Chapter 23 - After Christmas

 I missed Christmas (Chapters 21-22) so I'll have to catch up with them at the end of this year (2022 hopefully), so I'm just pressing on ... these chapters involved OCR (optical character recognition) from Adobe pdfs and then cut/paste into Blogger. Some errors in transition are likely.

After Christmas

Prison life was an intensification of army life. After long days of training in garrison and field followed by the hardships of combat, I was conditioned for survival. In January 1 called upon that background, for it was the beginning of our most difficult time in prison.

The days were drenched with irritation. They were long and dark and cold. We lived with the knowledge that until spring there would be little or no military advance, except in the air. The only advances that interested us were those that led directly to our release. Our world became a kind of quagmire, a stagnant pool of immobility. We saw no hope of release until late spring or summer.

We worked through gloomy January into grim February. Increased air raids on Munich, increased work details. We went out every day. Newly captured soldiers arrived from Italy, from across the width of France, from Belgium, from Holland, and from Germany. The compound was further flavored by Czechs from Prague, Russians from Minsk, Britons from New Zealand, Australia, and England, men from Yugoslavia, Poland, and France. 

As winter worsened, no branch of the service, it seemed, escaped capture: reconnaissance men, tank men, infantrymen, paratroopers, and gliderrnen; signalmen, wiremen, artillerymen, medical men, rear-echelon men-all streamed in from the walloping the Allies took in the winter of 1944. 

In prison our spirits went down. Munich was bleaker than ever; the slush-filled streets, freezing railyards, scarcity of wood, diminished food rations all checked our desires to volunteer for work.

"I don't know about your shoulders, Stubby, but mine hurt," I said.

Stubby responded by shifting his wire-wrapped bundle of wood from one shoulder to the other. It was so cold that we wore every piece of clothing we owned, which in turn was heavy and bundlesome and tended to pinch off the circulation of blood. We had walked blocks and blocks in the now-darkening afternoon. We halted to let a broken-down streetcar cross our path. Small, stockily built Russian women worked to keep the rails clear of the black snow. We stopped in front of a restaurant and could look through the drapes in the window. 

Coppola, who was wearing a Hungarian twin-pointed cap and whose head and face was wrapped in an olive-drab GI towel, said, "I wonder what it's like to eat in a restaurant?"

"You mean with knives, forks, and a tablecloth?" I said, and added, "Along with some wine?"

Coppola smiled. In the freezing cold, conversation was hard to come by. It looked warm and civilized in the restaurant, even in stinking Munich. Somewhere along our daily walks we sloshed past the infamous beer hall where, as it were, it all started. Any one of the baroque buildings could have been it. 

It was almost four-thirty and dark when we reached the boxcar. It had a stove that an old Posfen kept warm with wood we and he had brought from town. It certainly must have crossed our minds that at any time we chose we could overpower him, or both guards when there were two. In Munich we could escape almost any moment during the day, in the streets, within buildings, in the switchyards. We could escape while traveling from Munich to Moosburg. The train went through Friesing, a good-sized town, but also through much open country. We knew the route well, knew the woods and the fields. Coming back at night, with the door open, we could have jumped. Not until Moosburg or even until roll call the next morning would we have been missed.

Why didn't I escape? Or why didn't more of us escape? A few tried. Most of them were caught and returned to camp. Some did not return. Where were they? Did they make it over the Swiss border? What did happen to them? We had rumors that they were shot, but we had no facts. It was hopeless to think of escaping from camp-guards were all over the place. It was easier to escape from outside the camp. Why didn't I? I was in a U.S. military uniform, visibly not a German soldier. It was too dangerous to be alone in Munich. The least that could have happened was recapture and some slight punishment; the most, death. The same was true of the countryside. In addition to German civilians, military personnel were everywhere. It would help to secure civilian clothes, and maybe there were some in the bombed buildings, but to get it out was not easy.

It never occurred to me that any part of my military duty was to escape or to overtly torment, frustrate, confuse, irritate, or even destroy the enemy. I was a well-trained goldbricks this training flowered in German prison camp. Perhaps my thirty-three years and military experience conditioned my attitude and actions. Heroics were out. I was not interested in pushing any further my diminishing percentage. I decided to sweat it out where I was. To sweat and wait. That proved to be difficult enough.

"Coppola," I said, "what'll you do when you get out of prison? Aren't you afraid you'll no longer give a damn?"

He thought for a moment and answered, "Could be." "There are a lot," he continued, waving his arm toward the men in the boxcar, "who'll never do anything again." 

I said, "Maybe you'll take off for a couple of years and read all those books?"

"Right now," Coppola answered, "I'd just like to sit in the sun of Nogales. just sit and soak up the heat."

"Under a big sombrero, eh?" I said.

Stubby groaned and moved his stiff legs out from him and, changing positions, said, "I might come join you. I never want to see winter again."

We finally heard the whistle, and the train left the yards. It rattled and banged and rocked without a stop through the darkness to Moosburg.

When we got inside the barracks I found the Monster's bunk vacated. I grabbed it. Why he left or where he went I don't remember. He could have gone on a farm Kommando. These were volunteer groups that periodically left the compound. We understood that each POW who joined a Kommandogroup got two Red Cross Boxes, mittens, other clothes, and the promise of better food on the farm.

We also knew that the work would be harder. But then, too, there was the hope of being free on the farm. This was countered by the knowledge that so long as we stayed in a stalag there was safety from air raids and there was safety in the numbers. Finally, friends were sometimes separated on the  Komrnandos.

Life in the barracks was more disagreeable after Christmas. Deprived, as we now were, almost entirely of cigarettes and subsisting on a minimum of food, we were even further from the cocky, sexy guys of Garrison. We were in truth as ordinary as dung, and as obnoxious. When times were good-that is, when food, supplies, and sex were sufficient-comradeship flourished or was at least possible. Now comradeship dragged its feet. Thievery became a way of life.

One man recalled, "In my company you could lay a ten-dollar bill on the bed all day; no one would take it."

A half~truth at best, but possible in a company or platoon. But in prison, where life ceased and existence throbbed for its being, men could no longer be trusted. It was a bitter twist that all of life, humor, fellowship, love, even honor, should lie not in the mind or heart of man but in his stomach.

In the darkness and gloom of January and February tempers got short. We all knew that men stole from their friends. I taunted a fellow POW into saying, 'Why shouldn't I steal from him? Somebody stole from me!"

There was no response, but he irritated me and I shot back at him, "If you'd steal from your friend, you'd probably steal from your family." He held his tongue, but I couldn't mind. I threatened him with, "If you ever steal from me I'll beat hell out of you." 

He answered me sharply with, "How do I know you didn't steal from me?"

I screamed back at him, "I admit you don't know!"

We simmered down and walked apart.

Nights in prison were all the same, except that Saturday night was special. We usually could expect the next day off-and that was good. But Saturday night in civilian life had been date night for many of us. The backlog of feelings about Saturday night made it a lonely night.

... to be continued ...

An Actual Shower of Frogs, Tunisia 1943

From WJ Stigall's WWII memoir, A Shower of Frogs

Chapter 4: Kairouan and a Shower of Frogs

The day of July 9, 1943, was very much like every other day in Tunisia. The single exception to the deadly sameness of our life was the sense of imminent action. Nothing was more certain about the days and nights around the Kairouan arc than that they would be pretty much the same. The same olive-drab uniforms, the same uninspired chow, the same marches, the same faces rising out of the same bodies, the same sameness. If one felt lucky, he might try a fig from off the tree or grapes from merchants in the nearby village of El Elen or Skrina. The result was usually diarrhea. The smells of the day went the distance from obnoxious arrogant camels to the fragrant jasmine, from dirty dishwater to the sweet-smelling oleander. 

The sameness was occasionally broken by a drive into an Arab village, passing on the way small donkeys, dirty-looking "Arabs" and once a magnificent group of wild horses racing one another madly along the dust-filled fenceless roads. As we were driving back from Kairouan one afternoon, a dark cloud came over the camp and it rained water and hundreds of tadpoles, which squirmed around on the hood and floor of my jeep. We thought it very odd, being pelted by small living forms from the sky, each about half the size of the head of a pencil. [With the editor's apology about the characterizations: WJ Stigall loved North Africa, including the people there. Hence his quotation marks.]

By then we were so used to the strange sights of Tunisia that only later, when my honesty was questioned, when it was thought that there was upon me "the spell of Arabia" or that I had a Moses complex, only then did I search for the scientific explanation for this "plague" of frogs. 

Water, in being blown up from the ponds, also sucked the infinitely small tadpole. Fierce winds, common in Tunisia, blew both water and tadpoles some distance and eventually dropped the living matter with the rain.

Christmas 1944 as a POW (continued)

Christmas 1941 continued (Chapter 20 of A Shower of Frogs) 

December 7, 1941, had wrenched us from our peaceful pursuits. Discharge day would send us back to peace. Between these dates was a host of experiences as numerous as the cosmos and as varied as snowflakes. If we were to pick out one vexation in prison that crowned all other vexations it was the sense of wasted life. In normal military life this sense was staggering; in prison, it was an insidious and corrupting force. It gnawed away at the nerves of us all, both old and young. It gave us a sharp sense of the irreplaceable quality of lost time. Waiting. Waiting, Waiting. Men chose the Munich detail to avoid thinking about it, only to sit in a boxcar for five hours-waiting.

Food was certainly our immediate practical concern. It was also easier to talk about. While our tongues told of the hunger, our eyes reported the waste. Few of us could articulate the waste; all could speak of food. In early November and December, until it grew cold, I spent hours walking in the yard adjacent to the barracks.

I was sometimes joined in my deliberate pacing by Coppola, Stubbs, or someone else. Usually I paced by myself. At the time I felt I could never again visit a zoo. That feeling passed. I neglected to count the steps it took to encompass the yard, but as I remember it, it was about half the size of a football field. I walked around counterclockwise (being a suppressed left-hander). I would alter this by pacing back and forth on the longest side.

I walked beside one of two eight-foot barbed-wire fences that were separated by a long zigzag trench, six feet deep, with sides supported by logs. At the corners of the yard were guard towers built of logs rising to a height of twenty feet and manned by one or two German soldiers with a machine gun. Across from the long side of the yard, fifty yards distant, was a British camp where vigorous soccer games never ceased to amaze us Americans. How did they

have the strength for such frivolous exercise? At one end of the yard, I could stand and look a mile away into a forest. Late in autumn some of the trees turned color and were reminiscent of Tom Wolfe's description of America in old October. It was a neat twist of irony that I should be in Wolfe's beloved Bavaria, but not as a tourist, while at the same time remembering his impressions of the Nazis in Germany, while all this was mixed up with thoughts of America at Halloween. Looking out beyond the fences to the far distant fields, I remembered the corn stalks and pumpkins on the plains of Illinois, which led me to recall a line from Robert Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois: "And this too shall pass away" I was comforted and sustained by this thought during the winter of our incarceration.

Except for news brought in by recently captured prisoners and from unreliable information drifting around camp, I lost contact with the world. The silence within the glider when free of prop wash was symbolic of the silence that surrounded me. I was cut off not only from the men I had known for nearly three years, from my friends at home and in England, but also from the life of the world.

The Germans gave us blank forms for written messages. Never believing they'd really be delivered, I nevertheless sent a number of them. I knew that for some period of time my correspondents would be unaware of my whereabouts. The silence that surrounded me went out from me. There was nothing I could do about it unless the letters got through to them. (Many did.) This worried many of us, and as Christmas and New Year's approached our apprehension increased.

***

We all sat about, in the closing days of December, just before Christmas, wondering and speculating on whether we'd get one Red Cross box apiece for Christmas, as had been rumored. We listened for the sound of the truck that brought the boxes. We'd heard the truck, run to the window or door of the barracks to check. It was usually the garbage or coal truck. We kept looking, kept hoping, as we approached Christmas Eve.

182

Christmas 1944 Continued

Continuing on from our September blog post ... 

British prisoners seemed like men older than Americans. They looked like middle-aged men, especially the sergeants. Many Englishmen were gray-haired, their faces deeply creased with lines, and many of them wore heavy, serious looks. Regarding battle talk, the English were more apt to comment on equipment, always calling the German Merry. The American talked about his experiences, frequently overembellishing his adventures. I was always amazed to watch the English soccer games played with considerable energy, energy I could not have spared, energy Americans simply did not have. It was a sobering experience to realize that many of the British soldiers had been three to five years in prison. ... 

During the long hours of the 218 days of prison life I, like all the other men, spent the days sleeping, eating, preparing food, talking, scratching my bites, pacing around the yard, reading, thinking. There was ample time to think. I listened to stories, a million of them, in diverse dialects from Manhattan to Mississippi: from men who were in civilian life salesmen, bartenders, bricklayers, a man who was a fashion designer, a professional gambler from Alabama, a New York orchestra leader, a Harvard freshman, men who were carpenters, teachers, truck drivers, grocerymen, farmers, a whiskey salesman, a CPA, a welder, the lean, the lame, the potbellied, the far-sighted squinting with the nearsighted, the colony of gluttons, the POW who at thirty-three had the mind and emotions of a below-average child of ten, the dazed man who, in spite of a wife and three children, couldn't remember the date he sailed, arrived in Europe, or was captured, the Brooklynites who argued over their inane game of naming favorite movie stars: men of Polish, French, Danish, Irish, German, Mexican, Czech, Jewish descent. 

Prison life was naturally a true conglomeration of us all. But even with the understanding that World War II was the common man's war and that we comprised a common man's army and with the knowledge that the army had quotas to fill, it was appalling that so many poor specimens of mankind were sent on so perilous and important a mission and were forced to face so brutal and so coldly calculating an enemy as the Germans. 

There were many pleasant moments while sitting in the warmth of the sun in the semi quiet barracks relieved of the agony of the Munich detail. I read, wrote, thought, and reflected upon all the many strange places I had been during the three years of a journey from home-a home to which someday, I would return. I wondered at the resiliency of the human body and mind to adjust to so widely varied a set of environments and experiences that had been mine and hundreds upon hundreds of us ordinary men from America. Not one man among us could ever have imagined one iota of the life he was destined to live, the multitude of men he came to know, the kaleidoscopic experiences that were to be his. Before it happened he would have disbelieved it could; years afterward he still has doubts that it did happen. It was all too incredible to be believed, too momentous and monstrous to comprehend, he too small a cog in it to see much more than the next cog. In the rare moments of quiet in prison, in comparative safety withdrawn from action, nearly uninvolved even with the immediate life, a man could catch a glimpse of the enormity of his times. 

In garrison life, seeking privacy, I went to the furnace room of the barracks, writing into the night. I wrote in jeeps, in a truck cabin, in the dungeonlike holds of ships, in fierce wind and sandstorms within a tent in Tunisia, in candlelit private homes in Naples, in a library in North Ireland, a British barracks in Scotland, a shattered Norman farmhouse, a tent in England, the floor of Stalag XIIA, and on the splintered surface of a table in Stalag VIIA. It would seem that most anyplace would serve if one had to write, including the Service Club, whose thundering blasts of full-volumed jukebox contained so encompassing a cloud of sound that one found at the center a vacuum of silence.

More on Christmas, 1944

 Chapter 20, continued

Once Stubby and I had finished eating we played cribbage, I wrote some notes, we read (if the light was good enough), and we listened to music. A POW named Smoky a western yodeler who imitated a well-known radio singer and whose popular ballad was "The Wabash Cannonball," rendered this selection time and again.

We had a trio who sang popular songs with a mixture of corn to the accompaniment of a comb and toilet paper. On Sunday nights there was a Methodist group who sang loudly. There was a hillbilly quartet whose favorite song was "How I'd Like to Hear My Mother Praying."

I called across the room to Leonardo, who was visiting his friends Cortez and Trez, "Coppola, ask them to sing 'Besame Mucho'!"

"Si, amigo," he answered, smiling.

I had firm command of ten words of Spanish. With Coppola and his Spanish-speaking friends it was noblesse oblige. We heard much singing in prison, but none was so wonderful as that of Trez and Cortez. They harmonized while seated at the table or lying in bed from opposite sides of the room. Their voices blended in romantic Spanish and Mexican ballads. They sang beautifully together and were, for me, the sole musical treat of barracks life. 

At ten o'clock the guards turned off the lights. One POW was assigned every hour to fire duty. Usually he sat at a table under a single lightbulb covered with a tin can with both ends removed. For lack of anything to do or because they were tired or cold, most of the men were in their bunks by ten. A few stayed up to shoot craps, play cards, or just sit around the single light falling theatrically on the rough table. Gradually we all drifted off to bed, leaving the solitary guard. When called upon, Stubby, Coppola, and I pulled our guard turns one after the other.

By one o'clock I found the barracks still but not silent. It was a meditative time. It was hard to hold the mind in the barracks and on the life at hand. I wanted to move to fantasy: I wanted to go home.

During my hour stint I sometimes paced the length of the barracks. I walked from restlessness, to keep awake, and to keep in condition. 

Once the weather became too severe to walk comfortably outside and if I missed the Munich detail for a few days, it seemed important to exercise.

In the semidarkness of the dim barracks deep in the night, there was a stillness broken by a multitude of human and nonhuman sounds. I was never unaware of the presence of 150 men, even if all were asleep. I, like every other man in the room, had spent hundreds of nights in rooms crowded with sleeping men and knew well the sounds of night sleepers. The difference in prison was in the physical condition of the barracks, the beds, and the men. In the prison barracks I could hear the slow, steady breathing of men. There were low vocal sounds of moaning coming from a man's deep dreams. Since I dreamed more in prison, I assumed others did. The actionless, frustrated, lonely life produced an active dream life. I heard scattered sounds of snoring and coughing; I heard the crackling of excelsior in the sacking, the squealing of wooden frames and taut wires. Hardly a full minute of absolute silence went by before a pair of heavy shoes hit the floor and a POW went clumping and scraping his long way to the latrine. The buckles on the combat boots jingled and clicked; leather was scraped across the soft wooden floors and sounded all the way to the exit. Now and then I heard a scratched match followed by a quick flame. Frequently there were articulated sounds: something between a sigh and a groan, a word would come forth clear and startling in the dark night. A full sentence was blurted out from a darkened corner of the barracks, almost magnetic in its insistence and clarity When the temperature dropped to zero, the effect on the kidneys brought men out of bed until the passing of POWs was like ants coming and going to a hill of sand. The lice, fleas, and bedbugs bit and scratched in the night, and men vigorously scratched them in their sleep or would suddenly awaken, sit up in their bunks, and in fury scratch their legs. All night long gas attacks, gas on the stomach, punctured the silence. I heard the swift scratching noise of a rat over the rough floor, a door slamming, and, in late winter, the fierce wind blowing against the thin walls, shaking the glass panes, rattling them.

One Sunday in December it was announced that all who wished could attend a performance of The Barrette of Win pole Street in the theatre building. At two o'clock one of the sergeants joined a German guard and took several of us through the compound to a barracks that contained a row of seats and a slightly raised curtained stage. Elizabeth Barrett and her sisters and female friends were all played by British prisoners of war. They were costumed in the Victorian period, and appropriate furniture included a chaise lounge of green velvet. The cast got a number of unintentional laughs from the mixed American, British, and French audience. Not all of the men were thoroughly convincing as females, but the actor playing Elizabeth Barrett was totally convincing. Who he was or whether he was, as rumor told, a well-known female impersonator made no difference. The situation was so characteristic of British adaptability, as well as needs, that it provided for me one of my memorable experiences in the theatre.

... to be continued

Other memories of Sept 11

Here's a picture of my Dad in front of fascist HQ in Sicily after it was seized by the Allied invasion from North Africa. 

His parents later received this picture with a note from General Patten's widow saying the General had this photo on the mirror all through the war. Every day he would look at this picture and say, "Now there is my kind of soldier, why can't some of those sons-of-bitches I have in my command be like him?" 

William J Stigall, Jr. 
Sicily, 1943

[It's a 9/11 memory because my Dad was in a hospital north of NYC when the attack occurred, and we could see the World Trade Center burning from our apartment that night. For us, 9/11 meant as much that it was his last "good" day on that awful day, awful week.] 

December 1944 - Chapter 20 - A winter in prison

December in Prison

It was the first of December 1944. Coppola, Stubby, and I were settling down for a winter in prison. I had finally given up expecting the war to end before Christmas that year. Word had drifted in to us that our mission in Holland had failed and that German resistance in Germany had stiffened and stopped the advancing Allied armies.

Stubby was lounging quietly above Coppola, who was trying to read by what remained of the light of  day. Leonardo had by now a fine full red beard, augmented by a mustache with long, well-twisted ends. His slow, thoughtful movements, sometimes seemingly calculated, gave him an appearance of age well beyond his middle twenties. His beard, mustache, and slow gestures suggested a nickname, Pop.

I was stretched out in my bunk with my head turned toward Coppola and away from the fine mist of powdered excelsior that trickled down from the sack above me. "Hey, Pop," I called out to interrupt him, "how long has it been since you've eaten a piece of meat?"

He pulled himself out of the book and slowly, deliberately, time being no pusher of Coppola, thought for a moment, then said, "Six weeks." He ran his right hand repeatedly across his mustache out to the far ends. He added in a low, soft, accented voice, "In France. A week or so before I was caught."

Stubby leaned over to say, "We had some meat in Holland. Eight weeks ago. Haven't had a piece larger than an inch square since we got here, and that was in soup." Many unpleasant things could rightfully be said of GI chow, the quality of which depended upon the staff sergeant and his cooks, but even at its worst, we had meat two or three times a day. In possible. He almost never spoke, but when he did it was in a quiet tone, agreeable and simple. He loved to talk about the farm from where he came. I never knew his name, but in spite of his utter gentleness, the word monster forced itself upon me.

Across the bunk from the Monster was Arriga, whose large body supported a huge head with an enormous jaw and arms that swung freely from his heavy shoulders. His hair was dark and twisted: it lay scattered over his head, a part of it dropping from a low hairline into his eyes. Arriga's hands were gigantic and moved awkwardly, as though they were unskilled in the simplest of human activities. His body was covered with lice and flea bites grown into festered sores. The itching irritated Auriga, so he sat up in bed with his shirt and trousers off, scratching his bites with uncontrolled passion.

He was like an ape in a cage sitting on his top bunk endlessly, silently seemingly enjoying the ecstasy of scratching. Normally Arriga's face was a blank. However, when angered he flared up or grew sullen and surly and, when prodded to it, was riled to animalistic violence. The suddenness of his temper was frightening. But normally he was quiet, even childish. Arriga would move slowly across the floor dragging his unlaced shoes and sit down at the table with his "stamp pictures" and various souvenirs he had collected from Munich. He handled them, over and over again, moving them about on the table in some personal pattern. With his heavy hand he copied drawings from other men's sketches. He was twenty-four and had been in the army since eighteen months before Pearl Harbor. Arriga's mother had to OK his volunteering for the army. As he told it, "I was sure scared that she wouldn't do it." Arriga could neither read nor write and was (according to him) declared unfit for overseas duty. He was captured fighting on the western front.

We all worked on the Munich detail, and on evenings when we got back early, around six or seven, there was time to thaw out beside the stoves, heat water, play cards, talk, sing, lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling at the patterns formed by the wire against the scalding above one. There was also time to bake puddings. The puddings were made with bread or round, crisp Canadian crackers ground down into crusts. Chocolate, raisins, powdered milk, prunes, butter, sugar (or any part thereof) were mixed and stirred up in a homemade balding pan. The puddings were baked either in the brick oven in the room between the barracks or in a homemade stove tied, for security, to a pole in the center of the barracks. The brick oven contained one section partitioned off with shiny tin panels on which the delicious puddings were baked. In the barracks, the community stove was a German adaptation. It was there when we came; we simply added numerous holes for the individual blowers and homemade ovens. When Red Cross boxes arrived containing all the ingredients for a pudding and wood was available, the fragrance of the culinary delights balding in the ovens saturated and smoked the barracks.

The puddings took from fifteen to twenty minutes to bake. Most men did their own balding, but some paid another POW one cigarette to stand by and feed the oven wood. If wood was scarce, we paid a German guard one cigarette for the wood. The balding of puddings was one of the principal activities of prison life. We stood around the stoves waiting our turn to use them; we stood about just to watch others using them; we stood and griped because some men failed to contribute their portion of wood; quarreling, bitching, kibitzing, we stood and shared, open-mouthed and with ravishing hunger, at the glowing puddings going in and coming out of the ovens.

 -- to be continued -