Chapter 4
George Collar
Page 2
In the next few minutes, every time you turned around they’re opening the door and throwing another guy in. We must have had 14 guys in that room before long. One of them was Red Dowling [Jim Dowling is one of the veterans profiled in Tom Brokaw’s "The Greatest Generation"]. Red was hurt, and he was also sick, because he threw up in the corner. That’s one reason I remembered him, that and his violent red hair.
When I first wrote to him years later, I said, "I think you’re the redheaded guy that was in that little cell with me." He wrote back and said, "I’m the redheaded guy."
Pretty soon they opened the door and told us, "Raus!" We all stood up in a line outside the door, and they came down the line and picked three of us out. They picked me and Eppley and this guy whose name I thought was Summers. I know he was a lieutenant, and he said he was a navigator. They loaded the rest of the fellows on a Wehrmacht truck and away they went. And they took us three and marched us down the street, and up the street came two haywagons. Each wagon was drawn by a team of horses. And there were a whole bunch of men and boys – they were either older men or younger boys – and they all were armed to some extent. There was one guy – he was an older guy but he was short; his name was Hans. He had black hair. And he had an old Mauser pistol with a wooden holster. The wooden holster serves as a shoulder piece. It was a World War I Mauser with a big broom handle. Then there was an aristocratic looking guy on a horse, and he had a fine shotgun. He was riding around through the hills and fields and he’d come back and report where there were bodies and where there were wrecks. None of these people were military. They were all civilians.
We marched up the street. I still had no idea what they were going to do with us. We’re marching alongside the wagon and we got up to a little orchard with a fence around it. We went through the fence, and lying there on the ground, face down, was one of our fliers with no chute. And then I found out what they wanted us for.
We had to pick the bodies up.
When we picked this flier up, he was still warm, and every bone in his body was broken. He was limp. One of the Germans had an envelope, and we took one dogtag off and he put it in this envelope, which they sent to the Red Cross. And I remember reading that guy’s dogtag. His name was Bateman, and he turned out to be a navigator on Johnson’s crew which Dowling was the bombardier on. We picked him up and put him in the haywagon. Then we marched around up and down the hills and fields all day long, till almost dark, and we picked up a dozen or more bodies. Parts of bodies. We went in one little cow pasture and we found two legs, and this guy must have been big because his thigh was big and heavy, and he still had his flying boots on. And it was an officer because he had forest green pants on. We picked those legs up and put them in the haywagon. We went up on a hill and we found this plane crashed up there, and there was a turret, and there was a guy in there and the top of his head was sheared right off. You could see his brains.
We found another guy who came down in his chute and he must have been killed in the fall. He was lying with his feet in a little creek. We came across a meadow and there was a guy laying in a pool of blood, and it turned out to be Joe Gilfoil. He was tossed out over the static line by the guys on Miner’s crew after he got hit in the leg by a 20-millimeter shell. And it happened that Gilfoil had been on Schaen’s plane before, and Eppley was a good friend of his. When we rolled him over and he saw who it was, he almost passed out. Gilfoil’s skin was a bluish-pale color because he had been drained of blood. There was blood all over the meadow.
That morning, in the mess hall, I’d seen a guy. I’d seen him before. I never knew who he was; he was in a different squadron. He was a big, rough-faced guy, and I thought, "Who is that guy?" I don’t know why I noticed him.
We came across this plane that’s crashed, and in the co-pilot’s seat, here’s a guy sheared in two. From his waist down is in the co-pilot’s seat. The rest of him is missing. We look up ahead and about a hundred yards away, here’s the upper part of his torso butted into a tree. When I rolled him over, it was the guy I’d seen in the mess hall that morning.
I paid particular attention to his name. His name was Geiszler. Martin Geiszler Jr. Everybody on that plane was killed with the exception of the pilot. The pilot’s now dead, but I had a little article he wrote one time, and he said that after they got hit, he must have been blown out because he doesn’t remember a thing until he came to in the hospital.
When I was in Stalag Luft 1, there was a fellow from Los Angeles by the name of Oscar McMahon in the same room I was in. This Geiszler was from Bell, California, which is in the Los Angeles area, and after the war I got a phone call one day. It must have been the summer of ’45. I got a long-distance call from Bell, California, and it was Mr. Geiszler, this guy’s dad. He said he wanted to know who I was, and if I was the same guy that was on the Kassel mission.
I said, "Yes."
He said, "We were at a Red Cross meeting and we met a fellow named Lieutenant McMahon and we asked if anybody knew of anybody that was on the Kassel mission and he said, ‘I knew a fellow who was a prisoner with me.’ " He said, "My son, Martin Geiszler Jr., is missing and we don’t know what happened to him. All we know is he went down on the Kassel mission."
I said, "Look, I’ve got to tell you right now. Your son is dead."
You could have heard a pin drop.
I hated to tell him, but what are you going to do? You aren’t going to tell him he’s alive. I could have said, "Oh, I don’t know anything about it," but I didn’t want to do that.
Then he said, "Can we come to Michigan and see you?"
I said, "Sure."
By God, if they didn’t come to Michigan; the war was still on in the Pacific and it was hard to travel. They came clear to Michigan, he and the Mrs.
I didn’t tell them tell them all the details. They never did know that he was torn in two. But I said, "I can definitely tell you that your son is dead because I was one of the guys that picked his body up. I hate to tell you that." But they thanked me for telling them because they didn’t know.
It was only a couple of weeks later that the Red Cross notified them that he was dead. But those people, they used to send our kids presents – books and clothes – he offered me a job; he owned a factory in Bell and wanted me to come to work for him. They had one more son that was still alive.
One other guy on this plane that I picked up was Berquist; he was their radio man. Nobody on that plane lived except the pilot. And Mrs. Geiszler, when she found out the pilot was alive, she was bitter. I don’t think it was his fault. She thought, "He shouldn’t be alive if my son’s dead."
We came back after going all day long, up hill, down dale, picking up dead bodies. We had two haywagon loads of bodies and parts of bodies. We came into the cemetery at Lauschroden. We unhitched the horses and left the two wagons standing next to a stone building. Then they marched us into town and we went up to the village pump, and we drank water until we thought we were going to die because we hadn’t had a drink of water all day. All we’d had to eat all day was a couple of apples that some kid gave us.
Then they marched us over to the little jailhouse again, and pretty soon – this must have been a little after dark – they brought us a big mug of ersatz coffee and some white bread. That’s the last white bread I ever saw until I got back to the United States.
A little later, we’d just gone to sleep when they rousted us out again. There was a Wehrmacht truck outside, and it was full of wounded men.
We got in this truck, and we drove all around the countryside until about 3 a.m. We’d stop in a village and they’d take us up into an old mill or an old barn and there’d be a wounded guy laying there. Sometimes they’d tried to help him and sometimes they hadn’t. We’d bring them out, lay them in the truck – one guy had a 20-millimeter hole right through his thigh. How he was alive I don’t know. We brought him back, and all these guys are in there, and Jerry Cathol was laying near the tailgate. He thought his back was broken. It wasn’t, but his hip was dislocated.
Jerry Cathol was a big guy. He played end for the University of Nebraska. And I carried that big guy up two flights of steps. Three o’clock in the morning in Eisenach at the hospital. And after we got all these wounded people unloaded and in the hospital, they took us three guys that weren’t wounded over to the Wehrmacht base. They took us downstairs and there was a guardroom down there. It had rows of wooden shelves, about six feet deep, and they had a raised end like a pillow made out of wood. About 25 of our guys were laying on these shelves. One of them was Ira Weinstein. One was McGregor. And there were two guys that were wounded; they were laying on stretchers on the floor. They should have been in a hospital. One guy had a leg wound and it was bad. The other guy couldn’t walk either. We had to carry them.
We stayed there for a couple of days. I don’t know exactly how long we were there. You couldn’t tell whether it was daylight or dark because you were down in the basement. In the morning they’d bring us a bowl of barley and at night they brought us some black bread and ersatz coffee. They took us one by one and the guy tried to quiz us, and he took our wristwatch. If it was a private watch he gave it back. If it was a government issue watch he kept it. But he gave you a receipt for it. They took mine, because mine was a government watch. I’ve still got the receipt.
Eventually, two guys showed up from the Luftwaffe. They were feldwebels; high-class sergeants. Spoke English, and they had Walther submachine guns. They told us, "We’ve been delegated to move you to an air base at Erfurt. We’re going to go by civilian train. We’ll protect you, but keep a low profile. Don’t say anything or do anything that would stir things up." Also, when we picked these wounded guys up, they put a bunch of loaves of bread underneath the blankets. That was supposed to be our food on the trip. They said, "Under no circumstances show that bread to the civilians."
We marched down the street and we got on a civilian train. We had a whole car to ourselves. We went through Gotha and we got up to Erfurt. And Erfurt at that time had never been bombed; it was quite a picturesque town. That’s one of Martin Luther’s old hangouts, quite a historic place. We got off the train and marched up the streets. We had these two guards. And it was hot. We weren’t in too good shape, and you get tired carrying these stretchers, so we had to keep changing off all the time. It was uphill almost all the way. We got up to the top of that hill, and we just about died. We set the stretchers down in the street and we all sat down. One of the guards stayed there and guarded us; the other one went over to a beer joint and had a beer. And about that time a lady came out from a house and she had a big can full of cold water. Boy, did we drink that water!
Then the guards scrounged around, and pretty soon somebody showed up with a two-wheel pushcart. It had rubber tires. We put those stretchers on there and we pushed them and pulled; it was nice. We just about got out of town, and we blew a tire. Then we had to start carrying them again.
About suppertime we came dragging onto that Luftwaffe base; I mean we were dead. We came in carrying the stretchers and went right in this barracks. We all flopped right down on the wooden floor and went right sound asleep. That was an awful day.
We were there a couple of days, and then they ordered us all out into the street, and there was a big truck waiting for us. A staff car drove up and a German colonel got out. He called the roll, and when he called the roll he said, "Veinshtein."
There’s little old Weinstein, about five feet tall.
"Veinshtein," the guy says. "Das ist Jude."
I thought, "Uh-oh, they’re gonna kill Weinstein."
Weinstein thought that, too, I think. But the colonel didn’t say any more. All he said was, "Das ist Jude." And the next thing you know we’re on a truck heading for the Erfurt station. We get to the station, we unload, and we’re standing in a column of twos on the sidewalk, and a couple of SS guys come out with black uniforms. Meaner than hell. And they start in on us when they find out we were "terrorfliegers." They were ranting and raving and a crowd started gathering, and they were getting the crowd all worked up. About that time the staff car drove up with this colonel. He stood up in the back seat and he read the riot act to those two guys. You should have seen them scram. He was a Luftwaffe colonel.
We got on the train, and at about midnight we arrived at Frankfurt am Main. The railroad station looked like a skeleton. All the glass was laying in pieces all over the floor. But the trains were all running in and out. They pulled our car onto one of the tracks, and we’re all sitting in there, and away goes the engine. It left us sitting there.
Pretty soon somebody in the crowd discovered there was a POW train over here with a bunch of Amerikanisch terrorfliegers. So they came over and they started getting hostile. They started picking up paving bricks and they were threatening the guards. The guards told us to lay down on the floor, and they held their burp guns on these guys. All it would have taken is a rock hitting one of the guards’ heads and we’d have been dead. You know what saved us? The air raid siren went off, and everybody skedaddled for the air raid shelter except us; we’re sitting there. Soon we heard a plane coming; it was a Mosquito, and he dropped a great big bomb about two blocks up the street. Man, did that shake things up.
By the time the all clear sounded, an engine came in and hooked onto us and pulled us out of there. And they took us to the little town of Oberrussel, which is a suburb of Frankfurt. It was what they called an interrogation center. They marched us up the street. It was dark; it must have been one or two o’clock in the morning. We marched up these dark streets, and the guys that were leading us didn’t know where they were going. They had to stop and ask people.
Finally we came to this camp. They took us in the courtyard, and the courtyard was full of Polish, Canadian and British paratroopers that had been captured at Arnhem. I was right next to a Polish colonel, and I was hungry. I saw they had a garden plot, and there was a cabbage. I reached down. I couldn’t get the whole head but I got a few of the leaves. They weren’t very good eating; they were the outer leaves.
Finally, they took several of us to a basement room and several to another room. And the next morning they came along with a big canister of Purple Passion – that’s what we called it – it was cabbage soup. Boy, that tasted good. Then they said, "We’re going to take you one by one for interrogation." I had a little compass. I hid it underneath the window in a crack. It’s still there because we never came back to that room.
They took me down to this room and there was a guy sitting there. He had an Afrika Korp uniform on. It was a light summer uniform. He looked like a captain. He spoke perfect English.
"Here, have a cigarette."
"No thanks."
"Have a seat."
He starts talking real friendly. And then he starts quizzing you a little bit.
"What group are you in?"
"Can’t tell you."
"What kind of plane were you flying?"
"Can’t tell you. Not supposed to do that."
He kept doing that, asking this and asking that. Finally he says to me, "You don’t need to answer any more, right now anyway. But I can tell you a few things."
He said, "You’re from the 445th Bomb Group." He knew all about our group. For crying out loud, he knew more about it than I did. "Now," he said, "if you want to go to a permanent camp and be with your friends, you’re going to have to answer a few questions. Otherwise you may be here for a long, long time."
I said, "I’m just supposed to give name, rank and serial number."
"You do as you please," he said. Then he dismissed me and they took me out. They put me in solitary confinement in a room on the second floor. It had a single bunk there, with a mattress filled with excelsir. Excelsir is like fine wood shavings. That was a standard bed in Germany for prisoners. I stuffed some of the excelsir into my boots because they were too large, only I didn’t know it but the excelsir was full of fleas.
While I was in solitary there, if you had to go to the toilet, there was a rope; you pulled that rope and it dropped a signal down in the hall. And the guard, when he got around to it, he’d lead you down to the toilet. You weren’t supposed to talk to anybody in there. And then he’d bring you back. I’ve heard of guys that were in there for twenty or thirty days. I wouldn’t have lasted that long. It was so hot, it was like an oven, they must have had steam heat. There wasn’t any air. I went down to the toilet once and there was a Royal Air Force guy there, and he spoke out of the corner of his mouth. He’d been there about thirty days. I thought, Jeez, this is going to be awful.
The next morning, they rousted me out and I got out in the hall; there must have been 200 guys in the hall. Most of the guys from the Kassel mission were there, and there were some from the 15th Air Force. They took us out into a courtyard and there was a barracks by itself out there. We went in there, and there were British paratroopers. Polish paratroopers. Paratroopers are taken care of by the Luftwaffe, because paratroopers are part of the Luftwaffe in the German army. We’re all in this room, and they took our shoes off. They tied the laces together, threw them in a pile on a blanket and away they went. That’s so we couldn’t escape. I was kind of hoping I’d get a better pair but I didn’t.
Boy, were these paratroopers rough guys. They held out two weeks up at Arnhem and they were only supposed to hold out for seven days, and they got captured. And this one British guy, tougher than hell, he says, "Wait till we start winning the war. We’re gonna bollix all the men and shag all the tarts."
The next day, they came along with that big blanket full of shoes. We all fished out our own shoes and put them on. Then they marched us up to the railroad station, put us on a train, and we’re heading for Wetzler, that’s what they called Dulag Luft. Wetzler was the hometown of Zeiss Camera Company. Also they had a 20-millimeter antiaircraft gun factory there. On the way up, there were planes strafing so they backed us into a tunnel. We got up to Wetzler late in the afternoon. We’d just gotten out of the train, and we’re all standing there, 250 of us, and the guards have burp guns on us. At about that time the air raid siren sounded and along came a flight of P-51s, and I thought, "If they see this" – we’re standing right next to this old steam engine – "that’s a good target." We were sweating blood. The guards went over in the entrance to the air raid shelter and held their guns on us and made us stand next to the engine. The planes circled around and they came back, and I thought, "This is gonna be it." They made one circle and they took off. The only thing I can think is they knew there was a prison camp there, or it’s possible it could have said POW on top of the train.
Then they marched us up the hill into the camp.
That’s where we first encountered Red Cross parcels. They got Red Cross parcels and made meals out of them. It was pretty good food for a day or so. Then eventually we were put into contingents and went up to Barth. We went through Berlin – what a shambles that was.
At Barth, we were in Stalag Luft 1. We didn’t do too bad until the first of the year of 1945. Right after Christmas. We used to get a Red Cross parcel a week per man, and eking that out along with your German rations you just about had a square meal a day. It would keep you alive. But when they cut back on the Red Cross parcels, we lived on 800 calories a day till Easter. Longer than Easter. I went from 170 pounds down to 135. And you don’t have much ambition and pep when you get hungry.
Sometime in 1945, they rounded up all the Jewish guys and took them over to the North 1 compound and put them in a single barracks. There was a funny thing about that. They never got Weinstein. But yet they took an Irish guy.
Around the end of April, things got really hairy. We could hear the Russians’ guns. They were approaching Stetin; that was 60 miles away. The Germans gave us permission to dig slit trenches, which we did.
We knew where the lines were because there was a secret radio in camp and everybody got the news every night – the real news, not what the Germans were telling you. Colonel Hubert Zemke was our senior Allied officer. He was head of the 56th Fighter Group. Colonel Zemke was approached by the German colonel, and he said, "We may have to move this camp." In other words, we’d have to march to the west, towards Hanover. And Zemke said to Colonel Warnstedt [the German commandant], "We are not in any kind of shape to be marching. We’ve got people here that have practically been on a starvation diet for four months. We can’t march very far. What are you going to do if I give the order, and everybody sits down in the middle of the compound? Are you going to kill us all? Besides that," he said, "you know and I know the war’s pretty near over." Warnstedt did know that, too.
So Warnstedt said, "I don’t want to see any bloodshed, so I’ll tell you what I’ll do. When we get ready to evacuate, I’ll let you know and you can take command of the camp."
This is all going on unbeknownst to us guys because this is high-level stuff. So on the evening of the 30th of April, 1945 – we got locked in every night; the lights went out. The power was shut off about 10 o’clock. We could open up the blackout shutters and get some air. We’re laying there; some of us are sleeping. About 2 o’clock in the morning, the word got around. "Take a look at the guard towers, they’re all empty! And the dogs aren’t in the compound." They had dog patrols every night.
Somebody broke the doors open and we got out and sure as hell, the Germans had left. So Colonel Zemke sent word, "Everybody stay put in his compound. Don’t move." Because we didn’t know where the Russians were.
At 6 o’clock that morning the first Russian guy showed up at the gate. He was some kind of an officer but he was drunk. He was on a white horse. And he was raising all kinds of hell. He said to Zemke something about, "What do you mean? Aren’t you happy to see the glorious Red Army? I don’t see anybody cheering. I don’t see any towers being burned down."
Zemke thought, "I’d better give this guy a little show," so he passed the word, "Burn down a couple of guard towers." Then they lit some guard towers and everybody took off over the hill. They all went to town, and Zemke was fit to be tied.
They came back the next day, and you should have seen what they brought with them. They had a full tracked vehicle, brand new. It drove in. And there were horses, there were sheep. Rabbits. They took everything. It was awful. And this guy Crotty, a friend of mine who was in our room, he was quite a drinker – we always told him the only thing that kept him alive was getting shot down – he went in town, the Russians were all drunk because it was May Day, that’s a big celebration – and they’d uncovered a bargeload of Holland brandy in the harbor and everybody had bottles sticking out of every pocket. They were all drunk and they were making everybody else get drunk.
And old Crotty, they carried him home on a shutter.
The Russians had a policy of automatically killing the burgomeister and anybody that’s connected with him. A bloodthirsty policy. So the burgomeister of Barth went out on the dike and took his family with him, and he shot them all and killed himself.
Warnstedt I think got away. There was another German major that wasn’t a bad guy that was captured there, I imagine they killed him. But I’ll tell you what they did. A couple of months before we were liberated a whole contingent of Ukrainian partisans came into town. They were fighting on the Germans’ side, and they were like irregular troops. They had all horse-drawn vehicles. They were driven out of Poland, I guess, and they came into our town. The Germans let them come up on our peninsula inside the compound and they built a tent city there. And I heard that the Russians rounded those guys up and murdered every one of them. Stalin was the most ruthless, bloodthirsty sonofagun that ever lived. One of our guys would go to town, he’d liberate a bicycle from somebody and he’d be riding along; if a Russian saw him and he wanted the bicycle, you either gave it to him or he’d blow your head off. The Russians went in the jewelry store and they shot the jeweler. I saw Russians with wristwatches up and down both arms. We got sick of the Russians pretty quick. Some of them were all right. Some of them were just ordinary guys like anybody else, but some of them were real rabble-rousing communists if there ever was one.
Finally, they came in and got us on the 13th of May. We were liberated the First of May and on the 13th they flew in with B-17s to the Barth airfield and picked us up and took us to France.
A lot of guys ate too much right away and got sick. I heard one English guy died from eating a lead cake. That’s a cake that’s made without any risers, like it’s made out of hardtack biscuits, heavy as lead. It lays heavy on your stomach.
First we went to Camp Lucky Strike in France. That had been a staging area for when the replacement troops came in, but they were making it a staging area for POWs. They only had rations for 9,000, and 20,000 showed up. You didn’t have too much extra to eat. I saw a donut line the length of the runway once.
Eisenhower finally came and gave a big speech. He said, "I don’t understand why it is that we’ve got to take care of 20,000 in this place that doesn’t have the facilities, and we’ve got all kinds of bases over in England with plenty of facilities." So I was the first guy to sign up to go to England, and they flew us out of there in a Liberator. It flew right over Tibenham. The personnel at Tibenham had already left for the States; there wasn’t a plane on the hardstands. And they took me up to Horsham St. Faith. Treated me like a king up there. I finally got home about the middle of June.
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