The Box Car Ride ... continued ... Days 6 - 7

[As a visceral anti-fascist, what would Bill Stigall think of today's America? We do know what he thought of the Nazis and their box car.]

A six-foot, eight-inch American named "Kentucky" did a good deal more than take up a lot of space. Aside from food and women, about which he regaled us for hours, he seemed most fond of his mules. They were probably his only acquaintances not sick to death of his repetitive, foul, and poverty-stricken language. We'd heard 'em all, but even as prisoners of the army, which we all had been, we could sometimes escape Kentucky. We were now his captive audience.

On the afternoon of the sixth day the train again came to an abrupt, jerking, unexpected stop. Again the guards ran for cover. We could see them easily through the windows. They scattered from the train like rats from a sinking ship. There was immediate terror in the boxcar. Again we hollered, "Guards, let us out!" Again, "Shut up!"

There was furious scrambling to get the door open and the barbed wire away from the windows. We heard a plane, but it was not over us. It seemed to go away from us. We listened, and when we could no longer hear it, one man asked, "How do we know our car is marked?" "We don't," someone answered. "It's marked; I saw it," another answered. "How do we know it's marked big enough for the pilots to  see?"

One man refreshed our memories with, "Germans mark ammunition cars with POW and HOSPITAL. And you can be damn sure the pilots know that." "Shut up!" someone yelled. "Listen!" The sound of the plane grew louder. We could not see it, but there was no doubt that it was someplace above us. We heard it dive.

"It's coming down, for Christ's sake."

The nearer it came, the wilder the squirming and shoving in the car. Instinctively we sought the sides of the boxcar, pushing and swearing to get a spot along the wall and out of the center of the car. The plane made a pass somewhere near us, and we heard a hundred or so bursts of machine-gun fire. No one knew which direction to run. We kept trying to guess if the plane was coming down the
track or across the car. Again we heard the plane above us, but off in the distance. We waited in silence for the next pass. Several minutes went by. We waited. We could no longer hear the plane. We saw the guards return to the train. When they got close enough we cursed the bastards. They got in their cars, and the train resumed the trip.

Being trapped in a German boxcar with Allied planes strafing the area was a great equalizer. It was hard to believe that any man here was free of bitterness, frustration, and fear.

[Years later my Dad met an Englishman and as they recollected, the Englishman had bombed my Dad's POW camp. I can't say they stayed good friends.]

William Stigall, 1943 and 2001