The Record Special Sections Tribute to Veterans 11-11-2019 | Page 2

2 ❚ MONDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2019 ❚ THE RECORD
TRIBUTE TO VETERANS
A SOLDIER’S STORY
Paratrooper Spends
The War in POW Camp
100-Year-Old WWII Veteran Honored for Service
By JAMES EMOLO
A
going to die, I was going to die.”
The paratroopers’ mission was
to blow up an ammo depot, but
their transport plane missed the
jump mark and all the men got
scattered.
“I landed alone on the side of a
hill,” says Stivale. “I had three gre-
nades and 150 rounds of ammuni-
tion. But at 3:30 that afternoon,
I got captured. Four German SS
soldiers had me outmanned and
outgunned. I put my hands up ...
and they took my watch.”
Stivale is so sure of the times
and the date he jumped and was
captured because he documented
many of the details of his mili-
tary service in a diary, which he
kept throughout the war. It went
everywhere he went and like
Stivale, it too is a survivor. The
tattered, time-worn diary is trea-
sured by his family today.
After being captured, Stivale
was put to work filling holes on a
bombed out German airfield. He
was then transported over sev-
eral days with other POWs to the
Naples area of Italy where they
were crowded into a boxcar for a
“miserable” five-day rail journey
to Stalag II-B in Hammerstein,
Germany.
“We didn’t stay there long …
maybe a couple of weeks,” he
says. “The Russian army was
getting closer all the time, so the
Germans marched us several hun-
dred miles to a camp in Central
Germany. I just remember they
kept saying ‘Raus! Raus!’ (move,
move) all the time. I’ll never forget
that. It was the only German word
I knew.”
When Stivale and the other
POWs arrived at the camp in
the village of Parchim, he says
the only food they got was
potatoes and black bread made
with sawdust. “It made me sick,”
says Stivale. “If it wasn’t for the
Red Cross package I got once a
month, I would have died. It had
Bloomfield High School in 1938,
and, like many other young men
in Bloomfield, was drafted into
the military as the U.S. entered
tribute plaque fixed atop
the Walnut Street sign
the war.
“The Army kept moving
in Bloomfield recognizes
me from camp to camp. I was
Thomas Stivale who lives
inducted at Fort Dix, then sent to
on the street in the two-family
Fort Bragg, NC, for training, then
home he and his wife, Pauline,
to Louisiana, and then five days
purchased in 1947. The plaque
in a truck to Washington State
wasn’t installed, though, to cel-
and Oregon,” says Stivale. “I said
ebrate Stivale’s longevity on
‘enough of this. I’m getting out
Walnut Street or, even more so,
all the years the 100-year-old resi- of this outfit,’ So, I volunteered
for the Airborne and was sent to
dent has lived in the city. Rather,
Fort Benning, Ga., for parachute
it salutes Stivale’s military service
as a combat veteran — particularly training.”
At Fort Benning, Stivale
the two years he was held captive
became a member of a new
in a German POW camp during
unit being formed — the 456th
World War II.
Parachute
Field Artillery
Battalion
of the 82nd
Airborne
Division. To
qualify, he
made five
training jumps.
But it was
the sixth jump
he would soon
make that
would seal
his fate
in the war.
After train-
ing, his unit
shipped out
PHOTO COURTESY OF ROSE FALCHI to North Africa
from where
Lifetime Bloomfield resident Thomas Stivale, left,
the invasion
was honored in 2016 by the City of Bloomfield for
of Sicily was
his WWII military service, including two years in a
POW camp. Mayor Michael Venezia and Councilman launched from.
“At 12:30
Nicolas Joanow presented Stivale with an honorary
street sign that was then posted on the street where a.m. on July
10, 1943, I
he has lived since 1947.
made my first
combat jump … and my last,” says
Stivale’s roots run deep in
Stivale. “It was night time and
Bloomfield. Delivered by a mid-
they dropped 15 of us over Sicily.
wife in his family’s then home
In training, some guys froze up in
on Newark Avenue, he was born
the door of the plane. But I had
on October 15, 1919. He attended
no fear of dying. I figured if I was
city schools, graduating from
Tribute to Veterans
Thomas Stivale was awarded his Parachutist Badge, or “Jump
Wings,” after completing Airborne training during World War II.
cigarettes, chocolate and canned
meat in it. I traded the cigarettes
to French prisoners for white
bread they got in the village. They
were in the camp for so long …
seven years … and the Germans
would let them go into the village.”
Any thoughts of escape,
though, says Stivale, were not
realistic. “We were in the center
of Germany and nobody spoke
German.”
Stivale was held in the camp
for nearly two years, marking two
birthdays and two Christmas Days
there. But there were no celebra-
tions. He spent his time making
entries in his diary and awaiting
Red Cross packages and letters
from home. He also received no
news about the outside world. In
time, though, he could hear bomb-
ing in the distance and planes fly-
ing over. “That’s when we
knew it was pretty close to being
over,” he says. “Those bombers
were heading to Berlin.”
Noted in his diary, the camp
was liberated by Russian troops
on May 2, 1945. But, Stivale says,
it was more a day of fear than
jubilation. A fellow prisoner he
was with that day got shot in the
mouth by the Russians when they
took over the village of Parchim.
“His name was Bob Vogo, from
Chicago. I don’t know if he lived or
died,” he says.
A few days later, Stivale’s two
years of captivity came to an end.
He was turned over to American
troops and flown to Nancy, France,
and eventually transported
to a port city where he boarded
See STIVALE Page 4