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 - 

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.

-0-

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.