American Valor Quarterly Issue 8 - Winter 2010/2011 | Page 13

As to mail, I received one letter in fourteen months. It was from
my mother. What a blessing knowing that the family was all well
and they knew I was alive. My wife had written, but the Germans
must have kept her love letters for their own entertainment. We
got a Red Cross food package for Christmas. It contained a can
of spam, a bar of tropical chocolate, a box of raisins, a can of
powdered milk, a small container of powdered coffee, a box
of sugar cubes, a small can of liver pate, a bar of soap, and
three packs of cigarettes. It was nothing that a normal person
would be too excited about, but for a starving prisoner of war,
it meant the difference between life and death.
On February 5, 1945, one year after I had been shot down, just
as the sun went down, there came a far off rumble of distant
guns in the evening air. The Russians were coming. The war
American prisoners of war are marched through the grounds at Stalag
would soon be over and I would be going home. The German
Luft IV. Thousands of American prisoners were held behind its barbed officers in the prison camp weren’t about to be taken prisoner
wire from its opening in May, 1944 until it was evacuated as the Red
by the Russians; they knew what would happen to them if they
Army approached in February, 1945.
were. They decided to hold us prisoners for barter to trade for
in German and headed for the door. And I was right behind their own freedom when we reached American lines. We would
them. I found a ditch beside the track and lay as flat as I could as be their ticket to freedom.
I watched a squadron of American P47 Thunderbolts swoop
from the sky. They came so close that I could look ou Ё