Paratrooper ~ Vol. IV
MY WORLD WAR II STORY
April 15, 1942 ~ December 14, 1946
© 1997 by Edward M. Isbell
507th Parachute Infantry Regiment
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Chapter 5
On June 23, we left Starvation Hill in trucks. Late that afternoon we pulled into a large town and they placed us in empty houses. Most of the furniture and some of the belongings of the former occupants were still there.
We didn't know that there was a German headquarters in the next block.
About an hour before dark the air-raid alarms sounded. A few minutes later fighter planes came to knock out the anti-aircraft guns, and bomb and strafe. They got rid of their bombs first and then started using their 20 and 50mm caliber machine guns. A short time after they left, the heavy bombers came to finish the job.
The house I was in had two stories. I was upstairs under a mattress. It wouldn't have taken much more for the old house to collapse from the vibration. Debris of all kinds came through the windows and doors. Dust and the odor of sulfur was stifling.
We looked around the next morning at the still-burning houses and German soldiers running around trying to get organized. I don't remember seeing any civilians around. They must have moved out when the German headquarters moved in.
Some of the older houses, like the one I was in, were still standing, but that was about all. The destruction was indescribable. We were lucky again! A few of our fellows had to be taken to a hospital. We always wondered if they got to a hospital.
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On the 24th of June we started out again. Why we were moving in daylight I'll never know. They couldn't have wanted their trucks and guards destroyed even if they didn't care what happened to us. We had only gone a few miles when our fighters spotted us.
They made several passes before they started strafing. This gave us time to get out of the trucks and run into a nearby field for cover. The planes destroyed all the trucks. I don't remember how many trucks there were in the convoy ~ about 10 I think.
We had a few wounded from stray bullets and shrapnel. Two guards stayed with the wounded to wait for transportation to a hospital. We had left about half of our original group back at Starvation Hill. There weren't enough trucks for everyone.
We walked the rest of the day, reaching the outskirts of St. Lo, France. Just after dark the air-raid alarms in St. Lo started sounding. A few minutes later we could hear the bombers coming. Everything seemed to get as light as day with spotlights and anti-aircraft guns firing at our bombers. We watched as the heavy bombers dropped their bombs on the city. I believe this was the first bombing of St. Lo. We were fortunate not to have been in town.
A large German headquarters was located there. The Allies warned the Germans by dropping leaflets that they didn't want to destroy the beautiful city, but would have no other option unless they moved their headquarters out. The Germans didn't move. Not much was left of St. Lo after the bombing and artillery barrages it received in the days to come.
After the bombing was over we moved through the town. The heat from the burning buildings was intense. We got a break about the center of town, just across from a Notre Dame Cathedral, a beautiful structure in the light of the fires. It didn't look as if it had a scratch on it, although all the other buildings around it had been hit. I understand it was the last building to go down in an artillery barrage a few days later. I read about the destruction and saw pictures of St. Lo after the war ended. The city was completely leveled. The tallest structure left standing was a portion of the cathedral.
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We walked the next two days. Just before we got to Alencon, France, we passed a small muddy farm pond. The guards let us take a swim (my first bath since I left England). The water was cold even though it was June. Our blood bad gotten so thin it was hard for us to keep warm any time.
There was a small transit camp located near Alencon. The huts had dirt floors and wooden bunks without mattresses. The POWs worked in the hospital, at airfields, etc. My left toe became infected from a blister. It was giving me so much pain I couldn't sleep and I had a hard time getting about.
A fellow POW gave me half a jet of morphine and the rest of the jet that night. I don't know where he got the morphine or how he kept the Germans from finding it, but it was a lifesaver for me. He gave me a few more jets before he shipped out the next day. They always searched us each time we left a camp and entered a new one. He was afraid they would find it. The Germans would have been happy to get it as they were short of medical supplies.
The toe got so bad I thought gangrene was setting in and I was worried about losing it. I had a safety-razor blade that I kept in my Testament that I used to relieve the pressure. The morphine was the only thing that kept me going. I knew that the time would come when I would have to pay for using the stuff, but we learned to live minute-by-minute.
Carrying large stones to fill bomb craters at the airfield was very painful because of the toe. A red-headed German sergeant thought I was faking (it was hard for the Germans to get work out of a POW any time), so he took a disliking for me and kept pushing me around. I called him the red-headed SOB. The more he harassed me the more I cursed him.
One day I sat down to look at my toe and he tried to get me up. I looked him in the face and called him a Nazi swine. He understood that word. This was the worst thing you could call a German. He turned red in the face and started cursing me in better English than I could speak. He told me to get off my ass and go to work.
He began to laugh when he saw my surprised look. He told me he had attended college in the States before the war, and after they won the war he was going back. I told him if he was so smart he should know they had already lost the war, that I felt sorry for the German people for what they would have to go through the next few months unless they gave up and killed that crazy leader of theirs. He walked off shaking his head.
After that he didn't bother me any more. I guess he knew, as so many Germans did, that they had lost the war, but just couldn't accept it or couldn't do anything about it.
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That evening when we got back to camp I went to the commander and showed him my toe and asked him to put me on a detail that didn't require much walking. The next day they put me hauling water. They had a wagon that carried a large wooden barrel pulled by two horses. We pumped the water by hand from a farm nearby and hauled it back to camp.
One of the fellows on the water detail kept watching a cat that stayed around the barn. He said the cat would make a good meal. At the time I didn't think anything about it, but one day while we were pumping water, this fellow went inside the barn to relieve himself and stayed longer than he should have. The guard got worried and met him at the door just as he was coming out. We had only the one guard and he would let one man go at a time.
On the way back to camp, we noticed that this fellow had something in his shirt. It turned out to be the cat. He told us that an Italian told him how to clean and cook a cat so it would taste like rabbit. My appetite wasn't very good during this time because of a fever coming from the toe. I knew I didn't want any part of a cat. That evening I went by the area where they were cooking it and the odor was so bad I didn't wait around to watch them feast. There were times later that it might have tasted better than a T-bone steak to me.
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After my toe got better, I worked at the hospital, carrying soldiers to the operating room for leg or arm amputations. I never had much feeling for them or their pain during this time, but now as I look back I'm sorry for the pain they had to endure. The Germans were short of pain-killer, and some died from loss of blood and the pain.
The only good part about working at the hospital was the food. It was the only place during my incarceration that I could get plenty to eat. One time I ate so much soup it gave me stomach cramps and when I bent over it ran out my nose.
When the morphine ran out, I came down with a bad case of nerves and dysentery. I couldn't eat my bread ration and I gave it to some of the men in my company who were being shipped out in trucks. No one knew where they were going or when they would get something to eat. They had only gone a few miles that afternoon before being strafed by our fighter planes. Most of them were wounded or killed. The guards told us they had been taken to the hospital in Alencon.
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Most every afternoon just before sundown we had dogfights overhead. The Germans had several landing strips in the vicinity. When the air raid sounded, they would try to get their planes in the air so they wouldn't be destroyed on the ground.
They only had one plane that could outrun ours, so they had to fight it out. The fights were always between our P-38 and P-47 fighters and the Germans' FW-110s and ME-109s. When one of our planes was shot down, the Germans guards would yell and clap their hands, and we did the same when they lost a plane. It's hard to think of war as a game, but it was ~ a game of destruction, suffering and death.
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This is one of those hard-to-believe stories that happens in war. One afternoon there were two P-38 fighters and three German planes going after them. One of the P-38s started smoking and the pilot bailed out just before it burst into flames. The pilot landed in the middle of our compound, which was about the size of a football field.
Someone yelled out to him, "Hey, Mack, we weren't expecting company to drop in today. Sorry we can't be of some help."
The pilot was trying to get out of his chute and had not realized he had landed in a POW work camp until a guard yelled "Handy oh! Handy oh!" (Hands up). The pilot had his pistol out and we thought the guards were going to shoot him. Someone yelled out, "Hey, Joe, you're in the middle of a prison camp. You had better drop the pistol or the guards are going to shoot you."
About that time bullets started hitting around him. He threw his pistol down and the guards slowly moved out to capture him. He put up a fight and the guards worked him over with rifle butts and had to drag him most of the way to the camp commander's office, where he was interrogated most of the night.
He was shipped out the next day, but not before he yelled out that our forces were close and moving fast. This was no news to us. For weeks the Germans kept us just behind the front lines. We were always hoping to be liberated, but it never happened.
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An officer, Lt. Roger Whiting, was brought in with some other POWs. I got to know Whiting while we were stationed in Nebraska. We dated the same girl there. We had made a list of all the men in our company who we knew had been captured. I volunteered to get the list to Whiting before he was shipped out. An officer would have a better opportunity to get the list to the Red Cross.
We knew how hard it must have been on our families, not knowing what had happened to us, only that we were missing. The officers were always kept separate from enlisted men. It took the better part of a night for me to get through the fence that separated us from the officers' compound without being spotted.
I could only move a short distance at a time because of the spotlight making its rounds. When I did get to the fence, I had a hard time getting under it. They didn't have any watch dogs, thank heaven. I made it to his hut and gave him the list. He told me what news he had about the war.
When I started to go back, he said, "Isbell, Hilda and I are getting married if and when I get back to the States." At that time girls were the least of my worries. I wished him luck and started back. Whiting was shipped out the next day. He and Hilda got married when he returned home.
I made it back to my hut without any trouble. Anything that moved in the compound after dark was shot, unless you were going to the pit to use the toilet. The walkway to the pit had a fence on both sides and was well lit.
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