Death March

My father, Roger Lacroix, was captured on 19 December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge. It was the greatest battle of World War II. His entire division was destroyed by the German SS troops. Immediately following his capture, he and his division marched 110 miles to a prison camp in Limburg, Germany called Stalag XII-A.

Another veteran named John Kline, who was in the 423rd Regiment of the 106th Infantry Division, kept a personal journal of his experiences leading up to, during, and after that great Battle. We are very thankful for Kline’s excellent record of events, which are very accurate. A great credit goes to him for this, and much of his work is re-posted in this blog. Here is the account of the nine day forced march.























12/20/44
Left Bleialf at 6:30 AM, they were on the road until 2300 that night. “They had no water or food except for the snow from the ground. There was much evidence, in the area, that a large-scale battle had taken place.”

Kline records: “I remember as we were leaving Bleialf walking through a small village. It could have been outskirts of Bleialf, or some small village nearby. There were German troops in American jeeps. They were opening ration boxes and meat cans. They were eating our Christmas dinner. My guess is that this had been our battalion supply depot. There had been had been a real shoot out, with hand to hand fighting. There were dead Americans and Germans lying in doors, ditches and hanging out of windows. The infighting must have been fierce, for some of the bodies were on top of each other.”

Dad remembered women handing them food through the windows as they walked through the small village. The road they were on eventually took them through the town of Prüm (pronounced “Prom”), Germany. They ended up that evening sleeping in an open field near Gerolstein, Germany.

12/21/44
At Gerolstein they were awakened at 0600, and given their first food since breakfast on Dec 18th. They fed them hard crackers and cheese. Seven men to one can of cheese. They left Gerolstein during the evening.

12/21/44
”Arrived in Dockweiler Dries 2300. Billeted in an old German barracks. During the three and one-half days there, they were fed one ration of very weak potato stew. They received two bread rations of one loaf split between five men, one ration of cheese and one small can between four men. They were each given two old German Army blankets. They were old and worn, but did give some warmth. They would prove to be lifesavers as time went on.”

12/22/44
During the night the road along side the barracks was strafed and bombed by a British Spitfire. The English usually flew night missions; the Americans flew during the day. The weather was clearing and cold.

12/25/44
Christmas Day Dockweiler Dries: On the march by 0630, marched all day and night, no water, or food, except snow. Kline remembers there was “No Christmas, except in our hearts.” And to that my father agreed!

12/26/44
They stopped at a cluster of farm homes about eight miles north of Mayen. They were billeted in one of the barns. No food.

Kline points our that “In Germany you always see several farm homes and barns clustered together, as if they were built that way for protection. Many of them have a common courtyard arranged around a square, with each family living in buildings on opposite sides of the square.”

12/27/44
Koblenz: They arrived there in the afternoon. They were fed soup and bread served from a portable kitchen. Koblenz is a big city. It took a lot of punishment from bombings. They were walking in groups of about 500. Dad remembered seeing a uniformed German photographer taking pictures of his group, as they walked by.

They were billeted in one of three large brick barracks just on the south edge of Koblenz. They were three stories in height. The barracks were said to be part of a former officer-training center. They slept on the cement floor using the blankets. It was at least out of the weather. There was a bucket at the entrance to be used as a latrine.

12/28/44
At 1430 (2:30 PM) bombers began to bomb the rail yards near them. The guards herded them into the basement. Dad remembered that he and other prisoners jumped into a trench outside when this bombing occurred. Many of the bombs fell around the barracks. Fortunately, there were no direct hits. They counted fifteen bomb craters around the buildings. It was very cloudy and overcast. It had to be American planes bombing by radar, for the practice was that Americans bombed during the day and English by night.

12/29/44
Again at 1430 the antiaircraft guns started firing. They were bombed again. This time the guards would not allow them to go down into the basement. He was in a room on the second or third floor. Again bombs fell around them. They were hitting very close by. After the raid they all went outside, to see what happened. There were bomb craters all around the area. The bombers had been aiming at the nearby railroad yards, but hit in their area.

The high-ranking noncommissioned American officers (noncoms) asked for a meeting with the German guards. These noncoms insisted that they could not keep them in a place of danger. They told the Germans, if they did not voluntarily take them out of town, the Americans would walk out on our own, as a group. The guards were as frightened as the Americans were. They agreed, but told them that they would have to walk all night, over 25 miles, without stopping. The noncoms agreed to that and they prepared to leave Koblenz on a forced overnight march.

12/29/44
1700 - Darkness had set in when they left Koblenz. They crossed the Rhine over a wooden bridge, which Dad remembered, that had replaced the one that had been bombed. They turned right after they crossed the Rhine River bridge. Then they followed a road to the left, up into the hills. They walked until 1030 the next morning. One of the toughest trips for these weary men so far, 40 kilometers with very little stopping. When they did stop we were not allowed to get off the road. The guards were afraid they would try to escape. It had turned very cold and the two German Army blankets did little to ward off the cold. But, as thin as they were, the blankets kept them from freezing. There was no water, so they ate snow. Some of the men were developing diarrhea.

They had traveled at night most of the time since leaving the front lines. The roads were narrow and rough. Kline recounts: “There were many German troops and vehicles, including tanks, moving in the opposite direction, towards the front. In the blackout conditions it was difficult to see how large the towns and villages were. You could be walking along on a valley road and the silhouette of the hills with a building on the skyline, would give you the impression you were in a large town. The German troops, in particular the tank troopers, would not give way for our columns. It was a matter of just stumbling along, following the man in front of you.” Dad remembered this well.

12/30/44
Arrived Stalag XII-A, Limburg, Germany 1030 in the morning. This was a large prisoner transit camp. Large circus style tents and what seemed to be adequate food. They still had not been registered as Prisoners of War. My father received his number, which he believes was POW#10011.

A typical boxcar

They left Stalag XII-A, Limburg at 1600, 30 December 1944. They were loaded into old 40&8 style boxcars with sixty men to each boxcar. Their boxcars are much smaller than those in the U.S.A. The larger U.S.A version of these boxcars were designed to hold forty men or eight horses, so you can imagine how cramped these POWs were with sixty men packed into a boxcar smaller than a 40&8.

There was a very small amount of straw on the floor. There were two small vents, high on each side near the end of the cars. The vents were covered with boards and barbwire. “There was one metal can to be used as a sanitary facility. It was about the size of a five-gallon lard can. They had no canteens or jars with which to carry water.” Many men had dysentery at the time and the hardship of being confined to the freight cars was aggravated by the filth and stench resulting from men who had to urinate and defecate inside the cars.

During their short stay at Stalag XII-A, they had been given a large portion of bread, but no water. The sanitary conditions in the boxcars, using the lard can as a toilet, were terrible. Many of the men had developed diarrhea. They could not all lie down, to rest or sleep, at the same time. Someone was always left standing. They slept in short shifts and when they did get settled down, they would all decide to try to lie more closely on top of one another to allow others to lie down. Often someone would have to run for the lard can. Usually there was someone over it. It caused a lot of problems, since a man with diarrhea has little "holding power." The stench was terrible.

They were not allowed out of the boxcars. That was until at one point, during the day when they were being attacked by one of the British planes. First the tracks in front of the train was bombed, causing the train to stop.

Amazingly, Kline was in the boxcar immediately behind my father’s. Here is Klines account: “The train stopped and the guards headed for the fields. The prisoners in the car just ahead of mine managed to break out of the car and get to the fields. They formed the letters 'POW' in the snow. This kept us from being strafed. Those of us in my boxcar were not able to get out. We were told that the pilot dipped the plane's wings and waved when he recognized us as prisoners. I had no opportunity to see it, for I was not next to the small window. Most of us huddled on the floor, in fear of our lives, when we heard the plane.” This testimony of the incident by Kline is confirmed by my father’s own account. Since I was a child, I remember him telling me about this incident where the man laying in front of him in the boxcar was cut in half by the planes strafing. He and his fellow soldiers in that boxcar immediately panicked, and banged on the door to be released. Once the Germans let them out, they formed the “PW” in the snow, identifying themselves to the pilot as prisoners of war.

After that, due to the heavy Allied air strikes, they traveled at night. The travel was erratic. They would go for a long time, stop and sit, then they would go again. This was due to bridges and other sections of the railway being bombed out, forcing the train to find alternate routes.

From Leipzig, the rail system leads southeast to Dresden a major railroad center. Their destination turned out to be Mühlberg, about thirty-two miles north northwest of Dresden.

01/07/45
My father arrived at Stalag IV-B, Mühlberg, Germany. Stalag IV-B was just a few miles south of Muhlberg on the Elbe. The Commandant welcomed incoming prisoners and told them, "For you, the war is over" and told them about the warning wire and what would happen to them if they stepped across it. Stalag IV-B was a transit army camp. They lived a horrible existence there. The camp contained 240 or more acres and was surrounded by a page and barbed wire fence on 10-foot posts, 4-6 feet apart. The 240 or so acres were subdivided and cross fenced sometimes with a double fence into 8-10 compounds or more.

The buildings were wooden frame, single story structures, 40-50 feet wide and 150 feet long, with lined interior walls and ceiling with inlaid red brick floors, running water and electrical power. Down the one side and half way up the other were a double set of tandem triple bunks, which would cover an area approximately 12' x 7' and accommodate twelve prisoners. At the one end was some washing facilities, running water and a large vat for brewing up tea, coffee or cocoa and at the other end near the entrance to the hut a single toilet: used for emergencies only. The balance of the floor area, approximately 25%, was used for the dining eating area and cook stove. The cook stove was made of brick with a sheet metal steel plate top, more of a grill than anything. The Germans supplied the prisoners with a ration of coal and wood for heat and cooking.

Security on the camp consisted of watchtowers around the perimeter manned by armed guards and in between patrolled by guards on foot. Sixteen feet inside the perimeter fencing was the warning wire and if you crossed it you were shot. Here the prisoners were fed 1/6th loaf of bread, a pint of Grass Soup with five boiled potatoes. They were fed once a day.

At this camp, they were finally registered as Prisoners of War. They were also each given a German POW postcard to write home, which my father used to write to his mother on January 27, 1945. She received it (as pictured below) after he had already returned home the following summer. He wrote: "Dear Mom and Dad, Here I am this morning to say that I am fine and in good health also. Hoping you are the same. I am a prisoner of war in Germany. See Red Cross about writing back. Time to say goodbye. God bless you. Love, Roger."

Mr. Kline explained to me that this was the point where his party got separated from my father’s out of Stalag IV-B. He said that when they classified the Americans as prisoners of war, “They split out the non-coms "Sergeants" from the Pvt's, Pfc's and Corporals and sent them to different Stalags or Work Camps (all in accordance with the Geneva Convention). That is why I ended up with the Non-Com group shipped to Stalag VIII-A, Gorlitz, Germany.”

During the march to Neubrandenburg, Germany, many had to sleep outside on the ground in the freezing weather. There was two feet of snow and 19 degree temperatures. Sometimes my father would find a rotten potato on the ground and eat it. He carried an old hunk of cheese in his shirt that he would pull out occasionally and take a bite.

My father clearly remembered one occasion when he slept in a very cold, bombed out school building. It was just as cold in that school as it was outside and he slept on the floor. There were two cans by the door for sanitary purposes. But to get there you had to climb over other men sleeping on the floor in the dark, and it was difficult to do so without stepping on someone’s feet. Since everyone had frozen feet, it really hurt when they were stepped on and they wanted to kill you when you did so.

On another occasion, his party bedded down for the night in a train depot. It was overcrowded and there was no room left on the floor to lie down. The only place my father could find to lie down was between the small rail tracks used by the coal cars.

At another time they were moved to some barns in town. Once when they slept in a barn, the farm lady, cooking potatoes for her cattle, brought out a whole tub of freshly boiled, steaming hot potatoes for the prisoners to eat. This was so refreshing to the hungry and exhausted prisoners. They devoured every potato in that tub!

There were political prisoners there as well. They wore old, dirty and tattered striped prisoner’s uniforms and caps. They looked like they were the walking dead. They were nothing but skin and bone -- pitiful, emaciated creatures in striped pajama-like uniforms, their faces hollow, eyes haunted, and movements halting. My father said that all prisoners wore uniforms. However, by the time he got there, they were out of uniforms, so for six months he wore the same Army uniform he had worn since arriving in Germany in December.

My father recalls that he was marched out to a bombed out street and told to clean up the debris. He was so weak that he collapsed. He still had diarrhea, as everyone else did. It was making them all so weak they could hardly walk. At this the point my father was moved from there to an infirmary at Stalag II-A in Neubrandenburg, Germany.

If you would like to follow the rest of this story, it is continued in my next post titled Prisoner of War Experience.

_______________________________________________

Len Lacroix is the founder of Doulos Missions International.  He was based in Eastern Europe for four years, making disciples, as well as helping leaders to be more effective at making disciples who multiply, developing leaders who multiply, with the ultimate goal of planting churches that multiply. His ministry is now based in the United States with the same goal of helping fulfill the Great Commission. www.dmiworld.org.