Behind Hitler's Lines

by Thomas H. Taylor

  No matter: a roof overhead was luxurious compared with a chilled water-filled foxhole on the Island. Besides, passes were the order of the day, the first in nearly three months. Unleashed, Screaming Eagles took Reims by storm, frolicking and forgetting while swinging from crystal chandeliers as substitutes for parachute risers, doing PLFs from balconies onto feather beds. Drinking as if the dead were there with them, despising those who had not seen the elephant and smashed its tusks.

  In early December General Taylor departed for Washington to represent the 18th Airborne Corps at a conference called by General Marshall concerning structural changes in Airborne divisions based upon their combat experience in Europe and the Pacific. The 101st's assistant commander went off to England for a critique of Market-Garden, leaving the Screaming Eagles to rest and recuperate under Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, who headed division artillery. The departure of the top of the chain of command raised no comment: the Western Front was quiet, the Germans seeming content to man the Siegfried Line while their hands were full of Russians on the Eastern Front. The prospective contest closest to combat was a football game between the 506th and 502nd on Christmas Day. Before then those troopers not on pass lazed about as the scent of a thousand turkeys from home wafted over mess halls.

  Ed Albers was alone on duty in I Company's orderly room at 3:00 A.M. on December 17 when the phone rang. Uh-oh; at that hour it must be MPs holding some trooper who had closed a Reims bar with a smoke grenade. Instead it was Captain Anderson, ordering the cooks to produce breakfast in an hour.

  “What's up, sir?”

  “The krauts have broken through somewhere. That's all I know, but the division's been alerted to move.”

  General McAuliffe knew little more. His orders from Reims were just to motor march toward Luxembourg, Tony. Flatbed trucks are en route to pick up the 101st. You'll be with either 18th or 8th Corps, we haven't decided yet. You probably won't see any action, and we're sorry if this spoils the holidays.

  A peppery but self-commanded man, McAuliffe rose from his chair, muttering profanity, as he received those instructions on the phone. He gathered himself to point out to Ike's staffer that the 101st didn't have winter gear or even much ammo. “I've got companies that haven't received new weapons for the ones disabled on the Island. I've got hundreds of replacements who haven't even been assigned.”

  We know, we regret, but just get moving and report to General Middleton. Things will sort out, sir, and you'll probably be back in Mourmelon by Christmas. Ike's looking forward to seeing that football game (he was a punter at West Point). What did you call it—the Champagne Bowl?

  There was a total of forty players on the two football squads. In the next month seven would be killed and seventeen wounded around the Belgian town of Bastogne.

  * The misnomer can only be attributed to Americans' typically poor knowledge of foreign geography. To them, the Netherlands meant Holland with wooden shoes and windmills. The error was never corrected, not even on a stone memorial at Arlington Cemetery or the 101st's monument at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. This is a source of polite annoyance for the Dutch where the 101st jumped, one of whom told the author, “If we had liberated New Jersey during World War II, what would you think if we had called it New Hampshire?”

  * The author attended the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of “Remember September,” marking the liberation of the southern Netherlands. In 1994 commerce with neighboring Germany was brisk and cordial, but for the week of September 17 not a single German license plate could be seen on Hell's Highway.

  * Survivors of the farmhouse fight cannot rememberthe lieutenant's name, a common lapse after searing combat and the passage of years. What Albers remembers is that “Green” had been a track star at the University of Southern California, one who would never run again.

  * As did Robert Postma fifty-five years later, recalling that day when the 101st departed from his homeland: “I was eleven years old at the time of our liberation. We had been under Nazi occupation for almost five years. Our beautiful little country lay in wreck and ruin till 17 September, the day the sky filled with hundreds of planes. From the place I was watching I could see gliders coming down and paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division landing just north of Eindhoven, my home. Soon there was incessant gunfire and explosions. To me the Screaming Eagles were like ferocious gods from heaven. That has remained the greatest moment of my life: when I knew we were free, free to live, free to breathe the air. It meant the terror was over, the pain of cold and hunger would cease. It meant that we could laugh again. It meant that all the cherished things of life that were lost would gradually return to us. It meant that once again we could live as a people with dignity and respect.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A DOG AND A MOLE

  STILL WEARING ITEMS OF JOE'S UNIFORM, ALBERS WAS PUT IN for the Silver Star for saving Lieutenant Green at Veghel. In the meantime Joe was in a boxcar with trembling memories of the train across France. Now a homemade compass gave a depressing answer to the krieges' question of where they were going—east, deeper into Germany, farther from the liberation that seemed possible after initial good news from Market-Garden. They had just left a stalag that might soon be liberated, en route to one that obviously wouldn't.

  As the suffocating miles rattled by, Joe's disappointment reached despair. The news of September 17—Market-Garden—had been like a call from the Screaming Eagles: we're coming! Then the echo faded. If luck were a lady, Joe had been her unnoticed suitor. Yes, he was still living after several events that could have killed him and nearly did, but merely being alive produced little gratitude at his age. It came over him that he'd have to change his luck by will alone. So Joe began eyeing the boxcar grille. The two troopers on the train from Paris could have been crushed on the rail bed for all he knew, but the memory of them disappearing into the night air was still an almost religious vision.

  He maneuvered under the grille, pulled out his shiv, and started prying. Other prisoners helped. They pried, dug, pushed, and wrenched, but the German boxcar was better built than the French forty-or-eight. For two days and nights they worked on it, then tried the wallboards but found them inches thick with a metal plate in the middle. Joe gave up when his shiv broke, a time mark of prudence in his mental recovery from the blow that had put him in a coma for six days and distorted memory the way sunspots short-circuit the electromagnetic field. He was able to reconstruct his thoughts for a period thereafter, able to reflect that breaking the shiv probably saved his young life.

  “Even if I'd gotten out, I was in the heart of Nazi Germany— not France—with no real plan to get away. I pushed my luck. Lady Luck doesn't like that. After the war I read a perfect description: luck equals opportunity plus preparation. I sure wasn't prepared.”

  Mostly at night, skirting air raids on Berlin, the train rumbled on, its occasional toots low, grim, and authoritative, as if saying, Make way for Hitler's Reichsbahn. Joe awoke feeling a different pulse from the rails, a new sound that came from a bridge over a good-size river. The best guess was the Oder, that the train had crossed the prewar frontier into Poland.

  “Anything in Germany at that time was nothing compared to what had happened in Poland,” Joe says. “Now we were in it. One of the college guys on the train said, ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.’ ”

  AFTER THE FALL of the Berlin Wall, it became possible for Joe to search for Stalag III-C, the destination of that train. During the cold-war years he had retraced his journey through France: St. Come-du-Mont, Starvation Hill, Alengon, the Paris railyard, visits therapeutic and resolving of memories. In 1992, when Joe crossed the Oder for the fourth time, John, his son in the State Department, was driving a rattletrap rental car. Joe had a detailed Polish map but only a vague idea of where III-C had been. As he had since V-E Day, Joe wore a small compass on his watch strap. It didn't help. With growing discouragement, father and son crisscrossed miles of unbroken pine forest. Saint Christopher never ado
pted me, Joe joked wanly.

  Then on a dirt road they came upon a farmer trudging east. Fluent in German as well as Russian, John hailed him with wie gehts? There was a slight but not too friendly response, so John tried a Russian salutation.

  Stalag III-C? Da, the farmer knew where it had been, and since he was headed that way, he'd gladly accept a ride. Joe moved to the backseat and peppered him with questions for John to translate. The farmer was impressed that Joe had been a III-C kriege, and was now the first American to return. But there had been French, he explained, and for good reason, as the visitors would see. He was a boy at that time … life had been extremely hard… he'd lost his parents, their farm confiscated when this part of Poland was annexed by the Reich. The Russians gave it back. They were hard masters but nothing like the Germans.

  The dirt road became stone, huge flagstones pressed flush with the earth, stones scarred and marred by deep gouges, which, though anciently weathered, were so evident that Joe asked to stop and examine them. The farmer nodded; yes, down this road had come the first Russian armor, each cannon overlapping the hull of the tank ahead. No rubber treads, just the metal cleats clattering like tractors from hell. Stop, please. In twilight the farmer pointed to a low silhouette in the forest, a cairn. They got out to look, for this was all that remained of III-C, all that had not been reclaimed by the state-planted pine forest. The eerie cairn was a memorial to seven thousand French POWs who had been wiped out by a typhus epidemic in 1941-1942 when the stalag opened.

  There was one other artifact. Where everywhere else the forest floor was flat, there was a field of wavy earth beneath the trees. Before years of gentle erosion the waves had been mounds, the mass grave for twenty thousand or more Russian POWs—the farmer could only guess how many. Most died he supposed, from starvation, for even farmers went hungry during the winter of 1944-1945, the hardest winter anyone could remember, the winter he'd lost his parents.

  The three walked while Joe tried to orient the present with his memories, then returned to the car where he sat for long minutes hunched with hands clasped between legs. What happened to the railroad track? he asked suddenly. They had not walked far enough, replied the farmer. Darkness was deepening, but Joe wanted to see it. They found it, the single track overgrown with weeds higher than the rusty rails, weeds so strong they had pierced a rotted platform.

  JOE' s TRAIN HAD DISGORGED its first load of Americans on the platform at III-C, half the size of IV-B, whence they'd come. There was no forest then; the surrounding land was farmed luckily for the new arrivals because local potatoes became their sustenance. Back in Germany everything had to be trucked to stalags or brought in by rail. The more the Anglo-Americans ruled the skies, the harder it was for the Germans to transport anything. But Jabos didn't strafe across the Oder. By Allied agreement, they left it to the Soviet air force, which at that time was out of range and not nearly so strong as the RAF and AAF. So in a way Joe never expected, III-C's location near the city of Kustrin was a blessing.

  “If ten thousand Russians starved to death at III-C,” Joe says, “it wasn't because there was nothing to eat but because the krauts wouldn't feed them. That farmer's parents died when the Wehrmacht took their produce and livestock. Guards told us that all Slavs were to be exterminated. Starving them to death was the most efficient way to do it. When the guards said that, they just looked at us as if we should understand. The farmer's parents understood. They let themselves die while they gave him all their food so he could survive. It was that simple.

  “I read that right after the war the U.S. government asked Hollywood to reconstruct the Germans. Please don't make any more movies about nasty Nazis; don't always make the Germans the villains. We need American public opinion to support the new Germany as an ally against the USSR.”

  The British felt similarly, that the looming threat from Stalin was justification to sweep the evil of Hitler under the rug. After V-E Day Montgomery said, “Uplifting and enlightening films are needed at once…. He who controls the cinema controls Germany.”

  FROM MEMORY JOE CAN diagram the layout of III-C: railroad track on one side, stone road on the other, with a creek beside it. Within a double fence of barbed wire, German buildings fronted on the road, separating several rows of American huts enclosed in another barbed-wire fence. The Russian compound, also set off by a fence, adjoined. Joe was among the first Americans transferred to III-C. More arrived after Market-Garden, and a flood after the Battle of the Bulge, but the Germans kept them in separate compounds so they could not learn the ropes from the old guys. Eventually the total number of Americans reached two thousand.

  In setting up their compound they followed military organization, forming squads, platoons, and companies. Senior NCOs formed the chain of command; the lowest-ranking were hut commanders (six huts to a company), the highest being Master Sergeant Coleman from the 82nd Airborne. Joe never met him. Coleman and his small staff lived outside the compound by the stalag headquarters. That created some resentment at first, but they had to live where the Germans told them to, so if they were better off than other krieges, that was just an example of an old army acronym, RHIP—rank hath its priviliges.

  There was another chain of influence, if not command, a democratically capitalist one headed by BTOs—big-time operators. They gained that status by being the shrewdest barterers or biggest winners at gambling. A big loser had nothing to pay off his debts except personal service, so he became what the British back at IV-B called a dog robber or batman.

  “I don't know where batman came from,” Joe says, “but it wasn't the comic book. You might see a BTO private with a staff-sergeant batman who made his bunk, stood in for him at roll call, swept his hut, brought him chow—did anything else the BTO wanted. Now and then those roles would reverse after a big crap game. Coleman's chain of command had a lot of respect for the BTOs, more so than vice versa.

  “Our first concern at III-C was the winter coming on. A smart thing I did was throw my ditty bag on the top bunk of a three-decker. There was a small stove in the middle of the hut, and I knew the heat would rise. Also no one would climb over me and drop straw. I think it was at that point I considered myself an old kriege.

  “I did all right in crap games but wasn't a BTO and, looking back, actually didn't want to be. BTOs pretty much lived in the present, accepted it, made the best of it, enjoyed the status. It could be very different from what they'd been in the army. I understood their point of view: if you had to be a POW, be a BTO. But for me escaping was all that mattered, so I used my hoard of cigarettes to get on the escape committee.”

  Word evidently reached Coleman about Joe's efforts to break out of the boxcar. His application for the five-member escape committee was readily accepted. Three of them had to approve any escape plan before it went up to Coleman for the final go-ahead and support from the supply committee. During Joe's first month only three proposals were presented, two for tunnels—the classic British way—and one jail break. None was approved, indeed not a single vote cast in favor of any. Tunnels, the committee felt, were too slow, especially with the ground starting to freeze. Using force (jail break) needed enough “nonescapees” who would risk their lives to support it. To get a few escapees outside the wire required a full-scale riot inside. Lives were sure to be lost and everyone else punished. None of the committee thought krieges would sacrifice the way they had on D Day. Back then their attitude was save the world; now it was save yourself.

  “When the Market and Bulge POWs came in we heard their slogan, ‘Win the war in ‘44.’ We told them that here it was’ Stay alive till ‘45.’ ”

  Proposals were also rejected for want of an escape strategy when loose in Poland, the inherent problem with III-C. No one had a solution, just as Joe had not when he tried to pry his way out of the boxcar. Nor was there any precedent because no one in institutional memory had ever escaped from III-C. After a while proposals stopped coming in and the escape committee was dormant, but their deliberations
had keened Joe's thinking about the potential and pitfalls of an escape. Just as important, he had identified two men who looked like good escape confederates. Their names, as Joe remembers them, were Brewer and Quinn. He transferred to their hut, though that meant giving up his top bunk.

  One of the first essentials for an escape was getting to know the Germans and their routines. The guard shifts were eight hours, one of which was at night when krieges couldn't leave their huts, but shifts rotated, so if Joe wanted to focus on a particular guard, he could talk with him every couple of days. Starting a conversation was no problem. Guards liked to practice English. Word was that several were planning their own escape, to get away from the Red Army and be captured by the Americans. Using his German name and a cigarette, Joe could get along with almost any guard who wasn't SS. The rule was, don't mess with the SS. Don't even try to talk to them, or you might get a smashed mouth. Besides the guards, there was a “ferret” in his compound, Sergeant Schultz, the only German Joe ever got to know. Their introduction was through a warning.

  The pitiful Russians were herded around like sheep, taken out to labor details before dawn and returned after dark, worked to death while being starved to death. Schultz advised Joe about a new guard—don't go near the fence when he's on duty. One afternoon the Americans saw him in action. The Russians had been hauling garbage from camp headquarters when a whistle blew, the signal to get back to then-compound or be lashed there with bullwhips.

  “One skinny little kid tried to scoop up potato peels from the bottom of a garbage pail and fell behind,” Joe recounts. “The master racist Schultz warned me about was a dog trainer—police dogs. He yelled something, let a German shepherd loose, and it sprang right for the jugular. The dog threw the poor kid's head back and forth till the neck was cut through and his head came out like a wine cork. The new guard had a belly laugh, and the kriege next to me threw up. He was sick all day.”