Canthook

He was cold. He was tired. He was hungry. Most of all, he was scared. He was trapped behind the enemy lines in the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944, although he only knew that he was lost, that he hadn't had anything to eat for three days, and he had very little ammunition left.

When shells lit up the sky, Red saw a foxhole, and he dove in. Red had brown hair; he was called that because he had quite a bit of American Indian blood. The name on his birth certificate was Ivan; it was a family name, but between his birth and WWII, names that sounded Russian had become unpopular in the US.

As he dove into the foxhole, he collided with a German soldier, also cold, tired, hungry, lost, and scared, too. He was also low on ammunition.

Red spoke a little German and the kraut spoke a little English. It was enough. They decided that as miserable as they were, the only thing to do was to remain in the foxhole, and try to warm up a little. If they were discovered by the Allies, they'd explain that the German soldier was Red's captive. If they were discovered by the Germans, then Red would be the German soldier's captive.

It may not have been what the recruiting office had in mind, but they weren't too concerned about winning the war at that point; they simply wanted to live through the next day and the next week.

As it turned out, they were discovered by a German patrol, and Red spent the rest of the war in a POW camp.

It wasn't Hogan's Heroes, but Red bore no grudges towards his captors. He was poorly fed in the POW camp, but he got the same food, in the same quantities, as those who guarded him. He and his fellow captives were yelled at a lot, but when he thought about it, Red said that Allied officers yelled at him and his fellow troops all the time, too.

They were used for work details. They'd be required to put potatoes, turnips, and beets in gunny sacks. When the guards weren't looking, sometimes they'd stick a bunch of empty sacks in among the vegetables, and often they weren't caught. When they ran out of sacks, the work routine was over. The guards weren't kind, but they weren't cruel, either.

Meanwhile, Red's wife was living on a farm in Ohio with her sister and brother-in-law. Red had a two-year-old, and so did his sister-in-law, and the kids really enjoyed playing together. Some of the german soldiers had been shipped back to the states, and the POWs were used for agricultural labor, raising such crops as potatoes, turnips, and beets.

The german POWs weren't caged in POW camps. They lived in the same farmhouses that were used by the farmer's family.

"Scared? Why should we be scared of POWs?", Red's brother-in-law said. "They were just kids, far away from home, lonely and worried about their own families. Nice guys, most of them."

I never even heard any stories about sabotage, such as tossing gunny sacks in among the vegetables, so that the farmer would run out of gunny sacks. On the other hand, I didn't hear any stories about romances between POWs and farmers' daughters.

As the months wore on, Red saw many of his fellow prisoners getting thinner and thinner. Red was stocky in the first place, and perhaps that's why he survived when others died of starvation. There were fewer guards than prisoners that died of starvation, but part of that was due to the fact that manual labor is more physically taxing than standing guard.

It's really tough to be locked up. It's bad enough when you're serving a fixed term, and you can count down the days. When you're a prisoner of war, and you don't know how long you'll be there, it's worse. Red started worrying about the ribs that were starting to show. He worried more about the gray matter between his ears. He figured he was losing it.

One day, the guards came by and told him the war was over. That would have been May 7 or May 8. He'd been a prisoner for almost six months at that point. The guards didn't put down their guns, but they didn't act like guards any longer, though; it was like the guns were for self-protection against prisoners who had experienced real or imagined slights. Nothing happened, though, and the guards got more and more relaxed. Nobody left; they didn't know where they would go.

Red watched as a steady stream of ghosts walked down the road. As skinny as some of his fellow prisons were, they looked corn-fed, compared to those people. You could almost see through them. It turns out that there was a concentration camp down the road, and those people had been held captive there. They knew where they wanted to belong, and they started walking across Europe to get where they were going.

The real horrors happened in the concentration camps. I asked Red about them. He said he didn't know. In Poland, the starvation led to an awful lot of disease. They obviously were losing a lot more people there than in the POW camps, and someone would have had to do something with the bodies.

The holocaust? Well, there were a lot of people who blamed the jews and the gypsies for bad economic times. Although you hear a lot about the jews, he said, the holocaust was far worse for the gypsies, and when I looked it up, it turns out he was right. "Sending 'em to the showers" might have been nasty, he said, but simply letting them die of hunger and disease wouldn't have been any kinder.

The army came along and told them to stay where they were for a little longer; they didn't have anything set up to handle them yet. The army did drop off some rations, though, and a few days later, trucks came by to haul them to a camp where they could treated.

The war wasn't over in the Pacific yet, but it was over for Red. They kept him in the hospital for a while - he can't remember how long - and then sent him home. It's a bad idea, they told him, to get your wife pregnant for the next two years or so; you're too run-down. But his wife got pregnant before long, and gave birth in about 18 months. His son had a number of congenital illnesses.

Red never wanted to watch shows like McHale's Navy or Hogan's Heroes. They weren't funny. He watched a few movies that were war dramas. He mostly seemed to be watching them to catch factual errors.

And he was a different man when he returned. He was kind and gentle until he perceived that he was being given short shrift, and then he would put his foot down and demand his due. He wouldn't tolerate others being treated with disrespect, either. One fourth of July, his kids were setting off firecrackers, and a local cop stepped in and started to bully the kids. Red came out and crooked his finger at the cop. "Come here."

The cop sensed that Red was dead serious. He came. Red said that it the cop was certain that a law had been violated, that he was certainly required to arrest the children, but there wasn't any excuse for bullying them, and if the cop didn't start acting in a civil matter, that there would be severe repercussions, and that as he didn't particularly want to go to prison for attacking a cop, he would appreciate the courtesy if the cop would straighten up and fly right. Nobody argued with Red. It wasn't that he was big, or muscular, although he was both, and it wasn't that he was violent, for Red was not a violent man, but there was something in his voice that said, "You don't want to mess with me." The cop decided that the kids were just having a bit of fun, and left.

Red is gone now, and is buried next to his wife. Most WWII vets are gone now. He didn't belong to the VFW or the American Legion, and he generally had contempt for those who did. You won't find many who were POWs in either organization, he said. The American Legion is more warlike than the VFW, he said, because the VFW won't take a member who served stateside, and the more you know about war, the less you're interested in fighting one.

But he supported the idea of a strong military. A strong military, he said, meant that you don't have to fight wars. It's the little dogs, the ones that can't possibly win a dog fight, that pick fights, because they are insecure. A large dog, one you wouldn't want to face in a fight, doesn't need to fight; he accomplishes what needs to be done with a single loud bark, and because he has self-confidence, he doesn't even need to bark very much.

It's women, he said, and men who are unsure of themselves, who start wars. Nobody else is that stupid.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Battle of the Bulge - Geneva Convention - holocaust - prisoner of war - starvation - strong military - VE day