News-Info-Alerts

Re: WW II Ex-POW Remembers

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: March 22, 2002

"Former Urbana school superintendent remembers days as POW

Sunday, March 17, 2002

URBANA (AP) -- As a former Urbana school superintendent and one-time member of the Champaign County Board, Kermit Harden is well known around here. But he's one of those people who never talked much about his experiences in World War II.

That's changing: A documentary is being made about a prisoner exchange involving a group of Allied soldiers held by the Germans, and Harden was one of those soldiers.

"I'm just lucky to be alive," he said of his military service in Europe. "We all should have been killed three or four times."

Harden, now 77, traveled last month to Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., for a reunion with 11 other soldiers who had been prisoners with him, and for interviews for a documentary that Samford is sponsoring.

During World War II, Harden was imprisoned on an island in the Bay of Biscay, just south of northwestern France in the Atlantic Ocean. He remembers it with a wry sense of humor, calling it: "45 days and one shower."

Harden was an 18-year-old sophomore at the University of Illinois when he enlisted in the Army in the spring of 1943.

"I was probably just keeping up with the crowd," he said.

In 1944, he shipped out for France on a ship carrying 18,000 other soldiers.

"By late August, 65,000 Germans were backed up at Lorient and St. Nazaire," Harden said. "Our division was assembled to keep them there."

In September, Harden was wounded, and ultimately awarded the Purple Heart, but he calls the incident "a little shrapnel set off by a cat who tripped a wire."

The next month, a French farmer told the Americans that some German soldiers wanted to surrender. In the late afternoon of Oct. 2, Harden and some others went off to meet the Germans.

"They were there, but they were not ready to surrender," Harden said. "They shot our scout. Five were killed and five or six were wounded and sent to a German hospital. That left 45 of us who were captured. We were taken by boat into the Atlantic Ocean to an island called Ile de Groix. I remember an old fort and a moat. There were two big rooms with bunk beds, straw mats, fleas and lice."

The only heat was a wood-fired potbelly stove in one of the two rooms.

"We just kind of existed there on two slices of bread and a little bowl of soup each day," he said. "I lost 40 pounds and in those days, 40 pounds was a lot for me. They took us out for walks and the French would give us food like apples, tomatoes and heads of cabbage. We'd string out our columns so guys out of sight of guards could collect stuff."

When the guards allowed Catholic soldiers to attend a church service in a nearby village, 10 of the prisoners went and came back loaded with food.

"The next Sunday, the Catholics had converted us all," Harden said. "Later, we were a little embarrassed when we heard about how hard prisoners of war in Germany had it," he says.

Throughout most of their 45 days of imprisonment, the American soldiers had an advocate they saw only at a distance. He was an American Red Cross worker bringing candy bars, crude cigarettes and clothes.

"Come to find out, that man was negotiating for our release," Harden said.

The man was Andrew Gerow Hodges from Birmingham, Ala. A book titled "The History of the 94th Infantry Division," published by The Battery Press of Nashville, Tenn., tells how Hodges negotiated four prisoner of war exchanges, working entirely on his own. A total of 149 Allied soldiers, 114 of them Americans, were released.

Harden was lucky enough to be in the first group released, on Nov. 16.

Hodges was later awarded the Bronze Star, the highest military award a civilian could receive at the time. Today, he is a retired insurance executive who works with the Boy Scouts and other charities in Birmingham. He is a life trustee of Samford University, which is financing the documentary."