Chapter 19 (continued) -- Stalag VIIA

I was frequently joined in Munich by Coppola. We talked endlessly in an effort to pass the agonizing hours in the boxcar. Coppola was rugged, but he did come from below Tucson and the severity of Munich's winter was no treat. We walked together through the snow-sloppy streets of Munich with the black snow, wet and cold, sucked into our shoes. We passed many elaborate Catholic churches, some battered, some with full rococo fronts untouched. 

Coppola entertained me with stories of a former archbishop of Arizona. "He was a scoundrel," said  Leonardo. He went on to tell me about his wonderful collection of old books, volumes in Spanish and English. While walking the battered streets of Munich, Coppola and I made plans for the future.

"When we get released," he said, "let's go to Paris." "I'm with you," I said. "We can simply disappear for a couple of weeks and see Paris. It's too good an opportunity to miss." I spoke nothing but English and a few words of Spanish. Coppola could get us around in French without any trouble. This conversation was elaborated upon many times in the long days in prison.

Coppola said, 'We'II get a room somewhere, eat bread, buy wine by the case."

I asked, "What'll we use for money?"

"We'll get it," he replied.

I later discovered that Coppola, on his way through France, had decided that he could afford a few days away from his outfit and gone to Paris until he ran out of money. He left friends there. Coppola also had obtained, someplace between Paris and prison, a flamboyant Hungarian cavalryman's overcoat, whose wide sldrts marvelously concealed as many as ten kilos of bread from Munich. Practical as that may be, it was the picturesque quality of the apparel that far outweighed its usefulness. His heavy head of hair, shaggy red beard, and elongated mustache, all covered with the dirt of ages and punctuated with strong white teeth, completed the picture.

In Munich around one o'clock there was usually an air raid or air-raid warning. When the sirens sang we were hustled off to cellars, strong brick buildings, or the basements of bombed buildings. We never stayed out in the open. The guards were always interested in shelter. A few times during the winter of 1944-45 the bombings were heavy. The English and Americans took turns plastering the railroad yard and the city. Usually I delighted in the raids. Some does I was dreadfully afraid.

One day we were worldng on the second floor of a building recently hit, clearing away bricks and rubbish, collecting our piles of splintered wood, when the air-raid siren screamed its warning. The two German guards led the ten American POWs down the staircase to the cellar of the building. In a few minutes five or six male and female German civilians came down the stairs, shutting the door after them. The women lived in the two-story brick building next to our building. The shelter was small, barely accommodating the sixteen or seventeen of us. It was equipped with tools, water, and seats. It had been quickly and crudely constructed, or reinforced, from the original basement.

In a few minutes the planes in waves passed over us, dropping bombs that seemed to fall close to us. A small amount of white dust filtered down the staircase. More waves of planes followed, dropping bombs now unmistakably close. The shelter shook with the shock of nearby explosions. Dust covered us all. The noise of the siren and the exploding bombs was terrifying. The fear of death was mixed with the complexity of sitting in a German air-raid shelter with German soldiers and civilians while my air force blasted us. I wanted them to ruin Munich, Idle Germans, but not kill me. It was the old situation of whether one was willing and able to pay the price for the experience.

I watched the civilians for signs of their reaction to the bombing. I could determine nothing from their stony expressions. I often wondered what would happen should the guards desert us. The shelter rattled with near-hits, the shock and vibration of which loosened a couple of the wooden pillars supporting the roof. I was frightened to death. I loathed the idea of having to die in a lousy German air-raid shelter, never having the chance to get home, never seeing again the people I loved, never telling them what I had seen and done. Even my notes I could not bring back; they were hidden in the barracks. I had come so far a distance, through so much, and then to die so miserably, so near the end of the journey.

One American soldier, with unbelievable nerve or unstrung from shock, kept a running solo, shouting, almost in rhythm with the shock waves, "Hit 'em. Whambo! Hit 'err; whambo!" He kept up this verbal pounding until the German civilians were obviously angry. He then increased the tempo. While they may or may not have understood his words (and many of them understood English, although they seldom spoke to us), there was no mistaldng his meaning. He continued his psychotic actions until the guards ordered him to stop. I had already screamed at him to shut up. My nerves were not that good, and in my extreme fear I joined the guards in shouting at him to cut it out. He subsided, grinning. The raid lasted two hours, until finally we heard the all-clear.

***

The distribution of food among 150 grumbling, distempered, cold, tired, and hungry men was a frightfully disorderly mess.

"Got it all ready, Bill!" Stubby called out.

We sat down at one of the tables to eat. "Where did you work?" he asked. "Some land of school, a university, in fact. It was blasted. Same job. Passing bricks." "It was cold, eh?" Stubby asked. "Yeah, except that we got inside some of the time. No air raid, but a long damn wait," I answered.

Down the aisle of the barracks a POW passed us calling in a firm voice, "Catholic rosary will be recited in Barracks Six A1 now." He repeated his announcement twice before he got out of the barracks.

Stubby said, "We had mail call today. Two letters and one package. The package was for one of the guys from Brooklyn. You should have been here when he opened it. The box was about twelve inches square. When he shook it, it made a noise. It was ten phonograph records. They were all smashed. His friends from the Bronx razzed the hell out of him. It was sad." Of course we didn't have a phonograph anyhow. Mail call was almost nonexistent, but every once in a while two letters came for 200 POWs. These always intensified thoughts of home. Food and serious illness were our first concerns. After them, most men worried about the effect of their disappearance at home. From men recently in the States, men like Stubbs, we heard about the procedures of informing next of kin.

A form telegram reached a soldier's family a month after a soldier was reported missing from his unit. Certainly all such telegrams were worded the same-which is understandable. But the contents overran the form; key words lifted the impersonal wording out of the message. Postmen on the route, knowing the situation in the home, knew the telegrams and sometimes took special precautions in delivering such messages.

I later read one received at my home on October 25, 1944.

-end of chapter 19-

Chapter 19 (continue) Stalag __ Munich

Until late winter I occupied a middle bunk. Above me was Stubby. Across the aisle, an arm's length away, was Coppola. We had no free choice of work details in Munich, but Stubby and I tried to alternate days, leaving one behind to protect belongings, pick up information, and warm food when the other returned from Munich.

At 4:30 A.M. the German guards entered the barracks, turned on  the lights, and shouted their repellent, "Raus!" Stubby called down to me, "Bill, your morning to get tea!" I crawled out, untied my shoes from the wires above, laced them up, took the overcoat off the bed, and put it on. I pulled a knitted cap down over my forehead, put on a precious, if thin, pair of cotton gloves, and said to Stubbs, "When I get back, do you want some tea?" "No thanks. I can't stand the smell."  The tea, which came nearly every morning, was so foulsmelling that few could drink it. Some men washed their feet in the dark, steaming, putrid tea. Since the tea was boiling hot, some men shaved in it. I usually drank some.

I joined a detail of three or four POWs and a German guard. It was now beyond the middle of December, and it was cold. We carried the milk cans of hot, malodorous tea from the kitchen to the barracks. Again the men were awakened by a few forceful "Rauses" or occasionally, later in winter, by the appearance of two aggressive unleashed German police dogs.

"See you tonight, Stubby," I said.

"OK, Bill. Bring some wood if you can," replied Stubby. He was still under his blanket and overcoat and would stay there until roll call at seven o'clock outside in the yard. Unless detailed within the camp, he would spend the day in the barracks, as I would the next day

At 5:15 we went outside to form a column of five or sixes. It was very dark, intensely cold. We waited, already chilled, amid much grumbling and swearing or sometimes in absolute silence. After being checked and rechecked, we marched through the Gates out of the compound a half-mile to the tram. 

Fifty of us and two guards got into the boxcar. It was now six o'clock and barely light. In the boxcar there was sometimes a stove, sometimes not, sometimes a stove and no wood. We sat on the floor and waited for the train to take us the fifty miles to Munich. Conversation was nil. Some of us went back to sleep; others managed to converse with one another or with one of the guards, picking up news but mostly rumors. We tried to find out what the work was for the day. We waited. Finally the train started and made a swift run to the outskirts of Munich. There we would stop and let more important traffic enter the city over what few lines were open following many air raids. We would go either a mile or so into the city or all the way to the great glass station, the pride of Munich. No glass remained, and the steel supports had been twisted and blasted to smithereens. Piles of rubble lay all about. Usually only one or two tracks were open. It was a joy to see.

We arrived in Munich about nine o'clock and marched through the city passing what were once tourist sites. We paraded around piles of rubble, passed lines of German civilians going to work or scrounging for food. We went to buildings recently bombed and spent the day passing bricks or junk from hand to hand. We worked in the freezing railroad yard, the coldest place in Munich. We assisted the railroad workers repairing tracks. Small fires were kept going, and naturally the guard's chief job was to keep POWs like me away from the fire and on the job. We usually had two guards with rifles watching us all day. Once in a while we went back to Moosburg minus a POW, he having disappeared during the day. I suppose this was murderous on the guards. Some stormed furiously at us, some did not.

On mornings after severe air raids we would not get into Munich until ten-thirty or eleven-thirty. We ate promptly at noon. Food was one of the reasons many POWs chose to take the Munich detail, for this was additional food to that at camp. Usually the food was distributed at a central point and was the same as at camp, bread, cheese, and soup. Now and then the soup, bean or potato, was good, and when it was, it was very good. 

One noon my group of ten POWs was taken by the guards to a restaurant. We sat at a table and were waited on. We each had soup, bread, a small piece of meat, and a mug of beer. The guards paid for it. Most of the people in the restaurant were German civilians. Civilians never touched me or made any attempt to do so. They generally ignored me. We were, along with the Russian workers, the concentration camp workers in their striped uniforms, a common enough sight in Munich.

The civilians I saw in Munich were models of stoicism. They made clear to me that until we overran them they were going to and were able to resist the frightful bombings. Many civilians came in from the suburbs carrying, almost to a man, briefcases containing, among other things, their lunch. Munich was a badly battered city, which I relished. All transportation was reduced to fifth-rate vehicles. Bicycles with trailers, pushcarts, small-gauge trains, small, open freight cars brought civilians in from the suburbs.

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A day in the life of a POW camp: Chapter 19 (beginning)

[Irony alert: WJS was a private throughout WWII and you may recall his caustic comments about General Eisenhower in England. In this chapter, we find a new species, Sergeants. Probably better than generals but closer at hand.]

Stalag VIIA

Our train of boxcars came to a stop at a small station named Moosburg. We backed up a short distance on a siding, the doors were opened, and we unloaded. There was sunlight and the weather was moderate. Again we walked into a barbed-wire-enclosed camp with manned machine guns in tall towers. This was Stalag VIIA. It was situated in gently rolling agricultural country with small forests visible from the camp yard. Stalag VIIA was not as crowded as XIIA. Still we did not at first have bunks. Although it was nearly November and the air was sharp, it was not cold. We had come far south, deep into Germany, away from the advancing Allied armies. We had, as we slowly discovered, come to Bavaria, fifty miles north of Munich.

Our compound was like a zoo with an indoor and outdoor living and pacing area. We moved about in our own section with relative freedom, like captive animals convinced but seemingly adjusted to our restricted environment. We lived in buildings that were long, one-storied, made of stucco, brick, or wood. There were two sections of sleeping quarters divided in the center by an enclosed space with a concrete floor. The small center room was always cold because of the concrete floor and the four Windows without glass. There were three rooms in the center area, one with two water spigots, one with a pump and table for washing clothes, and a third with a brick furnace for cooking. The furnace room was occupied most of the time. It was especially crowded whenever wood and food were available.

Our barracks was the core of all our activity. The room was low, dark, and crowded, from one end it gave the impression of a tunnel. The barracks was dimly lit by six naked lightbulbs so weak that I could look directly into them without blurring my vision. There were two rows of bunk stacks, one on each side of the aisle down the middle of the barracks. During the day there was light from the ten or twelve small Windows, but since most of the bunks headed toward the side of the building, light was restricted to the spot near the window. Flanked by two stacks of bunks, each open space in front of the Windows was a beehive of activity. 

After five weeks of sleeping on the brick floor, we got bunks. The bunks were three high, two sections wired together side by side so that each man had a man adjacent to him. The bunks were wooden frames with heavy wires for springs and a gunnysack, the length of the frame, stuffed with excelsior and loaded with fleas, lice, and bedbugs. The bottom bunk sagged so that a man's butt touched the cold floor. The top bunk was the most sought after, since bunks underneath suffered from dust sprinkled through the pores in the gunnysacks.

Hanging from the bunks, from the walls, and from the ceiling were freshly washed clothes; a variety of tin cans, ingeniously contrived with handles; toasting irons; swinging shelves; stationary

ledges; Red Cross boxes; towels; elaborate pots and pans picked up on the Munich detail; musical instruments. These hanging objects gave the barracks the appearance of a well-stocked pawnshop. No two items were alike. All the clutter increased the dimness and darkness of the barracks. During the shorter days of winter, with less light and longer hours spent in the barracks, the "hardware" and the smoke from the cooling stoves saturated the living space with dimness.

Across the room one-fourth of the wall space was given over to bunks. The remaining space consisted of tables, long, rude, unplanned planks, with accompanying benches. Beyond the tables at the end of the room was an enclosed space-a private quarters that housed the staff who ran the barracks. There was a door with a sign:

    PRIVATE-KNOCK.

The occupants of Private Knock were there when we arrived. They were American POWs called sergeants and were in charge of daily details, getting and distributing supplies and food, assisting the Germans with work details, and passing on information from camp headquarters. There were approximately two hundred privates in each of the two barracks. Two hundred ravenously hungry privates made for some tension. 

The privates were detailed to bring the pots and cans of food from the central kitchens to the barracks, where the division took place. At first the distribution was behind PRIVATE-KNOCK, but later we were organized into groups of twenty-five with a leader who was admitted to Private-Knock. We were appeased but everlastingly suspicious. Continuous hunger sharpened our concern for food, any food, all food. Absolutely nothing else was of equal importance.

... 

Map of Moosburg's location NE of Munich

Site of Stalag VII A

Stalag VII A memorial, Moosburg

Brief comment on post-war life ...

 

Two personal comments on Chapter 18 …

My Dad mentions only a few people by name in A Shower of Frogs. One of them was Leonardo Coppola of Nogales [the book says Nogales, Mexico but I’m not sure of that. Perhaps it was Arizona.]  And as far as I know, Coppola was the only WWII comrade he ever got together with after the war, although I think he corresponded with some (e.g., Stubby).

This chapter also highlights hunger: my dad wasn’t a beefy guy in the first place, but after the war, he was positively thin. Still physically strong with a strong appetite. And he never gained weight after coming home.

Another Boxcar Ride: We Go South - Chapter 18

 [I have two reflections on this chapter that I'll share in the next post. - SP]

Suddenly, without any preparation, the Germans selected 700 American POWs, marched us to the railroad siding, and jammed us in as before, and we were off on another journey we knew not where. We left without our daily rations and without a new Red Cross box, which somehow we had expected to get. It was the middle of November. We had not yet been given overcoats, and blankets were turned in. In that land of high blood pressure the guards, shouting and gesturing, worked to get us in the cars.

As before, a milk can was provided and the doors locked. The train started with determination and continued for many hours. The first two days were a repeat of the former trip-no food, no water, a calculated effort at bestiality.

We, however, were different men now. Behind us was a long boxcar ride and several weeks of prison life. There would be few surprises this trip. There would be no false hopes or great expectations. We were alerted to long hours of waiting in switchyards. We'd experienced want of water, food, and air. We would remember the frustrating and maddening necessity of dividing bread and cheese whenever the swines of society chose to toss it in the car. We'd find ways this time to stretch our legs. There would be more readiness to deal with the claustrophobic conditions. There might even be a little cooperation, now that we were all Americans in the car. Of course there would be a stronger sense of self-preservation in several meanings of the words.

Yet it was surprising, what happened. We had learned very little. The disorder was, if anything, greater now that we were really hungry When, after sixty hours, the Legitimate Bastards of the human race opened the door and dumped in some food and water, some men did not get any. There was still the galling problem of dividing a loaf of bread into seven or eight portions and seeing that the pieces were passed around the car. Not all men got some. Then, too, the active ingredient of cheating moved in on the division of food.

***

Through the long days and longer nights we realized that we were traveling south. We could feel it in the warmer temperature, especially at night. As four days dragged into six, we made new friends. Stubby and I met a private soldier named Leonardo Coppola of Nogales, Mexico. My first memory of Coppola is of sitting next to him against a wall of the car and watching him use a small knife, slowly, patiently, slicing a piece of cheese and carefully relishing each bite. He also managed with equal deliberateness to spread some butter and cheese on a piece of bread.

"Want to borrow my knife?" he asked me.

"Thanks," I replied. I sliced my bread and spread some cheese.

Coppola had a two-week beard and a significant mustache. His English had a noticeable accent. Coppola seldom wasted words and his vocabulary betrayed considerable reading. He had not, as I remember him, been long in Stalag XIIA. He was a tank cowboy, an infantryman riding the Patton tanks of the Thirty-sixty Division. In some wild skirmish he, along with a number of others (some of whom were in the car), was captured and sent to Limburg. Coppola had a sense of humor; the gift of laughter in our situation made him quite a man.

There was little for us to do all the long hours of the ride except sleep, dream, gripe, meditate, talk, and listen to talk. Stubby, Coppola, and I listened for hours to our hungry buddies detail the wondrous meals they had enjoyed in civilian life. Every time they sat down to a table it was to thick steaks and large baked potatoes with bokoo butter. They used to load up on stacks of pancakes with bokoo bacon and pitchers of syrup. Breakfast was always several eggs, fried potatoes, sausage followed by bokoo cups of coffee. The empty stomach did marvelous things to memory. In fact, hunger froze their memories around a series of the top eating's of their life and released from capture any cruddy suet and beans or cold hominy they ever consumed.

The empty stomach also performed a miracle in another area of our lives. After a month in prison I realized that I no longer heard the Bunyanesque tales of sexual potency. This powerful human force that had of necessity to be liberated and elaborated upon ad nauseam was suddenly out of the conversation. We no longer heard a single example of glorious sexual conquest. Not one tall tale of life against the dark walls of Britain, the green lawns of Ireland, the haystacks of Scotland. Not one exuberant recitation of exciting shack jobs in Naples. Nary a detail of happy life in truck cabins.

Now it was, "I'm so hungry I could eat a whole pie." It was exclusively "my stomach." Our attention shifted from one organ to another. Out of food, out of sex. Who could have imagined that the stomach was the seat of man's sexual Powers? It was the most delightful surprise of prison life. It was Emersonian: one of life's compensations.

***

There were moments during this trip when life was quiet in the boxcar, when men slept from exhaustion or boredom. There were times when things simply quieted down. One man played softly on a harmonica while we listened and dreamed, and one had a glimpse of the possibilities of companionship or some dream-like communion that might arise from so painful an experience shared by so many men. It never did. During the last few days I was conscious that we were moving farther southward into gentler, warmer country. I stood for hours by the small window, leaning against the end of the car, and watched the beautiful pastoral landscape. We passed groves of dark, mysterious evergreens with sunlight streaming through tree limbs and glittering on the piney ground. They evoked the romance surrounding the words Black Forest. As we looked through our postage-stamp window, now unobstructed by any barbed wire (we had lacked it out), our journey, with a little imagination, was at times like a trip through fairyland. The nights turned warm and soft. It was no trouble to stand in the swaying, rumbling car watching the passing scenery in the soft moonlight of Bavaria.

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More on life as a WWII POW in Germany

William Stigall's Shower of Frogs (Chapter 17, Stalag XIIA)

Poverty destroyed group companionship, but it cemented personal relationships. Someplace back in those three days of glorious weather in Holland while walking and singing Stubby and I came to appreciate each other. When we arrived at Stalag XIIA it was obvious to me that Stubby was far from beaten. He had lived a rugged life, had worked on a farm, had been on the bum, had worked as a short-order cook, and had operated a pneumatic drill in the streets of Des Moines. Physically he gave the impression of being knotted. The lines in his face were far too deep for a man of twenty-nine. On the day Stubbs came out of the boxcar with an inch of scraggy red beard and gaunt face, he looked all of forty. 

He was wiry and nervous, chain-smoked, and consumed coffee as a habit. Part of his aggressiveness was undoubtedly expressed in pushing a giant truck over the Alcan Highway in the early days of the war. His instinct for self-preservation was strong and healthy. He had every intention of again driving trucks in the States. There was a streak of the romantic in Stubbs, as indeed there is in many truck drivers. The lonely, self-contained life hustling solitary trucks over the unending concrete of the United States either calls for or makes romantic men. By a slight stretch of the imagination Stubbs was a latter-day mountain man combined with a western scout. He was practical and realistic, except on the subject of the Alcan Highway, when the poetry took over.

"How long were you up there?" I asked him. 

"Two years," he answered, "and I wouldn't give ten thousand dollars or ten years of my life for the experience."

"You liked it, eh?"

"Bill, you should see the northern lights in December. Nothing like them can be seen in the States. The country is wide open and wild. There are marshes there so deep that a truck can sink into them and disappear."

Stubby had many tall tales, which reflected both his Alcan days and his restless life. One came in time to believe most of the stories. He was,after all, out of Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Saroyan.

Our sleeping quarters became greatly overcrowded, so Stubby and I, along with many others, were moved to a temporary tent, a large circus tent with straw on the ground. Our night's sleep was frequently interrupted by sick men rising and stumbling over us on their dark way to the latrines, blackouts being strictly enforced. Occasionally a guard walked through or a rat ran over our half-conscious bodies.

In late October roll call began at 4:30 and lasted two hours. American POWs would escape on work details and not be missed when the group returned at night. At 4:30 the next morning the Nazis discovered the absence. This always raised the blood pressure, infuriated and irritated the well-organized Luftwaffe officers. They took out their anger on the rest of us. I stood for hours-waiting, hating. After six weeks we were issued German dog tags, which I still have. They were thin rectangular pieces of crude steel or iron two and one-half by one and one-half inches. Mine was stamped: "ST-XIIA." This was followed by 92285-a number I never learned.

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Chapter 17 - Stalag XIIA (continued) ... things not going well

Bill Stigall on "comradery" as a POW:

Soon after I arrived in Limburg I lost track of Sergeant Birdwell and Corporal Gerry. As noncommissioned officers, they were separated from privates. I thought of them often. I remembered our many arguments, our long, long miles together, our many bivouacs in Louisiana, Carolina, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Italy, England; I remembered our Christmas together in North Ireland, our terrible days together in Normandy. I missed them. I never saw them again. 

As private soldiers Stubby and I were required, by the Geneva Convention (we were told), to work. In Stalag XIIA that meant digging pits for potatoes, removing rubble from bombings, and digging ditches. On one such detail, we walked to the edge of Limburg and were given shovels and told to dig. One bright and knowing POW asked the German guard what we were digging.

"just dig," he grunted.

"Are these gun emplacements?" the POW questioned.

"Yes," said the guard, and pointing to the earth he added,

"Dig."

The POW refused. There was a big argument. Other POWs joined the argument. A Luftwaffe officer came over, and the POW explained, "By the Geneva Convention we are not allowed to dig gun emplacements against our own troops." More verbal exchanges.

Big talkers.

Big joke.

From the argument, I gathered we had two choices: resist and take the consequences-probably solitary confinement and no food-or dig. My notes inform me that we all dug. Not willingly; under protest, at the end of a rifle or a bayonet. But we dug; with infuriating slowness and like stumblebums, we dug. 

While we worked, one newly captured POW who had recently been in the States enheartened us with, "You should see what the German POWs get at home." We paused to listen. He went on, "They have clean barracks. They get GI chow." "So?" someone said. "And who cares?" The guy went on, "They even mix with American soldiers and civilians."

"Yeah, Americans are softhearted."

Who could refute the reporter? So we argued these international problems while we dug a few lousy holes for the Germans to hold out against the coming of our buddies. It was as funny as hell.

If ever there was a buddy system in some units of the U.S. Army, by October in POW camp it was no longer discernible. Prison life, indeed the boxcar ride, saw the buddy system collapse. Hunger for food and cigarettes dominated our lives. All we had lots of was hunger. All we had to share was hunger. We started begging butts when a man reached for a cigarette. The butt, pinioned on the point of a toothpick or held tightly at the tips of a tweezer, was passed around among ten to twelve men while it burned the last one's lips. We watched our buddies snipe butts from the latrine floors. They begged butts from Nazi guards, from German civilians, while the latter looked on in contempt and the former with withering scorn.