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Pursuit Across Germany
Almost everyone has seen pictures of American soldiers opening the gates of PW
camps, but one bizarre incident escaped public notice. One of the two 90th Div Arty
chaplains was en route between two battalions on pastoral business when he made a
wrong turn and was about to enter a village when he realized that there were no white
flags displayed in token of surrender. He told his assistant-driver, organist, secretary, and
altar boy - to stop while he checked his map. At this point a ragged man jumped out of
the roadside ditch and addressed the chaplain in English with a heavy French accent.
"Don't go in there! There are German SS troops guarding the prison camp in the village.
Go back and bring your army to storm the place."
The man was an escaped PW from the camp he mentioned, and he thought that
the other PsW would probably rise up and overpower their guards, or at least distract
them enough to keep them from resisting the Americans.
The chaplain thought it over. Neither he nor his assistant was armed: medics and
chaplain personnel were not allowed to carry weapons. He didn't know much about our
tactical plans, nor how soon infantry would be available for this mission. But he did
know the protocol for surrendering a village, so he decided to bluff.
After making sure the PW spoke German as well as French and English, he told
him, "You go back into the village and tell the burgomeister that I am here to save as
many lives as I can. I can hold off our soldiers for two hours, but unless by that time the
village, including the SS soldiers, have surrendered and all the firearms, knives, and
cameras have been collected and white flags put up, his village will be turned to rubble
by artillery fire. Can you do that without being recaptured?"
And well within the two hours, white flags were flying. The chaplain drove in,
armed the PsW with the collected weapons, and told them to take over until the American
troops arrived.
As he climbed back into his jeep to leave, the French PW who had first seen him
asked, "Sir, is it a custom in the American Army for two unarmed men to capture
villages?"
Late in the spring we occupied what looked like an ordinary farmhouse with a
stable across the courtyard. It appeared to be deserted, so we didn't have the usual
problem of getting the Germans moved out. But other hazards started turning up as soon
as we arrived. Everywhere we had to step over little piles or puddles of stinking dung: on
the floors of the house, in the courtyard, in the stable. Out in the courtyard there sat a man
who looked like a scarecrow made of sticks with rags hung on them. It took me awhile to
realize that he was in the last stages of starvation, exacerbated by an acute diarrhea.
Inside the stable I found the most shocking sight I had seen since the burnt German
tanker at the Falaise Gap. This was a man who was beyond the last stages of starvation.
On the straw in one of the stalls, he lay on his side, his pelvic bone showing through his
thin trousers. His buttocks were so shrunken that his seat was concave instead of convex.
I stood for a long moment while the truth seeped through. This stable was not for cattle or
horses, but for slave labor who worked the farm to grow food for people who didn't share
it with them. No wonder the German proprietors had left before we could catch them and
hold them as war criminals!
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