Of Mice and Menus

"The best diet I was ever on"

I was engrossed in my former New York Post colleague Lewis Grossberger’s Raw Truth Bulletin satirical conversation with Vladimir Putin when I reached for the mini chocolate croissant from Amazon Fresh I was eating, took a bite, and would have broken a tooth if I didn’t have dentures. As I stared at my desktop computer, it seems, I tried to bite my mouse. That got me thinking about some of the prisoners of war I’ve interviewed.

“I’ve seen people eat dead rats,” one of them, Jim Koerner, said. A sergeant in the 10th Armored Division, Jim was captured in the first days of the Battle of the Bulge and bounced around several prison and labor camps. “Once I had the detail of making soup for 2,000 men, and I was given a horse’s head for flavor. I had to knock the teeth out of it and put the head in the soup, eyes and everything. I’ll admit I ate some and was very happy to get it.

“One time they called two of us in to this place where the soldiers ate, and they had an officer from the SS. They had this little stinker, what the heck was that German? The small guy that was a bastard as far as the way he treated everybody, in the upper echelon of the Nazis … Himmler. Nobody told me, but just by this guy’s looks, if he wasn’t Himmler he was a dead ringer. He came into that camp just before we got moved out, because we could hear and see artillery flashes and we knew they were getting pretty close.

“They brought two of us in; they knew we were sergeants. We’d pulled the rank off but they still knew that because the threads were on the sleeve. And they asked us, would we make an announcement that they could record? They told us what to say, and they wanted it in writing. They had food there, and they said, ‘If you say that, you can have that food.’

“I said, ‘I love my country. I won’t say anything against it.’

“The other guy said the same thing.

“They spat in the food. It was really the tail end of what they had on the table, the fatty meat and all, but it was food. They spat on it and threw it in the garbage. They said, ‘Go ahead. Kill yourself. Die. Do what you want.’

“We got out of there. And when they left, other POWs came up and they took the food out of the garbage that he spat on, and they ate it.”

Hal Mapes, a B-17 waist gunner whose plane was shot down near Chartres, came home to Glen Rock, New Jersey, married and settled down. One day his wife, Nancy, was mortified when he bent over, picked up a piece of food that fell on the floor, and ate it.

“Best diet I was ever on,” said Hal, who lost 55 pounds during captivity in Stalag Luft IV and on the long march across Germany near the end of the war.

The fact that Sergeant Tim Dyas went on to become a high school principal did little to diminish the loss of self-esteem he suffered, another characteristic of prisoners of war, from having to surrender his squad of 82nd Airborne paratroopers.

In the middle of a pitch black night, Tim’s squad was dropped into the middle of the Hermann Goering Panzer Division during the invasion of Sicily. “I had about ten or twelve men,” he recalled. We were up against a hillside, and the German infantry was throwing hand grenades down at us. We were throwing them back at them. And two tanks were burning on the road at the bottom of the hill. But they smartened up, and finally other tanks got past the two burning tanks and came up and turned their guns at us. So I looked around quickly and I said to my men, ‘Surrender.’ I still, you know, intellectually it was the right thing to do. Emotionally it was the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life. The difference between the Air Force and the ground forces, the Air Force, when their plane gets hit, they have no control over that. But on the ground you have control over your destiny. We had no control. As a psychiatrist told me, he said, ‘What could you have done? All gotten killed? What would you have accomplished?

“I said, ‘Intellectually you’re right, but emotionally it’s a terrible blow and I have never recovered from it.’ One of the men with me went on to become the chief justice of the Supreme Court in Louisiana. We talk on the phone occasionally, John Dixon. And he says, ‘I thank you for what you did, you saved my life, and then I turn around and say, that sonofabitch. But you were right, I know you saved all our lives.’

“I said, 'Yeah, but it doesn’t feel very good to this day.’”

For a long time when I thought about prisoners of war — primarily because I had interviewed a few of them — what came to mind was “The Great Escape,” “Stalag 17” and “Hogan’s Heroes.” Oh, and of course “The Bridge Over the River Kwai,” which I’d seen a long time ago. I once was invited to the Eldred, Pennsylvania, military museum, which was dedicating a new wing that it had to build because a patron left the museum his collection of thousands of military history books. And that was almost twenty years ago. Post in a facebook group a question like “What is the best book (or movie) about B-17s,” you’ll get so many suggestions you have to stop reading; or “What is the best book (or movie) about D-Day, and don’t even get me started about the best book or movie about tanks. What might come up about prisoners of war would pale by comparison, yet there were 120,000 American POWs in World War 2, and god knows how many of British, Canadian and other nationalities.

I wrote my most recent book, “Prisoners of War: An Oral History” because through 19 interviews and excerpts from interviews that I’ve done I wanted to show some of the themes and characteristics almost unique to being a POW. While their colleagues in the foxholes or the skies were complaining about C-rations and powdered eggs, “kriegies” were carefully measuring portions of bread made with sawdust so that no one would get a bigger piece than another, or wishing they hadn’t skipped most of their breakfast because they were worried about having to relieve themselves on a long bombing mission. POWs were being beaten with no recourse by some guards and bartering with others. They were planning escapes even though they knew there was no chance of avoiding re-capture. They were looked down upon by family and friends back home. Corman Bean, a navigator on a B-24, kept a diary, as many officers did at Stalag Luft I, in which he recorded some poetry that he and other prisoners wrote, although he claimed when I interviewed him that none of it was his own. “Oh, I couldn’t write that.” Probably he didn’t, but he certainly could have; there was that low self-esteem despite a successful career in the farm chemical business.

Here are some excerpts he said were collected from prisoners’ letters from home:

“If you need any money let me know.” From his mother.

“I find it difficult to live on your two hundred dollar allotment each month.” To Lieutenant B.L. from his wife.

“We’re not sending you any parcels. We hear you can buy everything you need in stores near your camp.”

“I’ve been living with a private since you are gone. Please don’t cut off my allotment, though, because he doesn’t make as much money as you.”

“I’m going to file for a divorce. Mother and I have talked it over and since you have been gone so long, we decided it was best.”

“I knew I should have kept you home and joined the Air Corps myself. Even when you were a kid I expected you’d wind up in prison.”

Talk about a kick in the butt. The POW received a sweater from a woman through the American Red Cross, and upon writing her a letter of thanks received the following answer: “I’m sorry to hear that a prisoner received the sweater I knit. I intended it for a fighting man.”

A kick in the butt