News-Info-Alerts

Re: Life in a POW Camp

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: December 14, 2003

"WWII vet remembers life in POW camp
 
The Associated Press

Harold Bennett, a World War II veteran and former German prisoner of war, looks through photographs recently in his Kentwood home of the Austrian camp where he was held hostage for 16 months.KENTWOOD (AP) — More than half a century since Harold C. Bennett endured 16 months as a prisoner of war in Germany, the 80-year-old World War II veteran still recalls the events leading up to that fateful day his plane went down.

Now, a frail man with white hair and wearing a red flannel shirt, blue jeans and All-star tennis shoes, Bennett sat in his chair close to the fireplace at his Kentwood home of 22 years. His wife of more than 50 years, Elaine, sat close to his side.

He was born in Ohio and raised on several military bases throughout the United States as his father, an Army lieutenant, served time in the military.
When Bennett was 12, his father died of prostate cancer, and the family relocated to Louisiana.

His call to serve in the military came as a teenager just shy of graduating high school. He and some friends were playing football outdoors when they got word that Pearl Harbor had been bombed.

The news excited the young men, and they went directly to New Orleans to enlist, he said. The recruiter took their information but instead of sizing them up for a uniform, he persuaded the boys to finish high school first. Reluctantly, they returned home.

“That was the best thing anybody ever done for us three nutheads,” Bennett said.

After graduating from Amite High School, 18-year-old Bennett was back at the recruiter’s office signing up for the Army Air Corps.

At 19, Bennett was a radio operator for the B-24 bomber nicknamed the “Silver Dollar.” As part of the 446th bomb group stationed at an air base in England, he flew during air raids to take out specific industrial entities in Germany.
On one such mission over Osnabruck, Germany, on Dec. 22, 1943, his plane was hit by falling debris from another aircraft. The right wing of his plane was knocked off, which sent the bomber descending.

Bennett pushed the co-pilot out and parachuted just three minutes before the bomber exploded.

The men landed in a field owned by local villagers who held them at gunpoint. The villagers ordered them into a carriage that was actually a hearse and took them to a German air base where German authorities questioned him.

He was transferred to the Frankfort Air Force Base, where he was placed in solitary confinement and interrogated for more than a week. Bennett and another soldier communicated through Morse code by tapping on their cell walls.
“They didn’t do nothing bad to me,” he said.

He was only struck once, he said, adding that it was his fault. Bennett failed to stand and cursed a Gestapo general who entered his cell.

“He struck me with his gloves and said that I would be killed in the morning.”
Later, he was sent to a prison camp atop a mountain near Krems, Austria. He and several others were taken by cattle cars. It was so crowded, the men had to take turns sleeping.

“It was cold as hell,” he said. “We didn’t have much food.”

At the prison camp, the soldiers operated their own barracks. There were about 1,100 men. Most were American soldiers. Escape was not sensible, he said. He recalled seeing men gunned down for trying.

“We didn’t have a bad, bad life in our prison camp,” he said. “We weren’t directly mistreated, just rough handling.”

During his 16-month stay, Bennett got to be in a top management position in charge of security among the prisoners, he said. He was responsible for making sure the new arrivals weren’t German plants.

Their release came in 1945.

“We woke one morning,” he said. “It was just us — no Germans. The Russians were coming. They were bloodthirsty for the Germans.”
 
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