

Part 4: Trading cigarettes for food in a German hospital

THE STORY SO FAR: German troops have decimated Army Pfc. Jim Creech's small squad of riflemen.

Fourth of 10 parts


The three men Jim Creech brought with him to clear German stragglers out of a woods were dead, cut down by enemy fire.

Many more Germans occupied the forest near the French town of Colmar than the Americans had believed. Some were now closing in on Jim's position.

In the dusk and light rain of Nov. 25, 1944, with fragments from a 20 mm shell searing his right leg, the squad leader played dead until he heard the click of a round going into a chamber.

He glanced up. Two Germans had leveled their weapons at him -- one a rifle, the other a pistol.

"Come here, boy," the one with the pistol said in English.

They helped Jim up, pulled his arms around their necks and walked him to an area where the Germans tended about 20 wounded. An aid man cut off Jim's pants leg, and Jim saw he had four cuts in the calf where shell fragments had penetrated and lodged deep in muscle. Using Jim's first aid kit, the aid man wrapped the leg in a cloth bandage.

Left unguarded, Jim tried to crawl back to the American lines under a darkening sky but got lost. He felt a pair of boots. There stood a German at the 20 mm gun that had caused Jim's wounds.

Deciding to withdraw from the woods, the Germans backed the gun- mounted truck onto the road where the German carrying the tripod had been shot. They lifted Jim into the rear and ordered him to put both hands around the gun barrel.

A guard saw the gold high school ring Jim wore on his left hand and wanted it. But Jim couldn't twist it off. He tried to interest the guard in the silver infantry ring with crossed rifles that he wore on his other hand. The guard looked at it, shook his head and threw it in the woods along the road. He reached for his bayonet, intending to cut off Jim's finger to get the gold ring.

Jim hurriedly stuck his finger in his mouth and got enough saliva under the ring to pull it off.

At a warehouse-turned-field hospital, doctors tended to Jim and re-bandaged his leg. An aid man gave him a slice of bread. Famished, Jim took a bite and gagged. The bread was made from equal parts of chestnut hulls, sawdust and flour.

An ambulance took him to a German army hospital in Zweibruecken, where he was the only American patient and ate a little better. In the morning, he and the three dozen Germans in his ward got hot coffee with sliced bread and marmalade; in the afternoon, hot soup. They also got four cigarettes a day, and because Jim didn't smoke, he traded his for the other men's bowls of soup.

One day Jim almost made his situation worse. An SS officer came into the ward, accompanied by an armed guard, and went from bunk to bunk, speaking to the men. When he got to Jim, he asked in perfect English:

"American, eh? Why did you come to Germany?"

"I came to kill my enemies, Germans!" Jim answered.

The officer's face reddened. He grabbed the guard's rifle by the barrel and swung the butt at Jim, who shifted to avoid a blow to his head. The butt struck him on his injured right knee, causing a bruise, days of pain and a permanent scar.

As always, memories of his girl in Allentown helped sustain him.

"My dearest darling Joyce," he wrote on Dec. 5. "At night as I sleep, before me I see you, my darling future little wife. I dream of the days ahead when we shall be together again. In the daytime, I see before me, you, the girl of my dreams I still have the disc with your name and address on my dog tag chain.

"I love you only, Joyce, and it gives me great joy to know that I have a girl who's true and is waiting for me."

Beer garden propaganda

Within a week, a doctor told Jim: "Your wounds are healed enough now that you can do work around the hospital."

His captors had him clean operating rooms. He'd mop the floors and wipe up blood. Surgeons would strip clothes from the wounded and throw them onto the floor. Jim would search through the clothing and pocket anything that might have "food value" -- cigarettes, lighters, small boxes for storing tobacco. He even squirreled away ammunition, a bayonet and potato-masher grenades.

He would sort the clothing by throwing shirts, trousers and jackets into a can if they couldn't be worn again, or setting them aside if they could be washed or re-used. He'd hide the ammo and grenades under the clothes in the can.

Going down hallways, he'd stop into patients' rooms and offer Germans cigarettes and other items in exchange for food. One of his regular customers was Heinz Stechow, a tall, English-speaking Luftwaffe airman who had been transferred to a Panzer tank unit. Shrapnel had pierced his arm and lodged under his breast plate. He spoke to Jim, and they became friends.

Once, Heinz took Jim to the beer garden outside of the hospital, where martial music played on the radio. The two drank mugs of beer together. But everyone hushed when the radio carried a speech by Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, who talked about how many Allied planes and tanks the German forces had destroyed and how many prisoners they had taken.

"You can't believe all that crap," Jim said. "It's just propaganda. The Allies are now in Germany, and the war can't last much longer."

Heinz said nothing.

Privately, Heinz believed the Nazi propaganda that Germany had developed a "miracle weapon" that would win the war.

Trashing his explosives

The next day, Jim learned that his hospital stay was over. German troops were passing through with other prisoners, and Jim would join the POWs in a march toward a stalag, or camp.

Now he had a dilemma. He knew he'd have to get rid of his stash of grenades and ammo he'd taken from the clothing of German wounded. He didn't want them used against Americans.

He lugged two cans of ordnance out of the hospital. It was a gamble. He wasn't permitted outside unaccompanied and could have been shot. He took the cans to the back end of a big incinerator and emptied them.

The burner was packed. Jim strode to the other end of it, opened the door and set fire to the trash with a cigarette lighter. He figured the fire would take six to 10 hours to burn down to the explosives and he'd be safely gone by then.

Back in the hospital, a guard stopped him. "The prisoners are not going to be here today," he said. "It will probably be tomorrow."

Stunned, Jim fretted that the incinerator might blow up while he was still in the hospital. What would happen to him?

Heinz sensed something was wrong, but all Jim said was that he was sorry to leave because he didn't know what to expect in a stalag and probably would never see Heinz again.

To Jim's relief, the guard returned and said he'd leave immediately, even though the other prisoners weren't coming. Jim got ready, but he had no socks or jacket.

Outside, two guards met him. He glanced back toward the hospital and winked at Heinz, who watched him from a first-floor window.

They would see each other again.

The guards walked with Jim for about seven miles in cold, drizzling rain until they arrived at a barbed wire-enclosed compound. They opened the locked gate. One stayed behind. The other trudged with Jim on the slushy, half-frozen mud to a metal warehouse.

The guard pulled open its one big door. A blast of stench hit Jim as he peered into the dim room.

Crowded inside were about 100 starving, filthy Russian soldiers who had been prisoners of the Nazi regime for months, even years. Many had open wounds and sores. Some had no shoes, while others had rags wrapped around their feet. Their hair and long beards were matted. They coughed, sneezed, shivered, hollered, moaned, groaned and vomited.

The room had no running water, no toilets, no windows, no furniture, no heat. Its only light came from a bulb hanging from the ceiling. On the concrete floor, yellow paint outlined 2- by 6-feet sections -- the space allotted for each man. They had no mattresses, pillows or blankets.

The guard led Jim through a tangle of wretches to a yellow- bordered open spot on the floor.

"This is yours," he said.

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