Behind Hitler's Lines

by Thomas H. Taylor

  For Joe, with his brains full of static, the Paris march was incomprehensible. Not until years later, when he watched POWs exhibited on TV in Hanoi and, later, the American body dragged down a street in Somalia, did his victimization by the Nazis reveal its intent. POWs were not just military captives for such enemies, they were a propaganda resource.

  The office buildings on the route were used by German bureaucrats, who hung out the windows as a sound truck, working up the crowd, preceded the show. Movie and still cameramen were positioned on pedestals at various points. It made Joe think of how the press publicized the Currahee march from Atlanta to Fort Benning. Physically he felt about the same at the end of both marches; the first had been 142 miles, the second about 2.

  Lights, camera, action, mostly for French civilians whose jobs depended on the German occupation. They shouted on cue, some pelted the POWs, but most were just grim, no doubt aware that the next American soldiers they'd see in Paris would be carrying weapons and riding tanks. Something revived in Joe when a trooper started singing the 82nd's march, which begins, “We're all American and proud to be …” Joe tried to stand tall, march like a soldier, and stare down spectators. Rosie remembers it as a surreal spectacle. There were the Germans at the windows, cursing without much gusto. He had crossed the ocean to rid France of them, but there were the French spitting on him.

  At the end of the shameful parade a thousand prisoners bound for Germany squatted at the squalid station till trains sent on higher-priority cargo. After some twelve hours without food or water, boxcars arrived: “forty-or-eight” boxcars, famous from World War I—they could hold forty humans or eight horses. One such boxcar is on permanent display at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

  The German filmmakers had a final scene to shoot. They kept some cameramen around to photograph a guard light up, take a couple of puffs, then throw the cigarette on the ground in front of POWs. Smokers like Rosie hadn't had a drag for weeks. They'd scramble on the ground for the butt. To increase mortification, guards started dropping butts, then ground them with a boot while POWs clawed to save them.* This got to be too much for Jim Bradley, who was gaining a reputation for guts personified. He whispered to Rosie: next time they throw a butt on the ground, step on it first—and anyone's fingers who tries to get it. This they did while cursed by fellow POWs and cameramen wanting more shots of Americans groveling for smokes.

  Overloaded fifty to a boxcar, without food, with only one bottle of water and a can for waste, the POWs were bolted behind sliding doors. In humid heat the train languished in a railroad yard hour after hour. They tried to arrange themselves so everyone could sit down, but there wasn't nearly enough room; about ten in each car had to stand. Rank was as nothing in their situation. When it was agreed that a couple of hours had passed, ten seated men would change places with standees.

  Under way at last, Joe's train lurched along, causing some air to pass through cracks between the car's slats. Someone thanked God for that small mercy, and a prayer for His protection was answered by forty-nine murmured amens. They didn't know one another, but when a man started crying there was someone beside him with the comfort of feelings as intimately shared as they were impossible to express. There was little age or perspective in that stifling mass of bodies, no motto to sustain them. All they knew for sure after the Paris march was how wantonly evil the creatures of Hitler were. The American army had tried to warn them how evil but lacked the capability to tell how much. In the case of the Nazis, the shibboleth of demonizing the enemy could be faulted not for falsity but only for inadequacy.

  Thoughts turned to buddies fighting at that moment in France. They had grown to know the Nazis too and remembered Brays, Vanderpools, Harrisons, and Wolvertons, what they meant, why and how they'd been killed. These buddies were not forgetting the prisoners, who seemed to receive a telepathic message in the boxcar, which steeled their resolve to survive—because the war would be won, it had to be. The 101st had returned to England by the time Joe was in the boxcar. After the war they said how hard it was to think about those who'd been left behind in France. He was to have that feeling when visiting Gettysburg with its photos of Confed-erate dead all over the battlefields. Lee's army had had to march away and leave them.

  THE TRAIN TO GERMANY bumped and banged along for about as many hours as it was shunted to sidings. That was the routine for a claustrophobic week: herk, jerk, and halt. Guards were on top of the boxcars. Prisoners yelled for water when the train stopped but never got a response though they could hear guards scramble down if there were sounds of aircraft. They also got down at each stop, went off and watched with their weapons pointed at the cars. They were watched in turn through the slats.

  The prisoners were so packed that those sitting had to fold their knees into their faces. Being trussed that way became too much for two troopers near Joe who started talking with him about escape. At a corner of the boxcar was a rectangular grille, about eight feet up. Slowly making their way to the corner they positioned themselves to remove it. Joe was the tallest, so he went to work first. The grille was sturdy metal mesh embedded in wood. More discouraging than that was its size, only a couple of feet in diagonal. With his build, Joe couldn't possibly get through.

  Undeterred he pushed and pulled on it for two days and nights. Prisoners watched like a silent chorus; some offered to help but couldn't because only one could work at a time, so the grille was recognized as a project for the pair who would use it. There was a quiet cheer from the others when the heavy mesh finally came loose. Now it was for the pair to decide at what time and by what method to attempt to get out, a onetime only experiment. They'd have to be boosted, then held horizontal while trying to wriggle through the hole.

  Joe recommended that the attempt be at night to have the longest period of darkness for getting away. Surprisingly the Germans had not taken a head count in Paris, so if anyone could depart undetected, there'd never be a search for him. The big question was whether to go out facedown or faceup. The guard was judged to be sitting at about the middle of the roof. Along the side of the boxcar was an eave. The escapee would have to grab it to pull himself through the hole. If the eave didn't break, he'd then have to push away from the car so as not to be run over, a lesser problem because the train never went faster than ten miles per hour.

  The first trooper decided to go out faceup. That way he could grab the eave without reversing his hands, somehow extract his feet, push off with them, do a half twist, and land rolling forward. The second trooper would be boosted up so he could see what happened to the first. He would go out facedown, if faceup didn't work for his buddy. They hugged each other while Joe hugged them both.

  Lifted by four POWs, up went the first trooper on his back. He had to gyrate his shoulder into the diagonal of the hole, then his head disappeared. The train rocked along slowly. The decapitated man crossed his arms tight to his torso. His hands gestured to push him out, even if to his death. Both arms couldn't make it. He dragged one forward. The wood frame, full of splinters, drew blood, but he was going to get that arm through even if it meant leaving all the skin behind. The arm ground through. A silent cheer, as everyone listened for any movement by the guard on the roof. Total quiet reigned over fifty men packed head to head.

  With one arm out, he had an easier time with the other. He was still being held—the two-thirds of him still in the car— horizontal. He must have gripped the eave because he started easing the rest of his body through. He was disappearing. Joe's recollection of that scene reminds him of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.

  The second trooper's head was right beside the first one's hips. When the feet went out, the second trooper demanded to be boosted up the next second. His buddy was gone, and he couldn't wait to join him. Just then the train built up speed as if Gott mit uns was coming true for the Germans, but Joe saw it another way: not more danger for the escapees but a sign that they could speed away to freedom. And Jumpin' Joe had counseled them, re
minded them how to do a good PLF, and that it would be an easy one because the train was doing less than fifteen miles per hour.

  The second trooper's feet went out the grille hole. Men had ears to the wood when he dropped but didn't hear anything. Joe crossed himself and prayed for the two of them, pleaded for God to protect them. For the first time since his head had been bashed in at the chateau, his compulsion to escape revived. There were other reasons he can't quite identify, but the major ones were Jack Brown going over the wall on Starvation Hill and the two troopers jumping from the train. Joe never stopped comparing what they did to what might be a similar gamble for him. If others were getting away—though quite likely they had been killed or recaptured—then he was lacking something more than luck. That infuriated him. To have been recaptured was an ignominy that could only be mitigated by escape.

  THERE WERE TWO FEWER in the boxcar now. Places were reshuffled, and it was Joe's turn to be crammed next to “Stinky.” Off and on during their POW time, they'd run across each other. He got his nickname because of the strafing outside St.-Lo more than a month before. He dove for the nearest cover, and it turned out to be a French four-holer. He came out looking like a soaked chimney sweep, and the way he smelled was so bad that in the Paris march no one would go near him, not even the hecklers. Now Stinky was back-to-back with Joe, sitting on the floor of the boxcar knees to face, both of them wrapped in a stench strong enough to cause pain. Stinky whispered that he wanted to tear off his skin, that he had been prevented from trying. After the war Joe heard he became a compulsive bather.

  AT DAWN AFTER the escape, the guard on Joe's boxcar shouted “Jabos!” They sounded like P-47s. No one inside knew if the cars were marked POW. They weren't.* The first pass reached out ahead of the train as it chugged on. Would there be a return pass? Yes, because brakes shrieked, the boxcar jolted to a halt, and the guard climbed down, his rifle clattering against the slats. POWs cringed as antiaircraft machine guns fired from the train. Joe's car was two or three down from the locomotive, the Jabos' target, and they hit it. He heard steam blowing out of the perforated boiler like a huge whistle. Prisoners piled on one another, their only protection the men they could burrow under.

  The third pass, with armor-piercing 50-calibers the size and weight of poker tips, destroyed the locomotive. Pulling off, one Jabo stitched the nearest boxcars with a burst. The pilot just kept his finger on the trigger a second too long— erupting the flesh of a score of his countrymen.

  Joe has a lot of trouble telling about this, as if it shouldn't have happened—God to whom he'd prayed shouldn't have allowed it to happen, and Joe shouldn't have had to witness it, as if to be witness was all but as horrible as being victim.

  Pulp and bone particles dripped from his face, mixed with the unique taste of someone else's blood. Blood that for a lifetime till the previous minute had been contained and circulating in veins and arteries. Blood, now a cloudburst of stickiness, hovering like a pause in a water show. Blood spurting, then flowing, finally just seeping, spreading, soaking as if to quench the screams and gurgles of the dying, those dying in extended torture, all in the space of a boxcar.

  The living, many crying to die, couldn't move except to grapple against one another. Those shot through the entrails vomited, starting a slithery chain reaction among men gone thrashing mad with pain. The unwounded tried to slide the wounded around to take care of the worst off. The worst off didn't scream as much as the ones with guts torn out or cheeks blown off. Joe struggles to exorcise the memory deeply dredged.

  “Euthanasia is against my religion, but if I'd had enough will to do it, I could have strangled those sufferers and I think they'd have blessed me with their last breath.”

  The 50-calibers had blown huge rips in the boxcar's side, blasting jagged splinters of wood everywhere. Slats became splints and grimy T-shirts bandages, sopping in seconds, handed off to be wrung out, then wrapped on again. A shredded artery pumping blood was just clamped by hand. Till the man died, someone else would take over as a manual tourniquet.

  Three, four, five men died from loss of blood during the next twenty-four hours, a calendar for Joe watching them pale whiter and whiter, weaker and weaker. An American son, husband, brother, name. Some wailing so much the survivors were glad to see them go. The dead, and pieces of them, were piled in one corner. By everyone else standing, a bit of room was made for the dozen wounded still living. Nothing else could be done for their awful pain, nothing at all. For the unwounded it was like watching relatives being executed in a torture chamber. Joe stood hour after hour, rocking and holding the man beside him, watching and hearing others struggle and die, each in his own individual way. The stench from ruptured bowels became so overpowering that the unwounded passed out standing up. When that happened Joe felt a new heavy weight and propped himself to support it.

  The guards never unbolted the boxcar till it reached Germany four nights later on a Stygian night setting a scene from Auschwitz as floodlights shone on the train and a wide semicircle of SS troops guarded the unloading, while German shepherds snarled, barked, and lunged on their leashes.

  The POWs in Joe's boxcar were uncowed. They ignored the order to form into ranks, instead performing a duty to their countrymen. First the wounded were passed out, then the dead—with dignity that silenced even the SS. Joe had been an altar boy, and lifting mutilated bodies, he felt, was like raising the bread and wine.

  A fellow pallbearer thought similarly: “Here's our offering, you Goddamned krauts, your curse. If you get back half of what you did to us, you'll get off easy.”

  * This film was shown in Germany for the secondary purpose of depicting the U.S. Army as a despicable rabble that could not stand up to soldiers with the sterling discipline of the Wehrmacht.

  * Wehrmacht intelligence warned the German high command that boxcars marked POW might become targets for paratrooper raids that could easily stop a train and liberate its prisoners, a good idea but one never contemplated by Allied Airborne planners.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE STALAGS

  WHEN THEIR TRAIN HAD RUMBLED THROUGH FIELDS DENSE with concrete antitank barriers, the POWs knew they were crossing the Siegfried Line into Germany. Joe arrived outside Limburg, noted for its cheese, at a camp with STALAG XII-A arching over the gate. It was one in a prison archipelago created five years before when Hitler had invaded Poland. From now on POWs would be “krieges,” Kriegsgefangener. Hardly any of them remained in the same stalag for the rest of the war. Unlike concentration camps, designed for slow or rapid extermination, stalags were essentially bins to store captured soldiers.* By 1944, with the outcome of the war threateningly uncertain, treatment of krieges was a concern of the Wehrmacht high command, whose nightmares included answering to nations who had sent their men to war under the Geneva Conventions. So despite hard labor, severe hardships, and sporadic cruelty, the lot of krieges was surpassingly better than that of other prisoners of the Third Reich. In contrast to France, there would be scant interrogation in stalags. A kriege might never again be questioned by the Germans unless his current conduct ran afoul of camp regulations.

  He could nearly hibernate, as many did, like the protagonist in Slaughterhouse-Five by kriege Kurt Vonnegut.

  Each kriege was assigned a prison partner called a “mucker” (British terminology), a mate with whom to muck it through captivity. Why the Germans in 1940 set up such a buddy system is unclear, probably as a device to apply pressure vicariously through the mucker of a truculent kriege. That worked sometimes, but far more often muckers helped each other cope. In Korea and Vietnam when the captors paired prisoners, it was to divide the POW chain of command or insinuate potential informers with suspected resisters. Propaganda to the outside world was the principal aim of the Communists, brainwashing the means.

  But in stalags such propaganda was a low priority because the world, by this time, had been immutably fixed in its division between the Allies and the Axis (Switzerland maintaining an amoral
appearance), so there were no important outsiders to win over. And for the very practical reason that they held more than three million POWs at one time or another, stalag commandants could devote few resources to brainwashing. What effort there was came from the propaganda ministry run by the notorious Joseph Goebbels. He wore a uniform but was not in the Wehrmacht.

  Krieges were constantly exposed to Goebbels's pronouncements and publications, but that was about as far as Joe's stalag commandants went after hearts and minds. Far more important was a tacit understanding that the relative positions of captors and captives would be resolved by the outcome of the war as it plunged toward conclusion. Winner take all, and if Hitler won, the losers would lose all. That much was clear from what krieges saw of the hideous treatment of Soviet prisoners, millions of whom, when the Wehrmacht overran most of European Russia, were simply enclosed in barbed wire to die of starvation and exposure. Russian prisoners later in the war fared even worse.

  Churchill opined that “the Germans are either at your throat or at your feet.” As the Allies closed in on Hitler's frontier, stalag guards treated Western krieges like fellow soldiers. But when British armor failed to seize a bridge too far at Arn-hem, camp authorities celebrated victory through new restrictions on kriege life. Into the winter when General Bradley breached the Siegfried Line, these same restrictions relaxed noticeably. Then with Hitler's initial success in the Battle of the Bulge, more and worse restrictions were imposed.

  A dynamic of the war watched constantly by krieges and their guards was the strategic bombardment of Germany, the attempt to deliver body blows on Hitler's industry. It meant American bombers by day, British by night, nearly every day and every night. In 1944 the targets were usually away from stalags, though frequent thunder resounded across the land. Fighters from the depleted Luftwaffe rose to meet Allied armadas, but aerial combat was at altitudes too high to see more than contrails and casualties. A plumed spiral of smoke ejecting parachutes was a bomber; a meteor could be either a German or American fighter, but nearby bombs were a rarity. Stalags had been openly identified by the Germans and the locations circled on maps of Allied pilots, making a stalag one of the safest places from air attack, yet a place from which krieges were often ghoulish spectators. Joe grew to dread seeing a formation of B-24s attacked by the Luftwaffe. A similar flight of B-17s (Flying Fortresses) usually battled through intact, but when Liberators were hit by fire they soon disintegrated and, after the first fighter pass chewed up a B-24, a couple of the crew would “hit the silk.” They used a rip cord to open their chutes and steered them down. Suddenly above them the Liberator blew apart and there were a half dozen more canopies clustered up there. From his jumping experience, Joe was pretty sure that the B-24's explosion had blown open the chutes. He could tell they were not being steered because random wind drifted the canopies like confetti of death. He mumbled something about bodies descending, souls ascending. His mucker looked at him with approval—Joe's head was coming back together.