News-Info-Alerts

Re: Former Camp Mates Remember Captivity

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: June 30, 2003

"Tioga Co. men recall their time in same POW camp

By CHUCK HAUPT Gannett News Service

OWEGO -- Pfc. LaVere "Si" Cortright weighed 180 pounds when he was captured in Normandy by German forces in 1944. When he was liberated from a prisoner of war camp 10 months later, the Army infantry soldier had lost 60 pounds.

First Lt. Hugh Hogan, a company commander in the Army's 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment, was taken prisoner during the invasion of Italy and suffered frostbite on both feet during a forced march at the hands of his German captors. He would spend 19 months behind barbed wire before the war ended.

Staff Sgt. Ralph Meza, an aerial gunner in the Air Force, bailed out of his shot-up B24 and landed in a pine tree. A German major was there to untangle him -- and to turn him into a prisoner of war for three months.

Cortright, Hogan and Meza are friends now, living not far from one another in Tioga County. But they were strangers when they spent time in the same POW camp at Moosburg, Germany.

Each man was subjected to long days of solitary confinement to soften them up for the coming interrogations.

Cortright spent 10 days in a 6-foot-by-6-foot room where hard brown bread and potatoes were slid under the door to him twice a day.

"The day they opened up the cell door to take me out, the first thing the (German) officer did was offer me a Lucky Strike and a drink from a bottle of wine," Cortright remembered.

The officer, who spoke perfect English, asked the same questions over and over, with Cortright giving only the required name, rank and serial number. Then the bespectacled, middle-aged officer slammed the table with his fist, bellowing, "You know, I could kill you. Your bombs and planes killed my wife and two daughters."

For the most part, their captors treated them humanely the entire time of their captivity, the three men said.

Not that circumstances were humane in themselves.

Escape plans

Cortright remembers 21 days jammed with other POWs into stifling hot, sealed boxcars, suffering from dysentery and pleading for water.

Not allowed to bathe or shower for weeks or months at a time, many men's heads were alive with lice and disease was rampant, said Meza, 79, of Owego. And then there was the endless marching, with prisoners stripped of their shoelaces and belts to thwart thoughts of escape.

But in the midst of misery came a comic moment.

"We passed by a French bakery," Cortright said of the march that would take him to the POW camp. "They were throwing bread to us. But we had to release our pants to catch the bread -- and many prisoners' pants fell down.

"But we got some bread," he said.

Hogan, 85 and living in Owego, tells of the never-ending escape plans hatched by himself and his fellow POWs in an officers' camp, Oflag 64 in Poland. At one point, he thought to bury himself under garbage in the barrels shipped out of the camp every day.

"We had an escape committee -- it was just like in Hogan's Heroes," he said. "They told me, 'Before you try that stunt, come over here to the window and watch.'"

He changed his mind when he saw a German soldier jab a long, sharp rod inside each can before it left the camp.

Hogan and other POWs dug a 120-foot tunnel, stashing the dirt in the rafters above their heads. The Germans must have gotten wind of their efforts, he said, because they exploded dynamite every 10 feet in the compound around their barracks. One POW barely made it out of the tunnel alive, he said.

Days at the POW camp were filled with work and hunger. One of Cortright's jobs was picking up the bodies of Russian POWs in an adjacent camp.

They subsisted on Red Cross packages, with their captors piercing each can with a knife to ensure no prisoner could store food and use it in an escape attempt.

As dark as the days were, the men didn't allow themselves the luxury of tears and couldn't afford the outlet of anger.

For Cortright, 81, of Newark Valley, the toughest part was knowing his family would worry about him. Like the other prisoners, he had filled out a Red Cross form to tell his parents he was safe. And he was able to send them form letters to keep them apprised of his circumstances.

But he knew they'd be trying to read between the lines, wondering if he was being starved or beaten.

Helen Hogan, now 83, said she was comforted to receive her husband's letters, even though much of his notes had been blacked out. The two had only been married three weeks when he went off to war. She found out later that her paratrooper husband jumped with 22 other men, only five of whom lived to be captured after three days of fighting the Germans.

"If he hadn't been taken prisoner, I'm sure he would have been killed," she said.

It was a joyful day in 1945 when the POWs were liberated by Gen. George S. Patton's Third Army. But it wasn't an easy transition coming back to the lives they had left.

The rest of their lives

They drank a lot, all three men said. And looking back, Cortright wishes he could have given his wife a more pleasant time in life. But they each made their way, Hogan becoming a structural engineer, Cortright a truck driver, Meza a mechanical engineer.

Each is now a grandfather many times over.

They stuffed their emotions as best they could to deal with what they had witnessed.

They rarely spoke of their days as POWs.

"I've known Ralph a number of years, and I never knew he was a POW," said Al Klein of Binghamton, president of the corporation that is hosting the 84th annual state convention in Binghamton. "Many times the combat veterans in particular don't talk about what they lived through. In many cases the individual doesn't want to relive the past that was just so bad."

Now Meza, Cortright and Hogan spend time at the Glenn A. Warner VFW Post 1371 in Owego, and it was at the bar in its basement that the connection among the men first came to light.

One day about a decade after V-E Day, Meza and Cortright were astounded to find they both had been at Moosburg. Meza knew Hogan had been there, too.

Some of their experiences were similar. Their lives since those days show marks of common emotion.

They feel guilty, they said, that others fought the war while they could not -- an illogical guilt that they had somehow allowed themselves to be captured. All suffer from anxiety and neurosis, they said. Aging has softened but not eradicated the memories.

Meza is part of the VFW ritual team and attends more and more veterans' funerals. He wonders who will be there to replace him when he's gone.

Each one takes his patriotism seriously.

"You don't realize what your freedom is until the day you get captured," Cortright said. "And you lose every ounce of freedom you enjoyed in the past."

©2003 The Ithaca Journal"