The Things Our Fathers Saw—The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation-Volume III: War in the Air—Combat, Captivity, and Reunion

by Matthew Rozell

  We were prisoners of the Italians for like three months. We left that camp and got up to a place called Sulmona, which is over east of Rome, in what had been a civilian prison. It had big 15-foot masonry walls, and it made thoughts of escape very difficult. Italian guards would be walking the top of that wall until one day in September, they were gone, and the German paratroopers were up there. That's how we found out that Italy had capitulated.

  On July 25th, 1943, Benito Mussolini was dismissed as prime minister by the Fascist Grand Council. King Victor Emmanuel III had him arrested and then appointed the ‘hero of Ethiopia’ Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who promptly signed an armistice with the Allies on September 3rd. A furious Hitler disarmed the Italian army fighting with the Germans and, sent 600,000 into slave labor.[16] Mussolini, being held at a mountaintop resort, was later rescued in a daring SS glider raid ten days after Italy broke from Germany. The German war machine now poured into Italy and dug in.

  A couple weeks later, the Germans marched us down to the railroad and got us loaded in the boxcars, and we went up north. We had several stops along the route. They'd just stop for a couple hours, right out in the open, but they wouldn't let us out of the cars. Finally, we got into Bolzano, up in the Alps, right at the southern end of the Brenner Pass at about 10 minutes to noon. We could hear our bombers almost before the train stopped. At the 12:00 bombing time, it turned out their target was this railroad bridge and yards right at the southern end of Bolzano! Somebody ran up and down and opened all the boxcars; the PoWs did this, not the Germans. You have a choice you have to make. Everybody is running like crazy. Do I go right or left? It scared the heck out of all of us.

  I went left into the city of Bolzano. If I had gone right, there were some open lots out there, and then the river was out there, so I might have had a better chance to escape if I'd gone to the river because I can swim good. Anyway, I went left with another fella with me. People were all in the bomb shelters, so there was nobody out, except a German guard here and there to try to keep us contained a little bit. We saw this guard down the middle of the street, so we zipped into a building. We went up the stairs; everybody else was in the basement. We got to the top and went over another building, and we came down on the far side of this guard. Then we walked up the street, maybe a half a mile right in the city. The third wave of bombers had already come over, and people were now coming out of the shelters, and the streets were getting full of people. We said, ‘What are we going to do now?’ We look like Americans right off the bat, you know, so we'll have to pull into one of these estate-like places, like a one acre property with a lot of hedges and shrubs around. We pulled into one, got in behind the hedges, and we're sitting there, figuring we'll wait until dark and then get out of there. A German guy comes out with a Luger, and he says, ‘Komm her,’ so somebody had seen us going in there.We were recaptured and returned back to the rest of the troops.

  We went back on the same train, went up north through the Brenner Pass, up to Munich. From there, we walked up to Moosburg, a big barbed wire camp. Later, towards the end of the war, we were back in Moosburg again, and there was like 30,000 of us in there. Anyway, we got in there, and we stayed there a couple of weeks.

  Then we went back on the train again, and we went up north. We went all the way to Sagan, I guess. That's about 90 kilometers southeast of Berlin on the Oder River. That was where Stalag Luft III was, and we moved into there.

  We stayed there for a year and a half. That's where The Great Escape [movie took place], and [that compound] was just over the fence. We couldn't see any of this, and we didn't even know it was going on. We had tunnel projects of our own. In fact, we had three going on in our barracks. It was Barracks 55, and we were in a corner, fairly close to the fences, but you had to tunnel a long ways. It was all sandy ground. That's where all our bed slats went, to holding up the sand [tunnels] from collapsing.

  We developed a system after a while. The Germans would know that you had tunneling going on. They'd wait a while, and then they'd come in all of a sudden and search for the tunnel. We had two tunnels that we called ‘diversionary tunnels’. They were the ones that were supposed to be found by the Germans. Then the other one was the main event, and hopefully they wouldn't find that one, but they did in our case. Eventually, they found it, but it gave us something to do.

  [To conceal it], we had a stove. It was the same way as it was in Stalag 17. Did you ever see that in the movie? They had a stove, a little potbelly stove. We did a little carpenter work under it, and we made it so the stove would sit there, but you could take the whole thing down in a flash and move the stove over and pull the whole panel up. Then you go down about 10 feet, and there's your tunnel. Anyway, it kept everybody busy. If you did nothing else, you had to carry sand around in your pockets and unload the sand somewhere. We used to dump it around shrubs and stuff like that, but the sand was real white. The surface sand was brown, so it was hard to conceal. The Germans knew we were doing it all the time. Eventually, we just went into the outhouse and dumped the sand right down the holes.

  We played a lot of bridge, played bridge all winter and played softball all summer. And if it wasn't for the Red Cross, we'd have been in dire straits. The Germans would give a bowl of soup on Thursday. Maybe you'd get a potato or two per person for the rest of the week. You never could tell what day you were going to get it. Every six weeks, they'd give you a piece of the reddest, most luscious-looking steak you ever saw, but it was horsemeat. It was so tough you could hardly eat it. You could take a little bite of that, and you could chew it for an hour, which we did. Anyway, the Red Cross parcels, you're supposed to get one per person a week. We were getting about one parcel for six or seven guys there for the first year or so, but then as the war started winding down a little bit, after we were on the continent, things started picking up a little bit. I think the Germans started getting worried about who was going to get blamed for mistreatment, and stuff like that. The camp commander wasn't any dummy. He was going to protect his ends, so we ended up getting one parcel for four people the last few months, so that was good. There was some sugar and a can of either Spam or something like that, cocoa. Our cooks made some great things.

  Oh, we did get bread. That's the main thing the Germans gave us was bread, like a pumpernickel loaf. It was not big, and it was black. We [heard] that the sawdust content was reduced to 10%, so I don't know what it was before that. Anyway, you could cut a slice of that about an eighth of an inch thick, and hold it right on the edge; it wouldn't even bend. [Laughs] Good stuff. I was a great bread eater all my life, and it was great. We'd get one-eleventh of a loaf of bread per day, per person. For breakfast, you'd have a piece of bread with some margarine on it. You'd get margarine in the Red Cross parcels. The Red Cross really saved us.

  The guards were older. Most of them had been on the Russian front. They'd been wounded, and some of them were a little bit crippled from their wounds, a limp or an arm that they couldn't straighten out or something like that, and all [seemed to be] older guys. Yeah, we got along well with them. We didn't do anything to antagonize them. They were just hoping the war would be over soon, same as we were.

  They had speakers in the camp, and we'd get German news broadcasts every afternoon. That was slanted, of course, and you didn't always get the truth from them. I remember when Cassino fell. It took them about four days to admit on the German broadcast that the Battle of Cassino ... They never did say they lost it, but they say, ‘We moved back to better defensive positions during the night,’ or something like this. Some ingenious Englishman there built some kind of radio that he could get the BBC broadcasts from. He kept it hidden. Nobody knew where it was, and nobody in our camp knew where it was. He copied that down every morning and sent it out on a piece of paper to somebody who was authorized to travel from one compound to another. They'd come in. The guy would come in with his piece of paper, and he'd brief everybody in the barracks on it after we posted guards to make sure that no Germans
were around, so we'd get the BBC within 24 hours. We knew when the [D-Day] invasion occurred, and we heard all the high points, Saint-Lô and Caen and all those.

  *

  My mother received notification that I was a PoW about two to three months after I was captured, but my brother was in the 1st Armored Division. He came through our area there in North Africa when they were going back to rest camp after Tunisia fell. He met some of the guys in my squadron. Lo and behold, later he ran into one of the same guys, probably at rest camp, too. This guy told my brother that I had been shot down, but they told him I bailed out, and they thought I was all right, so he wrote my mother. Everything was pretty good until she got that telegram.

  My mother could write to me. I don't think she was restricted on how often she could write to me, but she was restricted on things she could send me. She could send a little box about every 60 days. I'd write about once a week to her, once a week to my girlfriend. After we got communicating, which took like six months of back and forth before we got our records straight, then she was sending me long winter underwear and socks. The box would be opened, and I'd go through everything. As far as I know, everything was there. I ended up with two sets of long winter underwear. When we marched out of that camp, I had both sets on. It was January, 1945, and there was six inches of snow.

  Marched Out

  We marched south. I can't remember the little villages we passed through, but our terminal was a town called Cottbus.[36] It was about 45 or 50 miles, and it took us five days to get there because there were 10,000 of us. The winter conditions didn't help any. The first night out was absolutely wicked. You're all spread out, 10,000 guys. Some guys probably had good accommodations, relatively. Our group ended up in a stable. We slept on a concrete floor of this stable that didn't have any windows in it or doors. The wind whistled through there. We each had one blanket. This fellow from Wisconsin and I bunked together, so it gave us one blanket below and one above. It was a miserable night. Then we were out walking again the whole next day. We ended up in a factory, the second floor of a factory.[37] The heat was pouring up in that place so much you could hardly... What a contrast, you know? It almost drove us right out it was so hot, one extreme to another.

  Colonel Spivey was our camp commander, quite a wonderful gentleman. I'm sure he did a lot of things that I wasn't aware of, but he also did a lot of things that we all weren't aware of. I can't think of anything specific right now, but he was protecting us all the time and fighting with the German Kommandant. There again, the story went that he got easier to fight with as the war progressed. Anyway, then we got on the train at Cottbus and took off, and we got in Leipzig just before midnight. Sure enough, we just got in there, and the air raid sirens went off, but we didn't have to wait too long, and they pulled the train out. What did happen was 10,000 guys had just had this soup or some damn thing that the Germans served us and called it soup. We didn't know what was in it, and we hadn't had any solid food to speak of. I had a little bit of bread and margarine and cheese, but I was rationing that to myself, so we were all very hungry, and we ate this soup.

  We got in Leipzig, and everybody needed to go to the bathroom. They opened up the doors. I think there were like 2,000 in our group on this train. We took one look around. There were women and kids. There's no men, just the guards. One of the sights of the war was watching 2,000 men go to the bathroom right out there in the open, I guess, with all these people watching. We had no choice.[38]

  We got out of Leipzig and went down to Munich. Then we walked back up to Moosburg, and we spent the rest of the war there. There were 30,000 prisoners there then. A lot of them were Hungarians and Greeks and Romanians, people from that part of Europe. I know we had some civilians in there. Anyway, we were separated a little bit from them, not completely.

  Liberation

  We'd walk around for exercise. I got to be a good walker. That's what I did in Stalag III, I'd walk around that compound I don't know how many times. It's a thousand yards around, and I'd get my legs in shape. That really helped me when we marched out of there, I can tell you that. So I was walking around with a friend one morning. I think it was the 28th of April, and we could look up there on the hill. We could see something coming out of the woods, and we didn't what the heck it was. It turned out to be a Sherman tank!

  We got it on the radio that General Patton's army had got to Nuremberg, and elements of his army had turned south. That's what they said, so sure enough, here comes some of his army. Pretty soon, there were six tanks up there. Then the small arms fire started right in the woods, right next to us. We didn't even know there was anybody out there and all this machine gun fire was starting up! We all piled into the trench we had and tried to watch the war [in front of us].

  The village of Moosburg had a couple of church steeples, and the Hitler Youth went up in the church steeples with machine guns. They were shooting up the road, so the tanks blew those churches right down, both of them.

  [The guards] were exiting. I think a couple of guards got hit by gunfire, but all the rest of them were gone, and we never saw another German. This all started about 9:30 in the morning, and at 12:30, a Sherman tank came rolling right into the camp. It got a tremendous welcome. Then they put our own military police around the place so people couldn't get out, which was reasonable. We don't want to turn 30,000 people out in the roads right behind the front that had just barely gone through.

  This guy, Red Hanson from Iowa, he says, ‘Let's get out of here.’

  I said, ‘I'm with you.’

  We went out under the fence that night with our own guards on the fences, figured that if they saw us, they wouldn't shoot. Anyway, nobody saw us. It was pretty slim guarding, I guess, so we got out. We go down on the road, and it took us two days to get to Nuremberg. It was probably about 100 miles or so. We hitchhiked with American jeeps and stuff, anybody who happened to be going along. Every time we got [a lift], we’d have to prove ourselves. We looked like hell, you know. I had an Eisenhower jacket on and British woolen pants and some kind of English woolen hat, a military hat, no rank insignia, nothing whatsoever, no dog tags. They were all gone. None, nothing, absolutely nothing. The first guy who stopped had his pistol right out. He was a captain. We were really sad looking, so he asked us a lot of questions about Brooklyn Dodgers and all this. Finally, we convince him we're Americans, and he gave us a ride up the road. Then we had to go through it all again, it took us two days to get to Nuremberg. We went to the wrong airfield first, but then got to the right airfield where there were C-47s were bringing 50-gallon drums of gasoline in for the tanks, and we convinced the operations officer that we were Americans even though we looked like bums. He gave us a tent to sleep in. We got on that C-47 the next day, and we flew back to Le Havre, [France] and we were met there by some Red Cross ladies, who hugged us even though we looked so bad.

  We went to Camp Lucky Strike. We were either among the first to go through there, or there was a lull in operations because they had a thousand pyramid tents out there, and there only about a half a dozen occupied.[39] We showered. Man, that was great; something as simple as a shower is awful good when you don't have any. Then they deloused us—a guy came around with what looked like a flamethrower on his back and a big hose. Boy, he blew us in places we didn't even know we had! [Laughs] Then they issued us new clothes. They put us on five meals a day but with restricted quantities, which was okay, because we probably would have ruptured ourselves if we'd got into all of the mashed potatoes and gravy and stuff. That worked out good.

  I was only there about three days and they announced they had some openings on one of the ships going back in a 26-ship convoy to Boston, so I got on a troop ship. Actually, all the ships went to New York, but my ship went to Boston. I can't remember the name of it, but I remember we weren't on a restricted five meals a day [regimen] anymore. Boy, did I eat! [Laughs] I think I gained 20 pounds on that trip.

  [At Boston] we got on a train and went out to Fort Devens
and stayed overnight, and the next morning we were on a train again and went down to New York City, then out to Fort Dix, where I was processed out. I wasn't forced out. I had a choice. I could stay in if I wanted to, but I elected to get out, not knowing any better. I got out and got transportation back into Manhattan where my mother was living at that time. My train pulled into Penn Station evidently before my mother could get everyone there. I headed for the nearest barbershop where I had a shampoo, a shave, and a haircut. She had my old foot locker there with all my old uniform clothes in it, so I had everything except the tie, so I got all my uniform on except the tie. Soon she arrived, followed by my Aunt Lil and Uncle Fred and Bob and Shirley, who are my cousins. We had a big rendezvous with the family and walked down to this big restaurant in Greenwich Village and had dinner. I was treated like a hero. For George FitzGibbon, the war was over.

  As a reserve officer, George FitzGibbon was recalled during the Korean War when they needed pilots. He stayed in the Air Force, retiring in 1969 as a lieutenant colonel, the operations officer of the 41st Air Refueling Squadron at Griffiss Air Force base in New York. He passed away at the age of 93 on May 5, 2015.

  chapter Six

  The First Engineer

  Charles P. Corea hailed from Rochester, New York, just north of where I went to college before returning to Hometown, USA to begin my teacher career. I did not actually have the opportunity to know him personally, bet felt he shared a kinship with many profiled in this book, especially since he served in the 100th Bomb Group, ‘affectionately’ known by its members as ‘The Bloody Hundredth’. He was trained as a flight engineer on a B-17 but did double duty as the top turret gunner on some of his missions, including his final one the day he was shot down. This interview took place just seven weeks after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks.