Caledonia Argus

Surviving World War II

Posted: 11/6/03

Editorís note: Glen A. Jostad of Brownsville wrote the following article about his experience in a Prisoner of War Camp during World War II for the 1995 Houston County Veterans Memorial book. We are pleased to reprint it with his permission.

Glen wanted to add a few more details to the original article, so we have added them in brackets throughout the story.

Thank you, Glen, for sharing your story with the readers of the Argus.

In 1941, I graduated from high school and I enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps, of course, the War was about to start at that time and at the end of six months, they were breaking up the CCC camps and so I enlisted in the Air Force. After about three days of basic training - now I know most of you veterans had a good share of basic training, but they needed people in the Air Force pretty bad, so I had three days of basic. Then I was sent to radio school in Scotfield, Illinois, and from there we trained for our radio duties. I was a radio operator and a gunner on a plane. After six months we were sent to Moses Lake, Washington and there we met up with the rest of the crew. We trained almost all of our time from Moses Lake and from Redmond, Oregon and then later at Peyote, Texas.

I was on a B-17 and we flew over as an entire group. We werenít replacements, we were a group. Flying over, we left from Texas, went to Goose Bay, Labrador. When we landed in Labrador, I asked the crew chief, ìHow are you gonna get these planes started in the morning?î It was 20 below or better when we landed there, and he said if we would shut these planes off, weíd never get them started again, so he said they would run all night, which they did.

From Goose Bay we flew to Nuts Corner, Ireland. The day we landed there was a beautiful sunny day. You couldnít have a nicer day, no matter where we went, everyone was talking about the weather. When we came through the chow line, I asked the sergeant, ìEveryone is talking about the weather, is this something unusual?î He said, ìWell, Iíll tell you, Iíve been here 18 months and this is the fourth day of sunshine Iíve seen. From Nuts Corner, we flew to our base in England. We did a little more flight training and soon were ready for flying our missions. It was January 4th of 1944 that we landed in England, and on February 8th, just a month and four days later, that was the end of our free days for a while.

We were on our third mission and we were bombing Frankfurt that day. Our mission that day was in very high cloud cover, so the Germans were using their radio operated flak guns, and they were very deadly and very accurate. Most all of us have spent time hanging tinsel on Christmas trees at Christmas time. Our waist gunners and their planes, each one would have bundles of this tinsel, the same kind you hang on your Christmas trees, and they were throwing it out the window all the time. This tinsel floats down and backward and I could tell you that day, as we were approaching our target and came into the flak area, there was this huge black cloud just following us along. It wasnít just an isolated burst here and they were down there. So, it worked, Iím sure that stuff we think of as tinsel saved a lot of lives.

[Glen added that he was worried about ditching the plane, which involved setting it on water very softly. Usually a crew had only a few minutes after a plane was ditched to evacuate it. ìSo I practiced ditching a great deal,î he said.]

We hit our IP point, which in your language would be the Initial Point, and thatís where your bombing starts. At that point your pilot turns over the navigation of the plane to the bombardier, and he actually flies the plane with his bomb site. So we were well into our bomb run when we lost an engine on the right side, that wasnít too serious. When we lost our second one, that was very bad and we soon got the order from the pilot to salvo the bombs, which was done, and they also said, ìThrow out everything you can to lighten the plane,î so we threw out our machine guns. I threw out all my radio equipment and anything that was loose that we could throw, we threw. Since we could not keep up to the rest of the group any longer, we had to abort our mission and turn around and try to make it back. We were trying to make it back to the English Channel, with hopes of ditching in the Channel.

We made it back to about 40 miles northeast of Paris. We hit a little open spot in the clouds. Up until that time we had been traveling in heavy cloud coverage, so they couldnít see us and we couldnít see anyone either. We hit a small opening in the clouds and there were seven fighters, they pounced on us like a cat on a mouse, they really clobbered us with everything they had and there we were. We didnít have a gun or any ammunition to shoot back. That was the most distressing part for me, because all the time I had thought, ìIím gonna shoot down a German fighter.î I just knew I could do it, but when I had the chance, I didnít have a gun or the ammo to do it with. Shortly thereafter the order to bail out came from the pilot and being a radio operator, I had to keep my headset on and stay tuned to what was going on, because I was the communication for the rear end of the plane.

The order to bail out came and I left the radio room and motioned the guys to jump. The two waist gunners jumped out; the ball turret gunner came out of his turret and the man had sheer terror in his eyes. He said, ìI'm not gonna jump.î I said, ìTony, you have to,î and he said, ìI wonít do it.î I told him, ìyou will surely be dead if you ride it down.î So I started taking him over to the door where we were to jump out and I could not get him to jump. All the time the machine gun fire was coming through there like hail on a roof and you could feel it tugging at your clothes.

[Glen added that he had 13 bullet holes in his clothing. ìYou could feel the whiff go by.î He thought he had two wounds. ìI felt the burns.î But he didnít even have a scratch -- the bullets had cut the wire in his heated suit!]

How did we survive?

Iím not sure yet how we ever survived that time, but we did. I told Tony, ìYou donít have to jump, just sit down. Get your hand on your ripcord and stick your feet out the door.î When I told him that, I knew what would happen, because as soon as you put your foot out the door, the slipstream would pull you out the door. Well, he sat down and out he went, his chute opened, so I was the last one out. We landed in an open field and the first thing you have to do is collapse that chute and try to place it so it doesnít drag you along. I collapsed my chute and ran into the woods and then I looked for a place to hide that chute, because it was telltale evidence of where you were, unless you could find some way of hiding that chute.

I was in a big woodsy ravine and as I looked around I spied a badger hole in the side of this ravine. I thought, thatís a good place to hide my chute. I went over there and stuck it in there, then I sat down and used my feet to push it in further. As I was pushing the chute, I thought, maybe I can get in there too. I kept pushing and pretty soon I was completely in that hole, with just the top of my head sticking out. I kept my head down and covered and when the search party went by, they fortunately didnít see me. After a couple of hours everything quieted down and everyone seemed to have left the area. I then crawled out of that hole and proceeded down the ravine toward town.

[Glen figured that the badgers in the hole were the only ones on the European continent with a nylon-lined den.]

I had to cross an open pasture to get to where the houses were and then I met a couple Frenchmen. I tried to make known to them that I wanted them to contact the French Underground, the Marquis it was called. These were good fellows, they jabbered a while and were very friendly, then they were gone a few minutes. Pretty soon they came back and they had a bottle of wine, a loaf of that hard bread and two eggs.

The one fellow saw me looking at those eggs and wondering what I supposed to do with them, I didnít know whether they were hard-boiled eggs or what they were, but I was soon to find out. He got out his pen knife and poked a hole in the end of one, and indicated to me that I should suck that egg out of there. I sucked those two raw eggs, I drank the bottle of wine and I ate half the loaf of bread. Iíll tell you, I tried that egg business after I got home from the service and I could not do it, I tried it twice, and I just could not do it. But that day those eggs went down like nothing, I donít know if it was because I was hungry, because getting on a mission you get up around one or two oíclock in the morning and first thing you do is get dressed and go eat. It was probably ten or twelve hours since we had eaten so I was hungry and with the excitement, Iím sure everything went better.

These fellows then left and I thought I would get in closer to the houses and I might be able to hide. About that time an old fellow came walking down the lane, he saw me and came over and he jabbered like the dickens to me. He didnít seem very friendly and I should have been a little suspicious of him, but I wasnít. After a few minutes he left and it wasnít long before I heard some jeeps or trucks coming up the lane from the other direction, it was a couple truckloads of German soldiers. I was taken prisoner then and we were held in a farm house not far from where I was captured. We were there about two days and then they took us by train to Frankfurt, this is the city we had been bombing, so we had mixed emotions about going back there.Ý

Lynch mob in Frankfurt

When we arrived in Frankfurt, there was a lynch mob there. Iím telling you, we were scared, but I do have to thank the German soldiers, they did their duty. Some civilians did manage to break through, but they kept control and managed to get us safely out of the grasp of those civilians, it would have been as easy for them to turn their backs and let the people have their way with us. In that case, I am sure we would have been beaten to death or hung - one or the other, this happened frequently to fliers. That was the second time that our lives had been spared by the enemy. The first time was when I was floating down in my chute. A fighter came right straight at me, about as close as he could get and I expected to see those machine guns winking at me any minute. At the very last moment, he banked off to the side and when he went by, he waved. I hope that man survived the War.

After this event in the train station, we were taken to the interrogation camp. Iím sure none of you have ever been in solitary confinement, but believe me, it is no picnic. You get put in a small room - five by eight or something like that - with nothing, absolutely nothing in there but a low cot. You have four walls and a ceiling to look at. They leave you in there for many hours or days, depending on the situation and then you get called in for your interrogation.

[Glen added that in the interrogation cell, he saw things written on the wall like ìSargeant ëSo and So,í Royal Air Force, five months.î But the prisoners were searched and didnít have pens. ìSo I knew that was done on purpose by the Germans.î]

I do want to add one little incident at this point. You GIís know how important it was to have your dog tags on, especially when you went overseas. Well, somewhere between the States and England, I had lost mine and we were not to fly without our dog tags. I wasnít going to be left behind, so I didnít tell the pilot that I didnít have dog tags, which turned out to be a pretty hairy situation for me when my turn came for interrogation.

At first they want you to tell them all kinds of things, where you are from and if you were bombing and this and that. They offer you a lot of incentives - time on the town, money, women - you know, the good life. They try anything to get you to talk. All you are required to disclose is your name, rank and serial number, which I did.

He persisted and pretty soon he said, ìWell, you know, you could just as well tell me all these things. I know all about you anyhow. You are such and such a Bomb Group and you are stationed at Attleboro, England, and you are from the 731st Squadron and so and so is your company commander.î I did not disclose any information. Then he took a new tack. He said, ìYou know youíre probably going to be shot as a spy.î I said, ìWhy?î He said, ìYou have no dog tags, you donít have any identification at all. We donít know who you are.î For once in my life, I thought pretty fast and I said, ìWell, now, you just got done telling me how much you knew about our group and where we were from and you have all of our names of our crew and everything, and so if you know all of that, you must know who I am, that I am who I say I am.î Just like that, he quit, and that was about the end of my interrogation, but it gave new meaning to wearing your dog tags anyhow.

From there we were taken by train to Poland and East Prussia, way up by the Baltic Sea by the coast of Lithuania. We were there for about five and a half months.

[Glen added that their camp was below sea level, which would prevent them from digging escape tunnels, since they would hit water 15-20 inches into the ground.]

Always hungry

We were soon to get used to prison food and how much it would be and so forth. Our daily ration would be a cup of soup. The first cup of soup I had, I noticed it was just floating with little white worms. I used my spoon and threw them out. By the time I had all the worms out, half my soup was gone. I quickly decided I couldn’t do that any more, you ate whatever was there.

Also in the soup was some peas - we called them black-eyed- cow-peas - because we didn’t know any different. They looked somewhat like a soybean. Everyone had a black spot on it and they were black-eyed peas to us for sometime until one day I smashed one of them open. That black spot was a nice big black bug. So, we had our share of worms and bugs and that soup consisted mostly of dehydrated vegetables, basically cabbage, a few carrots and maybe some turnips.

Once a week we got a bread ration. Most of the time that bread ration turned out to be about an inch thick. You had so many men to divide up with, so many loaves for a barracks and so that was done very meticulously so you could make sure that everybody got their fair share. Well, that was the bread ration for the week. We soon learned that you take that chunk of bread - it was that heavy hard bread - and we’d cut it into four pieces. Then it was easier to slice into smaller pieces, we’d slice that into small pieces, enough so you’d have two pieces for each day until such time that you’d get your next bread ration.

We also received Red Cross parcels, but unlike the Geneva Convention where you are supposed to get one parcel per man per month. That sounds great and it would have been, if it had been the case, but it was not. Usually, if we got a distribution at all, it was anywhere from three to six men per parcel, so we’d go through that dividing process again.

[Glen added that prisoners were constantly hungry. “You went to bed hungry, you got up hungry.” But they got used to it so it wouldn’t bother them that much.]

When you got something to eat, you didn’t just gobble it down because you were hungry; you tended to hoard your food, because tomorrow or next week might be worse. You’d nibble a little bit at a time and if you had a little bread left or something by the time you got the next bread distribution, then you could have an extra piece or two of bread that particular day. Your stomach got so shrunk up that you couldn’t eat a lot of food if you wanted to.

[Glen added that he was on an “escape committee.” It worked like this: If someone was planning an escape, they would tell Glen. He would then tell a committee member in another barracks, who would take it up with the rest of the committee. That way they could all help with the escape attempt.

[The Germans had English speaking guards who wore distinctive uniforms. They would come into the barracks looking for signs of an escape. “They knew we were getting news but they didn’t know where or how. When these guards would enter the barracks, a shout would go up, “Goons up.” The Germans objected to the word goons, so the commandant issued a directive not to use the word “goons.” So they changed their warning call to “Red light,” which was acceptable.]

[Glen made a trap to catch birds, which were plentiful. He traded a pack of cigarettes for a sweater and unravelled the yarn for string for the trap. “That turned out to be the greatest trade I ever made. The guards took the trap away. So with the rest of the sweater, a friend of Glen’s knitted him a cap. The friend had made knitting needles out of toothbrush handles. “That was my most prized possession.”]

[The camp had American traitors who looked for radios. Radios were one of the best kept secrets of the war. A runner would come through and tell the news that he had heard on the radio. When a new gang of prisoners were brought in, they would be welcomed and questioned, and a lone prisoner would be highly suspect.]

After about five and a half months in this place, we could hear the Russians were getting close, we could hear the artillery night and day. They had a very distinctive crump-crump-crump- type of sound and it was getting louder by the day. We were pretty happy, we thought, we’re going to be liberated by the Russians. The Germans had other ideas. They took us to the seaport of Memel and we were loaded down into the holds of ships and we traveled three days on the Baltic Sea to the Port of Stettin. This trip was a very harrowing experience because the Royal Air Force, virtually every night, flew over the Baltic Sea, dropping floating mines in the ship lanes. When we were down in the holds of those ships, we were just praying that we wouldn’t hit one of those floating mines, because if we had, we would have been at the bottom of the Baltic. No question about it.

Many years ago when I was a young boy, I enjoyed Boy Scouts and I went to a couple meetings that were held at Camp Decorah. These meetings consisted of survival training and one of the things that I remembered from my Boy Scout training was how to alleviate your thirst or your thirst for water. The message was, find a little round, smooth pebble and keep it in your cheek and you can go without water for a long, long time. If you have something you just keep on creating saliva. After three days in the holds of the ship- it was hot, it was summertime - I remembered this lesson that I learned in Boy Scouts and I determined never again will I get caught without a pebble or a prune pit in my shirt pocket. From then on, I always carried one or the other in my shirt pocket.

Loaded into boxcars

After arriving at the seaport of Stettin, we were taken to a railroad yard and were herded into a bunch of boxcars. As many of you know, their box cars are only about two-thirds the size of ours, and when you get 60, 80 men in a car, you are crowded. This particular time they didn’t put quite so many into one car, because they put four guards in each car. We were sitting there and we were in a bad way for something to drink, for water. We learned one lesson very well, and that was you need food and water to live, but water is by far the most important. That’s the thing you need first, and you need it more than food. You can go a long time without food if you have water.

We got loaded into these box cars. Our tail gunner asked one of the guards if he could get us some water. The four guards that were in with us happened to be four older men and they seemed like pretty decent fellows. The one guy said “Yah.” He left and when he came back, he had about an eight or ten quart galvanized pail of water and our tail gunner got out a four ounce jar of instant coffee. He dumped the whole thing in the pail of water and stirred it up and before any of us took a drink, he offered the Germans some. They held out their canteen cups and they smacked their lips on that coffee and said, “Ach, is gut kaffee, gut kaffee.” So they were very pleased and this little incident was to prove pretty beneficial to us not too far down the road, because just before the train pulled out, they came along with handcuffs for each carload and all prisoners were handcuffed together, every two men were handcuffed together. When they came with the handcuffs to our car, our guards took the handcuffs and just threw them on the floor, so we were not handcuffed. That turned out to be a blessing for us down the road.

We then proceeded by train to a camp in Poland. It was just across the German border, somewhere in Poland. They had some nice surprises for us there. We were loaded off the train - I don’t know whether two or three car loads at a time - it was in groups, anyhow - and we were one and five-eighths miles (five kilometers) from the railroad siding to the end of the camp. They had a whole bunch of young war marines there with fixed bayonets and dogs. They would take out so many and get you on the road, then you were surrounded by these young war marines and you had to run every step of the way into the camp. If you were carrying anything, and we were, because prior to leaving Lithuania, they had issued each man two Red Cross parcels. Boy, we thought, what a bonanza! It was, but having learned our lesson, we didn’t eat very much of that food because we might need it at the next place.

When I read the book The Holocaust, there were at least three instances where I thought, this is what they did to us! They’ll give you something and take it away. This is what happened. They ran us into the camp. If you were carrying anything, you either got jabbed with a bayonet or had a dog sicced on you. If you didn’t throw whatever you were carrying, they jabbed you again or the dog would bite you some more. They sicced the dog on me twice and because I wasn’t handcuffed to anyone else, I was able to dart around and the dog took someone else instead of me.

My tail gunner hollered at me after the second time they sicced the dog on me. He hollered, “Joe, throw that pack. That’s why they are siccing the dog on you.” So I gave my pack the heave-ho, and after that we didn’t have anymore trouble. We got into camp and they were having every single bunch come in that way, the Canadians and British POWs, they had it the worst because they were the first ones to get run into camp. The war marines were fresh, they were eager and I suppose full of vengeance. This was their chance to take something out on the POWs, which they did. One Canadian I know had 60 bayonet jabs by the time he reached camp. A good many others had bayonet wounds and dog bites, but thanks to not being handcuffed, I managed to make it into camp without a dog bite. A lot of things happened in this camp. One day we saw a German electrician working on electric poles, I don’t know how this happened, but he was electrocuted.

There were a lot of prisoners standing around, all we did was walk around the compounds during the day. Some of the prisoners laughed, thinking it was a big joke. One more dead German, one you don’t have to fight down the road. The camp commandant was a man who had lost his whole family from air raids, and this might help understand why he did what he did. It wasn’t too long before he must have heard about the people laughing about the electrician being electrocuted, so we were all chased into our barracks, the doors were bolted. Around every prison encampment there are the guard towers every so often with two guards and machine guns in there. It wasn’t long before we found out what the deal was. They were machine-gunning the barracks, and we took 18 hits in our room. {They got lots of hits because they were closest to the guard towers.] Luckily, not one of us was hit. Of course, after the first burst of fire, we all hit the floor, that is probably what saved us. I guess he had the last word with us there.

Then it was Christmas, or winter time I should say, while we were there. There were latrines on the end of the barracks, which was good for us. They used Russian and Polish prisoners to clean out these latrines during the cold weather. For quite a while we thought that the wagons they hauled human excrement out in, looked like the same wagons they were hauling our bread rations in with. We started paying close attention and sure enough, it was the same wagons. That was a little bit of a revelation, but I guess it didn’t hurt us, because we are here.

About the time I had been a POW for about eight months, one day another POW said to me, “Do you have lice?’ I said, “No, I don’t think so.” He said, “Well, gee, if you don’t, you are awful lucky.” I said, “Well, what do they look like?” “Well, he said, if you got “em, you’ll probably find them around your waist, in your groin area or in your shorts or in the seams of your pants or possibly under your armpits or in your hair.” I said, “well, I don’t think I have any” and he said “well you are lucky.” I don’t think it was two weeks later that I discovered I had lice and I don’t believe I slept for two days after that.

[Glen added that one day he had to get a traitor from the barracks, so that someone could read the news without the traitor hearing it. So Glen and a friend from Milwaukee, which was the traitor’s home town, took him outside and walked around to discuss holding a POW reunion after the war. It diverted the traitorous POW so the news could be read.]

No liberation yet

After about another five and one-half months, the Russians were getting close again. We could hear the artillery once again, day and night, getting closer and closer and we thought, maybe this time this will be our chance and we’ll be liberated.

It was not to be.

They decided to evacuate our camp in the face of the oncoming Russians and they evacuated the entire camp in three groups. We went out in the first group and I don’t know whether this was lucky or not. I’ll never know, because I don’t know how the other two groups fared.

Some of them walked out. I think perhaps two groups walked out.

[Glen added that those two groups walked until the end of the war, for four months, staying just ahead of places being liberated.]

We were herded into cars and were somewhere between 50 and 80 in each box car. We were locked in solid for eight days and that’s why I brought up about the pebble and the water and getting thirsty, because, I’ll tell you, after eight days you can become just about wild with thirst. I can truthfully say I really was not distressed, and thanks to that lesson I had learned in Boy Scouts, I had my prune pits or my pebble in my shirt pocket and I can’t truthfully say that I minded the thirst. I was able to get by, but some guys were just about crazy with thirst. It was the middle of the winter and there we were locked in those box cars. At night frost would form on the iron inside the cars and they would be scraping frost off the iron just to get a little moisture.

During this time we traveled from Poland down to Nuremberg. We had frequent stops at sidings because of air raids.

After we arrived at Nuremberg, the Germans said we could take a shower. The shower consisted of a bunch of overhead pipes with holes in them and you just took off your clothes and stood under the water as long as you wanted to and then you put your old clothes back on again. I did take that shower and it felt good, even though it was very cold [it was January], and you had no towel or nothing to dry yourself with.

The camps here were pretty bad. The latrines were outside and though we weren’t locked in as we had been in the previous camps, they still had their armed guards and dogs patrolling around inside the camp and at intervals they would be going by. If you had to go to the latrine, you either had to wait until the guards had gone by. You always looked first to see if the guard was coming or if he had gone by, because if he caught you outside, they would shoot you, and so we heard shots different times during the night. I developed dysentery at this place, so I was a frequent visitor to the latrine. More than once I saw the guard coming. I didn’t dare run, so I messed myself. Of course, I’d make a big mess to clean up. It would be different if you had a washer and dryer to throw your stuff into, but you didn’t.

At this place I was assigned a spot on the floor underneath the bunk. The bunks were four or five high and I was on the floor. There were a lot of sand fleas there. As I said earlier, we all had lice, and this place had a lot of mice and rats. So, being on the floor, the first thing you’re aware of when you lie down are those sand fleas. They are quick, they are fast and they bite hard. Your body lice movements are more subtle, you feel them, but they are not like the sand fleas.

Fleas, mice, and rats

Then, the mice or the rats. If one of them came and stopped on you, then you’d better wave your arms or kick your feet, because he was stopping to contemplate where he was going to take his first bite. I didn’t sleep for a couple nights here either, until I finally got used to the routine. The other thing we had to get used to there was very bad food. They issued us food and we were very hungry by that time, and usually when we got an issue of food, we would eat it. One day we got some cheese and it looked horrendous. After most of us had eaten our cheese, the Germans sent out an order: “Don’t eat the cheese, it is condemned for human consumption.” We ate it anyhow, because we were that hungry. We weren’t worried about the consequences.

The daily routine in this camp - because it was so close to Nuremberg and a major city and major area, we were underneath air raids - every night the Royal Air Force was bombing around there and we saw some tremendous fireworks displays. In the daytime there were these huge American bomber raids that would last for two and one-half to three hours.

After three months here, again our camp was in danger of being overrun, so we were put out on the road to walk from Nuremberg to Moosburg, about 200 miles and it took us 12 days to hike that far. During the time we were on the road, I got terribly sick. I don’t know why I was sick and I had no one to go to. I’d go two, three days without eating and I’d feel a little bit better, but as soon as I’d eat something, I’d get really sick all over again, so then I wouldn’t eat again. You can imagine, being in a weakened condition already, that didn’t help me out any.

Then enroute, we were probably two, three or four days out of camp, (we were always far more worried about our own fighter planes than we were the enemy planes) and sure enough, four P-47s came flying over and I saw one of them roll his wings down for a closer look, and boy, down they came. We were dive-bombed straight for twenty minutes by our own fighters. Luckily for all of us, there was a big woods right next to the road and we ran like the dickens for the woods. I never felt like I was so big in all my life as when I was crouched behind that tree. I thought sure they were aiming right at me. I guess a couple men got hit, but no one was killed. We were lucky and we didn’t have any more bombs by our own planes after that.

Free at last

We finally came within seeing distance of our destination. By that time I was so weak, I said to my fellow crewmates, “If you guys want to carry this stuff for me fine, if not, I’m going to pitch it.” I don’t know if that walk lasted another day. It was customary to shoot prisoners that had to fall by the wayside. I knew I was on my last day when we finally arrived at our camp in Moosburg. Our home there for the next month was one on the ground. There were no tents, no barracks. You lay on the ground night and day, and that’s the way it was for the next month.

[Glen added at one point he slept for a day and a half. When he awoke, he was taken to a POW doctor, anad diagnosed with yellow jaundice. The doctor told him to eat nothing but sweets for a week to 10 days. “I said, ‘SWEETS? How an I going to get sweets?’ He said, ‘We’ll rob some Red Cross parcels for you.’”]

Then we could hear fighting come close again. One day we woke up and there was lots of activity around the camp. We thought, well, the Americans or somebody must be getting close, because the Germans are getting very excited. All of a sudden, the small arms fire and shooting started and it lasted for two and one-half or three hours. When the shooting stopped and I saw that the flag being raised on the flagpole over town, I tell you, it was the greatest feeling I’ve ever had in my life, to see that American flag.

And we were free at last.

[Glen added that of all of the important occasions in his life, such as marriage or the birth of his children, none was more exhilarating than that moment.]

There are a couple of other things I want to add, and that is, once the town was secured and the GIs - this was a bunch of Patton’s Army troops that liberated us - some of them came into our camp, and I’m telling you, we looked at these guys and they looked like giants. Their shoulders filled their coats. Their buttocks filled out their pants. Big muscles! We really thought they were giants, but when you turned around and looked at your fellow prisoners, we were a bunch of doggone scarecrows. We were in rags and were all so skinny. It was quite a profound thing to see.

[Fifteen months later, Glenn was 65 pounds lighter.]

After things settled down, we did go into town a couple of times and went in a couple houses and asked for some hot water so we could shave. We did that at a couple houses. Incidentally, when we were in town, we saw a lot of our Red Cross parcels that we never got. We saw them in houses and on shelves in stores and things of that nature. We never did get much of the Red Cross packages. It was sent, but most of it didn’t get to us, and I might add, I never did receive anything from home, although they sent a lot of packages, but they never came.

After three or four days and a couple de-lousings, they put us on a plane and hauled us to France to a temporary camp they called Camp Lucky Strike, because it was a tent camp. The purpose for that was to get us de-loused, which we went through every time we turned around. You were de-loused and you had a new set of clothes again and then, of course, they had to get us back into physical shape, so they had this area set up in the four different eating areas. They warned us in advance. They said, “We have no way of knowing which area you are supposed to be in, so you jump from Area A to Area B to eat another meal. Nobody’s going to stop you, but for your own good, you’d better not, because you could die from eating too much. That is exactly what happened to a few men, when they over ate, their bodies couldn’t handle it and they wound up dying because they over ate.

After being in this environment for a month or five weeks, we were taken down to the port of LeHavre and we went back to the United States by ship. I was surprised, about the third or fourth day out of France, all of a sudden it was a battle station and destroyers started darting in among the convoy, apparently there was a German submarine somewhere, but they never fired any torpedoes, but our boys dropped a lot of depth charges.

The most glorious sight - aside from that flag-raising in Moosburg- was seeing the Statue of Liberty. Boy, I tell you, it is a feeling that you can hardly describe or know about unless it has happened to you. Sailing by the State of Liberty was a wondrous moment.

After processing, we were given a two month furlough and then we reported back to Florida. We were then given the choice to pick a base that was closest to our home, to receive our discharge, so I chose Truax Field, Madison, Wisconsin and was discharged from there in November of 1945.

And just one closing message, and that is: FREEDOM I want you to think about it I want you to love it, embrace it If necessary, don’t be afraid to lay down your life to preserve that freedom for your family and for all your fellow Americans. Believe me. It’s worth that.

[Glen said that writing about his POW experience, and sharing it again with the Argus, cost him some sleep, but it was an important thing to do. He’s grateful for the day that Ron Levendoski and Lorraine Voshart approached him in church about sharing his story. “It’s given me quite a bit of closure. It’s helped me.” He hadn’t spoken about it before 1995. “Unless it has happened to you, you cannot comprehend the feelings.”

For the first three or four months that he was a POW Glen was bitter. He didn’t think this was how the war was supposed to go for him, being shot down without firing a shot. Then one day it suddenly occurred to him that he should not be bitter. He told himself, “I’m alive, I’m not wounded, and maybe I might make it to the end of the war and get home again.” It was an important shift in attitude.]

Glen has two children, Karen, 54, and Cheryl, 50, both of Minneapolis. His wife, Carmel, died on July 4 of this year.

He still keeps in telephone contact with one of his crew mates.

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