Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  Guy next asked about what type of training Halm had received, and the German went on in some detail and with obvious pride about the excellent training he had received in antitank weaponry.

  Guy asked if Halm had had any contact with French civilians before his capture, adding that he had probably studied French in “Realschule.”

  As soon as he said it, Guy knew he had slipped up. There was only one Realschule, a high school that offered a more modern curriculum—such as modern languages rather than ancient ones—in Hildesheim. Guy and Halm had both attended the school.

  Puzzled by how the American interrogator could have such information about him, Halm tried to shade his eyes from the light to get a better look at the face in shadows across from him.

  “Why do you know so much about me?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Oberleutnant, you are a highly decorated officer, and we keep exact information on highly decorated enemy officers.”

  Guy did not know if Halm believed him. Realizing he risked being recognized, Guy halted the interrogation and had Halm returned to the cage.

  The next morning, Guy had the prisoner from Hildesheim taken to another POW camp so they would not see each other in the light of day. He did so without ever asking the question: What happened to my family?

  It had been stressed to the German-born interrogators at Camp Ritchie that identifying themselves as such was not only dangerous for their own safety should they fall into enemy hands, but it could jeopardize any family members they had in Germany or occupied territories. But there was another reason Guy had not asked the one question uppermost on his mind.

  He feared the answer.

  The German soldiers took Werner Angress and the other captured U.S. paratroopers into a field. They ordered them to strip—including removing their watches and rings—and lie on their stomachs. Their clothes were searched for hidden weapons before being returned, with most of their personal items gone.

  One of the other paratroopers turned toward Werner. “Sergeant, tell the Heinie I want to keep my wedding ring!” A German was admiring the gold band.

  Werner looked up, horrified to be given away as German.

  “I can’t,” Werner told the GI under his breath. “Sorry.”

  The paratrooper understood, nodded, and lost his wedding ring.

  After that, no one came close to revealing what they knew about Werner. They were trucked from the field to a barn, where they spent the night without food or medical care for their wounds. The next morning they were searched again, then taken in small groups to a farmhouse that served as a command post for the unit that had captured them.

  Werner was interrogated by an older warrant officer. He got the impression that this bespectacled, middle-aged Sonderführer had been a teacher in civilian life because he spoke typical school English, heavily accented. This worried Werner, because he thought the warrant officer might pick up on his own German-accented English. Werner was limping noticeably from the shrapnel wound, and his interrogator had promised him he would be taken to a hospital to have his wound treated as soon as they were finished.

  “What unit do you belong to, Sergeant?” asked the interrogator.

  Werner pointed to his 82nd Airborne shoulder patch.

  “Yes, but what regiment?”

  As two 82nd regiments had jumped on D-Day and one had been held in reserve in England—and might or might not have yet arrived in Normandy—such information could prove helpful to the enemy.

  “I can’t tell you,” Werner said, “and you wouldn’t if you were in my shoes. Under the Geneva Conventions, all I have to say is my name, rank, and serial number.”

  “Your first name is Werner. Are you of German descent? Perhaps you were named after your grandfather?”

  Werner realized the interrogator had given him a plausible answer.

  “You are correct,” said Werner. “I was named after my grandfather Werner.” Why stop now? “Grandfather and other members of the family immigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century.”

  “Where were you born?”

  Werner, the native Berliner, picked Lynchburg, Virginia, a town he had never visited but knew of because it was home to most of the men from his first army unit—Company B, 116th regiment, 29th Infantry Division.

  “Lynchburg!” crowed the interrogator. “I have been there!”

  Werner tried not to show his distress. What were the chances that a German interrogator in Normandy would have been to Lynchburg, Virginia? Rather than wait for a question that he might be unable to answer because he didn’t know Lynchburg from Timbuktu, Werner went on the offensive. “When were you last there?” he asked warily.

  “In 1926,” said the interrogator. “I was a very young man traveling for a German textiles firm. They sent me there for three weeks.” Werner asked if he had been back since, and the man said no. Relieved, Werner said, “Well, Lynchburg has changed tremendously since then.”

  The German seemed almost wistful. “Oh, I have no doubt it has.”

  Werner knew it was time to change the subject. “Is it possible to get something to eat?”

  “Yes, as soon as we are finished, we’ll give you some food. Now, when and where did you parachute jump?”

  Werner felt back in control. “You know I can’t tell you that.” His training at Camp Ritchie was paying off now that he had found himself, quite unexpectedly, on the opposite side of a prisoner interrogation. He knew what he could say and what he wasn’t compelled to say under the Geneva Conventions, and also, more subtly, how to keep up a friendly and reasonable dialogue during an interrogation without giving anything away.

  A few minutes later, a tall Wehrmacht lieutenant, who had been conducting an interrogation in another room, walked in. He asked the older interrogator in German what he had found out. Nichts, Werner’s interrogator responded. The lieutenant said he hadn’t learned anything either.

  Werner and the other wounded soldiers were transported to Cherbourg and deposited at the Louis Pasteur Hospital, where there were more than one hundred GI patients, many badly wounded. Some had had limbs amputated. Werner’s leg wound was treated with sulfur power to avoid infection and dressed. Since he could still walk, he was assigned to assist the German and French orderlies with feeding the Americans.

  Werner’s job allowed him complete access to the hospital, and his ability to understand both languages proved useful. Starting that first night, he would tell the patients shortly before lights went out what war news he had picked up from overhearing the Germans talking. That was how they all learned with certainty that the Normandy landings had been successful and that U.S. troops were advancing on Cherbourg and its vital port. The Germans were already blowing up docks and other harbor facilities they did not want to leave for the Allies.

  Three days later, Werner and other wounded who could walk joined U.S. prisoners being held a short distance outside of Cherbourg in an old barn that had bunk beds teeming with fleas. Werner preferred sleeping on the ground and spent a wakeful night listening to explosions several miles away. Early the next morning, the war came much closer when artillery shells landed three hundred yards from the barn. Several of the guards ran away, but those who remained decided to move the prisoners to a large tunnel complex at the edge of the city. When they arrived, the tunnel, which led into a hill, was serving as the headquarters of the German 709th Static Infantry Division, a coastal defense force that had sustained four thousand casualties since D-Day.

  The next morning, Werner was trucked back to the hospital with a dozen other prisoners to help load beds and mattresses to bring back to the overcrowded tunnel. The ring around Cherbourg was growing tighter, and as they rode through town, artillery shells were dropping everywhere.

  When they arrived at the hospital, Werner saw that manned antiaircraft guns had been posted around the building. Several German combat soldiers stood in the entrance of the hospital, and they looked daggers at the American POWs. As they passed by, W
erner heard the Germans talking of killing the “amerikanischen Bastarde.” Once inside the building, Werner told the others what he had overheard, but added, “They probably won’t, but don’t wander off. Stick with me.” Werner now felt like a mother hen, with everyone staying close to him as they carried the mattresses out of the hospital and loaded them into the truck. One 101st paratrooper named Sigmund “Sig” Stajkowski, with whom Werner had become friends during their days trying to evade capture, was still loading the truck with some other prisoners as the rest of the group went back inside. At that moment, an artillery shell landed right in front of the hospital. The concussion of the blast knocked down Werner and everyone else in the corridor, which suddenly went dark. Werner heard yelling and screaming outside, the Germans cursing American artillery for shooting at a hospital even as their own anti-aircraft batteries next to it blazed away.

  Outside, several German soldiers were dead, five American prisoners wounded, and Sig’s dead body lay next to the truck. He had been a sergeant who just before D-Day had been busted to private because he had returned from a weekend leave several days late. Werner knew Sig as a stand-up guy and one hell of a soldier; he had always been willing to help Werner in the often-delicate dealings with French farmers to secure food. Twenty-five-year-old Sig had been a farmer himself, having worked in his family’s dairy in Wisconsin prior to enlisting in the army in 1940. Werner knelt down and tenderly placed his hand on Sig’s shoulder. He was glad his buddy had taken those extra days of unauthorized leave in England and hoped he’d had a swell time. He removed one of Sig’s two dog tags from the chain around his neck—the other one stayed with the body for identification purposes—and helped load his broken body into another truck that carried him away, together with the German corpses, all stacked like a cord of firewood.

  The next day, June 24, as American forces were reported to be on the outskirts of the city, the Germans transported the prisoners to the harbor area and led them into an underground shelter.

  While some German troops outside continued to blow up the docks, others trickled into the shelter for safety. Werner was amazed to see the bespectacled warrant officer who had interrogated him show up. He greeted Werner like an old friend. Soon, he and Werner were playing chess. Every few minutes the interrogator looked up worriedly at the ceiling, which shook each time there was an artillery strike or bomb blast, and asked if Werner thought it would hold up.

  “Probably,” Werner said, “unless we take a direct hit.”

  “Why don’t your people stop it?”

  “Why don’t your guys surrender?”

  “This whole war is insane,” said the interrogator.

  The more they talked, always in English, the more Werner liked him. An older draftee with a paunch, he was not the stereotypical Nazi soldier, physically or politically. He was definitely not someone Hitler would have been proud of. Unlike some American-born GIs, Werner knew, of course, that not all Germans were bad Germans.

  As the hours went by, the other German soldiers in the shelter, interested in self-preservation and seeing that the fall of Cherbourg to the Allied forces was only a matter of time, turned decidedly friendlier. They gave the prisoners cigars and champagne left by a general and inquired about conditions in U.S. POW camps. Werner overheard them talking worriedly among themselves. Tomorrow, we shall be their prisoners, one said, to which the others agreed. They spoke about wanting to be sent to America, not England, as if signing up for a sightseeing tour.

  Werner asked for paper and pencil. By the light of a flickering candle, he began a record of some of his experiences since D-Day. It had been a long three weeks, half spent in captivity. His last entry for June 26: “Tomorrow is my 24th birthday, and I want to be a free man again.”

  His birthday wish came true the next day, at exactly noon, when the German general charged with the defense of Cherbourg surrendered under a white flag to officers from the U.S. 9th Infantry Division. As they had predicted, the Germans who had been guarding them lined up outside to be taken away under armed guard.

  Some of the freed Americans suggested Werner go over to the middle-aged Sonderführer who had interrogated him and tell him, in fluent German, that he had been outsmarted by a fellow interrogator. Werner declined. “He treated us with decency from beginning to end,” he explained. “The last thing I want to do is humiliate him now that he’s a prisoner.”

  Werner walked over to him. In English, he said, “I hope that we treat you with the same courtesy as you treated us.”

  They shook hands.

  Werner rejoined his regiment later that evening near the village of Vindefontaine, a little south of Sainte-Mère-Église, which he learned had been the first town liberated in the early hours of D-Day by elements of the 82nd, not far from where he was supposed to have been dropped. He was warmly welcomed by his buddies, all of whom had been convinced he was dead. A medical officer checked his leg wound, which was healing. At Werner’s pleading, the doctor reluctantly gave him permission to stay with the regiment instead of being sent back to England to convalesce.

  Not long after his return, Werner interrogated a prisoner who said he knew of a group of Germans who wanted to surrender but were afraid of being shot by the Americans. Werner had him pinpoint their location on a map. Taking a few troopers with him, Werner walked toward the spot, at the edge of a small wood at the bottom of a hill. When they reached the hill, Werner decided to walk down it alone. Reaching the bottom, he shouted in German to the hidden enemy soldiers that their war was over now, and it was time for them to surrender. He assured them they would be well treated.

  Two dozen Germans emerged from the brush with their hands behind their heads, led by their ranking noncommissioned officer, a corporal. Werner told the corporal to stay with him and directed the others up the hill.

  From the corporal, Werner soon knew the number of his regiment, where the remaining men of his badly shattered unit were hiding, and other bits of information. The corporal came from Berlin, he told Werner, and was a shoemaker in civilian life. He and his men were fed up with the war and had decided Why get killed now?

  Just then, one of the paratroopers up the hill hollered to Werner that an American lieutenant they didn’t know had arrived on the scene and wanted to shoot their prisoners.

  Directing the corporal to follow, Werner hurried up the hill, where he found the lieutenant pointing a rifle at the group of prisoners. Werner’s men had spread out protectively in front of the Germans, telling the officer they were the prisoners of Sergeant Angress and that he should stand back. The lieutenant refused, ordering them several times to step aside, but the troopers stood firm.

  “Get out of the way now!” ordered the young lieutenant.

  What Werner immediately suspected about the lieutenant was soon verified: he had just arrived at Normandy by boat and was keen to bag his first German and be a war hero.

  “Lieutenant,” Werner said firmly, “I am under orders from regiment to bring in these prisoners for interrogation. This is not your business. I will turn you in to my captain if you don’t leave.”

  Werner’s men raised their weapons in the lieutenant’s direction. He reluctantly lowered his rifle, gave Werner an angry look, then stomped away. Werner and his men escorted their prisoners off the field of battle to a POW cage to be interrogated. The eager lieutenant, Werner later heard, was killed in action a few days later.

  Plans were being made to “celebrate” the Fourth of July holiday with an assault against the German lines. Captain Breen, Werner’s regimental intelligence officer, told him to focus his interrogations on where the enemy units facing them had laid mines. The day before the attack, Werner interrogated a German sergeant who said little but in whose dispatch case he found a map with an overlay of every mine in the area. Recognizing the map as a major find, he rushed it to Breen.

  “This is marvelous,” Breen gushed. “We have to get maps to our battalions and the other regiments before the attack.”

>   Knowing the precise location of the buried explosives would allow disposal units to dig up and defuse them so Americans troops did not have to walk across live minefields. The information Werner had gained was so important, Breen announced that he would personally deliver a copy of the map to every unit in the division early in the morning before the attack began at noon.

  “Would you like to drive me?” Breen asked.

  “Yes, I’d like to very much,” Werner answered.

  Their exchange was not typical of one between an officer and enlisted man, but then neither was their relationship. About ten years older than Werner and married with three children, Breen treated his young sergeant in a friendly, almost fatherly manner. In turn, Werner was quick to volunteer for whatever job Breen needed done and even helped the kindly officer remember the times of staff meetings and other such details that had a way of slipping Breen’s mind.

  Werner worked late that night marking the location of every mine on more than a dozen copies of military maps. He finally got to sleep shortly before sunrise. By the time he awakened a short time later, the captain had left. Werner was told that Breen had decided not to wake him up, since he had worked all night, and had found someone else to drive.

  Around 9:00 A.M., a trooper approached Werner and asked, “You know Captain Breen is dead?”

  Werner was stunned. “No! What happened?”

  “Jeep hit a land mine.”

  Getting directions to where the accident had happened, Werner jumped in a jeep and found the spot where the captain’s dismembered body still lay in a ditch next to his crumpled vehicle. He was told the driver had been taken to a field hospital with major injuries. Werner fought back tears over the death of the man he considered a friend. It hurt doubly when Breen’s effects were delivered to the regiment. Included were the copies of the map he had been distributing, on which Werner had clearly marked the buried road mine that had killed him. The captain’s well-known absentmindedness had been his undoing. He had died on July 4.