Re: The POW Tour

Date: April 16, 2004

"Tour bus tells stories of World War II POWs

By Deidre Bello Iowa City Press-Citizen

Gloomy memories of captivity in a German prison won't keep John Butler from visiting a tour bus museum that is visiting all 99 counties to share the stories of World War II prisoners of war.

The collection, gathered by founder Michael Luick-Thrams and members of TRACES, a non-profit educational organization, includes German and American POW memorabilia. The tour visits the area this weekend.

Among the display items is a hat Butler knitted from an unraveled sweater while captive in Europe from July 10, 1944, until the war's end. The Washington native, now 85, is in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's but still speaks German on occasion.

"He also has a diary that's 45 pages type written that we reprinted," Butler's wife, Wilma, said. "He wrote it when he was in camp on toilet tissue and was able to hide it."

Luick-Thrams, 41, started the "bus-eum" tour in March. It has attracted more than 3,500 people so far. The tour started in Marshalltown and will end May 31. TRACES staff interviewed 50 POWs from Iowa. There were 20,000 total U.S. POWs.

"It just captures people's imaginations," Luick-Thrams said. "They like the idea of crawling into this little bus and looking at the panels and artifacts. They like the display cases, audio and video segments."

Since late March, Luick-Thrams' living quarters has been a 7-by-7 space in the back of the bus. His passion for history sprang through his graduate study in Germany, where he found that Nazi Germany had a connection with Iowa and the rest of the Midwest. He learned that less than 45 miles from his childhood farm, halfway between Mason City and Clear Lake, once was home to the German POW Camp Algona.

Curious to see what the bus will hold, Washington native Harold Stephens said he plans to visit it today with his wife, Betty. He was 20 years old, 170 pounds and recently married when he shipped to Europe straight from Fort Benning, Ga. He was a second lieutenant platoon leader with Iowa's 3rd Infantry when German soldiers captured him in January 1945 while they traveled along the Rhine River.

Stephens ate slightly less than a quart of soup a day. The soup was made only of parsley, boiled water and maggots - his protein. To keep positive, Stephens, who dropped to 128 pounds, and other POWs planned their escape, played cards, attempted to catch body lice with a needle, or spent time thinking up recipes for what they would eat when they got out. The soldiers also considered themselves lucky compared with the Russians in a nearby compound who died of typhus, Stephens said.

"I was married to my wife for not too long, and then in 1944 was wounded," Stephens said. "She kept getting these telegrams that I'd been wounded. Then she finally got one that I'd returned to duty. She then started getting telegrams that I was missing in action. It was tough, but that's the way it goes."

The TRACES bus tour tells similar stories with the ultimate goal of having a stationary facility to display the memorabilia and the bus itself, Luick-Thrams said. Two months out of the year the bus will return to the road, he said."