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urinate, so I thought, "that's where I'm gonna get loose." So, I waited until it was
real dark. We were up in the Alps, and I waited until the guard opened the door
and started urinating, and I kicked him in the butt as hard as I could. That damn
train lurched back towards me and that guy fell backwards on top of me. He was
a big guy, about six foot five and weighed about three hundred and something
pounds, and he had me pinned where my leg was hanging out the door. Here
come the other three guards a-hollering and a-screaming and kept trying to close
that door and were closing it on my damn leg. Finally, one of them had enough
sense to get a flashlight and saw what the problem was. I thought they'd cut my
leg off. Hurt? Mmm. Anyhow, they finally drug me back in and beat me up
pretty good. But we were on that train for four days. Oh, man, you talk about a
stinking bunch of guys, we were. Then we got out and had about an eight mile
walk from Crims to the Danube up to the top of that mountain, and that was one
tough walk with me and that busted and crushed leg. I liked to have never made
it up there, but I did. Anyhow, the main thing about a prison camp is the
starvation. I know for five months there was no breakfast. At ten o'clock you
got a ration of bread, which was two little thin, small pieces of bread with
sawdust in it. You could pick the damn pieces of wood out of it. At noon, you
got a can of watery rutabaga soup, and no supper. Seven days a week for five
months. You talk about losing weight. I think totally I probably lost about a
hundred pounds. I know afterwards when I weighed in in Le Havre, France, I
weighed 96 pounds. Anyhow, we finally got some Red Cross parcels every
Friday for about three weeks, and that was the end of that until sometime in
January. That was in September, and by October snow was rump deep and cold.
When you'd get to the main camp you were in, they'd take all your flying gear. I
had these heavy fleece-lined boots on, and they took those, so I didn't have any
shoes. I just had socks on after they took my shoes, G.I. under shorts, a G.I. shirt,
G.I. pants, and a helmet liner. That's a little wool cap that fits on your head to
kind of cushion the steel helmet. They'd give you a baby blanket. You talk
about cold. God---n, I like to have froze to death. Right before Christmas, the
Red Cross shipped a shipment of G.I. blankets. Everybody got one, and they had
one left over for each barracks that held two hundred men. I won that sucker with
the ace of spades. I went from nothing to two blankets, but we had no heat.
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