Behind Hitler's Lines (45 page)

“ 'Follow my ass!'

“I had to scramble back to a tank as Major roared off in the lead. I managed to tell her please don't use cannons, the camp guards don't have any antitank weapons and POWs could be killed. Major swore at me, said she'd use whatever was needed, but okay, she 'd first try to batter her way in.

“That's just what happened. Four tanks back I made the turn that had dumped me out of the beet barrel a month ago. The main gate was down. Three tanks were churning around the kraut administrative area, machine-gunning every building. Their treads were full of barbed wire from crashing through the gate and fence. Other tanks were using their cannons to knock down the watchtowers. A few krauts tried to
climb down and surrender, but Major's battalion was not taking any prisoners today.

“I jumped off my tank. The American compound looked abandoned, and the fence Brewer and Quinn had cut on our first escape was still up. Unless Major decided to knock down that fence, I'd just check out the Hitlerite part of the stalag. I remembered Schultz and where his little house was. He was there, on his back, eyes open, bloating from a stomach full of lead. I shed some tears for Schultz, did it alone because the Russians might misunderstand. If he hadn't been in Hitler's army, we could have been good friends. He'll be someone I'll look up when I soar.”

Near Schultz was a woman facedown, no doubt his wife. At least she hadn't been raped, from what Joe could see. Later he mentioned this to a Russian buddy, who was offended: yes, rape was common but not with frontline troops like Major's battalion. It was the rear echelons who did that sort of thing. He'd seen too much of Hitlerite rapes and mutilations to do it himself.

As soon as the shooting let up Joe heard a long wail. It came from the Russian compound, a pitiful but joyful sound. Russian POWs began to come out of the ground. Major's men were frozen by the sight. Slowly then faster the risen POWs massed like a throng of stick figures. On Major's command a tank crashed down part of the fence.

“The POWs stumbled toward us like ghosts from hell. I was probably less stunned than anyone because I knew how they'd been suffering and dying. The commissar rushed over to Major. They had an argument, which he won. The POWs were pushed back through the hole in the fence. They obeyed that order, but Major's men rushed through to join them despite the commissar's protests.”

Joe learned that all POWs were suspect in the Red Army. When the USSR was being overrun, soldiers surrendered by the hundreds of thousands, not knowing what Hitlerites were like. To discourage surrender, Stalin put out a policy to punish family members of POWs. “It took a brave man to be a coward,” a Russian buddy told Joe. That was early in the war,
but Major's commissar was still following policy. Her troops were not, at least not at III-C, from what Joe saw.

“All kraut rations were rounded up and taken into the POW compound. Belorussian troops found Belorussian POWs, Mongols found Mongols. They hugged like lovers and rolled around together for a long time. After that the POWs were lined up in ranks. A soldier gave a vodka bottle to the first POW. He took a slug and passed it to his left for the next man. Each POW sort of reeled back after his slug, but the discipline was perfect: one man, one slug, then pass the bottle on. The Russians had another name for vodka, which translated ‘my friend.’ It was as if each slug was an embrace from the closest friend the POW ever had.”

Like everyone but the commissar, Joe was overcome by it all while he leaned against a fence post. It was like going from one vision to another when someone nudged him to look over at the American compound, which had seemed abandoned. Figures were starting to emerge there too, much stronger, many fewer, more cautiously.

What Joe saw corresponds to what Coleman recounts on the dates January 31-February 1, during which time the American krieges had been forced twice to march from III-C toward Kustrin, each attempt being turned back by the Red Army. Those present when the stalag was liberated were about half the number in camp on January 30.

“They'd look over at the Russians, then the Russian POWs. I rushed to the American fence and started yelling, 'Hey, it's me, Beyrle!' I took off my pile cap so they'd recognize me.” They gawked and talked, then came over like they couldn't quite believe it.

“ 'What are you doing over there, Joe?'

“ 'I'm with the Russians!' I told them, holding up my PPSh-41.

“ 'Canyougetusoutofhere?'

“ 'You're free! You're liberated! “They still didn't believe it. 'Is Brewer here? Quinn?'

“‘Yeah,’ someone murmured, ‘right overthere.’” He pointed to the exercise yard. In the corner were two wooden crosses.

In shock, Joe asked about his mucker Johnson. No one knew, so he may have gotten away during one of the marches and countermarches yesterday. Yesterday. What a different day that was. Joe couldn't tell his compatriots when they'd be released. That was up to the Russians, who had their own priorities. He was pulled away by Major's first sergeant, who was greatly agitated.

Joe was taken by the hand and double-timed to stalag headquarters. Major, with some of her staff and company commanders, was pacing around the commandant's office. She had let two guards live long enough to show her where it was. The guards were now dead on the floor, their blood still flowing. Major looked at Joe impatiently, as if he had been playing hooky. Her order was, “Yo, open this vault!”

“What she was talking about was an iron wall safe the size of a walk-in closet. From where I'll never know she handed me eight pounds of nitro starch, American nitro starch the same as we'd used at Fort Benning. 'Enough?' I patted her hand and asked everyone to leave the room. The commissar didn't want to go. I said, Okay, you can light the fuse. He left.

“With the nitro starch were blasting caps and cords. All I had to do was prime the charges. 'Sergeant Lincewitz, be with me now,' I prayed, then set things up. I was conservative on the size of the charges, figuring to use more if the heavy door didn't blow open or hung up.

“I got behind the commandant's heavy desk and lit the fuses bunched in my hand. As they burned down I could hear Russians stomping around like they couldn't wait to get in the room. 'Fire in the hole!' I yelled, though I'm sure they didn't know what that meant.
Boom.
Nothing very big, not too loud or shattering. 'Be clever in doing the Lord's work,' the sisters had taught me.”

Through a cloud of smoke Joe saw the safe door hanging open like Ali Baba's cave.

After the explosion, shouting increased outside the office. Joe rushed to the door, said he was okay but had a little more to do, slammed it, entered the safe, and looked around. Papers and paper currency were scattered everywhere.

“Instead of the money—I'd be living in Monte Carlo now instead of Muskegon—I went for the papers first, papers and photos. The efficient krauts had every kriege's file listed alphabetically. So mine was near the top: my XII-A mug shot and the krauts' record of my POW life, including escapes.”

Joe hardly noticed the Russians rushing in. Except for the commissar they cared nothing for records, only the watches, jewelry, and cameras that had once belonged to POWs, and money. Blowing around were reichsmarks, rubles, sterling, Swiss francs, greenback dollars, and many currencies Joe had never seen. He liberated two pocketsful of two-digit dollars.

Major grabbed his head, pulled it back, and planted a big wet kiss on his lips. Yo had come through, justified her faith in him.
Ohh-ah!
her first sergeant agreed. She ordered the currency shoved into a big mail satchel before the commissar could intervene.

Major radioed the regimental commander, said the situation at III-C was under control, so her battalion was ready for its next mission. That's the spirit, the colonel said, and gave her one—move on to Kustrin at once. They pulled out before Joe could say good-bye to the Americans, pulled out on Major's tank, which he guessed held about $200,000 in various denominations. Major threw out several cannon rounds to make room for the money satchel in her ammo rack.

As she rumbled away from III-C the second echelon of Russian troops took over and began evacuating the American POWs east. They ended up in Odessa, as Joe eventually did but first they were used as hostages.

An army of Soviet defectors, mostly cossacks under General Vlasov, had been formed by the Germans when their own manpower ran short. Vlasov recruited in stalags where a huge number of Russians volunteered, first because nothing could be worse than being a Russian POW, and second because they hated Stalin more than Hitler. It's still debated today which dictator killed more Russians, but the nod should go to Stalin because he worked at it many more years, before and after the war.

As secrets of World War II have come out, one was that Stalin told the Allies that if they wanted their own POWs back, they'd have to turn over Vlasov's army, which had surrendered in the west. Eisenhower acquiesced in what must have been his most terrible choice.

FOR A FEW DAYS
after liberating III-C the only resistance encountered by Major's battalion was from snipers. She hated snipers, probably because they didn't shoot the first Russian they saw—they waited patiently and bravely to pick off leaders. The Germans knew that without leaders the Russians floundered, especially when attacking. Except in a firefight Major always stood halfway out of the turret, so she was an obvious sniper target and knew it.

If a Mongol brought in the rifle of a sniper he'd killed— that was very rare—she rewarded him with a tank ride for the rest of the day. Joe saw one of those rifles, a Mauser, with a scope that had the best optics he's ever seen. The Japanese were famous for their snipers, but the Germans, on then-record, were much better, the best snipers in the war.

It was “very unpublicized,” Joe says, “but just a few could hold up a large number of Russians. Lord knows the Russians were brave, but they had to have a target to be brave against. Snipers never gave them a target.

“I haven't mentioned the weather, but it was our worst enemy. Not a lot of snow but very, very cold, below zero, and the wind felt like being sandblasted with ice. The doctors today consider my feet frostbitten, though I have all my toes. I know they're still with me because they become very painful at times. When there are cold snaps in Muskegon I elevate my feet on the La-Z-Boy; it has a vibrator, which helps. Frostbite didn't happen at one place; it was a combination of my time in solitary, the freezing during my escape across Poland, then with the Russians.”

Joe guarded against the cold as they did, by wearing layers of cotton and wrapping strips of burlap around his brogans. Everyone's antifreeze was vodka. Alcohol draws blood to the center of the body, leaving the extremities more vulnerable to
frostbite. That didn't matter. The Russian attitude was if you feel warmer, you are warmer. Joe had a drinking problem for a while after the war. It started with the Russians.

“On our way to the Oder we swept snipers aside and just accepted the casualties they caused. Berlin was just one more river away. Berlin was now the war cry. Hitlerite buildings were overrun with gusto because there was often something to scrounge inside—apples, beets, sometimes clothing. Anything wool or fur we could use, to stuff in our socks, pile on our head, or wrap around our ears. My buddies told me these were great pickings. When the Hitlerites were retreating across Russia and eastern Poland, they took or destroyed everything, completely scorched the earth. Now that we were in the part of Poland that had been repopulated by Germans, they must have persuaded the Wehrmacht to leave them with something, things we were happy to liberate.”

This period after III-C was a calm before the storm on the Oder. At night before chow there were rounds of toasts, to the Motherland, to Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Lend-Lease, to Sherman tanks, Dodge and Studebaker trucks. To Detroit, Michigan, too, because they thought that's where all American vehicles came from. Actually the Studebakers were manufactured in Indiana, but Joe never said so. He'd get up, urged to every night, and loudly sound off with the Notre Dame fight song.

Joe didn't know all the words, which didn't matter because the Russians didn't know any. What they wanted was for him to da-da-da the tune. Before long they could too, and much better. Many of them had wonderful voices and made tremendous harmonies. Polish forests filled with a stirringly wordless version of “Wake Up the Echoes.”

“These things I remember,” Joe says. “They are among the last of my memories with Major's battalion. I expected to be one of her casualties. It was like a premonition.”

The Hitlerites were stiffening around Kustrin. The Luftwaffe made frequent appearances. Major knew this was serious because, before Joe joined her battalion, German planes
had been committed only at crucial points when a large Wehr-macht force was in deep trouble. The Germans were not in such a tactical situation now. They had shortened their lines and were concentrated, reinforced, and well supplied to stop Zhukov at the Oder. The Luftwaffe overhead now meant the last hand of the war was being dealt and it was showdown.

“We started losing a tank and ten men per day. Through a snowfield the platoon I was with came up on a wood line where there was a nasty, well-prepared position with a machine gun and some
Panzerfausts.
The krauts had let us get pretty close; usually they used long-range fire to make us stop and disperse. This time it was more like an ambush. The Mongols got down and crawled up to grenade range, but the Germans concentrated on the tanks behind them. The one in front of me lost a tread to a
Panzerfaust.
The crew kept fighting with its machine gun till another antitank round hit the turret where it joined the hull.

“A damn good shot from about fifty yards, and it finished that tank. It was smoking and could blow up with all its ammo inside, but I felt that if I could get up behind it, it would give me good cover to spray the Hitlerite position. I crawled up along the tank's track in the snow. There was plenty of fire going back and forth, and I wasn't noticed.