looking back part II: On the ground
'We were just trying to survive'
Monday, August 27, 2007
Hank Northrop's B-24 crew had arrived in England during a difficult time in the war effort.
After being shot out of the sky, the crew's officers including Thomas Jeffers, also found themselves arriving at their prisoner of war camp, Stalag Luft III, when prisoner spirits were sagging like tired barbed wire.
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Get latest headlines via RSS feeds"Just four months before the officers of 'Rhapsody in Junk' arrived ... the harrowing 'Great Escape' took place as 76 men exited late one blustery March night," writes Marilyn Jeffers Walton in "Rhapsody in Junk."
"Hitler had 50 of the escapees shot as a warning after being convinced that the murder of all the men, which he demanded, would not be wise," Walton writes. "The Northrop crew witnessed the construction of a memorial to 'The Fifty' that was built, primarily by the British and Australians at the edge of the camp where the ashes of the murdered prisoners were interred."
Separated from the officers, the rest of the crew was sent to Stalag Luft IV. And although officers and crew did not reconnect until the end of the war, all arrived at their respective camps after the harrowing experience of jumping out of an airplane.
Rough landing
Her father felt "great relief" when his chute opened and had "no feeling of descent until he was a few hundred feet above the ground," Walton writes. But the jolt, combined with an ill-adjusted harness, caused an injury that would rob one of his legs of feeling for months to come.
"The shock of deceleration was so great that his fully laced boot came off," she writes. It also deprived another crew member of both boots and separated the shoulder of a third.
Jeffers' shock was increased when he said to approaching farmer Nikolaus Clausen: "Sweden?" and heard in reply, "Nein, Deutschland."
Again providing excellent context for her story, Walton notes that the plane itself narrowly missed the church where services were being held that day for a local German soldier.
The anger felt by German civilians for Allied airmen also shows up in the story of Sgt. Alexander Cardenas, who was rescued by a German lieutenant who fired a shot over the head of an angry, shovel-toting crowd.
The crew learned together of the death of their gentle giant, Jack Flaugher, whose body was put in a wooden coffin and was carted in the truck with the crew.
Although in the face of civilian hostility, the crew thought that day that Flaugher had landed on the ground alive, Walton later in the book offers evidence that his crushed chest and other injuries were consistent with those suffered by airmen who collided with part of the plane while parachuting. Suspicion against the enemy also greeted the work of a Dr. Ernest W. Ittershaggen who "performed countless surgeries repairing broken limbs" of Allied airmen who parachuted to safety.
Ittershaggen was "an early pioneer in the use of pins to secure broken bones," Walton writes, and "when the POW X-rays indicating the use of metal pins fell into Allied hands, it was thought at first the prisoners were being tortured."
Harrowing train ride
Along with the others on Rhapsody in Junk, Sgt. Cardenas was shocked at the amount of detailed information interrogators had of the crew, down to it being their third mission, in his initial interview.
The uncomfortable stay in the overheated basement of a castle, where they were taken to be questioned, was only the beginning of the suffering for the prisoners.
While the officers were shipped to Stalag Luft III, the enlisted men were put in boxcars for transport to Stalag Luft IV near the Baltic port town of Stettin.
It was a harrowing trip.
"Allied bombers dropped bombs close to their train and afterward fighter planes strafed," Walton notes. "During the attacks, the train of prisoners stopped. The earth shook, and sirens railed. They knew the fighters would fly low to the ground to machine gun anti-aircraft installations, and they especially targeted trains."
Walton is poetic as she describes the enlisted men's final steps to Stalag Luft IV.
"They trudged up the sandy road for a mile to the camp, their scuffing shoes creating puffs of dry earth with each step."
Letters from home
The telegram informing Mrs. Jeffers of her husband's status as missing in action made its way to her at 6:31 p.m. June 28, one day after his arrival in camp.
Mrs. Jeffers was then living with her sister, Martha, at 23½ E. Southern Ave. in Springfield, the place where she on July 8 would receive what Walton calls "the guarded but welcome news" that her husband was a prisoner of war.
In most of his letters home, several of which are printed in an appendix, Jeffers refers to their unborn child as "Scrubby" and does his best to sound energetic and upbeat about the future.
Walton's story clearly documents the filth, cold, misery and malnutrition suffered by prisoners writing such letters, but she also provides details about POW life that will be new to many.
"The German censors were women who were assigned to a certain group of men's mail. They came to know the men on paper and from time to time wrote an encouraging comment on a letter that brought bad news. After the war, the women were invited to prisoner of war reunions, and many came."
Less friendly, Walton points out, was the initial reception prisoners got from other prisoners — with good reason.
After debriefing, a kind of screening took place to expose German plants.
"If no fellow prisoner could say he knew the new man," Walton writes, "questions were asked about sports or other trivia of the United States that any red-blooded American would know."
What friends Jeffers and co-pilot Dee Butler most wanted to know about was the status of their pregnant wives.
In the chaos of wartime mail, Jeffers found out before Butler that Butler's wife, Miriam, had given birth to a daughter, Julie Anne. A drawing Butler made in the prison camp survives as a memento of that day Jeffers broke the news that Julie Anne had arrived. The drawing appears in Walton's book.
The Russian invasion
The arrival of the 250 Russians in Poland during January of 1945 changed the lives of all the prisoners, sending them on freezing marches and locking them in frigid box cars for days on end.
The officers' move to a camp near Moosburg began with an almost giddy sense of freedom for those who had not been outside prison gates for months, but the weather turned the journey into torture.
"So bitter was the night that their trousers froze to the surface of the road," writes Walton.
A German farmer blessedly provided hot water to frozen men so they could make cocoa or oatmeal from the Red Cross provisions, and "down the line, an elderly German guard who had been kind to the (prisoners) was practically carried by two Americans as a third prisoner toted his rifle."
" 'We were all in the same boat,' my father told me decades later. 'We were just trying to survive.' "
As most of the officers boarded trains for the final leg of their journey, five officers from the camp "were taken to Berlin to meet with German generals and civilians without the knowledge of Hitler. It was hoped that the meeting would convince the men to entreat their superiors to join the Germans in an allied fight against whom they considered to be everyone's enemy, the Russians."
Fleas, lice and ticks
On a march of their own, the crew's enlisted men were also just trying to survive. After trading his ring for three loaves of bread and a dozen eggs, Cardenas would steal sour milk from a kitten and clean the slobber off a beet a cow had been chewing so he could sustain himself.
The enlisted men were evacuated from a second camp April 8, 1945, and carried living pieces of it with them when they wandered into Allied lines days later.
While being dusted with powder, "The thin men could see the lice, nits and ticks falling dead from their bodies," Walton writes.
In the midst of it, Cardenas wise cracks, "Let's see who makes the biggest pile out of those."
The officers would have to wait to be liberated from a camp near Moosburg that was occupied by the same enemy.
"Most of the men were cold and damp by the time they had arrived in early February," Walton writes. And although they already were covered with fleas, the scene in side the bunk houses had to be deflating.
"By filtered light coming through the cracks, the men could see bedbugs, lice and fleas crawling everywhere. Men's bodies were livid with welts from insect bites, and many men hung their meager blankets out all day in hopes of ridding the fabric of the biting beasts."
Freedom at last
Walton's story adds a couple of interesting twists to the closing chapters of the war in Europe. She describes Hitler's plan first to relocate prisoners of war in cages on the main streets of Berlin so that they would be killed as the city was bombed or shelled by the Allies. She then describes a second Hitler plan to move the most highly prized prisoners near his Eagle's Nest in Bavaria, there holding them as bargaining chips for better peace terms.
That never came to pass.
Six days after enduring the news of FDR's death while imprisoned, the officers of Rhapsody in Junk were liberated just before noon on April 29, when a camouflaged Sherman tank pushed down the barbed wire fence.
"So many (prisoners) jumped on the tank that not one inch of it could be seen," Walton writes. "Two P-51s with loud engines followed doing victory rolls over the barracks and tents. Fifteen minutes later, the fighter planes made passes again but this time rocking their wings or tumbling in acrobatics. An enormous cheer went up."
Their joy could not be contained.
Elation and sadness
Jeffers, who would make the military his career, returned through Boston, traveled to Camp Atterbury, Ind., then caught a bus to Springfield to meet his wife and 6-month-old daughter, Diane, for the first time.
Radio operator Lawrence Dean would return to Tennessee. Met by his father at the bus station, he took a taxi home, and when his father tried to pay the driver, the driver refused.
He had been the same man who'd delivered the news a year earlier that his son was missing in action.
"So it is my treat," he said tearfully.
"In Bloomdale, Ohio, the Flaugher family would have no celebration," Walton writes.
Their son had died the day Rhapsody in Junk went down.
But for 60 years, Walton's father would send flowers to decorate the grave at the American cemetery in Belgium where Flaugher?'s body finally was put to rest.
Knowing Flaugher was gone, Jeffers made sure he was not forgotten.
