News-Info-Alerts

Re: Ex-POWs Teach Patriotism

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: March 28, 2002

"Former POW tells kids about patriotism
By JOHN C. SCATTERGOOD

IRVINGTON — Former World War II Prisoner of War George Webb has received his certificate from the government of France thanking him for his service to the country.

Webb, 77, a former Mt. Vernon resident now living in Irvington was talking to students of Irvington Grade School Monday when Congressman George Shimkus walked into the school gym with the certificate.

The certificates were distributed to 250 former soldiers in the St. Louis area earlier this year but Webb was ill and unable to receive his. Shimkus had attended the ceremonies and picked up Webb’s copy for him, hand delivering it Monday afternoon to Webb as he talked about his prisoner of war experiences to the students.

“It was a great honor to make the presentation,” said Shimkus.
“I’d gotten to know him over the years during my travels around Washington County, which is a part of my district.”

Webb was the subject of a feature story in the Register-News last February where he described the various fates of the men who were around him when he, and they, were captured in the closing months of WWII.

Wearing the uniform of the Ex-Prisoner of War organization to which he belongs, Webb was pelted with a series of questions by the students.

“I think all ex-POW’s have a deeper appreciation for our government and our system and the people in the service,” Webb told the students.

Such an experience, he added, can make a person “more focused.”

As an example, he noted that there aren’t very many surviving POW’s in the country, but at least two are serving in the U.S. Senate.

“So, obviously, those people have to be highly regarded and highly dedicated.”
On the downside, Webb said, “There’s hardly a living POW who was incarcerated for any time who doesn’t have some gastrointestinal or other problems.”

A video tape presentation that Webb brought along of his, and other POW experiences, included photographs of skeletal POW’s who he said had lost 100 pounds in 100 days. He lost so much weight that just a thumb and forefinger would make it around his upper arms.

Asked by a student if he’d ever been beaten as a prisoner, Webb said he hadn’t, though the prisoners sometimes were shoved with rifle butts as they were being loaded in railroad boxcars. He also recalled a wounded American soldier who had been shot in the back of the head on being captured by the Germans.

Additionally, Webb recalled having a brush with the German hatred for Jews as he remembered how a “Jewish boy” standing in front of him had been separated out from the rest of the soldiers and never seen again.

Asked if he was scared on being captured, Webb said no, though acknowledged being seriously concerned.

“You’re so pumped up with adrenaline that you more or less act like a robot,” he told the students in the school gymnasium.

As to whether he’d rejoin the military if it were possible, Webb said, “I would love to be with the troops.”

“I have the greatest respect for the people who are serving our country...and there’s nothing that I wouldn’t do for them.”

Perhaps the most gruesome time for Webb was in one of the three prison camps in which he was housed. That one had the prisoners staying in barracks that were over the camp morgue.

“Every morning they (guards) came in for roll call and there would be people who had passed away during the night and they were thrown into the morgue.”
A Russian prisoner burial detail would arrive and “they would take all the clothes and shoes, everything, off of the bodies.”
The bodies were then “stacked on the back of a flat bed truck like cord wood.”

©Register-News 2002 "