The Boxcar Ride

... everyone who lived through World War II had their own story ... this may have been the most difficult of Bill Stigall's ... a POW somewhere in Belgium or Germany ... being moved to boxcars that after the war would be synonymous with the worst of the war. The GIs didn't face that horror, but it was hard enough - SP

Chapter 16: The Boxcar Ride

On the third day just before dusk we arrived at a railroad siding where there were ten small wooden boxcars about half the size of American boxcars. The guards slid back the doors and we were ordered in. About thirty of us climbed into each car. We sat down or lay down, taking up most of the floor space. The guards ordered thirty more into the car. We protested that it would be overcrowded, but thirty more came in. The door was pulled shut and locked.

There were two small windows, with shutters, on either side of the car, eighteen inches square, five and one-half feet up from the floor. The windows were boarded up from the outside; air came through the cracks in the car. Straw covered a part of the floor. It was getting dark. We had not eaten since noon and were hungry.

We maneuvered about in the car finding a way to sit down or, if possible, lie down. It was apparent that not all could lie down at one time. It got stuffy in the car, so we called out to the guards, asking for more air. No response. It was night. An hour passed. We waited.

The men in the car were mostly Americans, with a sprinkling of French and English Canadians. One man had an arm in a sling, one a painful jaw injury. Another hour passed. There was constant shuffling for positions in the car, made more difficult by darkness. We sat and we waited.

We were perfectly aware that we were a prime target for Allied aircraft. The fighting in Holland could not be far from us, certainly not far as planes fly. Transportation to and from the battle area was bound to be observed. A switchyard was the worst of all possible places. We sat in the siding near the switchyards. It was a test of nerves. We waited.

Around midnight the train started; we traveled a hundred yards; we stopped. We stood still for another hour. We heard other trains coming and going. Someone suggested that we were now in the switchyards. It developed that a number of us were not going to lie down at all, since those who got in first held grudgingly to their places. We began to argue about spots to sit. There were several noncoms in the car, but they chose to remain silent. It got colder during the night.

Finally the train started again and ran jerkily forward across switches and tracks for half an hour. It stopped and waited. The train then backed up to the  switchyards. For the rest of the night the train sped up, jerked to a stop, started again, ran for fifteen minutes, banged to a halt, started again. I spent most of the night sea ted against the wall of the car or standing up in my position, stretching my legs and then trying to squat down or sit down. We sixty English-speaking POW s settled down to live together.

Stubby ... a friend in the midst of it all

One of the chalets was larger than any other and was situated outside a town named Doorn, which rang a bell. I told the soldier marching beside me, whose name was Stubbs, that that house could be where the former kaiser of Germany had come to live when exiled by the Nazis. Stubbs appreciated the irony of our being marched by German troops past the former kaiser's retreat.

Clyde Stubbs was a short, wiry, a little less than average in height, and was consequently called Stubby. What he lacked in height he made up for in aggressiveness. I discovered, while walking through Holland, that he had been home in Iowa on D day, June 6. He had been driving trucks on the Alcan Highway. He was shipped out of the States through a replacement depot and landed in my tent in England. A month later he flew a jeep into Holland. He was about to have the most crucial experience of his life.