This business of killing prisoners

The judge, jury and executioner's song

I only recently saw Band of Brothers for the first time and have not yet watched Masters of the Air but both epics address cinematically the murder of enemy combatants who’ve surrendered.

In Band of Brothers it’s an Easy Company lieutenant who takes military justice into his own hands, giving cigarettes to a group of prisoners on D-Day before mowing them down. (the picture above is a screen shot from the scene). In Masters of the Air it’s civilians angry at the devastation the bombing has taken on their cities and their families who shoot a group of captured flyers. Both scenes draw upon a tragic reality of war.

And both have been played out in my interviews. Many veterans I spoke with witnessed such executions, but I began to wonder if I would find someone who admitted killing a prisoner. Spoiler alert: I did.

One of them, Stanley Klapkowski, is in the Pittsburgh Veterans Hall of Fame, despite a lifetime of drinking and getting into fights. During the war he was awarded a Silver Star and a Bronze Star and was considered one of the best gunners in the 712th Tank Battalion. He also experienced battle fatigue and had to be pulled off the machine gun atop a tank because he kept on firing after a battle ended. In 1996 I visited him at his home in McKees Rocks, outside Pittsburgh, armed with a series of anecdotes told by members of his crew, like how he was using the morphine that was provided in case of being wounded (which he denied, but said the German morphine he “might have used”), and the time he refused to let a prisoner go to the bathroom because he wanted to make the prisoner shit his pants (he succeeded). I asked if he remembered that.

“Oh no,” Klapkowski said. “That’s the SS, he spit in my face. I blowed his head off. SS. Regular SS. I said, "You murder your own people, you spit in my face.” Lucky there was no witnesses. They'd have turned me in. He was some kind of officer in the SS. I said, "How many people did you murder, you ...” He got white, he knowed I was gonna kill him.

He went on to describe another incident involving a sniper he and a sergeant captured. While he had a vivid imagination and a tendency to exaggerate, I tended to believe him.

I also believed Bill Pirone, a corporal in the 2nd Cavalry Regiment whom I interviewed in the 1994 runup to the 50th anniversary of D-Day, even though he, too, suffered battle fatigue some time after the incident he described. Some of what follows is both graphic and disturbing.

Aaron: Did you ever have any contact with SS prisoners?

Bill: Oh yeah. They used to spit at us. They had no, they didn’t care, spit at us and call us names in German. So I says to them one day, I says “Whatever you say, double back to you,” I says. “You’re lucky I can’t kill you.” And they knew it, you know, that we wouldn’t kill them because they get 15, 20 guys, we ain’t gonna kill 15, 20 guys, one’ll get loose and start telling. I’ve got to tell you a story, the Free French, FFI [Free French of the Interior], you’re likely to say he’s on a soapbox, but I gotta tell you, we’re up on the mountains, and every time we get down this one mountain, this here one guy with a Volkswagen started waving a flag. And when he waved that flag from the end of our column to the front, the Germans opened fire. He gave them, told them what was the beginning of our column and the end. Because we used to go on reconnaissance every day to make contact with the Germans. We had to keep in contact, either send the tank destroyers or the infantry.

So this one day one of my guys says “Hey Bill, we don’t want to say nothing, but that guy there is flagging us and we’re getting shelled, we’re getting the shit knocked out of us at the other end of the column. I says, “Well, tomorrow when he comes buy, stop him. Make him a prisoner, we’ll bring him up in the thing.”

I tell the lieutenant, he says “Shoot the sonofabitch”

So I get a, I made him dig a hole. I ain’t afraid to admit it. I blew his goddamn brains. We never had trouble no more. Nobody with a white flag waving. You know, he was endangering my 40 guys, you know, we could have got killed. Annihilated. Because that nitwit’s supposed to be FFI, Free French, you’d think he was happy that we were there, no.

Aaron: He was a collaborator.

Bill: The guy told me, I said “Tomorrow you nail him and bring him by me. He took him up to me, I says “Here, dig yourself a hole. And he’s going to me in French, “No no no no, not me, I’m you friend.” I says, “You’re not my friend.” And when he got through. two of us, with the M1 rifle we did a job on him.” I says “Now you don’t have to worry about waving any flags to anybody.”

Aaron: Sure.

Bill: Hey, that war is war, you know. He should never have did what he did in the first place. I didn’t care. It’s better him than me.

Aaron: And where was that?

Bill: I don’t remember the town but I know it was up in a wooded area.

Aaron: You were there for quite a while?

Bill: Quite a while, yeah, because we couldn’t go too far. It was raining like hell. It was muddy and all. And I know we used to go every day, the same time. and this sonofabitch every day he’d go from one end of my column to the other, because I was in the first platoon, in B Troop, and then all of a sudden the white flag would be coming out like this, and then we got hell knocked. And I said what the hell’s going on? So the guy, one guy says, “Bill,” in the armored car, he says “Corporal, I’ve got to tell you something.” He says, “That sonofabitch is telling the enemy the beginning of the column to the end. I says, “All right. Tomorrow when he does that, stop him. Take him the hell out of that god damn shittin’ piece of cheese box, put him in the armored car and take him up the hill.” We got rid of him. No more flags, they were looking for flags, there were no more flags. War is war.”

Just to note, this was a doting grandfather, and his wife was in the next room when I interviewed him. He lost a brother in combat on Thanksgiving Day in 1944 but I don’t know whether that was before or after, and it doesn’t seem to have factored into this incident. What stands out to me is the difference between Pirone’s raw emotion in the moment and the nonchalance of Lieutenant Speirs in Band of Brothers.

I’ll discuss the abuse of Allied prisoners of war in a later Substack, because I remembered another incident from my interview with Jim Rothschadl.

Rothschadl was the gunner in Lieutenant Jim Flowers’ tank, first platoon, Company C, 712th Tank Battalion. The incident he describes took place in Normandy in early July of 1944.

We got a prisoner one day, a day or two before this [the battle of Hill 122 which involved Flowers’ platoon] happened. We were moving along, and either a lieutenant or infantry lieutenant called for air support, and it was a clear afternoon. We thought the road ahead was going this way, and we were coming this way, and there was a long building on that side of the road, a real long building, with tile shingles on the roof; instead of shingles it had tile, and it was low and had walls about two feet thick, of stone. So we stopped there, about twenty feet from that building, and all the infantry guys were kind of huddled up against that building, a whole bunch of them, while they're waiting for these planes to come, and then they came within minutes, a couple of squadrons of Thunderbolts and Mustangs. And we had a pair of really powerful binoculars in the tank, and I was watching these guys. Each plane had either a 250-pound or a 500-pound bomb under each wing, and these powerful binoculars. They were not too far ahead of us when they were bombing. And I could see them just like I can see you. I could see a pilot. I focused in on one of them and I followed him down, I'm telling you, these guys went into a hail of bullets; you could see the tracers going up. None of them got hit. There were about ten or fifteen planes, dropping their bombs there. And one of them, it was a P-47, it was a Thunderbolt. I saw only one bomb drop. The other one hung on there. And I remember seeing the plane, as soon as he dropped the first one, they all flew back over our lines. And I never thought you could handle a plane like that. He was trying to shake that thing loose, and trying to get that bomb off. He was coming toward us, and the damn thing finally fell off, just on the other side of the building. And all these shingles came off, this tile, falling on all these GIs, talk about a commotion.

Then we stood there for a while, and pretty soon there was a sniper firing at us. Somebody hollered “Sniper!” Once in a while they had a crazy guy on their side that stayed back. Anyway, somebody picked up three or four infantry guys and started walking down this road. There was a great big cottonwood tree that had tipped over, and the bushes tipped with it. And I was watching these guys go down there; that's where they thought the sniper was. So I was watching with the binoculars there, and pretty soon I couldn't see them. They went around the tree there; there was a big chunk of dirt and the roots. Pretty soon they come out with a German. So I was watching this, I had my binoculars in the turret there, and they were coming toward me. He was kind of a small, little fellow. And they made him kneel down, right in front of my tank. So he was kneeling down on his hands and knees — just on his knees, he had his hands back here — and these guys were trying to ask him something. Enlisted men weren’t supposed to talk to prisoners, you know. It was sort of a rule. But they did. And I heard him say, I kept hearing him repeatedly say, this prisoner, “Ya sem Czech.” I can talk Czech. I thought, what the hell. So I walked over to him. And I knelt down by him and I started talking Czech to him. He jumped up, he was just delighted, you know, somebody talking Czech to him, so these infantry boys thought he was trying to do something, and so they grabbed ahold of him, a bunch of them, and down he went. So I told the guys, “Wait a minute.” And I talked to him for a bit. He couldn't talk German, he could talk Czech. The way the Germans did it, they took a lot of Poles and Czechs and they scattered them between in their infantry units as fill-ins. So I was talking to him. He had some pictures, he showed me pictures of his mother and his father. He said that the Germans killed them. They were born in Prague, they killed his mother and father, and then they put him in a labor battalion. Then when we landed in Normandy, they took him out of the labor battalion and put him into an infantry unit, along with a lot of people from other countries they had overrun. I should have got his name, too.

I was talking to him in Czech, and he said to me, he said the Germans told him, “If they capture you, they're going to hang you from the first tree. They don't take no prisoners.” Then he said to me, “Are you gonna kill me?”

“Noooo,” I said. “You're gonna be all right, now. They'll take you back someplace, and from there you'll probably go to the United States.” And I gave him a cigarette. And he had a little cigar, about this long, it was ersatz. It was a fake. He said they are no good, he said, but I'll give you one.

I don’t know what happened to the prisoner after this, but once a situation is deescalated in a manner such as this, his chances of survival likely increased greatly. I don’t know how Hollywood would have handled a situation such as this. My interview with Jim Rothschadl is included in my book “They Were All Young Kids,” about the ambush of Jim Flowers’ platoon in the battle for Hill 122.

Jim Rothschadl (the independent 712th Tank Battalion was broken out of the 10th Armored Division in 1943.)