I am G. V. Howell, Jr., and I was born in Waynesville, North Carolina, Haywood County. After a very nice childhood, grew up on a farm, I went to State College in Raleigh, 1939-1940. In 1941 along came the war, and the draft was behind me. I never did volunteer for service, but in 1942 I was called into active service. My point of induction was in Camp Kraft in Spartanburg, South Carolina; and after a few days there, I was transferred to Fort Jackson, South Carolina. In Fort Jackson, we went our separate ways; I was assigned to the Air Force and sent to St. Petersburg, Florida for basic training. After a month or so of very easy living in a plush hotel, we finished our basic training; and from there, we were sent to an Aircraft Mechanics School in Gulfport, Mississippi. After three or four months at Gulfport, we were called aircraft mechanics and sent on to a gunnery school down in Loredo, Texas, right on the Texas-Mexico border. After a sojourn in this place, we received our wings and were sent to Salt Lake City for redistribution to various crews that we might be needed on. This was in 1943 that we were ready to get ready for combat training. After a few days in Salt Lake City, we went to Boise, Idaho, and I was to become a crew member on a B-17. After a month or so of training here, one day they told us that we were no longer on B-17s, that we were about to become part of a new group of B-24s. So ours was made a model crew, and we
Anyway, we went to England. After flying a few missions, in fact, to be exact, for twenty-two missions, we flew over Germany and occupied France and the lowlands of Western Europe. We went on one mission that rather backfired on us. This was our twenty-fourth mission, and we were going to Berlin that day. We got over our target, dropped our bombs, and got back to what we thought was Holland; but we were still in Germany. Fighters shot our plane down, and we had to bail out. I never thought that I would end up like that, but that was the way it was. It was a rather funny feeling . . . I should not say funny, it was a rather strange feeling to realize that here you are at a point in your life where you are either going to die or you are going to keep on living; but that is about the way I felt, really as if I had nothing much to live for; but I went on. Anyway, I was the last out of the plane, alive I should say, or I was the last one out period. The pilot was right behind me, ready to leave; and he apparently, something happened which I do not know, but he did not get out of the plane. From where I landed; I jumped out of
All this leads up to our story here. In the next very few minutes, I learned what it was to be a prisoner of war. In a short few minutes after touching the ground, the German Home Guards surrounded us, and I had nowhere to turn. They were coming from all sides, there were no trees, no woods to get in. It was one of these peat fields where they have to dig up for fuel. We just went down perhaps in a bad place as far as escaping is concerned. Anyway, the guard finally arrived, and they did not harm me or anything like that. They kept asking questions, where was my pistola, meaning the pistol. They found in my little escape bag the clip of ammunition for a 45 caliber pistol. Well, I had the pistol in my bag; but before they got to me, I knew what was going to happen, I knew I could not shoot it out with them, it would be suicidal to do such, so I just buried it in the ground, covered it up; and I guess that it is still there today. Anyway, they said not much more about the ammunition, and took all of my belongings. We were taken to a little guard hut nearby, maybe a mile away. We walked there one Saturday afternoon, April 29, 1944. They rounded up the rest of the crew, and we were taken that night into a little jail, a little room about, I would say six by eight feet, and about six of us slept in that room that night. It was barely room for everybody to lay down. The next day, we were transferred to a camp at a city nearby, I don't remember the name of the city. We stayed there a day or two, and then next they sent us down to Frankfurt. Frankfurt on the Main, which was more or less an interrogation center. They took you there, and asked you
When we finally arrived in the camp, which as Stalag 17-B, we arrived one Sunday morning about two or three o'clock in the morning. I had a two-week growth of beard. I was wearing a heated flying suit, and I had a leather jacket that normally I wore. But anyway, the clothing I had was sufficient for our needs. It was not too cold, a little on the chilly side, but not too bad. Anyway, they took us in, and one of the first things they did was to give you a bath and took clippers and cut all of your hair off your head. They didn't shave it, but they clipped it down as short as a set of clippers will cut it. So after a day or two, I was well aware that I was somewhere that I did not want to be, but there was not very much that I could do about it. In the ensuing months, I found that one probably could not live a more boring life; but at the same time, you had to do for the sake of sanity; you had to find something to do. So, I began to play cards. I did a lot of gambling, very profitably of course. When we went in this camp, we were the last contingent to be placed in this particular camp. It was about four thousand Americans,
We soon learned that there was definitely a need for supplies in the camp that were not present and that a source of supply could be made through the Russians themselves. Back in those days, the Russians were our friends, and relations with the Russians in that particular year were very good, and they were considered our allies. Myself and about a dozen other Americans, due to the location that we were in the camp, we were in an end barracks adjacent to the end barracks in the Russian camp, which was a counter part of our camp, but separated by only about a hundred feet of barbed wire with a guard path between the two fences. We finally decided that we should make use of our strategic location within the camp, so we organized a joint trading syndicate. All the fellows around me were prisoners of war that had been shot down like myself; and they came from various states throughout the country -- Texas, California; New York, and whatnot. There was one other fellow from North Carolina up in Mt. Airys that was with me. We finally found that what we had to do was to establish a medium of exchange, and that ended up being a pack of cigarettes. A pack of cigarettes had an inflated value of approximately one hundred and thirty-five dollars in those days in our particular camp. We received Red Cross parcels, and in each Red Cross parcel there was five packs of cigarettes. At the time, I did not smoke, and I used my cigarettes for food or whatever I wished to buy that cigarettes would secure for me. There was a group of Russians that were exactly opposite from the Americans in the camp, and each one of us aligned ourselves with one of the Russians and would trade only with him. We would carry on our barter so to speak at night because it was strictly prohibited for the Germans to do any
I'll never forget one incident. I had always planned to escape from the place, and I thought that I'd be prepared for it whenever the time came. Anyway, I found a heavy box that our Red Cross parcels came in; it was, I would say, a box that would hold about a two bushel box to give you an idea of size. There were about eight or ten of these Red Cross parcels that were packed in this one box that had water proof paper on it and everything like that. But anyway, I got my hands on one of those boxes. I don't remember how I got it, but I did. And after accumulating some food stuffs, some d-bars, which was concentrated chocolate, and occasionally we would have cans of food that the Germans did not puncture when they gave it to us. Any kind of canned food that was perishable they would always puncture so you could not keep it as a safeguard against people trying to escape and so on. But anyway, they would hit a can and occasionally miss it, and if I found a can like that, I always bought it. Then I accumulated enough to where I had a good escape pack lined up ready to go if the time presented itself. Time went along, and no escape opportunity ever came about. Some of the boys tried to escape and of course they were shot right dead on the spot. There was a time when . . . of course the Swiss had distribution rights to the Red Cross parcel or supervised it rather, and there for awhile the Americans were shooting up all the trains even carrying the Red Cross parcels. So, sometimes, by mistake of course. But nevertheless, there were Red Cross parcels not coming through. We went about six weeks one time and did not get any parcels. We almost starved. But anyway, I had all of my escape material and things like that and a lot of my cigarettes, too, buried underneath the house. I thought one time about going down under the house and getting that, but no, I wasn't going to do that; I was going to be ready. But, finally I couldn't go any farther. So I thought, well, I'm going
The Germans gave us very little to eat. They gave us one ration of bread a day, something of a sort of weed soup seasoned with some horse meat, two or three potatoes, and that was it. They did give you a ration of hot water out of a tub once a day that you could either make coffee with, or you could shave with, which ever one you preferred. So after this incident, I never did put any of my things back in the box, and we were getting along towards the end of the war.
At night we could hear the Russian guns closing in on Vienna, and we knew the end was near. The Germans then decided to move us, rather the German officials there did not want the German guards to fall into Russian hands. So they decided to evacuate us from the camp, knowing that the Russians would shortly be there to take over. So one day, they took us out of the camp, and said, this is it, you're going west. So we went out on a march, four thousand Americans. They did not take the Russians, though; the Russians were left at the camp. The four thousand Americans were set on foot and told to march from one end of Austria to the other. So we marched for about twenty some days, doing about twenty-five miles a day. At night we would camp out in some meadow, orchard, or maybe in some farmer's barn or something like that, depending on how the weather was. The days were rather warm, the nights were quite chilly. This was in April of 1945. We finally ended up in the town of Braunau, which was Hitler's birthplace. We were taken into this forest, and the German guards more or less told us we were free to do what we wanted to do. We could go or come at random. So we went of course; nobody stayed there. Three or four of my friends and myself went down to his family's house and just moved in with them. Moved them out, and we moved in. We, of course, were close by to the place where our base camp was and where a lot of the boys stayed; but some of
You were talking about the trading system that you had with the Russians and the fact that you overcame the language barrier through an interpreter. How did you make initial contact with the Russians on this to get across the idea that you wanted to trade with them? Was this initiated by the Americans or by the Russians?
I could not answer that question because I am not sure how that came about. I think that what happened, and it was not me that started it, it was one of the boys. The end of our barracks projected down . . . you had what they called an A and B barracks, and you have a wash room in between. The last barracks which connected with the American compound was the one we were put in because it was the last one filled up. The same way with the Russians. I don't know . . . they were filled up when we got there, so I think that they were filled up before we ever got there. But anyway, I think that
Well, was there any time that you were able to come in direct contact with the Russians as far as talking?
I eventually did. When were were evacuated out of the camp, he escaped from the Russian camp, jumped the fence, and came over with us when we were marched out of the camp.
But while you were in prison, there was no means of communication except by throwing your rock across the . . .
We would talk to him and if we wanted bread, we could converse back and forth across the fence with him if we told him what we wanted, if we knew the Russians word for it, or the Germans word for it. I mean they knew enough German, and we knew enough German to where we could kind of carry on our conversation in German.
There were no German guards standing by?
Oh yes, but you just wait until they got out of the way, you see. You could say about anything you wanted to. We were always telling the German guard that the war was capoot and everything else and called him names and everything like that, they
Did the Germans search contraband goods very frequently or very thoroughly?
Very frequently. They would take you outside and they would to into the barracks and have dogs sniffing out for anything that they could find. They were trying to find, of course, if you had any guns or . . . they didn't want you to have radios for some reason, but we had beaucoup of radios, we were loaded with radios in the barracks, but I had this crystal radio set that was factory made in Vienna, and I even got home with that set. I don't know . . . I lost it. I don't have it anymore. Somewhere along the line, it got lost at home, but I had a set of brand new German Army earphones.
Well, how did the Russians manage to throw things like that over the fence?
Well, it could be done, I mean they could disassemble the earphones, for instance, and go ahead and didn't have to throw the whole complete thing at one time. He could disassemble it to throw one head piece and then his little cross piece over the other and perhaps he might do that . . . I don't remember exactly how he did it, but I know I got it. They were trading with the Germans. They were going out on work details in the countryside during the day. We did not go out on any work details, but the Russians did. So, that's how they had access to the various things. I don't know who they were getting them from, but they were sure getting them from somewhere, and they could get you about anything that you wanted. If you happened to have a craving for an onion, they could get you an onion. If you wanted a tomato, they'd get you a tomato, in season of course.
When the Germans found contraband goods, was there any kind of punishment?
Oh no, that was just a lucrative find for him; and he'd put it in his pocket, be it cigarettes, or onions, or bread, or what not that the Russians had thrown us. He just took it and what he did with it, I don't know.
It was never reported at all?
No, I'm sure it wasn't. He might have turned it in if he were real eager beaver German soldier, he might have turned it in, but I seriously doubt if he did. I don't know what disposition was made of his confiscations there, but I would imagine it didn't go any further.
You speak of the radios. How were these radios rigged to prevent detection by the Germans?
Well, that's a good question. The little crystal set was about the size of a soap box, and in a straw mattress, it was very easy to hide. Of course, there were always boards on the wall that you could pull apart that you'd know about the Germans wouldn't know about. You could pull them up and hide something like that, and that is where I kept mine, normally hid up in the wall. Of course, for a crystal radio set, it is necessary that you have an antenna of, we'll say, at least a minimum of fifty to a hundred feet or something like that. So what I did there was in the barracks itself you had a line, your power line for your electricity, that ran down the center of the barracks, that was exposed from the ceiling, not inside the ceiling, but it was exposed, nailed, and tacked on with staples to the ceiling itself. And around this power line was a copper tube that the power line, the wires, were inserted in, and that ran down the length of the barracks to keep it protected and all. What we would do was go to the extremes of the barracks and cut the copper tubing, sever a place about the thickness of a knife blade, whereas it would not be grounded from either end. It would be a complete extension of copper that you could not have found a more perfect antenna, it being up on the ceiling, giving it that necessary height which was better than being down on the side of the barracks, or on the floor, or
They never discovered that their copper tubing had been cut?
They apparently didn't. They apparently didn't. We had just enough to where it would be separated just the thickness of a knife blade. It had a fairly high ceiling in the barracks, and unless they climbed up on a ladder, they would never have noticed it anyway. On the floor, it would never have been visible to the naked eye. They could not have seen it from the floor, so I guess they never did notice it.
You spoke of storing your trading goods that you accumulated. Was there any problem with stealing among the prisoners?
I don't know. No, I would say that that was one of the least of anybody's worries. I would say that the element of theft was what you might say nonexistent. I would say that there was no--that thought--I never worried about anybody stealing anything. I, at one time, thought somebody had seen me bury my things in the ground. In reality, it was just a false thought on my part, because nobody had, and as far as leaving--of course we had nothing to leave. We had our cigarettes that we could leave in our barracks; but to my knowledge, I never ever in my life remember missing anything that belonged to me in that camp the whole time I was there. It was a situation of everybody having a common problem and respecting the other person, and there was just no problem whatsoever. I never thought about it much in that light, but in recounting over my situation, I remember that just was not a problem with us at all.
You mentioned the provisions that the Red Cross sent, the food stuffs. How was that handled, did they send large quantities and it was divided up equally among the American forces?
The Red Cross had this set up where they would give you a parcel. This parcel was approximately--this box was a square box, I would say perhaps a foot wide and a foot deep and approximately five inches high. Well, in this box you had usually a pound of powdered milk. You had a can of corned beef; you had usually five packs of cigarettes; you had two chocolate bars; you had a can of oleo margine, about a pound can. Once in awhile, we would get a small can of butter, which was a very small can of butter; it was very seldom that you got that. Really the oleo margarine provided a grease to do your
You say that it usually came in once a week?
We were supposed to get those once a week, but one time we went for six weeks without getting any, and the Germans said that the trains were being shot up, and the Americans were shooting the trains up which it may have well been. They weren't coming through. The might have been coming through, and the Germans were getting them. I don't know. We weren't getting them.
Did you have any trouble or did you have any indication that the Germans were pilfering the Red Cross packages?
If they were, it was not to my knowledge. I don't know. I highly suspect that since they were Johnny-on-the-spot and all, that they probably got a parcel of their own at least, and they might have had more, I don't know. It was set up whereas some Americans in the camp there--we had our own political system which was even similar to say the one here in the city today. You had a camp commander, and you had more or less the representative in each barracks that sort of carried on with the next higher echelon in command, and so on like that. Those boys really didn't get any better parcels than we did because all of the parcels were almost identical, and I don't think that they could have gotten more than one. I think that everything was pretty well watched there. But whether the Germans got any or not, I don't know. I don't know that much about it. We were not allowed to know anything about it. None of the Americans there would tell us what he and the Germans were doing behind closed doors, so I don't really know what was really happening.
You mentioned cooking your spam and what have you. What kind of facilities did you have?
In each barracks, there was a large stove which was a combination cooking stove and heating stove. It served a dual role. It was the only means of heat that we had. It was centrally located within the barracks. If you lived in the end of the barracks, then that meant you were about seventy-five feet from the stove, so you had little or no warmth radiating to your particular bed at night from that stove. And of course, nobody kept the stove going at night, anyway, because we didn't have any fuel to burn unless we pulled the building right down of our heads and used rafters; and we didn't want to do that. Of course, a lot of it was used, but not all of it. They did give you a small amount of coal to use during the day, and most of the time during the day, we would have a fire going to whereas on the flat surface on top of the stove. When I say stove, I mean that it was similar to like you might use in a restaurant--you had a large area that was flat on top that you could clean off and cook on, and fry anything that you wanted to cook. There was no baking or anything like that. It had to be fried or cooked in some similar manner. Of course, there was a lot of cooking going on. We did get a box of raisins in this parcel, about a pound and a half box of raisins. And a number of the boys made raisin wine. They didn't eat the raisins. They let them go through the fermentation process, and they would come out with some very good wine. There was always an alcoholic in the crowd.
Well now, since you were so far from the heat and the heat didn't operate at night, I presume that they furnished sufficient blankets during the winter.
We were issued, I think, two blankets, no sheets, two blankets and that's what you kept warm on. If it were real could, you could put your overcoat over top of you; or a lot of the boys, in fact everybody, slept with his clothes on and didn't pull his clothes off at night. It was too cold in the wintertime. You'd keep your overcoat on and put your two
What about bathing?
Between each barracks, and when I say each barracks, I'm talking about a length of one hundred fifty feet. So each barracks was over three hundred feet long. And in between each barracks, you had a sort of a bath facility which you had an enormous big concrete tub that nobody ever bathed in the thing. It was just there to sort of run off excess water. If you wanted to wash some clothes, you would put them inside the tub and let the water spicket run over them, and so on like that; or if you could get a pan or something, you could let them soak or things like that. You had spickets in sort of a crude basin there, a trough, it really wasn't a basin, it was a trough really on the sides of the wall, where it had fifteen spickets in each and each bathroom all together. And that was where you could go and wash and shave. I don't think there was even a mirror on the wall, but we didn't really worry a whole lot about shaving. I don't remember how often I would shave, I think I would shave about once or twice a week, something like that. Some people never did bother shaving. But I thing everybody as a whole kept clean. I don't remember right off hand that anybody was offensive in odor or anything like that, but you would certainly have thought they would have been to have lived in the conditions and bathed under the conditions that we had to bathe under. You did not take a shower; you just splashed water on yourself, and that's about it. And it was usually could water at that. If you wanted to heat some water and use to bathe in, you could do so. Once in awhile, the Germans gave us hot baths, thought. They had a place that they
Well, the Germans knowing that you were going to get these Red Cross packages, do you think that had any influence on the lack of food that they provided for you?
Well, I don't know about that. I think that the Germans--I would say that the Germans did very well in providing us with as much as they did give us because I think that even their own soldiers were hungry. I don't think that they were fed very well. I don't think that they were very far ahead of us. I base that on the fact that the guards would look at you with so much envy and jealousy whenever we would get the parcels and all like that. If you wanted to give them something, they would grab it. So we didn't give them anything. Maybe we should have, I don't know. But the Germans were our enemies, and we were not to comfort them or aid or abet their welfare in any way, and that's the way we did it.
Well, it's rather amazing, considering the conditions, that the Red Cross packages got through to you at all.
I think that it is a blessing that we got any at all, really; but, of course, if they had not been coming through, then they would have cut them off. I guess the Germans knew that, and some of the in people were, I guess, getting something, so they allowed it to thrive and prosper the best that it could.
Were you allowed to receive any communication from the outside world? Any letters from home?
We could get mail. I was there, I guess-oh, they would allow you to write, I think, maybe two or three letters a month home. They gave you a piece of paper that folded over, and then you could write your message on it, and address it, and there was no
And your letters did reach home then?
I did get letters home. I wrote letters home, and I received mail from home, and it did work its channel. I could say that it would take--I was in this camp for almost a year. I think I was there for at least three months before I ever got any mail. And I think, by the same token, that it was about three months before any of my mail ever reached home. But then it came in--you could expect to hear from home maybe once or twice a month, and that's about it.
Why did the Germans not send the Americans out on work detail?
Well, by the terms of the Geneva Convention, if you were a certain rank, you were not to be sent out on work details. If you were below the rank of Sergeant, then they were free to do whatever they wanted to do with you. But everybody that was in here was--ninety-nine percent of them were either Staff Sergeants, Tech Sergeants, or Master Sergeants, on of the three. Now the officers of our particular outfit that were shot down were sent to a different camp. They had a camp which they did separate the regular officers from the enlisted men. We had a few; we had a Chaplin who was an officer; we had a doctor there who was a medical doctor--that was an officer; we had perhaps four or five officers that were stationed in our camp. Why, I don't know. They were just there when I got there and they were there when I left. I mean they left with us, of course. I don't know the whys and wherefores of that.
So you had no duties except to kill time?
I had no duties whatsoever to perform. I had no work to do whatsoever. It was a time killing situation. You would wait out the end of the war or escape if you could.
You mentioned Spanish classes and a library.
We had that very well organized. They had people there who taught Spanish; you could take Spanish if you wanted to. You could to up in the morning, say at 10 o'clock and attend a Spanish class or just about anything that you wanted to do. You could take classes in it. They had a lot of boys who, for want of something to do, liked to do that. They would volunteer their services for the benefit of those who didn't know as much as they did about it.
And the Germans were not opposed to this?
The Germans were not opposed to it in any way. No sir, they apparently sanctioned it, and it was up to us whether we wanted to do that. So, they did not discredit it in any way to my knowledge. It was open and free and apparently with their blessings. I don't think they really cared one way or another. We learned to speak Spanish, we could speak German as well or anything that you wanted. Every once in awhile--of course, we had church services. I mean every Sunday we went to church if we wanted to. I always did, and they had this fellow that was a Catholic Priest. I think he was a Captain. He did not conduct his services in the vain of the Catholic Church. He conducted it as a non sectual, secterian thing, and he just had a regular orthodox type of sermon and everything like that. They did have a library there with a--not really much--I don't know how it got in there. I'm sure the Red Cross sent that in. There was not much to that, but they did, nevertheless, have one. They even presented--they had a little playhouse; they
But the Germans apparently abided by the Geneva Convention?
I think they did to a certain extent, yes. I think they went along pretty well with it, and there was something that must have forced them to do so. Of course, they had their people over here, and they expected the same treatment. I'd say that they probably treated us better than I would have treated them if the situation had been reversed. So I can't really condemn them and say that they did wrong, or anything that they would have done because after all is said and done, I had no gripe or complaint to make. They really didn't bother me any; and they didn't bother anybody really, I don't think.
How great was the morale problem?
Well, I can only speak for myself. I would say mine was pretty good. I kept busy. I knew that sooner or later we would get out of there. I would listen to the news whenever I could at night. We had in each barracks a newscaster who, once a day, would
What did you do for recreation?
Well, as far as physical recreation, I would say that I spent my time walking. We had a large lot back behind our latrine about the size of a baseball diamond, and you would get out and maybe walk that about one hundred times a day, just for the exercise it gave you. Other than that, we might have a ball. We'd sit and pass ball. Once in awhile, we would get--they had maybe a half a dozen in the camp--once in awhile, we would get a volleyball; and we would string up a rope and play volleyball; but I didn't do much of that, not really. As far as my recreational things, I guess playing cards was my mainstay. I guess I played cards more than anything else. But then again, you're always yakking with somebody or you're involved--like I was very involved with my trading activities, and I was organizing myself, I was working from one day to the next. In the afternoons, I had to get out and get up my order of things that I wanted my man to get for me the next day. I threw my message once a day in the afternoon over to the Russian interpreter. Sailed it on a little rock--a little piece of paper tied to a rock that was marked for Your. Of course, he knew me. He knew who each one's counterpart was, and he would give it to him. I don't know what the Russians had to pay him, but of course I'm sure they had to pay him something. Anyway, he would interpret what I wanted in Russian to the Russian. I might have wanted a piece of wire; I might have wanted a watch; I might have wanted an onion; I might have wanted a ration of a loaf of bread; or something like that. I
Were they able to deliver the next night?
Oh, yes. They would generally have everything you wanted. You let him know that day. This Russian interpreter may have been an officer or something, but I never saw him go out on work details. But my man went out on work details. So I did not see him in the daytime, but he would come in late in the afternoon and I would see him then. When he came in, of course, the message would be given to him, and then the next day, he would get it. The following night, he would throw it to me one item at a time. He would throw me say, the onion, and I would throw him back the pack of cigarettes if that's what we agreed on. He would hold up what he was to throw to me; and I could see it; and he would hold up fingers, two cigarettes, which meant two packs of cigarettes; and then you would nod your head. If you thought that he was charging too much for it, you would shake your head. And then he would give you, “O. K. then, one cigarette.” He would throw it over, and then I would throw back to him. And then it would just continue back and forth until we had finished--I had finished. Then somebody else was there, either before me or after me, who would go ahead and complete his. But we would never barge in on one while he was doing his trading. We would wait until he had finished. It was never the situation of two throwing at one time. It was singly, always. Perhaps we might start in when it got dark, we'll say at seven o'clock, and it might take us an hour and a half to complete our transactions back and forth.
The Germans didn't try to intercept? I'm sure they knew this was going on.
No, they had a guard, always. There were never Germans--at that time of day, there were never Germans in our barracks. They just didn't come in at that time of day. They left you alone. They came down every morning to wake you up, and then they would have a roll call every day. They would pull these spot checks on you, but in the early evening hours, they never bothered you. You just never did see the Germans then. You would have this lone guard walking up and down each fence between the Russians and the Americans. Then you would have them on the outer rim of the fence. Of course maybe in the whole camp, they may have had, I'd say twenty or twenty-five guards at one time on duty. They had the towers built, and they were in the towers, and they were walking the outside of the fence and things like that. But this was a sort of an interior situation whereas you had a guard that walked the length of about, I'd say maybe nine hundred to one thousand feet, maybe three hundred yards that he walked back and forth. All you had to do, you could watch and see when he got out of sight, go ahead and do your trading. You just didn't do it when he came along. He would, of course, he would keep walking back and forth, but we was continually walking somewhere; he just didn't stop; he just kept walking all the time; and he would eventually walk on out of your way. When he would come in, you would just suspend things until he gout out of the way.
Well, apparently they did not search the Russian camp that exhaustively, or they would have found these catches of . . .
I don't know about that. I don't know how they did that or how they got by with it. There was more bitterness between the Russians and the Germans than there was between us and the Germans; and how they were able to get the things in and all like that, I don't know. I don't know.
Was there a curfew?
Oh, yes. In other words, you were not supposed to be out of the barracks after the sun went down. When the sun went down at dark, you were not to go out of your barracks. That is why when I got under the house, I had to slip off on the side of the barracks away from where the guard would be, and jump out the window because he could see the door. I couldn't take a chance on leaving from there. Any one of the towers could see the door, but I'd get down on the side of the barracks, and duck underneath the house, you see.
Well, I was thinking about your trading back and forth. That was after sundown.
It was obvious that we were trading. It was no secret to them. They knew it. Everytime the guard would come by, he would, whatever contraband was out there, he would just pick it up and walk off.
Did you try to stay in the shadows?
That's right, and I would imagine that he was watching us the whole time. If we had thrown anything with him standing there, I don't think that he would have done anything about it. I don't really think he would. But the only thing about it would be, the reason that we would wait for him to get out of the way would be the fact that if we dropped something that didn't quite get clear, we would have him as far away as we could to see if we wanted to make a mad dash out and get it, you see, if it didn't quite clear the place. Sometimes the stuff would fall on the roof of the building and land up there; and maybe he got far enough away, you could scoot out there and get up there and get it, get a pole or something. We kept a pole there to pull stuff down with, a hook on the end of it to pull stuff down off the roof, you see. Whether these guards--I would say
You were operating from inside of your barracks?
Oh, yes. You couldn't get outside.
Well, this was why I asked about the curfew.
That's why I sat the end of our barracks was adjacent to their barracks. Our window was closes to the end barracks over there, so that's why we controlled the trading area. Now, some of the things that they would throw over, we're not going to throw through the window over there. We still had a place outside that we had to dash out here-he's going to throw it over here. You're not going to pinpoint it in the door, but you're going to get it over here in the general area. As long as it is beyond the warning line, you could make a mad dash out there when the guard was far enough away that he's not going
What was the nature of punishment for infractions? Did they have any type of punishment?
If they caught you with a radio or something like that? Yes, they put you--they gave you thirty days in a--I never did get in there, but some of the boys did. They put you in this dark room, as it was quoted to me, underneath the ground. In fact, it was underneath the delousing building, which was up on the side of a hill from us. I never did see the room itself, but they said it was just a plain barren room with nothing in it but, I think, a chair. There wasn't even a bed in it. And they gave you food maybe once a day. I don't think you got any Red Cross parcels or anything like that. It was sort of a dealers choice situation. I don't think they gave you much of anything to eat. They put you in there, I think, for thirty days or something like that. It must have been a rather severe thing to be subjected to. Complete isolation from everybody and everything. I think that being in a place like that you developed a rather gregarious instinct, because I had the certain clan that I palled around with, and I think that each one of those gave me a lot of support to carrying on. I guess we were very helpful to one another in that instance, in that after we went on this forced march, I know some of my friends were successful in escaping during the course of the march; and from where I was at the time the break was made, there was no way that I could make it. Although there was still alot of my friends there, there was still the close element that I palled with and everything like that, played
Don't you think that the Russian prisoners were fearful there at the end when the Russian Army was moving toward them that they may be butchered by the Germans?
Well, I don't know about that. I think that the Germans certainly wanted to make a wide berth between themselves and the Russians in all respects, and they didn't want anymore closeness to them than they could get. That's why they marched us from one end of Austria to the other, so we would fall into the hands of the--so that the guards would be captured by the Americans. They had to be captured by somebody somewhere along the line, so that they preferred the Americans rather than the Russians. Anyway, this march that we went on, though, was most eventful. I'll never forget; the first night, we camped out in a little orchard. Well, the only provision you had for water was to drink water out of a branch. They had a little branch there. But I would imagine that that water was probably cleaner than--you would liken it very much to the streams, say, in the western part of this state up in the mountains there that has a near perfect water to drink as far as cleanliness is concerned. But anyhow, we drank the water with no ill effects, but we slept on the ground and just about froze to death at night. It was cold at night. But anyway, the trek was finally ended; and it seemed like the end of the world for the Germans. When we got to this forest near Braunau, they just gave up. As I say, we were free to go anywhere we wanted to go. We could go out and live with some German
How did the German people react to you at this point?
Well, we were still in Austria. We were not in Germany itself, and I think that perhaps there would be a difference between the two. Had we been in Germany, but we were in Austria, and I think the hostility is much less severe in Austria than it would have been, say, in Germany itself. All the Austrians were highly Germanized, so to speak, but still I don't think it was that sense of loyalty to the Fatherland that existed in Germany itself. That would by my impression. I think we were lucky to be in Austria because I think that you might have gotten knifed if you had been in Germany itself doing some of the things that were done.
What regiment liberated you?
Well, it was a part of Patton's. I believe that was the third Army that he was commanding at the time. It was one of his units that actually made the liberation. But everything worked very fast. I mean the American C-47's that we rode out of Passau on were right there ready and waiting, and everything was highly organized and everything went off just like clockwork. There was no waiting or anything at all. They were ready to take you. All of this came about with just amazing speed.
You mentioned taking over houses there before you were liberated after you had been released by the Germans, and the families moving out. Did they do this voluntarily or did the Americans . . .
Well, we would go in the house, and the first thing we would want was something to eat, some bread. They'd usually have their food stuff hid. They had no refrigerators to raid. They would have bread, but they would tell you that they had no bread in the house, but we would just search around until we found it. We would usually find it hid. They had it hid from you, a big beautiful loaf of bread hid back in some trunk or something like that. We knew the tactics that they were pulling, so we would generally get us something to eat, but as far as getting out and--well, you might find some eggs or something like that, but as far as raiding the ice box as the Americans think of it today, the Germans or the Austrians there just didn't have anything to raid. I don't ever remember seeing a refrigerator in any of the places I was in, when I stop and think about it. They had the cupboards, where they normally kept the bread, and cupboards would always be bare. That's the first place we would look, and we would search around until we found it. You
Scavengers.
That's about what it boiled down to. As far as having any of their personal things, I know I remember one time seeing a real nice atlas, and I told them I wanted it. The woman pleaded so much with me not to take it, that I finally thought, well what the heck. I didn't bother. If it meant that much to her, let her keep it. But I would have liked to known where I was because I didn't have any map, and that was exactly what I wanted. But in a way, maybe I wish I should have taken it now, I don't know. I guess not. It's kind of hard to say what you should do. But we had us some little motorcycles to ride, and rifles and guns were a dime a dozen. You could have all of them you wanted. I mean, you could go to certain places in town and there would be just a whole great big pile of guns and everything that had been brought in. They were bringing in Army equipment and everything like that. That's where we got hold of an old truck that we rode around in. We were entirely mobile then before we were actually liberated. Some of the boys went down to this aluminum factory, a beautiful factory. I would compare it to the size maybe to the Dupont place over towards Kinston. They had their own switching yard and everything there, but they had apparently at one time had housed a bunch of prisoners in there from one of the concentration camps because there was still things left in there, I don't know what it was, but there was something in there that I think some of the rail--some of the hospital cars there that some of the patients were in that was in this railroad yard and everything like that. But the plant was a beautiful plant with tools galore; I even got some drills that I got home with, fost German drills. You know
Well, you say that there was evidence that prisoners from concentration camps had been there. Perhaps they had been working in the mill?
I don't know, maybe they did. I remember these hospital cars, and they even in the place they had a lot of hospital bed and all. I think they might have been housing them in that place. For some reason, I don't know why, they had had them there; but I think they had been there. I was a little leary being around a place like that where they had been due to some disease that you might of had, but I never had any ill effects from it.
Well now, you said that you knew the men who wrote Stalag 17?
Yes. I knew of him. He was not in my inner circle, let's put it like that. He was about three barracks over from me, but I knew of him. He was one that was highly interested in the little musicals that they had and the plays they would put on every once or twice a month, things like that. But he and another boy together wrote the basis for the Stalag 17. They called it Stalag 17. They deleted the “B”; there was a Stalag 17-A and a Stalag 17-B. 17-A was up in Poland somewhere; 17-B was in Krems, Austria. But ours was the one they were writing about. I remember seeing that when it was made a play in New York, and it was very close to the actual way it really was. They did a remarkable job of having it. I think this boy must have collaborated in the production of the play and everything like that, and he had it pretty well down pat. But when it was made a movie, it was changed entirely. The movie was not at all the way it really was. It was very, very far fetched and completely different from the way it really was. It was nothing. You
You mention that those who had attempted to escape were shot. How did they attempt to carry out these escapes, and do you know of any that succeeded?
They went berserk. I think they just went out of their heads. That's where the moral aspect that you mentioned a while ago comes in to play. I think that after you're cooped up, I think that you finally just cracked up. Out of four thousand with something like this over your head continually, I guess you can expect a certain amount to mentally go off, and there was no provision there for anybody that was not mentally good and strong. If you were not fairly stable, there was no hope for you. It was survival of the fittest, and if they would get to the point to where they were not rational enough to realize that the Germans were going to kill them, then some German guard does not question this man's sanity. He has no case history of his portfolio on this man. He is merely kriegsgefangener, and he's going to shoot him if he goes across the wire; it's as simple as that. That's what they did when they went berserk and would just run to the fence and start climbing up the fence, and the Germans would shoot him.
There were no well planned, well coordinated efforts to escape them when they had potential to escape?
There was, I guess, half-hearted tries right at our barracks. We were not the perpetrators of it. Some boys from another barracks come to our barracks. First of all, they were going to tunnel over to the Russian compound and they would go through the floor in the end of our barracks there, and we knew all about it. They were taking dirt
They never tried to punish any of you?
No, they never bothered anybody.
Well, what did they plan to do once they got in the Russian sector? That was still a prison.
I don't know. I even thought I was going. I was going to get in on that because I wanted to go over to the Russian--I'd dearly would've loved to go over to that Russian compound. Oh, I would've given my eye tooth to have gotten over there. What I would've given my eye tooth to have gotten over there. What I would've done--whether it was just--I guess the element of curiosity. I wanted to see how they lived. I had never been around Russians before. It was more or less a curiosity thing more than anything else. Not that I thought the Russians could do me any good. They didn't have anything I wanted, not really. I just wanted to go over there. I wanted to be able to go on a hit and run maybe come back, but if I could've gone on, of course I would have. But I think a lot of the Americans felt that this escape thing that they were pulling was not really an escape. They just wanted to get to the Russian compound, and maybe hope they could get out on work detail and slip away that way. But how good your chances would've been at that, I don't know. The Russians would have succeeded if it could've been done. But anyway, I don't know of any real concentrated effort that was made in our particular
Well, by hearing over the radio that things were going as well as they were war-wise, you realized that you probably would be liberated in a matter of a few months.
Yes, I guess maybe we were prone to sort of play it safe, and I guess that's the line of action that most everyone was following. They didn't have much choice to follow any other but just hope you wouldn't go crazy in the meantime. It is what we did. I would say that one of the closest was on this march that we had towards the end of our time there. One night in this barn, I got the crazy idea that I was going to hide underneath the hay, and then get away that way. For some reason, I didn't do it. I don't know why I didn't, but I had figured that thing out all night that all I had to do was hide under this hay. I don't know what possessed me not to do that. I think I could have made a break for it that way very easily as soon as they marched out, then I would have been free to go wherever I wanted to go. I never did. I never did escape.
Where did you think they were carrying you on the march or for what purpose did you think?
Well, we knew that they were getting us away from the Russians, I mean that was obvious they were marching us towards the American lines. We didn't know where we would end up. We just knew that we were headed west and that it didn't really make any difference where we were going. We were just going to meet the Americans as they were advancing because we knew where their positions were at all times. We knew they were
But the motivation for escaping at that point would have been rather small, would it not, because you knew that you were marching towards the Americans?
That's true. You had less reason then. Of course, it was just a seemingly matter of days before it would all be over with, which it really was; so it was probably the smartest thing to stay together and go out in an orderly fashion rather than to risk getting off by yourself and being a loner. And maybe some over-anxious German decided he wanted to kill you or something like that and bury you, and then no one would ever hear from you again. He had that to contend with.
One of these days, I have a first cousin who is in Vienna now and I asked her to go up to the old prison campsite and take some pictures, which she did. And it just looks like a field now. The barracks have all been torn down; there's nothing there anymore. I think that as many times as I've looked at the nearby countryside, though, I could pretty well zero myself in to the exact point where the barracks was. One of these days, I hope before too long, my son has his passport, my wife has her passport, and I've got an application--I just haven't gotten around to sending one in, but we would like to go to maybe Vienna and then work our way back from there up to where the old prison camp was and just reminisce. Further from that, I would like to take the--I don't know whether I can or not but I think I can approximately--follow the route that we took on the march as we left the camp and headed towards the western extremities of Austria. I remember the first place where we crossed the Danube River, and you could see on the bridge they had
[End of Interview]