that was my introduction to what we call "goon" bread - German, I guess it's military ration bread. I took a bite out of it like you'd take an ordinary bite of bread and the more I chewed it, the bigger it got. I wasn't sure whether I was going to be able to handle it or not. Finally, I got it chewed down enough where I could swallow and I learned that you take small bites of that stuff. You get along pretty good with it. I hid what was left of the local bread, because I thought he might come in and take it out, too, and I didn't want to lose it. I wanted to hang on to that, so I hid that, but he didn't come get it. Then the next morning, they brought around a couple of slices of bread that had some kind of honey or, I don't know what, flight jelly or honey or something like that on it. And some tea, Linden tea, I guess, made out of those linden blossoms. I don't even remember what the other meals are like. I suppose they were about the same, something like that. Anyway, we must have stayed there two or three days. 

Then, finally, they took us out one day. Well, there were Hall and myself and Henley, and Reandeau was there, too. I didn't know he was there in that prison. They took us out and had a big box with a lot of our stuff - my guess is our jackets, life jackets and parachutes, whatever, I suppose stuff they had picked up with us. They had us put that in the back of a truck and then they blindfolded us and put us in the back of the truck. They drove us down to the train station. Along the way you could, well, sense that things were in bad shape, because the road was kind of winding, devious, and you could tell that the truck was having to make detours here and there. They'd wind down into and out of a gully or a dip or something, which looked to be maybe craters, shell holes, or whatever. 

Page 22

Hamburg. Germany 

This particular time at Hamburg was what the Germans later called, in one of their editorials, "the week of terror" on Hamburg. The day we hit it was the second raid on it. The RAF had made a raid on it the night before and then we came in right during the day. The RAF came in the next night and we came in the next day, and this went on for about four or five days, day and night. The RAP at night, the U.S. - it was Army Air Corps at that time - in the daytime. The British always flew at night. They thought your losses were too heavy to fly in the daytime. We flew in the daytime, did daylight bombing. Our losses at that time were one out of ten - 10% losses. 

The day we were shot down, we lost considerably more than that. Out of - I think 64 airplanes went up that day, I think they knocked down - no, wait a minute, they knocked down 64 airplanes. I don't know how many got back. Out of our group, out of our squadron that had seven airplanes, one airplane got back out of our squadron. The other six were knocked down. Out of our group, I think we lost about ten airplanes, out of the 21 that we had. We got pretty well chopped up. We lost 64 airplanes altogether that day, which was, I suppose, the heaviest losses we'd had. At any rate, this was - by the time they took us down to the train station, we're probably just about at the end of this so-called "week of terror", and according to the German account of it, there were about 20,000 casualties, civilian casualties, in this deal. So, we were not too welcome the deal. You could tell they were busy, you could hear the bulldozers and cranes going to work, clearing things away and getting things going. 

After we got into the station, then they took the blindfold off us and we sat there for a while. Pretty soon there was an air raid and the place cleared out like nobody's business. Nobody left there but just the guards and us, until, I don't know, maybe an hour or so, whenever the "all clear" sounded. Then they all came back. 

They took - the guards took us out and put us on the train before they opened the gates for the public. We got on the car and in the compartment. They had compartments with an aisle down one side and then they had the compartments that would hold about eight people. The guards put us in there and there were only seven of us, of course, which were three guards and the four of us, but they wouldn't let anybody else in. When they finally opened the gates to let the people out, man, they swarmed out there like a bunch of ants. They crawled in the windows, they couldn't get through the doors fast enough, so they pushed each other through the windows, and they climbed up on top of the train and everything else. You never saw people so anxious to get out of town in your life. 

Page 23

While we were in the station we noticed that there were a lot of these "unter-sea boot" boys, submarine personnel and they were going on leave. It was kind of interesting to us, because that was a mission that we had been on, to bomb the sub pens, where they were outfitting the submarines with antiaircraft guns so that they could fight back at our aircraft sub patrol. So, apparently, a lot of those boys were on leave and there were a lot of other people getting out of town and it was kind of sad to see. A lot of them were bandaged up. They'd been wounded and hurt and - civilians, that is, had been hurt and wounded. 

Frankfurt. Germany 

But, at any rate, when we got on the train we headed toward Frankfurt - Frankfurt of the Meine. That's in the western part of Germany now. There was an interrogation camp there. They called it Dulag Luft and that's where we were headed. These guards wouldn't let anybody into our compartment first. Finally, after the train got underway and everything got out of Hamburg where people weren't so frantic to get on the train, they did let - well, they let a couple of young ladies on - frauleins. Pretty good looking gals, some of them. One of them really had a beautiful tan, looked nice, and I guess they kind of thought they'd like to have the company of these young ladies with them. They visited quite a bit and everybody had a bag with some lunch of some sort in it. After a while they reached into the bag and got out these eggs and they were raw eggs. They poked a hole in each end, then they'd suck the goody out of it. They seemed to think they were really good. Anyway, we headed on down toward Frankfurt. The girls got off before we got to Frankfurt, someplace, I don't know where. I didn't keep track of things like that. 

We got into Frankfurt about eight. They took us around and lodged us into the city jail and I recall in my stay there the bunk we had was shaped quite a bit like a chaise lounge. One end kind of sloped up, but it was made out of two inch boards and there was no pad at all, so it wasn't quite as comfortable as a lounge. And another thing I recall about that night, you could hear the hobnail boots clumping along the street. You could hear them for a block or two. Man, did they click along there. I don't know if they knocked sparks off their boots or not, but you sure could hear them clatter as they walked along. And I could hear that all night long. 

Page 24

Interrogation Camp 

The next day they put us on a street car, and it was a crowded street car, and took us out to the "dulag" to the interrogation camp. And they put me in the cell there with a English sergeant, who had - well, he'd been shot down, too. And I'm glad they did, because I was feeling pretty down in the dumps and didn't know what to expect next or anything like that. And this sergeant, being a European, I suppose, he had a better understanding of the German people than we did and he didn't seem to be afraid. As a matter of fact, he had pretty good humor and his spirits, you know, being pretty good. Morale was good and he sure helped to pull me out of the dunk {funk}. I recall not long after that, a bombardier, an American bombardier, came in and I've never seen a guy so down as he was. He was really scared and really down in the dumps. Between the two of us, we got him to feeling better, too, in a little while. 

We must have stayed in this camp about dam near a week, I guess - seemed like it was a week. I suppose that it would get to kind of drag out like that so you'd think it was a long time, but they kept putting more people in this room and this room was only about eight feet wide and maybe twelve or fourteen feet long, with a little window in one end that had a couple of panes that you could open up, but they couldn't open up big enough to get out. And it didn't let much air in. It, apparently, was only made for one occupant, because it only had one bunk and it was the same kind of bunk that we experienced there in the police station or jail in Frankfurt. Not made for comfort. So we all had to sleep on the floor and we called it the "sweatbox" because this was July, the latter part of July, and it was - well, actually, by this time it was probably the first of August - and it was hot in there. 

Finally, they came around one day - well, before we leave this, I guess I want to tell you about - we'd knock on the wall, we'd learn that one of our buddies was in the building there somewhere. The walls were just thin boards. You knock on the wall and had them pass a message down to so-and-so, whoever he was, you know, and they'd relay the message back. And we were doing that all day long and someone suggested that maybe the Germans had the place bugged - had some hidden microphones around to see what information they could pick up. I don't think any information they picked up would be worth much to them. I doubt it would, most of it was plain old malarkey, just trying to build each other's morale, telling wild stories on each other and things like that. I don't think they picked up much here. 

Page 25

Interrogation

Finally, they came and took us out and we went over to the interrogation place - where they were going to interrogate us. I don't recall now whether they took us out one at a time or whether they took us all over there together, but I know they interrogated us one at a time. I went into this interrogator and he was kind of arrogant in a way. He expressed himself as he didn't see why he should have to sit there and talk English to us because the whole world should be speaking German. I assured him that he was lucky that he could speak English, because after the war was over, the whole world would probably be speaking English, which he didn't appreciate comments like that. But, I guess, he expected some of that kind of stuff because he didn't seem to get too shook up. 

To my surprise, he pulled out a file on me - had my name on it and had quite a bit of information and my home - I think he had my home address. He knew what squadron I was in and, oh, there was quite a little hit {hint???}. He knew what flying schools I went to. I think a lot of this information they could probably get from Lisbon. Lisbon seemed to be the international spy exchange in the world at that time. You could buy - I understand that you could buy a copy of any paper that was printed in the world. A lot of this information was printed in papers, like graduates of flying school and things like that, they were always published, so the folks back home could be proud of their boys, you know. At any rate, he had a pretty extensive file there and then he had this form he wanted to fill out, but we were supposed to only give our name, rank and serial number and that's what I tried to get by with. Because of my - he did know my squadron already and, because my home address at that time was on my dog tags, I gave him my home address and my next of kin, my mother - the name of my mother, next of kin. That was all on the dog tags, so I figured they probably already knew it or they could get it easily, anyway. 

Page 26

So, I told him those things and then he had other questions. I don't recall what they were exactly. I think he wanted to know when I joined the squadron and the group and when the group came over to England. I don't remember. It seemed like he knew when the group came to England, but I can't remember now, but there was some questions there. He said they were for the Red Cross, and I told him I couldn't answer those questions. We jawed back and forth for a little bit and he said he'd like to take me over and turn me lose in the compound where the guys could get 'out and walk and they played football every afternoon, all this good stuff. I told him, well, I wasn't interested in football. I wouldn't cross the street to watch a game of it. And then he offered me a cigarette and said when we got through he'd give me a cigarette. Well, the first thing they did when they captured a person was take his cigarettes away from him, because they knew that was a leverage on him. And by the time a guy had been without cigarettes three, four or five days, he was pretty jittery, and then you have him kind of - almost give his life to get hold of a damn cigarette. But I didn't smoke. And that didn't help his cause any, either. And he sat there smoking his darn cigarette and blowing the smoke at me, which I didn't like. I'd wave the darn stuff away. 

Finally, he said, "well", he says, "I want you to answer these questions", and I told him, "I can't, I can't answer those". He says, "of course you can, you know the answers. Of course you can answer them." And I said, "well, okay, have it your way. I can answer them, but I won't answer them." Then he tried to get under my skin by telling me I was being childish and he tried to tell me that this information was all old stuff anyhow and that it was kind of obsolete, and I told him, "yeah, it looks like most of your information is kind of obsolete, because your maps on the wall are obsolete, too. They don't show the lines where they are." We had found out, after we got shot down, that they had invaded Sicily, but he didn't show it on his maps. The guys that came in told us about it. I wasn't going to tell him where he was wrong, but I told him that his maps were obsolete, too. But, he said, "I'd sure like to take you over there and turn you loose in that compound where you got freedom, but if you're not going to answer these questions, I'll have to put you in solitary confinement." And I said, "well, you just as well call a guard, because I'm not going to answer your questions. I'm through." 

Page 27

So he did, he called a guard and they took me over and put me in a cell by myself, about the same kind of a cell I was in before, only there wasn't anybody else there. It was a small room, probably about eight feet wide and twelve feet long, I guess, window at the end. I went down to the window and there was a guy in the room next to me. And I could talk to him out the window. He'd stand by his window and I'd stand by mine and we could kind of talk around that way. The guards came then and closed the blackout blinds. Blackout blinds are just like a wood door that closed over the top of a window and you couldn't see out, you couldn't do a very good job of talking. It even cut off the air. So, I went back and laid down in the bunk and took a nap and, after a while, it must have been about five or six o'clock, a guard came down and took me out. Took me down to the front, then they took me over and turned me loose in the compound, never asked me any more questions or nothing. They just took me over and turned me loose in the compound. It was kind of nice to be there where you could walk around, get outdoors. 

They had what they called a PX. They gave some scrip, they called it "lagergeld." Camp money was what it was. They could buy toothpaste and things like that, shaving cream, razor blades, stuff like that in their little PX, post exchange, which we did. There they gave me a pair of GI shoes, English GI shoes. They were black, about two sizes too big for me, but I guess that's all they had. I wore that darn pair of shoes all the rest of the time I was in prison camp. When they got - the sole got kind of wore out, they sent them out, the Germans resoled them and filled them full of hobnails for me. At any rate, I don't know how long we stayed there in Dulag Luft, but I suppose when they got enough for a shipment, they took us then and put us on the train, the old forty and eight boxcars, a World War I train. On the side of the cars, it says "forty homm 8 cheral" which is French for "forty men or eight horses." The old "forty and eights" and we didn't rate as ordinary men, I guess. They put fifty of us in there. There wasn't hardly room for everybody to sit down of the floor, even. They were small boxcars, probably about twenty feet long, I would guess, and had a window on each side, a small window, not big enough hardly for you to crawl out of it. I guess you could crawl out of it if you tried hard. And there was one in the front and one in the back, one of them on the right side in the front and one on the left side in the back. These were old German trains that - they didn't couple together like American trains do with an automatic coupler, they had kind of a bumper on each end of the car - on each comer of the car, a round bumper and a spring deal in it. They'd bump both together and then they had a chain with a turnbuckle that they'd hook together to tighten the turnbuckle up between the cars, and that's the coupling they had. They only had one axle under each end of the car, instead of having a truck-like axle like the American trains do, they only had one axle on each end of the car. And those damn things would get going down the road and it felt like they had square wheels on them. They also went from side to side. For some reason, though, they'd just get to shivering back and forth, side to side. You'd think this damn thing was going to jump the track, then you couldn't stand up, you couldn't hardly stay in the damn thing. It was just shivering back and forth. 

Page 28

Arrival at Prison Camp 

I know we were on the train more than one night, or at least one night. I don't know how much longer. We arrived at Sagan. We noticed we were going into forested country and you could see the trees had been planted, because you'd see one patch that would look like about forty acres that would all be the same height and then all of a sudden they'd step up maybe ten feet higher and there'd be another patch all that height. Different heights of trees. You could tell that they been planted all at one time. Then over to Sagan, toward East Germany, over on the Odor River, fairly close to Frankfurt and on the Odor on the old Polish border. The ground was sandy and poor, very poor. I think that's why it was all in forest, because it wasn't good enough soil for most agriculture. 

They took us in, give us a mug shot, made out our papers and card on us with our name, and they gave us a serial number, what we called a "kriegy number." The English had been there a lot longer than we had, so the English had already got some habits and some terms and things like that established and one of them was that prisoners of war were called "kriegies" and this came from the German word "kriegsgefangener" which meant prisoner of war. The German word for war is "krieg" and "gefangene" is a prisoner, so we were war prisoners. And the English had shortened that to "kriegy." They called us "kriegies." We got a kriegy number. I remember my kriegy number was 1926. I still got my kriegy dog tag. Anyway, then they took us and assigned us a place to abode in a barracks. 

Page 29

The Center Camp 

We were first put in what they called a center camp. The camp was called Stalag 3 and from some accounts that I've heard, some people considered it to be the country club of the prison camps. It lacked a lot of being a country club. But the way the camp was formed, they called a compound a "lager." We had the four lagers and the outer lager where the Germans stayed. They had a hospital in that area. And then they had the center camp, the center lager, and the east camp, and the north camp, and I guess that's all they had when we first got there. They were building the south compound. When we arrived there, the north compound had Americans and English in it, so did the center compound. The east compound was made up almost entirely of small nations like Lithuania, Albania, and all those little Baltic nations and places where the Germans had overrun. But some of the personnel, some of the soldiers or military people, had managed to escape to England, and there they joined up with the RAF and were flying against the Germans. So whenever they captured one those, they stuck them over in this little camp, this east camp, east compound they called it. 

Barracks

They put us in the center compound. It was about half Americans and half English, and we had big open bay barracks. They had bunks that were double deck bunks and they were kind of arranged around, so that they kind of made like little roomettes in a way you might say, and there was a table in the middle, and the guys that occupied these bunks kind of messed together. They did their own feeding and cooking there and had that table, so we took turns about doing the cooking. 

Page 30

Red Cross Food Packages 

We got a an l l-pound Red Cross food package - each man got a Red Cross food package each week. When we first got there, there were more English Red Cross packages than anything else, so we would get an English parcel one week. The next week it might be a Canadian and then the next week would be English and then the next week might be American. So, every other week was an English food parcel, then they alternated between American and Canadian parcels on the other. I must say that the American and Canadian parcels were better than the English parcels in most respects. However, the English did usually include in theirs a can of peas and carrots or some vegetable like that, but the meat that the English put out was atrocious. About all it amounted to was a canful of crumbs soaked in gravy and they called it a meat roll, whereas in the American, we usually got a can of Spam and maybe a small can of corned beef, too. In the Canadian packages, we got corned beef and Spam and there was butter. We got butter in the Canadian packages. It was canned, but it was butter, real butter. The American packages had margarine. In the English packages we got margarine. Some of the English packages would come with powdered eggs in them, too, and all of them, American, Canadian and English, had milk. Let's see, the American and Canadian had powdered milk, the English had condensed milk, like Eagle Brand milk. It was Nestle's condensed milk. They called it Condendo - thick and sweet. 

German Rations 

But we managed on the German ration, usually potatoes and in the season they'd give us cabbage and kohlrabies and stuff like that. So we managed to get along pretty good. It seemed at first that we were hungry all the time, because we were cut down on our rations from what we were used to at home, back in England, but as time went on, we got used to it. As an example, when we first arrived there, every man was given so much bread a day and so, what we did, we would give each man his ration of bread and he could do what he wanted. He could eat it all at one time or he could save it throughout the day. After we'd been there about two or three months, it got to where we didn't do that any more. We just didn't ration out. We just had the bread on hand there and the guys ate what they wanted of it. There was always enough to last and we never had to worry about it. 

One little incident that's kind of humorous, K. J. Hall and I were doing the cooking. We kind of buddied together quite a bit. He was a first pilot and I was a co-pilot. We had a bunch of cabbage that the Germans had given us, so we cooked it up and we had had corned beef and cabbage quite a bit anyhow, so we thought we'd try something different. So, we threw a can of sardines in with the cabbage to flavor it up. Man, that was a potent dish. But anyway, we learned by our experiences. We never tried that again. That was pretty bad. 

Page 31

Formation

A formation, "appell", was what they called "nose count". Each barracks would form like a platoon down on the parade grounds. This happened in the morning, probably about 9:00 and in the afternoon about 4:00, twice a day. The Germans would come by, one in front and one behind, and they would count and make sure that everyone that belonged in that barracks was there. They didn't know names, they just went by numbers. 

One day, in the morning - there had been an air raid during the night, we could hear the bombs falling around. We assumed that it was probably Berlin. We were close enough that we could hear the bombing raids on Berlin. This fellow hollered out "Berlin, kaput" as the guards went by, counting, and they grabbed him and took him off to the cooler with solitary confinement, usually a sentence of about a week or ten days, something like that. We had soft cooler and hard cooler - soft cooler, you got your Red Cross food package. Hard cooler you didn't, all you had was German rations. Sometimes, German rations were pretty meager and pretty austere, like potatoes or kohlrabies or cabbage, something like that. At any rate, old Perkins got hauled off to the cooler for spouting off against the Germans. 

We stayed in the center camp there until along about the first of September, I believe, somewhere in that area. Meanwhile, they were building the south compound, which was supposed to be all American. While we were in the center camp, they built what they called an "abort", the Boy Scouts would call them "kybos". In the military we called them latrines and over there they called them "abort". This" A board" was nothing more than a big hole in the ground and then it was lined up with bricks. It had row seats down inside like the old fashioned privies used to have. That's what it was, it looked like an old fashioned privy. It did have a toilet. Yeah, well, I guess someone would call it a toilet - outhouse, or whatever. It had running water, had taps where you could get water and wash your face out of kind of - it wasn't really a sink, it was more like a big old slab that the water poured down onto - a trough, I guess it was. And we could get water out of there to do whatever we needed with, washing, cooking, whatever. But, this window was right beside the barracks. We were living in right close. All of a sudden we put up a sign there that - well, the Germans would come around when those things would get full and they would bring around some Polish workers, I guess, people that worked for them, and they had a thing they called the honey wagon. They pumped this abort out into the honey wagon and haul it away, leaking the thing. Periodically, they had to be emptied. This one had just been emptied. Right after it was emptied, we got the word that nobody was to use it as an outhouse any more. You could get water there, but that's all. 

Page 32

All of a sudden, all of the kriegies around the camp were watering their flowers and they would carry water out of this kybos. The English had been there some time. Some of them had little gardens. A lot of them had flowers planted around their barracks, you know, nasturtiums and things, whatever. Anyway, they were busy as the dickens carrying water out all day long. The mysterious thing was that the ground in the flower beds kept rising, kept getting higher and higher and higher. What was actually going on was some guys had gone down inside this damn thing, because it was close to the fence. It was only about probably fifty feet from the fence, a hundred feet from the fence, maybe. They'd gone down inside there and started a tunnel. These people that were carrying water out, they would have a can almost full of sand and a little bit of water on top. They were carrying it out and putting it on their flower beds. A lot of this kept getting bigger and higher as they watered them all day long. They were really big. The only clue was that about the time they got the tunnel dug out clear underneath the fence, the Germans came by with a wagonload of coal and caved it in. That was the end of that. That's about the way most of the tunnels happened - that was about the fate of most of the tunnels, because it was sandy soil and unless you had it shored enough, it wouldn't stand, particularly when they run over it with a wagonload of coal. I think the Germans had discovered that, so periodically, they would run around and drive a wagon, a regular old-type wagon with a team, around inside the fence or through a load of coal in it to cave in any tunnels we'd started. 

Page 33

The South Compound 

About the first of September, somewhere around the first of September - during September maybe - they moved us over into the south compound. They came around and asked us, "anybody want to go to the south compound? It's opening up and it's going to be all Americans." There wasn't going to be any English in it. They had already taken all of the Americans out of the north compound and put them down there. And then they told the center compound that still had English and Americans in it. Then they told us we could go over there. So, we did, we went over there. We were kind of - we needed to be all Americans. There were four of us - the four officers - there weren't any enlisted men in this camp, so we got a room. They were six-man rooms, so we all got together. Of course, they put in a couple of other fellows with us. It was Jim Creary, our navigator, Herb Schindler, our bombardier, K. J. Hall and myself, all of our crew. There was a couple of other fellows with it. 

Just another little story, while we were still in the center camp. I slept in the bunk underneath. The guy above me was named R. J. Hall and he was kind of a slow spoken, everybody thought he was a little bit dull from West Virginia or something like that, but a real nice guy, a real good guy. But, the mattresses we had, we called them "pallets", were nothing but just a big gunnysack about six feet long and two and a half feet wide - two feet wide - and it was filled with wood shavings - excelsior - real fine excelsior wood shavings. They were fine when they were fresh, but they'd get kind of mashed down to fit your shape, and if you tried to stir them up and fluff them up again, all you got was a bunch of lumps. It was kind of like com meal mush. You couldn't get anything but a bunch of lumps. They were pretty lumpy. You'd get them all arranged so you could sleep on them pretty good, and then you'd get along if you didn't disturb them too much. Just as a joke, I went out, I picked up two or three big rocks, almost as big as your head. I stuck them up there under R. J. Hall's mattress and when he crawled into bed that night, he's squirming around, squirming around. He said, man, this pallet is getting lumpier all the time. Finally, he managed to get himself comfortable, fairly comfortable I guess. He didn't discover the rocks. He got through the night and the next day, the rocks were still under his mattress, so I got ashamed of myself and I took them and threw them out. I thought he would discover them, but he didn't. 

Anyway, we had the six men in our room in the south compound and we lived there happily until along in February of 1945. See, this was September of 1943, and we spent two winters there. It had been cut out of this forest that they had. Now, their trees were planted in rows and they were nearly all the same size, and we had this big area supposed to be an athletic field and parade ground, and it was covered with these stumps where they'd cut the trees down. The stumps were still under the barracks, too. They were all around. The camp was full of them. And they gave us a big old monstrosity of a stump puller, kind of like a couple of A-frames fastened together with a big rod with a hook on it and two long poles. We lifted up and pulled and got under these hooks and pulled down. You could get about 20 guys on one of those things, and by doing a little digging out of the stump, you could get hold of it and you could pull the stumps out. Well, the stumps' roots were full of pitch. They burn real good, they had a lot of resin and pitch in there. As we worked on this thing, the guys that worked the stump puller got to stack the stumps up outside their window to their room and they used those for auxiliary fuel during winter. And we got along pretty good that first winter because they had all that extra fuel. The next year, most of the stumps were burned up and I think the German economy was not as good as it had been, so it was not near as comfortable. 

Page 34

Daily Life 

During the summer when the 4th of July came around, we had a Fourth of July celebration, and we put on a real celebration. We had just about everything except the American flag. I don't think we had one of those. The Germans kind of went along with it, they didn't seem to complain. We had - not like the Korean prisons and the Vietnamese - we had our own camp staff inside our camp. We had a senior officer and we had a adjutant and we had the rest of our staff. A lot of the people in the compound had some kind of  little job. My job - I was a parcels officer for our block. We called them blocks, they were the barracks. Limeys called them cellblock, so everybody called them blocks. But, they were like a barracks - it was a barracks. I was the Red Cross parcels officer for our block and we had a mail officer, and we had a German rations officer and we had guys doing all kinds of stuff, which was a good thing really, it kept everybody busy. 

Mail was kind of a slow process, when I first was shot down and first got to write home, probably, the first part of August. I didn't receive any mail from home or answer to my letters until along about Christmas - just before Christmas - and so it took about four to five months to get an answer from your mail that you wrote out. Fortunately, they only gave us certain forms to write on and I think we had three letters and two postcards a week, or four postcards a week, that we could write each month. 

Along with the mail, the people at home were allowed to get parcels labeled from the War Department if they had a son, or husband, or someone in their family was a prisoner of war, they could get this parcel label from the War Department, and they could get four of those a year and they could send parcels over if they weren't too big. They could only be about ten or twelve pounds, but you could get - you know, they could send things like shaving cream and even shoes, small items of shoes, toilet articles. One of the parcels I got - Rachel {Brad's wife} had written to my mother and my mom sent her the parcel label so she could send a parcel. It had some Seaforth aftershave lotion in it, and I think I was the only guy in the compound that had aftershave lotion. Man, those guys would come to me to borrow that stuff all the time, getting a splash out of it just a little bit, you know. They'd give me a cigar or candy bar or some damn something. 

Page 35

Mediums of Exchange 

When we first arrived there, cigarettes and coffee and tea were pretty much a medium of exchange, but as things got going and fellows began to get tobacco parcels from home - that's another thing. They could send tobacco parcels. They had to send the labels straight to the company and it was mailed from the company. They couldn't mail it from home. They had to mail it what they called "in bond". They could send books, too, in that way, besides the four personal parcels a year. So the guys began to get plenty of tobacco and stuff like that, and so tobacco went down and after a while the only medium of exchange that really held up was chocolate bars. We got a chocolate bar in each Red Cross food package, Canadian, American or English. They all had the chocolate bar in it. So, we used that as a medium of exchange. They had a little exchange thing there they called "foodaco". You could take items of food over there and they had a point system set up, each item was worth so many points and you could trade whatever points you had for the same value of other items there. 

At first, tea was a pretty good exchange item, because the English all like tea, but after a while it got to where they found out that the Americans liked coffee and didn't like tea at all, so the exchange from tea to coffee began to go up. You had to have more and more tea to get any coffee from the Limeys. And, of course, after we got over in the south compound there weren't any more Limeys over there, so tea became a drag on the market, it wasn't worth anything. 

Page 36

First Aid 

We also had our first aid station in the camp. You take a camp there that had about, well, we wound up with 1,900 men in our compound, and you can find people that can do anything. We had guys there that actually had had a little bit of premed and some first aid experience and stuff like that, so we had our own first aid station that we operated there. I recall one incident where - Col. Clark, a lieutenant colonel from Texas, a big redheaded guy, and he was a pretty solid and sober sort of a guy. You never saw him smile much and he didn't seem to have much of a sense of humor - but he had pink eye and he had been going over to the first aid station. They had a new guy working there and he - by accident, put a drop of iodine in each one of his eyes instead of ardurol, which they'd been treating him with, and it just about set him on fire. If he could have seen, I think he would have torn the place up, but he couldn't see. They finally got him calmed down, but he was really hopping around. They cured his pink eye. Never had to come back for that again. Maybe he was afraid to, I don't know. 

Fences

Around the compound, there were two barb wire fences about - they must have been eight or ten feet high. They were about six or eight feet apart. I don't know how many strands of wire they had in them. They must have had about a dozen strands of wire on each. In between the two fences, they had barb wired stretched back and forth across so that if you got out between the two fences, you were in a tanglement of barb wire that was really terrible. That was the perimeter fence. Then back about forty or fifty feet from the inside of that, they had a rail, just some low posts with a board nailed on it for a rail, and between there and the outside fence was no man's land. If you got out in there, some guard would take a shot at you. Around the perimeter they had these towers with a guard standing in it. He had a machine gun up there. He just stood there and watched around to see what the activities were and all that. We called them the "goon boxes". The Limeys terminology for Germans was "goon". Any German was a goon to the English. So, we adopted a lot of their terminology. 

Page 37

Stooges and Ferrets 

We had what we called "Committee X", and I think they did over in their [English] compound, too, which was a committee in charge of anti-German activities, you know, subversive activity, you might say. We had another setup there, when there was any activity going on that the Germans didn't approve of, we'd put out - we called them "stooges", to watch for the Germans. They had these Germans that walked around inside the compound, we called them "ferrets". They wore a pair of coveralls and all they had was a screwdriver about eighteen inches long and a flashlight. They'd crawl under the barracks and up in the attics and everywhere around to see if anything was going on that shouldn't be going on. They wandered around in the camp all day long, just looking around, snooping around, so whenever you'd see one of them, you'd holler, "tally ho". That was to let everybody know that there was a ferret around. As a matter of fact, every time you saw a German guard or ferret there in the compound you hollered "tally ho", so that, you know, they'd get used to it. If somebody was doing something they shouldn't be doing, we'd have stooges posted out to make sure that they didn't get caught. So, they'd watch to see if any Germans were coming, like, maybe they might be digging tunnels or whatever they might be doing. If you just hollered when they were around close to something going on, why they'd get wise, you know, and they'd start sharpening up, trying to find out what you're hollering about. But, every time you saw one, you'd holler "tally ho", anybody, if you passed one up, you'd holler "tally ho". Yeah, that was the English - they were there first and we took a lot of customs from them, because they had a lot of the protocol already established, you know. 

The only radio that we had was not our radio. It was out in the forelager and we couldn't get to it to tune it. The Germans kept it tuned to whatever they wanted it tuned to. And they had a speaker on the cookhouse. They played music and they give news and stuff like that, German news. We had some contraband radios, little special ones, and what we used them for was to get the news on BBC - British Broadcasting -and so that's where we got our news. 

We also had a so-called cookhouse in the middle of the compound, the kitchen - all they ever gave us was hot water out of the thing, but they had a loudspeaker there that gave out German propaganda all day long, music and propaganda, and the news, regular German broadcast. I think we also had a speaker down on our theater. 

Page 38

Ice Hockey 

Incidentally, that winter we had been able to make ice hockey rinks just by flooding the ground with water and letting it freeze. We flooded an area. It was in the wintertime when it was cold. There was a period there, I suppose, for a month when it never got above freezing. The ground was real sandy, the water seeped through it, but by washing it down and letting it - the water would go in and it would freeze and it would seal after a little bit. It sealed it and we kind of put a little bit of a dike around, just a little one, not more than about, oh, I don't think more than six inches high. And when we finally got the ground to seal, then we flooded it with water. We took some paper ribbons and laid in the ice and froze it over to make lines for a hockey court. And then they would skate on it for a while, until it got a lot of slush built up on it, and then they have to stop and they'd shovel the slush all off and when it began to get worn down ... well, like, for instance, along about noontime then they'd put more water on, probably put another inch of water on it, let it freeze while everybody was going to lunch. They'd have to wait till it got froze before they could use it again and then at night, of course, they'd clean it all off and put a bunch more water on it and let it freeze again. Kept at it all the time, adding water to it, as we shaved the stuff up on time, we had to put more water on it to keep from wearing it out. By the time we left there, there must have been - looked like snow, you know, piled up - must have been four or five feet high all the way around that rink, where we'd been shoveling the stuff up off the top. 

We had two of them in our compound, I think, and the guys could skate. The YMCA gave us skates which you clamped onto your shoes. They weren't shoes skates, they were just ones that snapped on. But we had fun with them. 

Page 39

The Theater 

We had a little theater in our camp that we had built. Now, according to the Geneva Convention, when you became a prisoner of war, you were supposed to have been paid. Usually, the equivalent of the same amount of equivalent rank in the detaining army was paid, or whatever his own pay was, whichever was the least, like in America, the German prisoners in America, received the same pay as they had been getting in Germany. However, when we were over there we only got the pay of the equivalent rank, which was considerably less. They never gave us any money. They put it into a fund, just a group fund, and whenever we broke a dish or any kind of an item they had issued to us, windows, or anything like that and they had to replace it, they'd charge it against this fund. 

We had enough money in the fund to build this theater. It was a pretty good sized little theater and they furnished the materials and supervisor, and we furnished most of the labor, particularly where it took digging and stuff like that. And we had guys that knew about bricklaying, too, so the foundation was laid with brick. The rest of it was kind of prefabricated into panels, what you kind of consider similar to the plywood panels that we get in this country today. They were - of course, they were on the metric system, but they looked to be about four feet wide and eight feet high. I don't know what the dimensions were in metric, but the boards were probably only about half an inch thick or maybe a little bit less. They weren't three-quarter inch like we have in this country, they were thinner. That's what our barracks were made out of, the same thing in panels that way and they come and assemble them there. The boards they were made out of - instead of being plywood, were boards tongue and groove. They were probably about two and a half to three inches wide with a little tongue on one side and groove on the other. However, when they seasoned, they were pretty loose. I know we had some wall maps hanging on there that we cut out of newspapers that were hanging on wall, and when the wind would blow, those maps would flutter because the wind would come right through the wall. 

In the comer of each room, was a stove, a heating stove. The way the Germans built them, they would start at the ground and they would build up a little wall of bricks around until it would stand clear up to the floor level. Then they put a slab of cement on top of that for the stove to sit on. And the walls behind the stove were made of bricks. They would put the stove in one room adjacent to the stove of the other room so they used a common chimney. Both stoves used the same chimney. 

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Our little theater we had - we had a group of guys that later on organized themselves into what they called a "theater guild" and they put on plays and we had a real good orchestra. We had a fellow named Major Diamond and he was a professional musician. He had been the piano accompanist for Rubinoff, who, back in the 40s was a pretty famous violin player. And Major Diamond had been with him, playing accompanist for him. Pretty accomplished musician. And we had a lot of other guys who were real good. And we had some guys who could do a real good job of arranging. They could almost imitate Glenn Miller. They could do a pretty good job of imitating him, especially on records that they heard him play. We also had some regular old, what we call acoustic type phonographs, that they would pass around. I don't know how many there were in the camp. I think the YMCA furnished those also. But, they would - from time to time we would have one in our barracks and they would pass it from room to room. Each room would have it for maybe a day or whatever. I don't remember how long. There were a bunch of records that went along with them, you know, and we'd sit there and play the records and listen to them. 

We got books from the YMCA and we got sporting equipment, like baseballs, softball bats, even got ice skates and basketballs, all kinds of athletic stuff, from the YMCA. They sent it to us through Geneva. The Red Cross sent in food and clothing. Of course, the food and clothing they sent was actually GI. It was Army rations and Army clothes. It wasn't civilian clothes or anything like that. The Red Cross was only a medium of getting it there, actually. It was furnished by the military. However, it was nice to get that stuff. So we got along pretty good. 

We had to keep our own rooms clean. We did our own laundry. That was one of the things, I guess, that - after the war was over they finally determined that we never spent one day over there where the Germans completely lived up to the terms of the Geneva Convention. Most of the time we did our own laundry where we could do it. The guys invented kind of a little washing machine, they put a couple tin cans on the end of a stick and slosh it up and down. The old time washing machines used to have what they called "vacuum cups" in them, and you used to be able to buy a thing like that on a stick that you'd put in a pail. And you put your laundry down a pail and then you slosh it up and down like that. And wash it that way. So we made those kinds of things and that's the way we did our laundry. 

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We didn't have much of anything to litter the place with. Anything that was burnable we burnt for fuel, heat our rooms and to cook with. We had to do our own cooking. 

The Germans didn't believe in making the officers work, so we had little athletic programs. Like I say, we had a real good band, orchestra. They put on some nice musical programs and these guys would put on plays in the theater and the prisoners were kind of funny, when there wasn't enough room in the theater to get everybody into it. So, what they did, they'd say, well, the barracks were numbered and they'd have - maybe two or three barracks would have their turn in the theater one night. Then they put on the same play again another night and there would be two or three other barracks. They were designated which barracks could go. When these guys had a turn to go to the theater, man, they'd wash their clothes and press them up. The only thing you had to press them with was bricks. They'd use those tiles out of the tile stoves the Germans had. They were slick, glazed on one side, and they made pretty fair irons to smooth things out with. They'd really put on the dog, dress themselves up the very best they could. Most of time during the day they run around in maybe nothing but their damn underwear shorts and no shoes even, but when it come time to go to the theater, they'd dress up the best they had. It looked like they were really going to the theater. Some of them came around and wanted to put on some of my Seaforth aftershave lotion. Make themselves really spiffy. 

We had our fun there, too, from time to time. Little funny incidents that happened, like this one young man used to do a lot of singing with the orchestra and they'd dress him up to look like a girl, putting makeup on him and a wig and all that. Well, for a guy that hadn't been outside the compound for a couple of years, sitting back there in the audience, you'd look pretty good up there on the stage. Well, it just happened that this guy had been out in the hospital and had been circumcised. I don't know for what reason, but anyhow, he had, and he lived in our barracks. A little while after he came back, he hadn't been back but about a week or so, they had this - just a plain musical show, orchestra and singing. The whole thing was just like a musical show. There was no acting to it, just singing and music. The guys liked and enjoyed it. And old Battock was singing this torch song, I don't remember what it was, I think it was You Made Me Love You or something like that, Melancholy Baby or something like that, most of the guys were familiar with it, it was the tune back in those days. They did a real good job on it. I mean, some of these old kriegies were sitting back there, you know, and they were clear out of the wire. They were back dreaming about the old days, you know, back home and stuff like that. When it came to the end of the song, sometimes, you know, when a performance is really good, they don't applaud right away. Everybody is still kind of savoring the performance and this wise joker during this little period of silence, in a real loud hoarse stage whisper, he says, "Just think, we knew her before she was circumcised". That brought everybody right back into the compound where they were and the place nearly fell down in the end. They sure thought that was a great funny. But, that was one of the things that happened there. 

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One time, Jim Creary lost his shoes. Pat, his wife, sent him a nice pair of oxfords and he never polished them the whole time we were there and they had gotten pretty seedy looking, because sand has a way of picking your polish right off of your shoes. So, one morning before our morning appell, Herb Schindler and I got hold of Jim's shoes and shined them all up real good, polished them up. Man, they looked real neat. We stuck them back under his bed where they belonged and when it came time, they hollered, "everybody fall out for appells" and Jim wanted to get his shoes to put them on and he couldn't find them. He looked around under the bed and he could find them. They were there, he just didn't recognize them. We thought that was a pretty good little joke on him. By the time appell was over, everybody in camp knew that Jim Creary's shoes had been polished. It just spread like wildfire. 

The Kitchen 

Then we had sort of a kitchen up there in each barracks and we got one cooked meal a day. Each room would have a turn in the kitchen. They would have a certain hour when they could do their cooking in the kitchen. So, we'd have one cooked meal a day. The rest of it would be kind of like lunches. We'd have a couple of slices of bread with some butter or honey or jam on it for breakfast, and of course, we'd go over to the cookhouse in the middle of the compound and get a pitcher of hot water so we could make Nescafe tea or whatever we could make. That was in our ration. We'd have two kind of like lunch type meals and then we'd have a cooked meal in the afternoon. 

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When we first moved over there in the south compound there were six of us in the room, so we took turn about. There would be two guys to do all of the cooking and dishwashing, we called them KPs. They did everything for a week, then two other guys would do it the next week, and two other the next. So, we'd have two weeks off and one week on duty. Which wasn't really too bad. 

We got along pretty fair through the winter and at Thanksgiving time we got some special Red Cross food packages for Thanksgiving and we got some special ones for Christmas, that had fruitcake and plum pudding and things like that in them. We did pretty good. 

We didn't have any hot showers. We had to take showers .... We had a kind of a shower/washroom in the barracks but it had cold water, didn't have any hot water in it. So, we had to use a cold shower, but you get along pretty good with it in the summertime, wintertime it's a little bit tougher, but as we stayed there in Sagan we began to get used to these things and you learned to shave in about half a can of warm water. 

Skilled Artisans 

We learned a lot of skills in making things out of tin cans, take the tin out of a can. I had a pocket knife on me when we were shot down and the Germans allowed me to keep it. It wasn't a very big one. I had one blade in there we used as a paring knife, with a larger blade, and we had a small blade that we used for cutting tin cans and metal and then I had another small blade that used on wood, kept it sharp enough to whittle with. By taking the sheets of tin out of tin - cut a can open and then unroll the tin - and we could join them together with a special hooking system that we had developed there and you could make bigger sheets. We made a lot of them, for like baking pans where you could bake bread or pies or things like that. We made quite a few cooking utensils that way. The Germans gave us some pots and pans. There was one set of pots and pans for each barracks. 

As I said before, we had the one kitchen and each room had an assigned time there, as soon as we got our meal cooked we had to wash our pots and pans and hand them to the next room so they could get their stuff cooking. That's the way we did it. But, we did make a few utensils we used of our own. Each man was given a bowl, probably about a quart, and a spoon, a fork and a knife, and a cup, a mug, as it were. That was what we had to eat with in our rooms. 

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We even made percolators. We took some cans, a special can, I think they were plum pudding cans or something. They were about six inches in diameter and probably about two inches deep, two and a half inches deep. By taking those and soldering them together and you start to stack up there about four or five of them and make a pretty good percolator. We made the thing that goes inside to percolate. The Canadian Red Cross food packages had ground coffee in them. The Americans had Nescafe or some other soluble coffee. The English didn't have coffee, they had tea in theirs. But, anyhow, we could use it that way. 

We would salvage the solder off the tops of corned beef cans. The old corned beef cans used to have quite a bit of solder gobbing around on top when they seal them up. Then yu get quite a little bit of solder off by melting it off. We'd run it out into little thin bars. We also saved the tin foil off the cheese that came in the Red Cross packages. They used tin foil in those days, not aluminum. You couldn't do it now with aluminum, it wouldn't work. But we used tin foil, tin is a soft metal that melts at pretty low temperatures. Most solder that you buy is about 50% tin and 50% lead, so this tin made a pretty fair solder. We used pitch or resin where it would kind of harden on the boards on the house we lived in. We just saved that pitch, used it for a soldering flux.

Some of the guys used pieces of iron or something they could get hold of as a soldering iron, but when I got there I had had experience using a little alcohol torch before as a means of soldering, so I adopted some of the little grease lamps that the guys used to make light. They just used them for light when the Germans turned the power off, which they did whenever there was an air raid at night, they would turn the power off. Then it would be dark and interrupt your card game or whatever, so the guys made these little grease lamps, uses margarine in it and wick to burn. By putting a little blow pipe across the top this flame, you could blow out a real sharp clean flame and it was excellent for soldering. That's what I used all the time. We could do quite a little bit in making things, utensils and stuff.

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As it goes everywhere, there's always some guy that comes up with an ingenious idea, and one guy made himself a real nice, like a suitcase, out of this tin. He joined these pieces together and made big enough sections, mad a real nice looking tin suitcase. He used a nail and went around and had a design on it.  Had his initials and stuff, made a real nice design, kind of like you would tool leather. He used the end of a nail and mallet and made this design and it looked pretty nice. So, like everything else, other people had to try it. Some of them did pretty good, some of them were pretty lousy, didn't have the natural knack and skill to do a good job. The outcome of it was that the Germans didn't like the idea of everybody making suitcases. I guess, they thought we were all going to go somewhere. So, then they started a new deal that we had to turn back all of our tin cans before we could draw our Red Cross food packages again. So, it kind of backfired on us, but that didn't last too long. They went back to the old. I guess the senior officer convinced them that we weren't really planning a mass escape or anything like that.

The Escape

However, along in the spring of 1944, they did pull an escape. What had happened was they dug this tunnel out under the wire and along in the fall, it had been finished except just braking it through. They went at that in a real businesslike way. They borrowed bed boards from everybody in camp to shore the tunnel up so it wouldn't cave in. They even built like a little mine car to haul the dirt back out. They built a bellows and arranged to blow air down to the end of the tunnel so that the guys down there wouldn't suffocate so they had fresh air while they were working. They really went at it in a businesslike way. Of course, they had grease lamps down there to light it up so they could see what they were doing. They had this tunnel all braced up except for the breakthrough in the fall. Some of the guys that came down from the north compound, from the English compound, told us about it. Some of these Americans had been over there and they knew what was going on, but they didn't say anything about it until they actually broke it out. Like I say, they took all the Americans that were in that north compound and put them down in the south compound. Some of the guys that were in the room right next to us, they'd been in the north compound, and they told us they knew about the tunnel. We didn't know about it, us guys who came late, you know. They said they'd really kept good tight security on it, because the tunnel was finished in October, all except for just breaking through, you know, and they didn't - it just laid there all winter and they never got discovered, you know, until next spring when the guys broke out. I don't know why they broke out when they did, because the weather wasn't good enough yet really to ...

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This tunnel originated in one of the barracks in the north compound where the English were. They had moved the stove out of the comer where this thing was bricked up from the ground up to the floor and then filled with sand and then had a cement slab on it. So they moved this fill and slab back. The ferrets crawling around under the house couldn't see because the bricks went from the ground to the floor. They started a tunnel and they dug this tunnel out. Well, one morning along in the spring, when they had morning appell, the morning nose count, nobody came out of this barracks at all. They were all gone. The Germans got in a big "flap" and panic running around there. They went in, there was nobody in the barracks at all. They found the stove moved back and the entrance to the tunnel. There were 88 guys that escaped out of the barracks.

A few days later we found out that the Germans had rounded most of them up, and I believe it was on Good Friday, the Friday before Easter in 1944, the Germans gave us the news that most of these guys had been shot after they had been captured. They weren't shot in the process of being recaptured or when evading, but they had been rounded up, they had them in their truck. They stopped the truck, the told the guys to march all up the hill, run up the hill, which they did. They shot them down. The Gestapo did it, it wasn't the camp staff. The old commandant of our camp, the German commandant, he made it very clear he wanted everybody to understand that he had nothing to do with that at all, that was strictly the Gestapo that had done that, the SS and Gestapo. That was the event on which the show, The Great Escape, was based. They made a movie out here in this country and called it The Great Escape. Eight-eight of them got out and the last count we knew, there was, I think, Marine Commander Day that hadn't been accounted for. Out of the 88, 50 guys were shot. One kriegy, called Cliff Wayne, got a picture of the monument that was built to commemorate these 50 guys. The story of it is in that book, too, you can read that in the book. That was the great escape.

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Interesting thing about it was that there was a guy in the north compound that was up for repatriation. They was going to repatriate him - I don't remember some kind of physical handicap, health or something, you know, and well, he got there probably two or three weeks after this incident and they sent him back to England. It was kind of interesting that they'd send him back after that deal there. There was one guy in the north compound, an English fellow, that got shot down and he lost both his legs. I don't know if he lost them when he was shot down or what. I guess he did, because they repatriated him and sent him back to England. Under the terms of the Geneva Convention, if you were repatriated, you were not supposed to go into action against the country that repatriated you. You weren't supposed to go back and fight against them again, but he did. He went back - they give him some artificial legs and he was flying again. He got shot down again! The Germans wouldn't repatriate him anymore. They wouldn't send him back again. When he'd get in trouble with the Germans, instead of throwing him in the cooler like they did everybody (the cooler was solitary confinement), they'd take his legs away from him - take his artificial legs away from him. His buddies would have to carry him around until they give him his legs back.

After that, they started making it a little tougher on us. We had three or four appells a day sometimes. Then sometimes they would come in in the middle of the night and check to see if you were in your bed. They were trying to tighten up security so that it couldn't happen again. We did get some guys out of camp from time to time. We had what we called "Committee X" in the camp that was in charge of any subversive activities against the Germans. If you wanted to escape - if you thought you had a good plan, you went to talk to Committee X and talk it over with them. If they approved, then you could go ahead with your escape attempt. If they approved it, they would give you any help that they could, maybe in the way of maps and compasses and instructions and information that they had gleaned from previous attempts at escape that had been made. So, they were very helpful for that. We had guys in our compound, you might call them tailors, they could take a whole GI coat and make it look like a civilian coat. They could even forge papers, make papers. They could take the gelatin out of the sick packages that arrived and make duplicators like hectographs, where they could duplicate maps and instructions and things like that. So they would give you all of the help they could in that line. By doing this, they did get a few guys out of the compound from time to time.

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So, we carried on some activities against the Germans as we went along. They didn't want everybody trying it all the time, because that would make the Germans too much alert and then when a guy did have a good plan, you wouldn't have near as good a chance of making an escape. However, we never got anybody out of the country. They would get out of the compound, but in a little while they would be caught and brought back. One of the problems was, of course, speaking their language. If you tried to talk to anybody, they would detect the accent right away and then you'd be under suspicion, so the best plan was not to try to contact anybody, but then when they found you doing your traveling at night and trying to skirt the cities and stay away from anybody, then that was suspicious, too. Besides, you'd have to steal your food and stuff and that was kind of a bad thing, too, hard to get away with that. Whereas, in the daytime, you could buy - but like I say, your accent would be detected. So, none of them got out, they always came back. The Germans would congratulate them on a nice try and they would put them in the cooler for ten days or two weeks and then bring them back and turn them loose. That was the way most escape attempts wound up.

Moving to a New Camp

On January 7, 1945, we had a play going on, being presented in our theater. Incidentally, the name of the play was "You Can't Take It With You". In the middle of the play the Germans came in - this was, I think, the first time it was shown. The Germans came in and stopped the show about the middle of the show, said "everybody get back to your barracks and be ready to leave in an hour." So, they all went back to the barracks and everybody started getting their stuff all packed up. All we could do was take what we could carry because we were going to have to walk. The problem was that the Russians had gotten pretty close to us and we'd been able to hear Russian artillery for several days. So, we were kind of hoping maybe the Russians would overrun us and liberate us, but the Germans moved out ahead of them. Anyway, we had to carry everything, and the ironic thing is that one of the guys in our room had suggested that we make a sled. He said the ground was covered with snow and it had been covered in snow for weeks.

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The first winter we were there was quite mild, didn't get much snow and not much freezing, but this second winter, it got cold. The ground was frozen, we even made ourselves a skating rink by pouring water on the ground and freezing it and then pouring more water on that. We'd built up a pretty nice little skating rink there. The ground was covered with snow at this time and so, Bob Swinehart said we should build us a sled. This was a couple of weeks before this happened, but we didn't think that the Germans were going to move us out anyhow. Things - you know - around places like this you get rumors of this and rumors of that and they never work out. Half of them are just rumors. We kind of didn't think Bob's idea was a good one until the time came for us to move out. So we had to carry everything.

When we got out on the road - it took us probably two hours to get ready to go - and they got us out on the road and marched us down the road. We walked - about 11:00 o'clock at night we got started, and we walked and walked and walked. I don't know, we must have walked about two hours. Then they pulled a rest stop. We all stopped and rested.

When we got ready to go - they had a wagon with a load of bread with two little old ponies pulling. I never saw any real draft horses in Germany. Everything was kind of like you'd call a pony. These horses were in a sweat when they stopped and a horse is a critter that can't stand cooling off too fast. If he's lathered up, he needs to be exercised a little bit and walked until he's cooled down instead of just cooling down too fast. At any rate, when they got ready to start again, these horses couldn't pull the load at all. It was a load of that goon bread. Now, this goon bread is a normal size loaf like you'd buy in this country, weighed approximately five pounds. It was pretty solid stuff. If you hit a man with a loaf, it'd probably knock him down. It didn't need wrapping, they never wrapped their bread. The only near thing you ever saw to a wrapping might be a half a dozen loaves in a gunny sack. Other than that, most of the time they just dumped it into the wagon like a bunch of wood and hauled it around and distributed it that way. That's what they had - a wagonload of this stuff. There was enough bread in there that they decided to ration it out and every man got, I think, a quarter of a loaf of bread when they rationed it out. There were 1,900 guys, so there must have been about at least 5OO loaves of bread in that doggone wagon. If it weighed five pounds apiece, that's a pretty good load for a couple of old ponies to pull. At any rate, they got us going again.

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The German guards threw all their packs in the wagon and some of the German guards had little sleds they'd been carrying their packs on, so I heard these guys back behind us down the line, down the column, oh, 100 feet behind us, maybe. They were yakking away and the German was hollering at them and talking to them. Nobody knew what he was trying to say. I thought, well, I'd drop back there and see what was going on. Not that I could speak German - I didn't understand or speak very much German at all. But what the situation was, this German guard had thrown his pack and stuff in the wagon and he had the little sled that he was trying to get these kriegies to take. They didn't understand, but I could tell by his gestures and things like that, rather than what he was saying, that was what he was trying to do. So, I took the sled and went back down to where my buddies and we put our stuff on the sled and hauled it on the sled. One of the guys said, "I didn't know you could speak German like that." I said, "you don't have to speak it, all you have to do is watch him. You don't have to listen to him, just watch him and he told what he was trying to tell you." Anyway, that lightened up our load.

The next morning about daylight, they stopped into a big farmhouse yard. There was a big barn there and we stayed there for quite a little while, rested up, tried to get some sleep, but it was too cold to sleep. There was a house there you could go in and trade cigarettes and soap and stuff like that for some hot water so you could make some hot drinks. It was really kind of funny. Along about 10:00 there were a lot of civilians on the road. They were making an exit just ahead of the Russians. They were trying to get out ahead of the Russians. A lot of them had handcarts, they were pulling little wagons, sleds. Some of them had automobiles, some of them had wagons with teams and their families and things. Well, along about 11:00, came up a regular blizzard and it was snowing and blowing something fierce, so a lot of people who were on the road turned into this place where we were.

It was kind of - some of these old kriegies hadn't seen or talked to a kid in two or three years and it was really something to see them talk to these little tikers. Of course, we had chocolate bars that we had received in our Red Cross food packages. Some of the guys had saved up a few of them, you know, and they'd give them to the kids and the kids didn't know what it was. They didn't know whether to take it or not and then they asked their parents. Their parents would give them the okay so they would take it. I saw some of the old kriegies with tears in their eyes just from the sheer joy of talking to a kid. It was just that - children are that way. They really turn you on. That's what this world is all about anyhow. And those old boys, hard bitten kriegies with whiskers all over their faces, unshaven, unkempt, talking to these neat little guys, with tears in their eyes, they were so thrilled that they were able to talk to a child.

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Along that afternoon we took off again and it was so cold, I had a bottle of water in my overcoat pocket and it froze. I couldn't get a drink and I had to eat snow, which gave me the dysentery and I had a stomach problem from then on until we got out of prison camp. Got pretty sick. We walked until 2:00 o'clock that night, I think, and they came to a glass factory and they turned us in there. They had these big furnaces and we walked by all of the furnaces, then they finally took us out into a warehouse and we bedded ourselves down there. We stayed there a couple of days. Then they took us down to Spremburg and put us on those "forty and eights" again. We went down to Moosburg on those. They gave us a ration of canned meat, which was really pretty good, some of the best ration they'd given us since we'd been there.

All together, we walked 80 kilometers, which 50 miles from Sagan, down the road which was frozen and covered with snow. They didn't plow their roads, because it would make the roads more visible from the air, especially at night, so they didn't plow them. You couldn't see, they were covered with snow and nobody could see them.

German Military Retreat 

As we were on the road, there were military movements heading toward the front, which would be going the opposite way we were. It was almost pathetic sometimes. You'd see maybe one truck that would run and there might be people in one or two other trucks that were loaded with supplies headed for the front. They had these trucks that wouldn't run. Some of them didn't even have an engine in them, but they were towing, towing their supplies. I couldn't help but mention to some of the guys, that if the American Army ever got down to where they had to do things like that, they'd probably have given up long ago. But, they were still putting up a fight. 

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Moosburg. Germany 

We got down to Moosberg and the guards wouldn't tell us where we were going, but some of the guys had been down to Stalag 7 A, which was in Moosburg and they knew where it was. 

There were two guys in our car that planned to make an escape, but they wanted to go as far south on the train as they could. Finally, nobody could quite remember the routing or anything like that and the guards, of course, wouldn't tell you. Finally, they pulled into the station and there on the station it says "Moosburg", and these guys said, "golly, we missed our chance." We sat there on the track for a minute or two and pretty soon the train started up again, headed on out. Then they said, "well, we're sure going to get off this thing; the next time this train stops, we'll get off." It went on out for four or five minutes and then it stopped and they jumped out of the window and rolled down the bank. I guess the guards didn't see them, because they didn't pick them up right away. That was as far south as the train went, because it started backing in. They backed in on the siding by the prison camp. We stayed there in the cars until morning. Then they took us out and put us in the camp. 

These two guys showed up a couple of weeks later. They had managed to evade and they got hidden down in a stack of hay in a barn. It was raining, real nasty weather, and they tried to get some shelter and hole up there to keep from freezing to death. The Germans came in and were going to thresh their hay. Well, it wasn't hay, it was grain in the sheaves, is what it was. They did a lot of their work kind of the old fashioned way. They cut it and bundled it and put it in the mow. Then, in the wintertime, when there wasn't too much other work to do, they'd thresh it. So, they came in there and they were threshing this stuff and shoveling that stuff out, bundling it out, running it through the thresher. Here these guys were down there in the stack. So, they came back to prison camp. One of the guys' names was Vogle, Sammy Vogle, little short guy. He was always giving the Germans a bad time. Later on, he bribed a guard there at Mooseberg and got out. We got word that he did finally get back to American territory, but that's the only guy that I ever knew that ever got away. 

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Back to German Rations 

When we got to Moosburg we didn't get any more Red Cross food packages. I guess - well, German transportation was getting in pretty bad shape and everything that rolled up and down the highway or the railroads was shot at and bombed. Marshalling yards were being bombed. It was hard for them to get things around. So we didn't get any more Red Cross food packages. We ate these doggone potatoes that the Russians cooked for us. They had a big cook shack there that the Russians operated, the Russian prisoners. They'd drive in a great big four-wheel trailer load of potatoes. I bet it had ten tons of potatoes on it and they'd shovel them through the window, and I guess they must have gone right into the vats, because the potatoes that we got - they'd bring around in what looked like five-gallon buckets - and they hadn't been washed. They still had straw and sand and stuff on them, boiled up with the peelings on, rotten spots and all. We had to take them out. We didn't like to eat them like they came, so we wanted to cook them, but the Germans didn't give us any fuel to cook with, so we took the sub floor out of our barracks. 

The barracks had - on the bottom edge of the floor joists, they had a little clip nailed along each one and they had short boards that ran across from one joist to the other. Then they put sand and gravel on top of that as an insulation between the sub-floor and the regular floor. Well, by getting one of those boards started out of there so that the sand and gravel would fall down, then we could go along and knock them all out, and we took those sub floors and used them for wood and to cook with. 

They also had another thing, some ingenious guy built what they called a smokeless cooker. It was one can down inside another, and the principle that it worked on is that you tore up little pieces of paper, anything that would bum, in small bits and you ignited it and dropped them down in there, and it would bum with the deficiency of oxygen. It would make a lot of smoke. Well, at the top they had holes punched around so the air could come in and the smoke would burn at the top and it didn't leak any smoke. They called it a smokeless cooker. However, as I mentioned before, there were a lot of craftsmen that were not as skilled as others and they began to try to make these things, and some of the guys made such an awful mess of them that we had to change the name from "smokeless cooker" to "cookless smoker". The barracks would get so full of smoke that you couldn't stay in the thing. These guys were trying to cook. 

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K. J. Hall and I got ingenious and built a little fan - you could turn a little crank and run a fan - and really cook up. K. J. and I cooked together when we got down to Moosburg. A little interesting thing. The guys would barter through the wire and trade cigarettes and things like that to the Germans. Everything like that was done on what they call a communal basis. And so, they had these eggs one day. And they had a kind of a list there which barracks brought it, you know, get their turn at it. It happened to be our barracks. I think we drew straws or something like that to see who got the eggs, and old K. J. and I got the eggs. And, we fried those things up and we found out that fresh eggs didn't taste anything like the powdered eggs that we thought were pretty good and we'd gotten used to. I'm afraid we found out what fresh eggs tasted like again. We also found out that fresh eggs were worth $1,200 a dozen, because a man was offered $100 for an egg and he turned it down. Of course, there wasn't any money there, but they'd give a promissory note. Maybe that's why he turned it down. 

At any rate, that was our ration. However, we didn't get very much good ration. On Sunday, we got a kind of cereal that they called "semolina" that had a meat seasoning in it and it was pretty good. We only got that on Sunday, though. Other times we got this stuff the guys called "brown death", which was a cabbage that had been dehydrated, I believe. I don't think it had been krauted. I think it had been dehydrated. It was salty and gritty, it had sand in it. But because it had salt in it they would eat it, because nothing else they gave us had salt in it. We found out that the French prisoners who manned the showers had the salt, and when we'd go over about every two weeks for our hot showers, the French prisoners that were running the showers, they would trade us salt for soap. Otherwise, we didn't get any salt in any of our rations. So, that's the way a lot of rackets were worked, it seemed like. 

Anyway, after a while we got this rumor that there were some GI trucks - that the Red Cross was going to bring our Red Cross food packages to us in Red Cross trucks, which we thought was probably just a big rumor. But, it turned out that one day here they showed up. They were Canadian GI trucks with white sheet on them and a big Red Cross hanging on there. They brought parcels in. That was only about a month before we were liberated. 

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LIBERATION! 

We were liberated on the 29th of April, 1945. It was late enough in the spring that it was kind of getting a little bit warm in the morning. The sun was shining and stuff. Incidentally, on the 15th of February, the Germans declared that the German winter was over and that nobody had any fuel to heat with after that. So, there was no fuel for heating or anything. We didn't get any fuel. But, anyway, things had gotten pretty crowded in their camp and at one time, they had us assigned two men to a bed. There's just a little old single bed, so we moved out into one of the slit trenches. We built ourselves a kind of a dugout in a slit trench, took the divider boards in the latrine that divided the stalls and we used them for building materials to build us a place to stay out in the slit trenches, so we didn't have to double up with other people in the bed. 

Anyway, this one morning, the 29th of April, we woke up and there wasn't a German guard in sight anywhere. They were all gone. We heard rumors that the Germans were trying to make a treaty with the Americans for an open city at Moosburg. That's where we were, the city of Moosburg. Well, anyway, we were all out sunning ourselves, trying to keep warm, had our coats on and out in the sunny side of the barracks keeping warm, a couple of P-51s came over. One of them stayed up pretty high. The other one came down pretty low and circled over the camp and looked us all over real good, you know, make sure he knew who we were, I guess. And he went out over town and you could hear somebody shoot at him with a machine gun. And he circled back around, and went down and dove in on them and just strafed the heck out of them. Those old eight machine guns on the P-51 - you couldn't hear an individual gun. All you could hear was just a roar when they went off. 

But, anyway that seemed to start things. You could hear rifle fire and you could hear all kinds of things. Pretty soon, you heard the tanks coming over the hill. Those tanks had hydramatic transmissions, I think about eight speeds. Hydramatics. And they were shifting up and shifting down, depending on whether they were going uphill or downhill and they made a lot of racket, jazzing back and forth. So, we just stood out there and watched the battle until about noon. There were only two guys in the camp that got hit, and one person - they got tired of watching the battle and they were sitting in their room, talking, shooting the breeze and the bullet came through the window sill and penetrated the window. It went right into his belly. Penetrated his coat, but it didn't hurt him. I don't think it even broke the skin. Another fellow was walking across the street and a darn stray bullet came down the street, hit in the leg and broke his leg. But those were the only two casualties we had. 

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We sat there and watched - some of the guys were scared. They'd climb in the slit trenches, but you couldn't see anything from the trenches. So we were wanting to watch. So, anyway, about noon, we saw the old American flag rise up on the flagpole on top of the city hall over in Moosburg and, man, don't you think that was a beautiful sight. Boy, we were really proud of that moment. We knew we were liberated then. And a little later on a tank come driving in down the middle of the street and the guys just swarmed all over it. They begged C-rations and K-rations off these soldiers like we were starving to death, and really, the K-rations these guys had, they carried with them, weren't any better than the rations we were eating. 

Yard Bird 

Anyway, I went out and before long I found myself with a little old hack cart trying to work over so I could carry a few things with me when I left. I heard some fellow holler, "hey, yard bird." "Yard bird" was my old nickname when I was in the National Guard, so I knew it must have been one of those guys. I looked around and there was old Bob Barker from the old 249th Coast Artillery Band {at Fort Stevens, on the northern Oregon Coast} that I'd been in in the National Guard. He took me out to their camp and he fed me a good meal, as good as they could cook out of C-rations, and we really had a good visit and all that. 

We stayed there, oh, I don't know, several days. Holes sprung in the fence all around the compound. Guys went to town, they liberated the brewery and they liberated more motorcycles and automobiles than you could shake a stick at. Our parade ground was covered with them. I don't know what ever happened to them. I suppose they just sat there. 

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We all left when they gave us transportation out. They finally came in with some GI trucks and hauled us down to a little town called Straubing that had been a flying school, and we stayed there and a C-47 came in and picked us up. The interesting thing was that they didn't come in the first day when we expected them. So, these English guys, they all camped out right on the runway. Us Americans, we were looking for things a little more luxurious, and we found us some mattresses in the barracks and we sacked out on those. Well, the next morning when the C-47 came in to pick us, Limeys were already out there so they got out first and they took them out, and we had to stay another night. 

While we were there, several planes came in. A couple of Messerschmidts and a Pieshler "stork" and a IU 52. IU 52 was an old tri-motor, kind of like the old Ford tin goose, and it was their counterpart to our C-47. And they came in and surrendered to us. They came in from territories that were occupied by the Russians and they wanted to surrender to the western powers, rather than to the Russians. So they came in and surrendered to us. 

We finally got flown out to La Havre, France, where we had to wait and finally got on a ship to bring us home. While we were there at Moosburg, about the time we were liberated, I had been bothered - one of my teeth had been bothering me. I'd lay down at night and it'd ache like the dickens, so I got permission to go to the dentist out in the forelager. He was an American, but he had an old fashioned situation there. He had to treadle his drill like an old fashioned sewing machine. He had a foot pedal there he treadled the machine. I went out there and he pulled this tooth for me. 

Stalag Luft POW Camp Life

Tualatin Life

https://tualatinlife.com/veterans/bradley-summers-captured-after-b-17-shot-down-spends-almost-two-years-in-german-pow-camp-2/

POW Camps in Germany during WWII

https://www.b24.net/powCamps.htm

Hogan’s Heroes

https://www.uncommon-travel-germany.com/hogans-heroes.html#hogans-heroes-real

Stalag Luft III Photos

https://www.rafbf.org/great-escape/gallery

The Great Escape

https://www.rafbf.org/great-escape/about-the-great-escape

Wally’s War

https://wallyswar.wordpress.com/pow2/

Stalag 13

https://www.uncommon-travel-germany.com/stalag-13.html

Surviving a Nazi POW Camp

https://adst.org/2015/03/the-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-surviving-a-nazi-pow-camp/

Wartime Memories Project

https://www.wartimememoriesproject.com/ww2/pow/index.php

POW Photos

http://www.merkki.com/photo.htm

Lt Martin Fetherolf’s POW Diary

https://donmooreswartales.com/2012/05/25/martin-fetherolf/

AHFI Stalag Luft III Virtual Museum

http://www.comstation.com/afhi/museum/stalag/

Escaping Stalag Luft 3

https://www.learning-history.com/stalag-luft-escape/

Epilogue

Brad’s story was given to me by my sister, Susan, a few years ago.  I knew it was a story that should be put on the Internet to preserve it for Brad’s descendants and for the world to know what a typical man had to endure behind behind a wire fence during WWII.  

Brad died in the early part of this century, but I had known him since we first met at church during the 1960s.  We had several things in common, one being we both lived quite a distance from the church, and he had 8 kids in his family in contrast to the 4 kids in our family.  We even lived relatively close to each other.....perhaps 5 miles away.  Both he and my father spent considerable time living in Germany, during the final days of World War II. (My father entered the service right at the end of conflict with Germany, and was assigned to tank destroyers, and troop trains.)

It was pretty common knowledge among his friends of his involvement in a POW camp, and Brad was not shy about answering questions. He was an unusually funny guy, and could have been a natural comedian. It wasn’t that he was trying to make stuff up to be funny……he simply WAS funny!  Everybody who know him has stories to tell that will put a smile on your face, or horrify you in knowing the possible consequences of what happened around Brad and his family.  Best of all, he was a genuine friend to all who knew him. Brad and Rachel (his wife of nearly a half century) were warm and friendly, and helpful to a fault. Their children have grown up to be outstanding citizens, and I believe that is a result of Brad and Rachel’s devotion to raising God’s gift to them.

As a teenager, I noticed the silkworm lapel pin Brad ALWAYS wore on his Sunday suit, and asked him about it.  He explained that it represented being saved by his parachute. Following more questions, he explained how his flight crew was ferrying their B-17 across the Atlantic when the carbs froze up and they had to ditch in the Atlantic.  I also asked about his POW experiences, and he explained that it was the same camp as the Great Escape took place, though he was unaware of it until it had been discovered by the Germans the next day. Brad said the remaining compounds had to stand all day in formation on the parade ground because one entire compound was missing from the daily appells .  

It probably wasn’t very comfortable standing out there for so long, but I can only imagine that Brad was quietly cracking humorous comments now and then that kept the morale of the prisoners up and gave his buddies the confidence they needed to survive their ordeal.  Though I’m just guessing on that, it would have been so like Brad to do that. By nature, he was a wonderful guy to know, and will never be forgotten by me. For that reason, I dedicate my efforts on this website to the memory of Brad Summers, his wife and their children.

NOTE:  I should mention that Brad’s family has contributed some of the personal photos I’ve used on this site.  To illustrate what Brad explained in his story, I’ve included many other photos and website links that depict what it was like at POW camps in Germany back then.  As Brad’s kids supply further details, such as photos or personal comments, I will add to this site as appropriate.