A German prisoner of war camp is something you never forget, and Oflag 64 was a very special one. Here is a look at those grim, and not-so-grim, days a half century ago.

A TYPICAL CASE

The very first group of American prisoners arrived at
Oflag 64 on June 6 - 7, 1943. Among the 150 officers who had been
captured in Tunisia was a young lieutenant named Jim Bickers.
Here is his own report on how it all happened.

BY JAMES F. BICKERS

It was on St. Valentine's Day, 1943, that the German Afrika Korps poured through Faid Pass in central Tunisia and inflicted what became the greatest land defeat on U.S. forces by a foreign power in history. More than 5,000 American soldiers were listed as casualties--killed, wounded or captured--from dawn to dusk that day. I was one of them.

My problems started in June 1940, when I was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army reserve. I was 21 years old at the time and knew that we would be at war in a short time and I did not want to be drafted.

I graduated from the University of Illinois, went to work, got married in May of 1941, and reported for duty at Ft. Bragg, NC, in August of 1941, to the 17th Field Artillery Regiment. The 17th was commanded by Colonel Reese M. Howell, a West Point graduate of the class of 1915, Eisenhower's class, known as the "class the stars fell on." I was assigned to his staff as morale officer. If we had been a horse-drawn unit, I would have been assigned the job of MRO-manure removal officer.

The 17th maneuvered in the Carolinas in the winter of 1941 and was moved to Camp Blanding, Florida, early in 1942. We got orders to go overseas in the early summer of 1942, and returned to Fort Bragg for refitting, packing, and getting up to full strength. We went by rail to Hoboken, where we boarded HMS Orcades. We landed in Liverpool in August 1942, the first American troops in England. The 1st Armored Division preceded us, but they landed in Ireland. We were assigned to Perham Down on the Salisbury Plain, a British Army installation. The Brits had left to fight in Africa and in some other unsavory places against some very hostile Japanese.

We left England in November 1942, and landed at Mers El Kebir, Algeria. The French had blown the hell out of units of the 1st Division in Oran Harbor, and we were fired on sporadically as we moved to the Mountain of Lions outside of Oran. We thought that the Germans were the enemy, but we soon learned to say, "Cest la guerre," as we faced hostile Allies.

In January 1943, we motored to Tunisia through the Atlas Mountains. We went into position the second week in February when another battalion moved out. We used the same gun positions, and were promptly bombarded by the Germans who had zeroed-in on the previous tenants. We reported no damage other than a change of underwear. At dawn on the 14th, we received march orders and pulled out of our gun positions. The guns that we pulled out were box-trail 1917 Schneider 155mm howitzers--real state-of-the-art! The name Schneider came up again soon, for that was the name of the German Commandant at Oflag 64--Oberst Schneider, a jolly old elf.

As we were pulling out of position, we received orders to go back. We went back. Again we were ordered out. This time we formed a Battalion column and headed down a road to some place in Tunisia. We stopped, then suddenly the column started-up again; this time across country.

There were many interesting things going on around us: bombs bursting in the air, and stuff like that. We chugged along in the desert until we came under machine-gun fire. We thought that it was from the air, stopped, and took cover. To our dismay, we realized that the fire was from tanks coming from both sides. At this historic moment, Captain McCord pulled up in his command car, paused long enough to say "adios," and cut out. I haven't seen him to this day.

As the new leader of Battery F, I managed to get two howitzers back-to-back, and attempted direct fire against the tanks. That seemed to irritate the Germans; instead of using machine guns, they shelled us. Their Mark IV tanks had 77mm cannons, and the lads in the Afrika Korps knew how to use them. Soon we were looking down the barrels of those 77s, and a kid with long blond hair hanging over the turret of his tank actually said, "For you, the war is over." The situation was hopeless and the survivors were captured.

Anyone who has seen the movie Patton can recall the scene when he visited a battlefield after taking command of a Combat Command. You saw dogs gnawing on bodies, Arabs tearing the uniforms off dead soldiers, and the wreckage of a terrible battle. That was our battle of February 14, 1943.

The captured Americans were being marched toward Tunis and prison camps in the Third Reich at the same time Patton surveyed the scene.

The first night, the Germans marched us into a quarry and set up several machine guns. All of us thought that was the old ballgame. Instead we were given water and some canned meat that was worse than British corned beef, but to us it was wonderful. Our biggest problem was a lack of utensils, and containers for food and water. When we were captured, the Germans made us drop our pistol belts and harnesses; there went our canteens and mess gear. We had no overcoats or blankets and it was bitter cold after the sun set on the desert.

Most Americans captured in Africa had no idea of what the Germans were like. Our reference was the Germans we saw in the movies: the jolly comic opera figure segued into the sinister figure with the severe military haircut. Now we were being marched across the desert by a bunch of kids. Their equipment was well-designed and functional, and their discipline, bearing, and confidence impressive. Their caps were long-visored, very appropriate for the desert. We invented the baseball cap, but our military sent us into desert combat with skull-hugging wool knit caps, or worse, the so-called overseas cap with no visor at all.

We had no idea that their orders were to get us to Germany, because they knew that in a few weeks we would have over 200,000 members of the Afrika Korps as prisoners of war. We were the first ground force Americans in the "bag": important bargaining chips. The European mentality is totally different than ours; after all, they had been doing the war thing for generations.

We finally made it to beautiful downtown Tunis where we were locked in a building whose floors were wall-to-wall straw. One-by-one we were interrogated by English-speaking Germans from the mother country. My introduction to questioning was, "Skip the name, rank, and serial number, Lieutenant Bickers, we know all about you." He then told me where I went to high school, college, whom I married, and when, and my various duty assignments. In response to my query "how?" he said that the information was from American clippings services. Pretty cheap intelligence gathering.

After two days we were marched to an airport to board JU 52's: tri-motored flying boxcars with a top air speed of under 100 knots. While in the airport, some ragged, filthy natives were hawking some kind of greasy fried cakes. The Germans didn't interfere with them so, having been without food for several days, we bought the lot. Yes, we ate those greasy cakes made by those filthy natives and they were delicious.

Shortly, we took off for Italy. The planes flew just a few feet above the Mediterranean, and we were escorted by JU 88s and, above them, British fighters. The Brits knew that we were in the JU 52s, but we didn't know that they knew--tense!!

We landed in the Naples airport and were loaded into open Italian trucks; the Germans had handed us over to Italian guards. We were paraded through Naples to the jeers of the natives and barraged with garbage and solid and liquid excrement. We were taken to Capua, north of Naples to a compound, a tent city. There were a few water faucets and some holes in the ground for the sanitary needs of almost five thousand prisoners. There were no blankets and precious little food, and it was cold. The wind blew constantly off of the Sahara, the famed Sirocco or Mistral.

An important thing happened at Capua: the Vatican sent priests into the camp to take a census. We were told that the Secretariat of the Vatican wanted to make sure that there was a record of us before we went into Germany. My wife received a telegram from the Vatican telling her that I was alive before the U.S. Army did.

We left Capua by rail with German guards again and went through the Brenner Pass into southern Germany. We were interned in a camp called Moosburg: a huge barrack city housing thousands of Germany's enemies. To get to Moosburg we had to go through Munich, and on a platform in the main rail station we saw our first Jews. A large group was huddled together in a sitting position with their heads between their knees. On hearing English from us, one young man looked up and smiled. He was promptly kicked in the face by a guard, and a low rumble went through our ranks. The rest of the guards shot the bolts on their rifles; that "clack" got our attention. Germans were rushing through that station paying no heed to those miserable humans.

The German people knew what was going on!

In Moosburg, the officers were separated from the enlisted men, who were taken to we knew not where. We, about 150 officers, were taken to Rotenburg am Fulda in West Germany. We were marched from the rail station to the camp, one enormous ancient building. We entered through a door into a dark, dank, foul-smelling earthen floored room--a root cellar. It was pitch dark when the door was closed behind us, but we knew what aging cabbage smelled like. In a few minutes, a door creaked open at the other end of the cellar and a shaft of light illuminated our terrified faces. A German major limped into the cellar and, rubbing his pearl-gray gloved hands together, said, "Ah, guests." We rippled like wheat in the wind; Eric von Stroheim was going to lead us to the wall. We later learned that "Eric" was prisoner of the British in WWI, and was rather decent.

The camp at Rotenburg was housed in a former girls' school with nice girlish slogans like "Blut und Eisen" painted on the walls. The pre-war movie Maedchen in Uniform was filmed in the school and was noted for a famous "Ave Maria" scene with the maidens descending the great staircase. The camp housed the British "grand blessed" waiting for repatriation. They had severe wounds, missing limbs, eyes and other parts. Of course, the Germans, with great wisdom, put us with experienced POW's who promptly taught us the Geneva Convention Rules and the fine art of being a pain in the collective German asses.

That camp was 9A/Z and there were many stories, but my mission is Oflag 64; it's May 1943, the month of our departure for our very own camp.

We went by rail, and on June 6, 1943, we arrived at Oflag 64 in Schubin, Poland.

Author: Becky Driscoll
E-Mail: bdriscoll@dcccd.edu