Prisoners of War

by C. Alexander London

  Goldsmith and I met up with a group of paratroopers that took us to some ruined city behind the front lines, where we got our wounds fixed up and got to eat hot food. I’ll never forget that first meal. It was the day after Christmas and we got to celebrate. Even Goldsmith celebrated Christmas that year. It was his first one.

  “Don’t tell my grandmother,” he said, laughing.

  We got a plate full of hot roast beef and corn and peas and steaming brown gravy, and right on top of it all, a gooey blob of chocolate pudding. I don’t think anything ever tasted so good to me as that chocolate pudding on roast beef.

  A few days later, when I was rested up, I wandered off from the aid station, and I found a place where they were keeping some German prisoners that had been taken. I wouldn’t say they were comfortable, but they got food and water and they were kept in far better conditions than Goldsmith and the rest had been kept.

  “Anyone speak English?” I asked at the fence. Most of them were kids who’d probably been pulled out of school to fight in the war. They didn’t know anything. But one guy, a German Army officer, stepped forward.

  “I speak English,” he said.

  So I asked him what he knew about the dogs that fought in the German Army. Of course, he’d never heard of a war dog named Yutz. That was the name I’d given him. I never knew the dog’s real name.

  The officer didn’t know much about war dogs, except that they were mostly German shepherds, not Doberman pinschers like Yutz. The officer told me he didn’t know of any dogs like that fighting with the German Army.

  “We call this kind teufel hunden,” he said. “Devil dogs. They do not fight with the SS.”

  “But they do,” I told him. “I found him with the SS. He came with me.”

  The man shrugged. I could see that he did not believe me. “I do not know much,” he said. “I am not an important man. I am not a Nazi. You will tell your superiors, yes? Tell them I am not a Nazi. I fight for Germany, not for Hitler. You will tell them, please? I am an innocent soldier.”

  I walked away from the German officer, even as he kept talking.

  “An innocent soldier,” he said. I didn’t think there could be such a thing. Except for maybe Yutz, my devil dog.

  I don’t need to give you a history lesson. The Americans and their allies won the war in Europe a few months later. Hitler had killed himself in a bunker in Berlin. On May 8, 1945, the Germans offered their unconditional surrender.

  Because of what the government called my “bravery,” risking my life to save those prisoners, I was awarded a bunch of medals and got to finish out my service in the army back home in America, touring the country to boost civilian morale. Why the people at home needed a morale boost, I didn’t understand. It wasn’t like they had to sleep in foxholes or see the things we saw over there, but I did what the army asked me to do, and my parents sure were proud to see me get those medals pinned to my chest. My citation said nothing about a Nazi dog, and the army did not seem interested in hearing my story as it really happened. Just like the German officer, they didn’t believe me about Yutz either.

  I stayed friends with Goldsmith after the war. He even moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to live me near me. He opened a fabric store, just like the one his family had in New York City. He joked a lot about that, a Jew who moves back to the desert to open up shop.

  “What would Moses say?” He laughed. I didn’t really get it, and Albuquerque isn’t the desert anyway, but I laughed too, because that’s what friends do. We don’t have to always understand each other as long as we can get along. That’s the most important thing. If I could learn to get along with Yutz, after he’d tried to tear me limb from limb, well, I figured I could get along with anybody. And that’s what I did, my whole life.

  I never stopped thinking about Yutz, the best dog I ever knew.

  I tried to do some research on those terrible days when he and I shared an adventure. I never could find out about Doberman pinschers on the front lines, but I learned that the surprise attack in the Ardennes forest had been the last German offensive of the war. It came to be called the Battle of the Bulge, because it caused a big bulge in the German front lines.

  The attack started early that December morning with Goldsmith and me in our foxhole, and with thousands of guys just like us in their foxholes all along the front lines in the Ardennes forest, and it went on for over a month. It was the Nazis’ last chance to turn the war back in their favor.

  It didn’t work.

  They thought we’d all just roll over when their tanks crushed through, but we didn’t. The GIs fought too well, and the generals pushed back too hard for the Nazis to break through. Their whole plan crumbled. The Ninety-Ninth Infantry held their ground. The 106th fought back. The 101st Airborne and the 82nd Airborne stopped the German tanks in their tracks. General Patton’s Third Army and General Bradley’s First Army cut through the Germans and sent them running back into Germany. The whole attack had accomplished nothing but delaying the end of the war.

  That was a hard fact to swallow when I heard it. I was glad we’d won, but I came to learn that nineteen thousand American boys died in those few weeks of the Battle of the Bulge. And even that was nothing compared with over a hundred thousand German soldiers who died or got wounded or just went missing during that same short time. It was a loss of life greater than anything I could have imagined, and it was just a tiny part of a war that killed millions of people. Twenty-five hundred dead at Pearl Habor. Thirty thousand on Iwo Jima. Twenty-five thousand dead in the firebombing of Dresden. Forty thousand in the bombing of London. Two hundred thousand in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two million dead at Stalingrad, six million Jews murdered by the Nazis in their death camps, millions more gypsies and disabled people, political prisoners, homosexuals, and others that the Nazi state found “undesirable” and then exterminated.

  In total, the Second World War killed almost seventy million people, many of them soldiers, but most of them civilians.

  I asked around a bit, but no one counted the number of dogs who’d lost their lives in the war. In battles between nations, I guess, nobody counts the dogs.

  But I do, starting with one.

  Don’t miss the next installment of DOG TAGS!

  Andrew and his hound dog, Dash, hunt down deserters and criminals during the Civil War. But are they on the right side?

  This is a work of fiction, but it is set during events that were all too real.

  World War II was fought from 1939 to 1945 between two military alliances: the Axis Powers, led by Germany and Japan, and the Allies, led by the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. By the war’s end, most of the nations of the world had become involved in violent conflict, making World War II the most deadly war in history, killing between fifty and seventy million people, most of them civilians.

  The Battle of the Bulge, also called the Ardennes Offensive, was one of the last major battles of World War II in Europe. It was fought from the morning of December 16, 1944, to January 25, 1945. Adolf Hitler, badly beaten on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union, believed he could turn the tide of the war if he could break through the American and British front lines in Western Europe, pushing the Allied forces back to the sea. With great secrecy, he mobilized thirteen divisions of over two hundred thousand men against the poorly equipped, inexperienced, and much smaller units of American troops in the Ardennes forest. The Sixth Panzer Division, led by SS General Sepp Dietrich, spearheaded the attack and, as was later documented, committed many war crimes, executing American prisoners and laying waste to towns and villages.

  During the Battle of the Bulge, a small group of American soldiers that were taken prisoner, some of them Jewish, many of them simply picked for “looking Jewish,” were separated from other prisoners of war and taken by rail to a concentration camp in Germany. There they were forced to do slave labor, and they witnessed firsthand the destruction of the Jewish people in the Holocaust. Among them was Anthony Aceved
o, a Mexican-American medic with the 275th Infantry Division. He stayed silent about his experiences in the concentration camp for sixty years before coming forward to share the horrors he and his fellow prisoners endured under the Nazi regime. I was inspired to tell this story, in part, by his real-life ordeal.

  While there was great horror during the war, there was also great heroism. The Ninety-Ninth Infantry Division really was surprised by the German attack on December 16, 1944, and many were sent into retreat, but a small group of brave men, vastly outnumbered, fought back and held the Germans off for a full day before being surrounded. This delay gave the Allies a chance to bring in reinforcements and prevent a catastrophe. Individual acts of heroism were common on the front lines too, as regular guys — American soldiers cut off from communication, with many of their young officers dead — acted with bravery and intelligence to protect their fellow soldiers and fight back against the German assault.

  In my research, I used many great accounts of these events as experienced by the young men who fought World War II in Europe. Among them were Battle of the Bulge by Stephen W. Sears; The Longest Winter: The Battle of the Bulge and the Epic Story of WWII’s Most Decorated Platoon by Alex Kershaw; 11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944 by Stanley Weintraub; Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany by Stephen E. Ambrose; The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two by Studs Terkel; and the most important book written on the history of military working dogs in the American war effort, Always Faithful: A Memoir of the Marine Dogs of WWII by William W. Putney. For the train attack scene, I must give credit to my friend Dennis Cahlo, whose knowledge of the films of Steve McQueen remains indispensable. I am also certain that HBO’s excellent miniseries Band of Brothers influenced this work in countless ways.

  At the start of the war, the American military did not have a war dog program, even though dogs had been fighting alongside humans for centuries. The United States developed a program late in the war, calling on dogs donated from the civilian population. People gave their family pets to be turned into soldiers. While many were not suitable, many did serve and returned home as heroes, most notably Chips, the most decorated war dog in the army. He fought in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany. Mostly, however, dogs were used by the US military in the Pacific theater of operations. The Doberman pinscher was the favorite dog of the Marine Corps, and to this day on Guam, there is a memorial to the brave men and their dogs that fought there.

  The German Army used dogs in their military for the entire course of the conflict. Dogs guarded and tracked prisoners, protected bases and supplies, and went into combat. According to Jan Bondeson, author of Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities, Hitler was so fond of dogs and their keen senses that he even developed a secret training program for dog communication, hoping the Nazis could train SS dogs to read, write, and speak with their human masters. Needless to say, his program failed, as, thankfully, did his war effort.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  C. Alexander London is an author of books for children and adults. In addition to the Dog Tags series, he writes the Accidental Adventures novels for young readers and books like One Day the Soldiers Came: Voices of Children in War for older readers. When he is not writing books, he can usually be found walking around New York City talking to his dog.

  www.calexanderlondon.com

  ALSO BY C. ALEXANDER LONDON

  Dog Tags #1: Semper Fido

  Dog Tags #2: Strays

  Dog Tags #4: Divided We Fall

  We Are Not Eaten by Yaks: An Accidental Adventure

  We Dine with Cannibals: An Accidental Adventure

  We Give a Squid a Wedgie: An Accidental Adventure

  Copyright © 2013 by C. Alexander London

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc.

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  First printing, March 2013

  Cover art by Richard Jones

  Cover design by Yaffa Jaskoll

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-63344-4

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