News-Info-Alerts

Re: The Will to Live

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: June 23, 2003

"Eighty-year-old Howard Hurt of South Knoxville recounts his gruesome experiences as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany after he was captured in the Battle of the Bulge.

Will to live got WW II vet through POW ordeal

High atop a ridge in the Schnee Eifel - the Snow Mountains across from St. Vith, Belgium - Pfc. Howard Hurt peered through large binoculars at a beautiful German valley with a snowy landscape so enchanting it looked like a playground for angels.

The 106th Infantry Division had relieved the 2nd Infantry Division at the Siegfried Line, and it was stretched thinly across 27 miles of the front along the the Belgium-German border.

It was early morning on Dec. 16, 1944, and the winter was the coldest to hit that part of Europe in four decades. Having just arrived at the front, Hurt and the rest of the 106th were green and raw, but they thought they were ready.

Hurt was a messenger assigned to deliver vital communications from regimental headquarters to units on the line. It was a risky job.

As he marveled at the snow-covered valley stretching eight to nine miles before him, he suddenly noticed something else.

Those were no angels advancing into the valley. They were horse-drawn ambulance wagons and the big guns of the German 5th SS Panzer Division moving toward Hurt's outfit, which was posted to receive the brunt of what would be Hitler's final offensive in northwestern Europe.

With his heart pounding and his breath coming fast, Hurt and the jeep driver raced back to his unit, which was crowded into the little German village of Schlosenbach near St. Vith. Just as they arrived, the first German shells began shaking the earth.

Hurt didn't yet know it, but from his vantage point on the ridge he had just witnessed the start of the Battle of the Bulge.

What Hurt did know was that he and the other troops were taking heavy artillery fire.

"They were big shells," said Hurt, who is now 80.

Hurt had been a ministerial student at Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis when he was drafted in 1943. After his service, he returned to Southwestern and got a degree in psychology. He then earned a master's and a doctorate at the University of Tennessee and went to work in the government's nuclear facilities in Oak Ridge. He retired nearly 20 years ago as the top clinical psychologist at the nuclear facilities that had ended World War II, the war that changed his life.

In a couple of days of intense fighting, 30 divisions of German troops broke through the American lines, and Hurt and some 7,000 other members of the 106th were captured in what was reported as the largest surrender in U.S. military annals.

At Diez, Germany, Hurt was lodged in a line of boxcars filled with American POWs. He and his compatriots remained crammed in the cramped, squalid car for 10 days before it moved.

The door was nailed shut, and water was passed in through gaps in the car. Eventually, the German guards allowed one soldier to collect helmets and fill them with water once a day.

On New Year's Eve, British warplanes bombed the Diez rail yards. Hurt's boxcar was in roughly the middle of the line of cars. The cars at either end of the line were blown to smithereens.

Hurt was first taken to Stalag 9B, a prisoner of war camp at Bad Orb, a former resort northwest of Frankfort, Germany. There, he held religious services for his fellow prisoners, and a German guard had warned him to be careful, that he was being watched, especially since he also conducted a service for Jewish soldiers.

Soon, the Jewish soldiers, identified by their GI dogtags, were rounded up. Also included were soldiers who either looked Jewish or whose names sounded Jewish. Hurt and other "undesirables" were thrown in with the Jewish soldiers, and some 350 of them were packed in a railcar with no food, water or sanitary facilities and shipped out of Bad Orb.

The soldiers were jammed so tightly together that some died standing up and stayed that way because there was no room for the dead to fall.

After five days, Hurt and the others arrived at Berga on the Elster River in eastern Germany, a satellite of the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. By now, it was February 1945, and Nazi Germany was in its death throes.

At Berga, the German guards - this time the feared Gestapo - separated the Jewish soldiers from the others. Each day Hurt saw hundreds of concentration-camp inmates marched into the work camp, where the Germans were digging tunnels for an underground factory.

"We didn't know anything about the Holocaust," Hurt said. "They would transport 500 or so prisoners in, and the trains would take away 500 dead prisoners."

Hurt got lucky and became a messenger for a one-armed German officer, who took a liking to him. "I was his gopher," Hurt said.

One day when Hurt tried to help a Jew from the concentration camp whose cart had overturned, a Gestapo guard bashed his head with an axe handle. The blow fractured Hurt's skull.

"I woke up in a hospital," he said.

In the hospital, he came under a German civilian doctor's care, who saw that he was severely malnourished in addition to his head wound. .The doctor got Hurt and 12 other seriously ill GIs transferred to Obermansfeld, where they were treated by British doctors who had volunteered to enter Germany to care for Allied wounded.

Later, a train took the prisoners to a British hospital near Meiningen, Germany. The hospital had been allowed by German authorities to treat British wounded after Dunkirk.

On April 7, the U.S. 11th Armored Division liberated Hurt and the others and sent them to Paris.

"While I was in Paris, people kept giving me food," Hurt said, choking up at the memory.

Hurt entered the Army at 145 pounds, but by the time he was liberated, he was down to just 77 pounds.

"The cuisine left something to be desired," he explained.

Hurt's medical records showed that he suffered from malnutrition, acute infectious hepatitis, beri-beri, tachycardia, erythema nodosum (swollen nodules in his lower legs), conjunctivitis and heart palpitations.

Hurt arrived in New York on V-E Day (May 8, 1945). "I looked out the window, and fireboats were firing water up into the air. The war was over."

He had survived, he said, by never believing he was going to die.

"I didn't have time to die."

Senior writer Fred Brown may be reached at 865-342-6427.

©2003 Knoxville News-Sentinel Co. "