News-Info-Alerts

Re: an Ex-POW Remembers

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: September 21, 2003

"POW encourages Americans to 'hang together'

By Frank McCleary The Examiner

On March 27, 1945, Lee Lamar received a package with powdered milk, a chocolate bar and a few other items.

The care package from the International Red Cross was the first Lamar had received after more than four months as a prisoner of war in Germany.

Lamar remembered the date because it was his birthday. The package was significant because, under ideal conditions, Lamar, and every other prisoner of war should have received one every week.

Lamar, of Overland Park, Kan., spoke Thursday at the American Legion Stanley-Pack Post 499 in Blue Springs. Today is National POW/MIA Recognition Day.

On Nov. 18, 1944, Lamar, who grew up in northeast Missouri near St. Joseph, flew as co-pilot on his 21st mission in a B-24 bomber in Italy.

After Germans shot down the bomber, Lamar and other crew members evaded the Nazis for about a day before they were captured near Pola, Italy, along the northeast coast of the Adriatic Sea.

Unlike other Americans, Lamar said he was not mistreated. Civilians and some soldiers, including members of the SS, treated Americans badly, beating or killing them.

He knew of at least one friend who was beaten badly by civilians.

After his capture, the Germans took Lamar and other Americans to an interrogation center, near Frankfurt, Germany. They were held in solitary confinement and fed little, Lamar said.

"We'd been well briefed by American intelligence on what to expect," he said.

The Germans later moved Lamar to a prison camp in northern Germany, along the coast of the Baltic Ocean.

"It was cold," Lamar said of the camp. "We didn't have enough heat in the building."

The Germans fed the prisoners potatoes, rutabagas, cabbage and bread. The daily diet was about 800 calories, Lamar said.

"That wasn't enough to sustain people," he said.

The Red Cross care packages, when they arrived, helped, he said.

"If you had that, you could make out OK," he said.

On May 1, about five weeks after he received his first care package, the Russians liberated the camp. Not long after that, Lamar returned to the United States and continued the education he started in 1939 at St. Joseph Community College.

At the American Legion hall, Lamar talked about how Americans responded to wars from the Revolutionary War to the war on terrorism.

"Each generation we've had to fight to protect our freedoms," he said.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Americans rallied to the cause.

"We knew what we had to do and we pulled together," he said.

That war was followed by the Cold War.

"We knew who our enemy was. We didn't know how to fight the Cold War," Lamar said.

Americans made some mistakes, he said.

"In Korea, we were divided. We fought to a standstill," he said. "Vietnam was even worse because our country was completely divided."

Ultimately, Lamar said, America prevailed in the Cold War.

"We won that war economically," he said. "We simply outproduced the Soviet Union. They went bankrupt. They no longer exist."

The attacks of Sept. 11 plunged the United States into a new war - a war on terrorism.

"We're not even sure who the enemy is," he said. "We can be sure about one thing - their intent is to take away our way of life."

Lamar noted that the country is bickering again about war, but we can't afford to be divided again.

He finished his remarks with a quote from Benjamin Franklin."

"Now we must hang together or, most assuredly, we will all hang separately."

©The Examiner"