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My POW Diary |
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The following is from the original penciled log book written by Russ Lang while a Prisoner Of War in Germany during World War II. Additional detail and comments were added from memory and are enclosed in ( ).
Friday Feb. 16, 1945, Today marks the 60th day as a POW. When thinking back of all that has happened since my capture, I find some of the details are slipping away from me. In order that I should not forget these lessons learned the hard way, I'm going to keep this log book. I'm going to use Bob Wood’s diary to highlight some of the things that happened these past two months.
I was captured Dec.19,1944 near the St. Vith sector of the West Wall (Siegfried line). We were all hungry and except for a couple of D-bars (chocolate) and K rations I had nothing to eat since the attack started three days earlier. The Luftwaffe guards took us to a barbed wire enclosure and threw us turnips that were growing in a nearby field. The next day we were marched behind the German lines for several hours to a barnyard a some miles away. On the route we passed a long line of German tanks and equipment moving into the attack.
It surprised me to see the large amount of horses in use and delighted me to see the number of motor vehicles stalled on the highway. We had no place to sleep in the barnyard as it was muddy as a pig pen. On the morning of December 21, we got some water to drink and again we moved down the road. We passed a sight I could never forget -- wrecked American Jeeps with dead Americans lying nearby -- two of them Medics, all of them were stripped of their shoes and socks and just left lying there. I thought of Lil's cousin Jack for the Jeep was a 592nd Field Artillery vehicle. I hope he made it all right.
On the road there was all kinds of litter for we were tearing up all papers that we didn't reach during our surrender. As far as you could see there was the long line of prisoners and it made you feel so small and insignificant. Whenever we stopped we'd try to find some raw vegetables that may have been overlooked in the fields. We continued our walk all that day and half of the night, the Jerry telling us only a few more kilometers and then they would give us rations. We passed through more of the West Wall (Siegfried line) defenses and several towns and villages. The guards told the people they had all of Eisenhower’s Army there -- it must have been a good morale builder at that. We finally stopped at a hugh hotel on the 22nd but we had to stay penned up in the yard with no place to sleep. The building was full with wounded and the yard was overcrowded with us. La Montaino, Broyles and I tried to sleep in a doorway but a guard chased us away. I managed to find a seat in a barn window sill and I shivered there the last few hours of dawn.
They lined us up again that morning of December 23rd and gave us one can of limburger cheese for seven men and two bags of hard biscuits apiece. We ate for the first time. It was good We then marched down to the railroad station in Gerolstein and we were loaded on to box cars. They had livestock in them before we got on for the manure was still on the floors. We covered it the best we could with straw but some of it still got on our clothes. Sixty four (64) men were crowded into a car, and there we stayed for seven days and six nights from Dec.23rd through Dec. 29th.
We could not stretch out, there was not enough room. Some stood up, some sat with three sets of legs layered on top of each other. Because of the winter the moisture from our breath froze on the walls making it a sheet of ice. People in the center of the car were perspiring from the body heat of bodies tightly packed. Those on the perimeter of the car were freezing next to the iced walls. About every hour the person(s) on the bottom of the pack would scream out begging to be let up as they could not move or bear the weight of the legs on top of them. Then everyone would get up move to a new position. The ones from the outside to the center to warm up and the ones from the center to the outside to cool off -- and so it went throughout the day and night.
Some of those nights I thought I'd go mad! We would urinate and pass waste into some of our steel helmets that were emptied when the doors were opened. Then we were given water to drink using other steel helmets. All of our equipment, overcoats, and blankets were left back in the battle zone. I started to make a spoon out of wood and saved an empty cheese can for a dish. On the whole trip we got a half a loaf of bread with sorghum molasses three times and barley soup once. We stayed on the train in the Limburg rail yards the last three days.
This is how we spent the 1944 Christmas. We sang Carols, and prayed on Christmas eve as one POW read from his New Testament. Another POW, a Chaplain was allowed to come to each car earlier, the door was opened by guards and he was allowed to lead us in prayer and a five minute service. Home, and the lives we lived before certainly seemed more like paradise to all of us. Christmas Eve was not to remain peaceful very long. That night the British came to bomb Limburg. We heard the sirens and we could see the guards running for the shelters dug into the side of the hill next to the tracks. One of our POWs had managed to hide a cutting pliers and he cut away the wires that covered the small open window in the corner of the car. We pushed him out the window, then he cut the wires locking our doors and the doors of several cars until the first wave of planes roared overhead. We left our car and headed for the hills on each side of the tracks. We thought the planes were going to bomb the trains but we believe the target was an oil refinery on the other side of the hill.
Some of the bombs fell short and hit the hill with the shelter. Some of our POWs died with some of the Germans in the shelter. Eddie and I were lying on the opposite bank when the bombs fell. We were hit with rocks and dirt but unhurt. We got up and ran over the top of the hill into a meadow and stayed there until the raid was over. Then we kept going with others who had escaped the cars but we were soon met by a ring of soldiers who brought us back to our cattle car. The next morning a German officer scolded us for trying to escape. He said the train was clearly marked with Red Crosses on the roofs and we would have been safe if we had stayed put. We were skeptical because we had heard that the Nazis had marked other trains carrying their troops with red crosses.. There was a memorial service that Christmas morning in the rail yard for those POWs and Germans who died. We watched from our opened door.
When we arrived at Stalag XIIA near Limburg we were some sad sights, dirty, smelling, with over ten days of beard growth on our faces. We learned that an officers' barracks had been hit during that night's air raid and several were killed. We were thoroughly searched, received a hot bath and delousing, interviewed and became official POWs. We were then temporally assigned to barracks occupied by the British. They were real nice to us, they welcomed us with hot tea and we each got a cracker with jam on it. It hit the spot, even if it was only one cracker!
Dec. 29, 1944 We received our first Canadian Red Cross parcel today, one package for two men. Broyles and I shared one and we ate together, slept on a table and used the British fellow's pot to cook in. Our ration from the Germans consisted of one sixth of a loaf of hard sour dough bread per man a day, a spoonful of jam or oleomargarine and a spoonful of sugar. We got Jerry (German POW) tea once a day, (like dishwater but hot anyway) and British tea from our parcels twice a day. Twice while we were there we got a cupful of Jerry soup, which was usually made from barley, pea, turnip, or rutabaga. We also got cottage cheese and horse meat a couple of times. (It was the best and the largest ration that I had since we became POWs.) I also got a chance to write a letter home, something that I wanted to do since being captured to relieve the minds of my loved ones.
Dec. 31, 1944 We celebrated New Years Eve under a lot better conditions than we did at Christmas. The British put on a show in our barracks that lasted a couple of hours. There was a small band, singing and minstrel acts. A stage (improvised from the tables) was well decorated with the words "HAPPY NEW YEAR 1995 -- OUR LAST ONE HERE ". I hoped they were right and we spend the next one at home.
Jan 6, 1995 Today the non-coms (corporals and sergeants who were the non-commissioned officers) were loaded on trains for a trip to an American non-com camp, Stalag IIIB near Furstenburg on the east bank of the Oder river. (Our officers were separated from us at capture, and the private who remained would be sent to work camps throughout the countries occupied by the Germans.) We were loaded on to box cars again but this time there were 40 men per car. It was still crowed and you still could not stretch out to sleep. We had a stove in our car so we were quite lucky. I made melted cheese and sugar on toast on the stove. They were just enough to provoke my appetite but we fared a lot better than our previous trip. It took us two days to get to the Stalag. We went through Schweinfurt, Leipzig, and Frankfurt on the Oder. (We passed the bombed out ruins of the SKF ball bearing factory in Schweinfurt, not a wall was standing except what was the front entrance that carried the hugh sign "SKF". It was as though it was left there in mockery, or a hugh tombstone. It made our spirits climb as we saw what our planes had done. The Nazis couldn't win this war)
Jan. 6, 1945 We arrived at Stalag IIIB near Furstenberg on the east bank of the Oder river. Sgt. Bob Wood of Bloomington, ID and I teamed up together as "Muckers". We stayed partners, watching out for each other until we got back to the USA. He had been one of the rifle squad leaders in our company. We moved into the American compound and had to share the same bed until we could find some bed boards to make up another bed in the other part of the frame.
Life at IIIB was better than at the English camp. We got one Red Cross Parcel between Bob and myself every week and except for the cold cement floor and lack of fuel things were getting livable. Bob or I did not smoke, so we could trade all of our cigarettes for food. You could buy a loaf of bread for about four packs, a milk can of oatmeal for three packs, two cans of flour for three packs, a jar of jam for one pack, etc.. I got two books and a pencil that I used to write my diary and a future plan book.
(I learned what an addiction smoking can be. There were men who would rather smoke than eat. When rations became scarce as they did later, some of these men would go without food in order to get cigarettes. We had a whole barracks full of men with tuberculosis in the barracks next to ours. This was the result of smoking instead of eating.) Jerry's soup and rations were about the same in all the camps, just the amount, quality, frequency varied. Here we got pea, barley, oatmeal, turnip, (ugh) and dehydrated rutabaga soups. The last soup was terrible. It tasted like paper, and an odor you wouldn't believe. You had to be starving to eat it. It was like sort of an indicator, you could tell how bad off we were by how we ate that soup. I often wondered what it must have been used for, it couldn't have been in the German diet Maybe it was for the livestock. We got cottage cheese, jam or margarine, with the bread as we did in the British camp. (The bread was similar to German Army issue. It was dark, almost black, very heavy and had a moist sour taste. I believe this bread would never go stale and last for a long time without any wrapping or special care.)
German Black Bread Recipe This recipe comes from the official record of the Food Providing Ministry which was published in Berlin, on 24 November 1941 (Top Secret) by the Directors in Ministry Herr Mansfeld and Herr Moritz.
“From
our own experience with the black bread, we also saw bits of grass and
sand. Someone was cheating on the recipe.”
*We always thought it tasted like there was
sawdust in it! But we never suspected that it was really made that way.
The German population did not have our food supply and used a lot of
substitutes as in their coffee (Chicory and ground nut shells). Potato was often mixed into the soup here instead of separate issue except on two days of the week. Bob and I bought a blower to heat our meals or water instead of having to wait a turn on the stove when it was working. (If fuel was short, there was no fire. A blower can burn anything, coal, green or damp wood. It was much easier to find fuel for it than something that would burn in the stove. The heat was concentrated so you did not need a big fire to heat something up.)
This is what a blower looked like.
Turning crank attached to the
large pulley on the left turned the small pulley on right that turned the
larger pulley next to it that was attached to the same axle. This second
larger pulley turned another small pulley attached to a blower can that
had an 8 bladed impeller that turned inside the can at a high rate of
speed. This forced air up through an opening in the side of the fire box.
This was made by a POW from tin cans, pieces of cord, scraps of wood, a
few nails, and a German Dixie cup. The only tool he had was a scissors,
pieces of glass or a sharp metal bar. Pulley was made by putting the flat
board on the crank and with someone turning the crank he would use the
glass or other sharp object to cut the circle. Boards and nails were
ripped off buildings bed boards, etc. Only the German Dixie cup (German
mess kit pot) was obtained from a guard through a trade of cigarettes.
Cooking is a two man effort.
One of the popular dishes was a Stalag pudding. It was made from the crusts of bread soaked and boiled with raisins, sugar, and sometimes milk and chocolate. It was eaten cold or hot with oleomargarine and jam frosting. I made raisin turnovers while at Stalag IIIB and they were really good. I made potato pancakes that came out pretty good but they took too much oleo for frying so we could not keep making them. We really learned the value of food and proved it by using every crumb in some way or another. (In our trades we tried to end up with the most nutritious and satisfying food possible. Like milk instead of coffee or tea.)
Because of our constant hunger we always talked about food and home. One of the POWs that was bunked close by was Andy Dowden from East Hartford, CT. He and I talked about visits that we would make when we got back home. (We never did them.) Here is an outline of what we plan to do when he comes to Torrington. He had one for our day in Hartford.
A day in Torrington
12 PM - Dinner at Martha or Bertha (my sisters) Sauerkraut + sausages + pork with potato pancakes followed by pies, twists and prune and fig turnovers. 3:30 PM - Stop at Krusers (German deli) for some baked ham sandwiches and pumpernickel bread, cheese, etc. and German pastry. 6 PM - Supper at ? House [Bantam, Thomaston Rd. or Winsted) Home baked chicken with dressing, doughboys, cranberry sauce, and pies, etc. 8 PM - Stop at Toll Gate for an ice cream steamboat, milk shakes, etc. 11 PM - Spargilotti’s for spaghetti and meat balls. Have Hershey kisses and Nestle bars available at all times. 1 AM - Home for Bromo and aspirin (I can't believe that I really planned this, incredible !)
This is the menu Bob and I had planned for last week at Stalag IIIB. Tuesday Lunch Turnip soup - Jerry Dinner Oatmeal with raisins, toasted cheese on bread Wednesday Lunch Barley or pea soup - Jerry Dinner Potatoes, salmon gravy, Stalag pudding Thursday Lunch Dehydrated rutabaga soup - Jerry Dinner Meat and beans stew, toasted ham on bread Friday Lunch Oatmeal soup - Jerry Dinner Potatoes, salmon gravy, Stalag pudding Saturday Lunch Turnip soup - Jerry Dinner Potatoes, liver pate gravy, toasted ham on bread Sunday Lunch Pea or potato soup - Jerry Dinner Potatoes, Jerry gravy made from Jerry meat issue Monday Lunch Turnip soup - Jerry Dinner Oatmeal, toasted cheese on bread (Note: dinners would be absent without Red Cross parcels) The menu was never followed as we were told that we must leave the camp. (The Russians were advancing through Poland.) It would have been the best eating we had yet since becoming POWs. I'm hoping that I get a chance to take Bob home with me when we land back in the States. Some real baked beans and all those dishes I'd tell them that my folks made, maybe he could sample them. Anyway we're going to have a feast wherever we land -- all we can eat and split the bill. Ah me, on with the story-- |
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| Page last revised 11/07/2019 |
