When we finally arrived in the Paris freight yards, many of us were literally carried along by one or more of our fellow prisoners. During our long journey, we had been fed whatever the German guards could scrounge from farmers along the road. Since I had jumped into Normandy, my single decent meal consisted of the leftovers I had scrounged from the officers' breakfast table on my cleaning detail back in Alencon. I was not alone in my pitiful state and was better off than many of my companions. The overwhelming majority of us were malnourished, severely underweight, and suffering from heavy fatigue and emotional stress. There were many walking wounded.
We encountered a means of travel that unfortunately would soon become all too familiar to us, boxcars called "40&8s," which could accommodate forty men or eight horses. Some of us had read about 40&8s in high school history classes on World War I. The ones we rode in looked like they had been in hard use hauling cargo for many years. About two-thirds the size of American freight cars, they were thirty-one feet long and seven or so feet wide. I never could understand how 140 Holocaust victims could be packed into one of these cars, as I have heard was the case. When the door slid shut on forty POWs, we could not lie down without our bodies overlapping, much like snakes in the zoo.
The cars were made of hardwood and painted a faded red. Our single source of meager light was two high windows located at either end of the car, about six and a half feet off the floor. They measured about twenty-four by eight inches and were covered with metal bars. There was a sliding door on each side of the boxcar, but one was permanently locked. I never saw but one door on any car opened, even after air raids. The floors of the cars were rife with splinters. Metal straps throughout held the ancient boards in place.
We soon learned that our army's traditional "hurry up and wait" concept had been adopted by the Germans as well. We loaded into the boxcars, the doors were closed and locked, and the stifling heat treatment began. It was mid-summer, so the temperature was hot. The fact that nobody had "his" space, that everyone was forced to lie with arms, legs, and bodies crossed over other prisoners' limbs, made the suffocating temperature all the worse. In the middle of the never-opened door was a metal drum that could hold about thirty-five gallons. This was to be our toilet. It would be emptied upon arrival at our destination, several days hence, never before. Regardless of how little water or food we were given, the barrels were full and running over at the end of the first day of this and all other train trips I took as a POW. The only place where the urine and excrement could go was through the boxcar, exiting via the cracks in the sliding doors or floors. When the train lurched forward, the sewage ran toward the back of the car. When the engine braked, the filth flowed toward the front. There was no dry place in the entire boxcar: front or back, we were caught in the changing tide. I thought this was the worst thing I had experienced since becoming a prisoner of war-but I'd only seen the beginning.
As we all sat crowded in our boxcar, waiting for the trip to start, a guard unlocked the door and started pushing more men into the car. We did not see how we could possibly survive the trip with forty men in there, but now the guards shoved ten more prisoners in on top of us. In the car next to ours, some young trooper had taken a little pocket knife and proceeded to whittle away a hole in the bottom of the wooden floor. The guards' answer was to split up the men in that car, dividing the group among four others. As one of the "lucky" cars, we now had fifty men.
Hopelessly locked in our forty-year-old boxcars, we were sent down the battered railroad tracks toward our unknown destination. Food was scarce. I do not remember exactly what we were given to eat, but no doubt it was mostly bread. When we were being shipped to the interior of Germany, the usual POW allotment for a five-day train trip was about six ounces of cheese, green around the edges from mold, the same amount of German sausage, and about half a loaf of sawdust bread. And you had best drink all the water you could hold, because the next drink would not be until the end of the line. Any time our train stopped where German military or civilians could be seen, "Vasser, Vasser," meaning "water, water," could be heard from every boxcar. We begged for water for as long as we stood still in the freight yard. All night long we issued the chant and heard the voices of other prisoners begging, "Vasser, Vasser," never to any avail.
This lack of water was the cause of our greatest suffering and pain, except for one other factor. We once again came under fire by the same Allied pilots we had risked our lives to cheer in the Alencon freight yard. Defended by perhaps fifty German riflemen-guards, the trains were "easy pickin's" for the fighter planes with their high-powered machine guns and cannons. Our only defense in these raids was small, .30-caliber arms fire from properly scared German guards who rode in a small frame enclosure attached to the end of each boxcar. It did not appear that there was enough room for the guards to sit in these attached guard boxes, so I assumed they stood between train stops.
We had also become the targets for the pilots' additional weapons-the six 250-pound fragmentation bombs that they never considered taking back to England. Some target, real or imagined, always caught literal hell. The motto seemed to be, "Drop the bombs on an empty hen house rather than take them back to England and have to land with live bombs hanging under each wing. Better yet, find a German locomotive smoking along some rail line and blow it to kingdom come!"
The accuracy of these fighter pilots was beyond words. They never left a column of enemy vehicles without it looking like a junkyard. The guards could do nothing but run for cover, leaving us to enjoy the train wrecking, courtesy of the U.S. Air Corps. At the first sight or sound of American planes, the engineers slammed on the breaks, jumped off, and dived into the three-foot-deep ditches that lined most railroad tracks. We prisoners could see this from the tiny window in our locked boxcars. Some of the roofs and sides of our boxcars were shredded with .50-caliber bullet holes and 20mm cannon damage.
Fortunately, each time I was in a raid, the fighter pilots mainly contented themselves with blowing up the engines into little pieces. The coal-fired steam engine boilers represented tons of pressure, so when penetrated by bullets they exploded into scrap metal. This way, no other train could pass through in either direction until repair crews could clear the tracks. This usually precluded any railroad traffic in the area for several days. In some cases after an air raid, the Germans unlocked the boxcars and the surviving prisoners were required to lay the dead and wounded along the tracks in hopes they could get medical treatment or be buried nearby.
On our trip out of Paris, I believe the pilots were aware that the cars contained POWs. It may be that our train had a red cross with a white background painted on the tops of the boxcars to indicate that prisoners were confined in them. Frequently in such cases, the Germans would load every other boxcar with POWs, alternating their human cargo with military equipment or ammunition like artillery shells.
Or maybe the pilots were too far from their base in England and did not have the fuel to hang around our train and still make it back home. After all, such a mistake could find a pilot shot down and promptly joining us in a German prison camp, eating our meager POW diet until the war's end. What a letdown, I thought, from the fantastic meals those flyboys had at their transient mess halls back in England-great chow to no chow. Years later, I would hear tapes of these really courageous guys, as they described how they lined up to blast away at a German train, having no idea that it might be full of American POWs as well as equipment and supplies.
After a long and harrowing ride, we finally unloaded just outside of Limburg, Germany, a town on the Lahn River, located about thirty miles as the crow flies northwest of Frankfurt am Main. We must have arrived at Limburg sometime in the first week of August. Here I, like most of the POWs I associated with over my nine months of prison life, were processed by the Red Cross at Stalag XIIA. I officially weighed in at 98 pounds, down from my D-Day weight of 163. Like numerous other paratroopers in our group, I had already been a prisoner for ten weeks.
We had our official POW photos taken and received our prison dog tags. This official status offered us some small measure of security against being yanked out of line and shot for no reason. Such accountability hardly seemed serious when a camp commandant's wife could have lamp shades made from a POW's tattooed skin.
For my official photograph, I had to hold a sign up in front of me with my POW number written on it. It was August 20, 1944, my twenty-second birthday. Talk about a rite of passage!
My POW number was 82-927. To this day I cannot repeat the number in English without translating it from German first. I suppose I must have repeated it a thousand times as a POW and could rattle it off perfectly in German, but I never had occasion to give this number to anyone in English.
Stalag XIIA was a transfer camp used for administrative purposes. We "Krieggies"-short for Kriegsgefangene, or prisoners of war-were housed in a huge German desert tent, under which about one thousand men slept on the sawdust-covered ground. We did have a bath at XIIA and were deloused, clothes and all. They must not have wanted to transfer the quality lice of XIIA to the next prison we were headed for. Through the whole of my captivity, I had only two baths, and the barracks were never deloused either time. At Stalag XIIA, I think the bath must have been a show for the Red Cross. There again, how could you delouse a huge German desert tent, where men were sleeping in sawdust? We just moved the lice around on our bodies and had to wait till we scratched them back into place.
To our delight, in Stalag XIIA, Duck and I again met up with Bones, who had somehow gotten separated when we left Alencon. Our reunion was like meeting up with a long-lost child. Duck and I had mercifully remained together throughout our whole journey, enduring the trip from Paris to Limburg in the same boxcar. That squat little New Hampshire farmer was closer to me than a brother. By the time we got to Limburg, he was so weak he could hardly stand, but he managed to get into a fight with another American over some unimportant issue. Just to think that he still had enough spunk to fight!
I was starting to come apart as well. I vividly remember coming out of the tent to discover a rabbit six feet tall hopping across the horizon. I knew I was losing it, truly going bonkers. Fearing I was nuts for sure, I went back into the tent and got Duck to come look at this strange thing and tell me if it was real. He went to the back fence, looked up toward the top of the hill where the animal hopped along, and exclaimed, "Bob, no lie, that is a six-foot rabbit." We went back and referred the matter to an English-speaking guard, who laughingly explained that the U.S. Army Air Corps had bombed the nearest zoo. We had just encountered our first and only liberated kangaroo.