CHAPTER TWELVE
THOUGH THEY LOST AN AVERAGE OF 20 PERCENT OF THEIR body weight, krieges nevertheless regained some strength as compared with prestalag captivity, probably because they were now settled into a system resembling that of their own army, and the long haul was the road to survival. “IV-B or not to be,” one of them put it. Rosie and his mucker, Jim Bradley, would walk the perimeter to the Canadian, Dutch, and French compounds, divided by double twelve-foot-high barbed wire fences but open to international conversation. The only compound totally off-limits was the Russians', as if Germany denied their very existence. Each side of the perimeter was about a quarter mile. Joe paced it off repeatedly. Though IV-B was no less depressing than XII-A, here in IV-B he detected an air of latent verve among a few krieges drifting with the others, passing on rumors, looking to trade, exchanging survival tips. The most important were about new guards.
The worst news was that a Waffen SS had been detailed as camp guard because he'd been wounded and could pull only light duty* If he had been wounded on the Eastern Front, he'd take it out on the Russians—though nothing more could be done to them than what could already be seen. It was the Americans' turn in the barrel if a new guard had been wounded on the Western Front. At IV-B there was a postwar plan for the SS: to be loaded on the longest troop train in history and sent east (subject to jabo strafing) to wherever Stalin requested. That's what the krieges would petition Eisenhower to do with the SS.
With a settled population, krieges of different nationalities met and talked throughout the day. If Rosie took up with someone who didn't interest Bradley, Bradley'd go off and find someone who did. Then they'd get back together and both have something to discuss. Talk, barter, and gambling were the great time-passers. If a kriege was punished with solitary confinement, the worst of it was not bread and water but the loss of conversation.
Like George Rosie, Tom Gintjee had stalag experiences nearly identical to Joe's, but so far as he can remember they never met. Gintjee of the 82nd Airborne had been captured on D +1, strafed in the convoy to St.-Lo, and starved on Starvation Hill, and he had survived the death train to Limburg. At XII-A he presented a puzzlement for the Germans, for he was Japanese-American, one of very few the War Department had allowed to serve as individual soldiers outside the 442nd (“Go for Broke”) Regimental Combat Team, which would win great laurels in Italy and France. Almost all other Nisei were employed as translators in the Pacific. The Germans made some effort to convert Gintjee to the cause of their Axis partners but soon shrugged him off as too scrawny. Besides, the Japanese were allies of convenience, not of the master race, as the Germans made clear to him.
Gintjee was an engraver, cartoonist, and diarist, leaving a vividly written, wryly illustrated journal much read by the postwar kriege community. He dated each entry D, beginning with his capture, ending with D+320. Gintjee was the Pepys of IV-B, as stalag existence forced him to be by its unmitigable hours, days, and weeks of nervous boredom on which he reflected in the introduction to his unpublished memoir, Don't Fence Me In—the title taken from a Bing Crosby hit of the times.
Where Joe was restless, Gintjee was resigned to “the slow process of developing into an old kriege, a life expressly pointed to that day when [he'd] be freed and what was so important in prison life became suddenly useless…. [His] captivity was an utter waste,… a period of nothing, except for being sorely exposed to fellow krieges reduced to what was produced by their background and breeding.” He likened himself to a newborn, learning, “There are three elements— air, water, food—and that only air is unrationed by the Germans. He must learn self and mental discipline, constantly exercise them in order to continue … things the Army, for all its hard training, never tried to teach. Being a prisoner was not something they ever wanted him to be.
“Maybe a lesson will be gained from this and I hope I'm wrong in doubting it. As long as there are wars, another face will appear where mine is gone. In the place I vacate will be another prisoner. I hope he fares as well as possible.”
Like small slices of the IV-B pie were compounds holding French and Italian soldiers, who wore little silver stars on their caps and walked around freely—”not prisoners the way we are”—Gintjee noted, in extreme contrast with the mostly invisible Russians, the undead.*
“It's downright sadistic the way the Nasties [Nazis] slap them around. If we show emotion when the Russians are beaten we're punished too. I think that's why the Russians are beaten where we can see it. But the Nasties also beat them just because they like to do it.”
And because the wretched prisoners were the only Russians the Germans could beat any longer. The crushing success of Red Army offensives in the second half of 1944 were little known in IV-B, but from BBC broadcasts, heard on a secret kriege receiver, it was common knowledge that the Reich was being constricted on two sides.
Gintjee recorded: “They fell us out in formation for an SS general. Of course he was hours late and that's how long we stood in the cold. Maybe he thought we didn't know how the war was going. He had this leer while he went up and down our ranks and nodded to himself as if he knew a secret. He looked straight into my eyes. His eyes were like a dead fish and I felt a cold hand on my spine. What was God thinking, what was He drinking, when He created creatures like this?”
This SS general announced that lenient treatment of Western prisoners had improved their health to the point where they could now enjoy athletics. Thus boxing gloves were provided, this time for matches between nationalities. There were few volunteers. Anyone who could hold up his gloves for three rounds usually won. Once again the camp champion was Keating, though he was thoroughly booed whenever he fought.
Rosie remembers: “Keating was just a Nazi in an American uniform. He was a big help in their effort to divide us [by nationalities]. Brits and Scots played soccer against each other. That was also supposed to split them but the games become very popular for the bored guards to watch. How about another spectator sport? we asked, and got permission to put up two hoops and soon the krauts liked watching basketball too. They'd never seen it before. There were three American teams. Mine was called the Clipped Wings because four of us were Screaming Eagles. There was also a Canadian and a Polish team. The Poles didn't know anything about the game—couldn't even shoot a layup—but they sure learned how to play basketball like a demolition derby, and that's what the krauts liked to see. The Poles went after a rebound like it was a food parcel.”
In the strange world of stalags, the strangest relationship was that between Poles and Germans. The earliest Polish POWs (1939) were long gone, gone to their deaths from the firing squads of Nazi Einsatzgruppen, because Hitler regarded Poles as nothing more than Slavs, same as the Russians, an undetectable notch above Jews, and they were all programmed and sped to extermination.* But the twenty thousand or so Polish soldiers who somehow managed to reach Great Britain had there been formed into units under the aegis of the British, and wearing British uniforms, they acquitted themselves magnificently in North Africa, Italy, and Normandy. To these latter Polish prisoners stalag authorities accorded Geneva Conventions respect, nearly equal to that of other Allied krieges.
Rosie recalls: “To beat the hard-rebounding Poles, I recruited Pat Bogle for our team. He, Bradley, and I became a mucker trio. That worked real well because Bogle and I were smokers and Bradley wasn't and could barter his cigarettes for food. Bogle and my contribution was to star in the basketball league so our team won the championship prize of three packs each. I guess that made us professional athletes!
“Basketball also got me promoted. When I was captured my rank was PFC. Joe says IV-B was all NCOs, but there were EM there too. They were sent out on work details to farms, factories, and road repair. That meant digging up bombs the way we did at Alengon. The only reason you'd want to leave camp on a detail like that is if you were trying to escape. Otherwise you'd come back every night so worn out you couldn't get up next morning. Some guys were literally worked to death that way.”
The Man of Confidence at IV-B, Sergeant McKenzie, kept all kriege records. He also played on the Canadian basketball team with a few Americans who had joined the Canadian army before Pearl Harbor and were captured at Dieppe. McKenzie wanted to keep the league active because he was winning a lot of bets on games. That way he became a cigarette millionaire. He could have bought his way to Switzerland if he'd wanted to, but he stayed because of his responsibilities.
“Enlisted men had to pull work details, but NCOs didn't,” Rosie says. “That's according to the Geneva Convention. So—to keep me in camp and on the basketball court— McKenzie changed my records to read ‘corporal.’ I may have been the only American to have been promoted in a stalag!”
With no athletic ability, Gintjee's distraction was recording routine:
Days start at 0630 to the sound of a British bugler, and we fall out for roll call, followed by police call to clean up the area. The Nasties like to watch that. Some kriege will bend over to pick up trash and suddenly he hasn't the strength to straighten up. This really appeals to the German sense of humor….
The air raid siren sounded and I wasn't fast enough getting into my hut. That got me a hobnail boot in the ass whichissobonythatitprobablyhurthimasmuchasme….
I was wondering what's wrong with me. Everyone else in the hut has the squirts. Finally I got them too. Made me feel normal….
The crafty Brits built a crystal radio receiver tuned to BBC. The Nasties know it but can't find it because it's moved around the camp, sometimes in the wooden leg of an amputee. We get an oral summary of world news from the British compound. This is a real life line for our morale though the way BBC tells the news we have to wonder if the U.S. is in the war.
An inflexible curfew was enforced each night at dark. Anyone found outside the huts, the Germans announced, would be shot. There was also “warning wire” three feet from the barbed wire. Crossing into this zone was a capital offense. Krieges queried the MOC as to whether the shooting policy was for real. He replied that anyone who wanted to could be the test case, and he'd see that he got a postwar posthumous decoration for bravery.
Meanwhile, British uniforms were issued to everyone in rags. Gintjee stayed with his tattered jumpsuit, though the hole in his pants grew larger. What he was losing through his bowel did not concern him as much as petty theft in his hut, mostly from the tiny bread ration some krieges stashed to eat just before they lay down for the night, when without distraction thoughts focused on food and hunger prevented sleep.
“This is a cardinal crime because bread means rest. The less you have of one the more you need the other. The Nasties are curious about how we'll handle the problem. We're pretty sure the thieves are Americans. The Man of Confidence got wind of this and told us there had never been that problem with Commonwealth krieges. I'm sorry to say that he's probably right. He also says if we catch the thief he can make his death look accidental. Muckers are now sleeping in shifts so the hut is never empty.”
Gintjee was detailed for “camp fatigue” with thirty-four other EM. Tools were piled on the athletics field: shovels, rakes, and two pairs of pliers. He was able to grab the pliers and spend the day pulling nails from crates while fellow krieges shoveled and raked. They thought one job would be to level the field because of a big mound in the middle that spoiled soccer games (played with a patched-up bladder). That didn't happen. They learned that the mound was a mass grave for Russians and the Nasties didn't want them dug up. There was a second cemetery, begun with a test of the curfew policy. One night Gintjee heard a single shot. It killed a Dutchman who went outside his hut to pee.
Entry 108 began with the exclamation: “A God sent issue of fifty cigarettes per man!” Krieges took this as confirmation of news that the invasion of southern France had linked up with the Normandy invasion, so Nasty was nicer. A British chaplain immediately went around asking for each man to donate ten smokes to the Russian compound, where they were dying by the hundreds from typhus. From what he saw, they looked no more than twelve years old, and all maimed in some way: a twisted hand, a nose on the side of the face, legs that stuck out to the side at 45 degrees, a missing ear, a toothless mouth. The chaplain ended his appeal for cigarettes with the confession that it was difficult to consider these victims of atrocity as fellow humans, and even more so the monsters who had done it. Without complaint, nearly all the Western krieges donated ten precious cigarettes to be tossed over the fence. “For every Keating,” Gintjee scribbled, “there are a hundred guys who take pity on those worse off.”
After morning roll call Gintjee made it a habit to wander over to the Polish compound and admire one of the most ingenious contraptions in camp, a little stove made from German cocoa cans, with cups and saucers fashioned out of the tin in Red Cross parcels. The Poles auctioned them for souvenirs but had few sales till Gintjee made a deal to monogram them with solder, resulting in a hugely profitable collaboration. Something to take home from a stalag revived hope that home was out there, waiting and attainable. How far, how long, only the outcome of the war would reveal, but a souvenir from IV-B suggested inevitability.
Gintjee's mucker was John Marshall, whose souvenirs were buttons from uniforms. His ambition, pursued daily, was to acquire at least one button from every country represented in camp, including Germany and nations most krieges didn't know were even in the war, like Serbia and Albania. Slowly—one thing available in abundance was time—Marshall sewed them on his coat, like the weavers in a myth Gintjee tried to recall. In time Marshall became a camp celebrity. Krieges and even guards stopped him at all the compounds, studied his button collection, and sometimes donated or proposed trades. The buttons became too much for his coat, bulging his pockets and the bags he carried like some vagabond. His trove grew to hundreds of buttons, and the collecting kept him occupied and engaged. But a message came down from the Man of Confidence to Gintjee: was his mucker collecting buttons or losing his marbles?
There were krieges at IV-B who had slipped into that second category, most famously the RAF sergeant who had to be escorted at all times by another kriege or he'd head for the wire. At different times both Joe and Gintjee had that job, coveted because the Scotsman's tale was fascinating. He should have been in a Luftwaffe stalag, so he said, but since he was the very first kriege to be captured in the war, IV-B's commandant wouldn't approve a transfer. McKenzie asked him to negotiate with the IRC to have the original kriege exchanged in Switzerland for some German psycho prisoner held in England, but again the commandant refused. The Scotsman was so confident of his immunity that he claimed the guards wouldn't shoot him even if he went for the wire. That's why he had to be accompanied by volunteers like Joe and Gintjee.
“The benevolent krauts,” wrote Gintjee, began distributing a quatro newspaper named OK Kid! The editorial policy, of course, was propaganda, but the effect was informative and an entertaining distraction. “They couldn't have imagined what a pastime it was for us to read between the lines and guess what might really be going on in the world. We have to do it through articles like ‘What the Atlantic Charter Really Means’ (a Jewish conspiracy), and ‘Formosa Victory’ to show how the Japs were winning the war in the Pacific.”
A favorite was the Goebbels editorial saying democracy may be okay for some people but Europe has always preferred dictatorships like the Bourbons, Hapsburgs, and—no surprise—Hitler. The only disturbing feature of OK Kid! was Keatingesque essays by krieges about life in American slums. Readers were divided by these accounts. “Why not?” one of Joe's muckers shrugged, “if it gets you a parcel. We all know it's bullshit.” McKenzie felt otherwise, and anyone in IV-B who contributed material felt his wrath. Gintjee recounted:
The British love plays, especially comedies and musicals. No tragedies, thanks, there's enough of that here. The “theater” charged a two-cigarette admission till the Americans arrived. Most of us had never seen a play except maybe In a high school auditorium, so it took the boredom of a stalag to raise a little interest. To get us more involved the Man of Confidence ordered that the first play be free.
I'll never forget it. The cast was in civilian clothes though they were streng verboten in camp as a possible aid to escape. It was a variety show with an MC who came out, casually lit a cigarette then dropped it to go into his spiel. “My God,” he cried, “this is only a play!” and scrambled to retrieve the butt. But the audience was ahead of him and grabbed it. That was the biggest laugh I had in prison.
The Americans' greatest influence in IV-B was gambling, which for krieges of other nationalities there had been scant interest previously. With energetic ingenuity and imagination, crap tables and roulette wheels were improvised. Gint-jee felt gambling was an appeal to the spirit that tomorrow we may die or next month be liberated, so what the hell, it's only cigarettes—let's get some excitement in our lives, win or lose in an egalitarian contest. That became a campwide attitude expressed in raffles, numbers rackets, and gruesome betting on how many American bombers would be shot down the next day.
Gintjee also made observations as an economist. When there was a bonus issue of cigarettes from the IRC it did not make everyone happy. Creditors with tobacco fortunes saw their net worth reduced when debtors paid off in devalued smokes. The British especially grumbled about such volatility and how widespread gambling upset the equilibrium that had sustained them before the Americans arrived. What if McKenzie became a debtor to Keating? It was a question hard to answer.
Marshall invited a French Legionnaire to our hut to hustle him for a button. This Algerian was a recruiter for the Legion, so before he donated his button we had to hear his pitch. Travel, freedom, adventure and amour would all be ours. He almost had me convinced to join up after the war (they didn't have any Japanese!), but then I asked him about the pay. Two cents per day. I said I hoped he enjoyed riding camels but I'll just smoke 'em, thanks just the same….
Looks like the Allies are on the Siegfried Line. The Brits are giving odds that Montgomery will be here in a month. They're so confident that they'll accept IOU's. I bet twelve cigarettes at three to one, and will happily lose….
Now and then the Brits pull practical jokes on the krauts and get away with it. There's this half-wit guard walking the perimeter and he's really bucking for corporal. After a rain he spots a bit of commo wire sticking out of the ground. He pulls on it and up comes some more wire. He yells to the sergeant of the guard—he found it!—the top priority contraband in Stalag IV-B—the Brits' secret radio antenna. Guards gather around and pull up wire that leads all over the camp, and sure enough it ends at the British compound. They yank up the last stretch of wire. It's threaded through a pile of rusty cans at the bottom of a latrine! …
Much colder weather at roll call this morning. Men in the hut next door did not fall out. It has been quarantined for diphtheria. No other cases yet….
Klug is the top poker player in camp. He's so good Marshall and I asked him to invest for us. Sure, he said, for a percentage of the winnings but we take the losses. We won a thousand postwar dollars but then Klug hit a bad streak and we're down $1,500. Creditors are concerned about our health and want us to move away from the diphtheria hut. It's nice to know that people care….
A new sergeant of the guard, an asshole wounded in France. Big shakedown and inspection of the hut found some cartoons I'd been drawing of the krauts. That got me dragged into the commandant's office, an oberst. He only “reprimanded” me, and my sentence was three days in solitary with bread and water. Not much change in my diet, colonel!
Gintjee and his mucker of button fame were probably known to Joe but lost in his slow-healing head, as are most memories from XII-A and IV-B except for his twenty-first birthday, celebrated with a sugared lump of dough baked on the hut stove, a cigarette for a candle. The Germans had a present for him too, a few weeks later, when “Beyrle” was read out at roll call for transport to another stalag. Hundreds of Americans were joining him (but neither Rosie nor Gintjee), many unhappy to leave the tolerable routine of IV-B, but not Joe, who felt bridled by a chain of command that seemed reluctant to bring a rash Yank into their escape plans, if there were any.* They reminded him of the pilot of his Lysander, war-weary, war-wise, and willing to wait for war's end. Joe had been a .400 hitter in high school, but oh for two against the Germans. He wanted another at bat, and not with a cricket paddle.
Joe hadn't found a really kindred kriege (his IV-B muckers had been shuffled several times), and it was accepted practice not to ask personal questions because they could ignite short tempers and end in fights, which burned up scarce energy and satisfied only the authorities, who never ceased trying to turn krieges against one another. Nonetheless IV-B had been an education for Joe, thanks mostly to what he'd learned from two Rangers who'd been captured at Dieppe in the summer of 1942. They were the senior American krieges but didn't transfer with the others because the Germans had permanently classified them as Canadian. Joe can't remember then-names. Names didn't matter much; men went by monikers like King Corporal and Hockey Shorts. Joe's was Spud because he was always scrounging potato peels.
The two crease-faced, stubbly Rangers did a lot to clear his head and bring it to the most practical level, the only one that could sustain any other level. Their patient instruction reminded him of Saint Joseph's basketball coach, who first showed him which foot to pivot on, what pass to look for, which teammate was in the best position. Fundamentals, essentials:
Save some food from every meal, no matter how much is available from the IRC or won by gambling. Tomorrow there could be none.
Don't expect to learn about a successful escape. The krauts won't want to admit it and the escape committee doesn't want to be flooded with proposals.
No matter how tired you are, exercise. The energy you put out actually adds to overall strength even when it tires you out. Like stashed food, you'll need that deep strength when you get sick, as everyone does sooner or later. Exercise makes it later.
If your legs swell, it means you may be getting beriberi, so trade for anything that has protein.
The MOC has a net of informers, so be careful about what you say and to whom. It could be worse to be on the wrong side of the MOC than to piss off the krauts, sort of like the choice between being fingered by the police or the Mafia. The enforcers can get at you in ways the cops can't.
At XII-A and IV-B Joe was never made by the MOC mafia but now, from what the two Rangers had taught him, he felt ready to step up in an American camp. Early in the afternoon his name was called again and he was sent to a table where kriege dog tags were checked against POW records that had begun at XII-A. For the first time Joe saw his mug shot, now on the cover of this book.
Ditty bags were inspected for contraband, then there was a personal patdown, which did not uncover Joe's shiv (won in craps), a sharpened fragment from a truck shock, an all-purpose tool used mostly for opening Red Cross cans. He had tucked the shiv into a jump boot that stunk so much the Germans wouldn't examine it. The transfer began with a two-mile march to boxcars at a siding. The krieges groaned to see them, forty-or-eights again, likely to invite air attack.
But Allied fighters had not been seen much lately because they were concentrating above the Netherlands, as Joe would soon learn. A guard noticed his jump boots and asked which Airborne division he'd been in. When he answered the 101st, the guard said they had jumped again. Joe's buddies were back in the war for the first time since Normandy, on a date famous in Screaming Eagle history—September 17,1944— the same day as his funeral mass in Muskegon and also the day in 1943 when he landed in England. September 17 is the only day of the year when Joe reads his horoscope.
* Waffen (armed) SS were all-Nazi units, usually division-size, tactically integrated with the Wehrmacht, which was otherwise made up of conscripts rather than party members. These units were Hitler's elite, getting the best equipment and replacements but also the least rest and suffering the most casualties. They were under the general command of Himmler, who parceled them out to Wehrmacht field armies according to Hitler's wishes. Stalin developed an equivalent of the Waffen SS, his Guards divisions, comprising chiefly fervent Communists. When the two elites clashed there was always a battle royal, as if a personal match between Hitler and Stalin.
* Originally Axis partners, the Italians surrendered in September 1943. Except for reliable Fascist units in Liguria, their army was rounded up by the Germans and made nominal POWs.
* Einsatzgruppen (special action groups) were mass killing teams who began the Holocaust by shooting Eastern European civilians in droves—but not nearly fast enough for Himmler. Besides inefficiency there was a morale problem reported by Einsatzgruppen commanders: some of their men were not sleeping well after machine-gunning civilians all day. Thus the search for alternatives began, leading to poison gas in centralized facilities rather than bullets in the field as the final solution.
* As best as research can determine, in 1944 there were three one-man escapes from IV-B. At least two were successful, a tribute to British patience and their meticulous planning.