News-Info-Alerts

Re: Bataan Death March Survivors Meet after 60 Years

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: April 09, 2002

"Veterans of World War II POW camp in Germany meet after nearly six decades

By: Molly Miron, Staff Writer

Mike Michalek, left, and Warren Claypool stand by their vans marked with POW license plates. The men, who met for the first time Monday, were prisoners at the same camp in Germany 57 years ago.Warren Claypool and Maurice "Mike" Michalek met for the first time Monday, but they immediately knew they had history in common.
Michalek, 77, of Paulsbo, Wash., and Claypool, 83, of Puposky, are both veterans of the United States Eighth Air Force. Gunners on B17s during World War II, they were shot down and taken as prisoners of war at camp Kriegsgefangenlager der Luftwaff 4.

Michalek, bailed out after his plane was hit March 8, 1944, during the Allies' first daylight bombing of Berlin. Claypool's plane crash-landed May 13, 1944, in a field near Odense, Denmark, after losing an engine to German artillery. Claypool flew 34 bombing missions and Michalek flew 24.

Mary Wang of Bemidji is the instrument who brought the two former POWs together. She had received from her mother-in-law a copy of an newspaper article from the Warren, Minn., newspaper about Michalek, mentioning his POW status. Michalek was in Warren visiting his sister, a relative of Wang by marriage.

Wang serves as a home health nurse to Claypool and knew he also was a POW. He looked Michalek's name up in a history of his POW camp and discovered they were prisoners at the same place at the same time.

"That was 57 years ago," Wang said.

Wang knew the two men should get together and set up a reunion at her home.

Sharing memories

As the two veterans sorted through Claypool's war souvenirs, memories came flooding back.

"Everybody had the same food, boiled alfalfa, dehydrated cabbage, kohlrabi, with those nice little white worms," Michalek said. "I ate every one of those white worms, slurp like a noodle. I thought they were nutritious."

"Dad always said, 'The Lord helps those who help themselves.' I would have been killed many times if I waited for someone to help me," Claypool said, recalling that he weighed about 100 pounds when he was freed.

Michalek recalled that his prison number was 2731, then noticed Claypool's spread of medals.

"I don't have one of those. That's a good-conduct medal," Michalek said.

Missing in action

Michalek said his family received the notice that his plane went down, and eventually they learned he was alive and a POW. He said he received one letter during his imprisonment.

Claypool said he never received letters. His family in the U.S. and his English wife, whom he married two days before taking off for his final mission, learned of his whereabouts from an amateur radio operator in Pennsylvania. She has picked up the news from a German radio transmission.

"We were actually flying suicide missions," Michalek said.

Prisoners of war

The men described the events leading to their capture.

Michalek, a tail gunner, knew the plane had been hit. Fire was coming up from the radio room. He crawled out of his tiny turret and inside the length of the tail to jump from the plane.

"We went to the door once and the tracers were going by. I said, 'I'm not going to step out there.'"

The pilot was able to bring it through the artillery fire, and he bailed out.

Claypool was engineer gunner in a turret over the cockpit. He said his plane was hit and the pilot flew out of formation and landed in a field in Denmark.

"When the plane stopped sliding on its belly, there was a German guard with a gun," he said.

The men were interrogated and gave their captors only name, rank and serial number as they had been trained. However, they said the Germans knew everything about them, down to details such as when and where all the members of their families were born.

"They knew everything. They just wanted you to verify it," Michalek said.

He remembered his interrogator noticing a girl's name tattooed on his left forearm. The German said "Be true to her," and gave him a cigarette, he said.

They were moved from the interrogation center in Frankfurt, Germany to the Stalag Luft, for air force prisoners, in box cars designed to hold 40 men or eight horses or mules. However, Claypool said the cars were loaded with more than 100 men.

Free at last

Michalek said he was liberated when the Russians arrived at Stalag 1, where he was imprisoned. He and his fellow prisoners were under Russian control for about two weeks. Then they were put on a ship and taken back to the United States.

Before the Russians came, Heinrich Himler visited Michalek's stalag and told the commandant to shoot all the prisoners. He said the commandant disobeyed those orders and let the men live, perhaps because he was a good person, or more likely, Michalek said, because he knew Germany was losing the war and he wanted to avoid being tried as a war criminal.

Claypool's liberation from Stalag 4 was more protracted and difficult.

On Feb. 6, 1945, the Germans evacuated the prisoners "to keep the Russians from getting us."

They marched 630 miles in 83 days with no shelter, sleeping in snowbanks.

"That's the saddest part of my war," Claypool said, thinking of the 6,000 men who started the long march and the hundreds of men who died or were shot when they lagged behind the group. He was freed by the Allies on April 26, 1945.

Michalek pointed out that the Bataan Death March in 1942 in the Philippines was 10 days long. He said the U.S. government hushed up the airmen's death march through Germany because the information was too hard for the public to take.

Claypool said if he had removed his boots the first day of the march, he would never have been able to put them on again because he frostbit his feet so often on the march.

He also gives his mother credit for saving lives on the long walk. Many of the men had dysentery and he remembered his mother's cure, charcoal.

"I traded my watch, which the Germans didn't take because it was my own, not G.I., for a loaf of sawdust bread. I charred it real black and ate that," he said.

The doctor accompanying the men, also a prisoner, adapted Claypool's charcoal cure and saved many of the sick men.

When Claypool finally reached England and reunited with his wife, he discovered their brief honeymoon had given them a son.

As they told their stories, Claypool and Michalek also brought out one more experience they share. That is the bond people develop when they are fighting or trying to survive together.

"You can have brothers. You can have sisters, but if you've lost your freedom together, you're close," Claypool said.


©The Pioneer 2002 "