Living With The Memories: One POW Catalogs His Time In Prison Camp

By Kendra Bobowick

(Last week The Bee ran a story regarding a prisoner of war held captive in Switzerland. Author Cathryn Prince wrote about the Swiss POWs and spoke about her book, Shot from the Sky, at C.H. Booth Library this week. Her book details the incarceration of US airmen who crash-landed in Switzerland during World War II. Also taken prisoner during the war was Newtown resident Richard Andrews, who was held in German camps after being captured during The Battle of the Bulge. Mr Andrews was a prisoner at Stalag XIIA, where conditions and facilities were poor. The camp was intended as a transit site for processing new war prisoners. His story continues the saga of POWs that Bee readers were introduced to last week.)

“Your son PVT Andrews Richard W is a prisoner of war of the German government,” stated a poorly typed Western Union telegram from 1944. The message, echoing similar correspondence nationwide, was addressed to Mrs Georgia Andrews of Newtown. That same telegram, now yellowed but intact, is still legible, and retains an emotional sway over its subject: Private Richard Andrews.

Mr Andrews recounts the day he was captured by Germans as if it were a scene occurring just beyond the window where he fixes his stare. He was a prisoner for five months, “in pounds that’s 44,” he said recently.

He and his wife, Louise, remember with undiminished clarity the days when they began dating, times when Mr Andrews earned leave from the service, and his ordeal of neglect, starvation, and misery as a POW in Stalag XIIA, prison camp in Germany.

He watched as death cut down the weaker prisoners from hunger, and often from a coldness that the past 62 years has not warmed.

The first licks of mortal chill followed the morning of December 16, 1944, when the Germans captured Mr Andrews and “walked us a couple of miles where we slept in a barn, then they loaded us onto cattle cars,” he said. The temperatures were “far below zero,” he said. The cattle cars were open at the sides, adding wind chill, Mr Andrews said.

Comfortable and warm while seated at his dining room table, decades away from the barn, the cattle car, or frigid possibilities of death, Mr Andrews observed, “If you were 20 years old, you lived through it, and those who were 30-something often died. The age made a big difference in whether you survived or not.”

Those who succumbed to the cold inside the cattle car “had nowhere to fall,” he said. The men were so packed together that the dead “stayed standing up.” The ride lasted three days.

Once imprisoned, Mr Andrews said, “You thought about food constantly, escape constantly, and survival.”

Escape had distinct consequences, however.

“There was an outside toilet, but you didn’t want to use it. [Guards] would shoot one of the prisoners and say they had tried to escape and put them in there,” Mr Andrews said. “It was definitely a warning.”

That particular December 16, 1944, began what has since been named The Battle of The Bulge, referring to the geographic push of German forces against the Allied lines in World War II. Notable facts about that December indicate it was the “coldest, snowiest weather in memory in the Ardennes Forest on the German/Belgium border [where the Battle of the Bulge occurred]” according to battle facts found online.

Catching A Ride To   Prison Camp

Private Richard Andrews, a US Army Infantryman, was standing in a frigid forest “outdoors at 20 below in foxholes in the snow,” he said, holding a weapon feeble in the face of German forces. He was staring down the immense length of the Siegfried Line — an interlacing “defense system stretching more than 392 miles with more than 18,000 bunkers, tunnels and tank traps,” according to infromation found on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried­_Line.

Understating his dilema, Mr Andrews said, “I was looking at huge concrete bunkers interconnected by tunnels.” Positioned there with his .50 caliber machine gun, his inadeqacies dispelled any llusions of safety and Mr Andrews knew it, saying, “We had 20 rounds for the gun and one clip each for the rifles,” which was essentially nothing, he said.

Regardless of the odds, he used what he had.

“On that morning of [December 16] we heard a bunch of Germans talking,” although fog concealed the enemy, Mr Andrews said. Some time after the 4–6 am morning watch as dawn broke, “I just swung the gun toward the voices and with the daylight silhouetted I saw them, swung my gun and killed at least 20.”

The Germans shot back, he said.

Mr Andrews sat back and refocused on his dining room table and immediate surroundings as Mrs Andrews said, “Now they were out of ammunition, so imagine the feeling of them coming at you and you’ve got nothing.”

She then flipped through a scrapbook and reached for a shoulder insignia of a black and white stitched eagle. She ended his recollection to that morning in the forest saying, “This belonged to a German soldier.”

Mr Andrews and his wife keep scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, laminated paperwork, and the German soldier’s shoulder patch, the Western Union note sent to his mother, and more memorabilia dating back to World War II when in Newtown at the time “there wasn’t a man in sight,” Mrs Andrews laughs. Most of the men were at war, or worse, they were imprisoned like Mr Andrews.

Surviving Prison Camp

In prison camp, “You could volunteer to work, that way you could try to steal some food or something,” Mr Andrews said. “Everybody was terribly hungry, that was the worst thing.”

Each day the prisoners received coffee that “tasted like mud” and servings of grass soup, made from “boiling grass.”

“That was all there was,” he said.

Several prisoners volunteered to work on a farm. “We fought over who would shovel the horse manure, because it was warm,” he said. Mostly, the men chopped wood the Germans used for fuel since everyday resources were in shortage due to the war, he said.

Ugly and unhealthy conditions assaulted prisoners.

Many men contracted yellow jaundice because the Germans had resorted to “fertilizing with human manure,” Mr Andrews said.

Daily struggles were further diminished by attitudes toward prisoners of war.

“The people our own age had no compassion for us,” said Mr Andrews. The older generation, however, “had compassion. They were our guards, and that helped,” he continued.

Even decades later, Mr and Mrs Edwards agree they maintain a “strong and lasting dislike for Germany.”

Their thoughts will always remain partly devoted to what took place in the mid 1940s.

“It’s important to know that this happened, some say it didn’t,” said Mrs Andrews, referring to the Holocaust, Jewish exterminations by German hands, and the hellish treatment of prisoners, specifically in the concentration camps. “The Germans want to cover this up,” she said. She and Mr Andrews agree the German population was misled. Mrs Andrews questions how the population could not know.

“There were bodies stacked in piles and the stink went for miles,” she said.

Mr Andrews said, “[General Dwight D] Eisenhower rounded up all the German soldiers and everyone around and said, ‘I want you all to see this,” Eisenhower implied that in 60 years, they’ll say this didn’t happen,” Mr Andrews said.

Liberation, At Last

Russian women driving tanks liberated the POWs. Laughing a little, Mr Andrews said, “The tanks came up and the operators got out. A lot of the drivers were big girls and they all had canteens full of vodka.”

As Mr Andrews began to realize, many of his fellow prisoners, “had little knowledge of the concentration camps. That came out after the war,” he said.

Some of those men returned unscathed, others perished, and some came home full of nightmares. Mr Andrews, like many others, left not only a war, but also a prison camp. He lives with this memory daily.