News-Info-Alerts

Re: Retelling the Stories

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: October 08, 2002

"Great generation retells war stories
BY MICK WALSH Staff Writer

Go to a reunion and chances are the conversation will center around old friends, frat parties, ballgames and, dare we say it, our children.

The men of Oflag 64 talk about commandants, lentil soup and prison breaks.

Oflag 64 isn't a new IBM product.

The word comes from the German phrase offizier lager, which translates roughly into "a POW camp for officers."

The number represents just one of the many stalags set aside for U.S. captives by the Axis in Germany and Poland.

About four dozen survivors of the camp got together this past weekend to visit Fort Benning, where many trained before being shipped overseas, and to share remembrances of the 20 months they spent together from June, 1943 until January, 1945.

"It's a time to tell stories," said Bill Warthen, a retired tobacco and peanuts farmer from Vidalia who organized the reunion.

Among them: the thwarted escape attempt.

For them, the news from Stalag Luft 3 wasn't what they wanted to hear.

For they, too, had planned an escape from their German guards by digging a tunnel from inside one of their closely guarded barracks to an area on the other side of the barbed wire fence.

Months had been invested in the plan. Tunnelers sewed dirt from their excavation into the trousers of their fellow prisoners of war, mainly Army officers, all then in their early to mid-20s, most captured months earlier in North Africa. These men in turn deposited the dirt during their daily walks around the compound.

Slats from their bunk beds reinforced the roof of the tunnel. Forged documents and maps were made for the potential escapees. Civilian-like clothing was made. Classes were conducted in colloquial German.

All the men needed was the go-ahead from their superiors.

Then came word that a similar plan by POWs inside the massive Stalag Luft 3 camp had ended in disaster.

Their tunnel surfaced too close to a German guard barracks. Only three men were able to escape. Upon Adolf Hitler's orders, 50 of the escape organizers were lined up and shot.

Some of those actions were captured on film in the 1963 hit "The Great Escape," starring Steve McQueen and James Garner.

The Oflag 64 escape committee closed down the tunnel project immediately. It was March, 1944.

The Oflag 64 survivors, most well into their 80s, came to Columbus to reminisce, and to salute those who either never made it back from World War II, or have died during the 57 years since the prison camp was closed in January, 1945.

Day trips took them to the Gardens at Callaway, Andersonville, Plains and Fort Benning, where many of them had trained before being shipped off to Africa, where on Valentine's Day, 1943, the German Afrika Korps inflicted what became the greatest land defeat on U.S. forces by a foreign power in history. More than 5,000 U.S. soldiers were either killed or wounded that day. One hundred and fifty captives would be led off to a 10-acre compound in Schubin, Poland.

By the time the Oflag was evacuated in January 1945, the roll call had reached 1,400 -- still far less than the big camp at Stalag Luft 3, where more than 10,000 shot-down American flying officers were held, or the several stalags for thousands of American enlisted men scattered throughout Germany and Poland.

The Oflag 64 group was an eclectic one. Most of them were young lieutenants or captains, but there were enough field-grade officers to maintain discipline. Average age: 27. Most were college-educated, many with advanced degrees. They included men who in civilian life had been doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, journalists, artists, ranchers, musicians, and even a former commandant of a U.S. military school.

"Two words come to mind when I think back to those days," said Warthen, "hunger and cold. There was never enough to eat and that winter in Poland was unbearable."

Red Cross parcels were available periodically, he explained, sometimes to be shared by two or three men. "They were something to look forward to and a great supplement to our limited diet."

Coffee was brought into the barracks by the guards every morning... in buckets. A watery soup, two or three slices of black bread, and maybe one or two small potatoes represented the daily menu.

As bad as the conditions were at the camp, which before the war had housed a boys' school, the resourceful Kriegies (German for prisoners) persevered. You didn't see it in "Hogan's Heroes" or any of the other romanticized tele-tributes to POWs, but the men of Oflag 64 refused to allow their intellects to waste away.

A theater group was established; so was a glee club and a jazz band, which used instruments given them by the Red Cross. An elaborate program of classes was set up by those men with academic backgrounds. They built themselves a greenhouse, a tailor shop and a shoe repair shop. The camp library had 7,000 books.

But in early 1945, with the Russian Army closing in on Poland, Hitler ordered the camp closed and the prisoners moved to a stalag 300 miles away in Hammelburg.

"Keep in mind it's January and very cold," said Warthen. "We marched for 45 days in all. Many of us were ill with dysentery. We ate anything we could find to stay alive. ANYTHING. Others had frozen feet. But what's truly amazing is that not a single one of the Oflag 64 men died on that march. In fact, during the 20 months the camp was open, only one American prisoner died, and he from a heart attack. You can thank the leadership and the respect for discipline among those in the camp."

Just before checking out of the Sheraton Four Points on Sunday, Warthen and his reunion committee made plans for next October's get together in Minneapolis.

And probably tell the same ol' stories."