224411 Pte. Raymond Charles "Jay" Johnson US Army Coy E 109 Infantry Regiment from:Exira, Iowa My father, Raymond "Jay" Johnson, enlisted in WW2 at the age of 33. He went off to war leaving his wife and, at that time, 4 children at home in Exira, Iowa. 10 years after the war ended, I was born. Being the last of 7 children and the youngest male, my father intrusted me with his war medals. He never talked much about his time in the military and when he did, it was short talks about the events he experienced.
Later on in his life he finally told me about fighting in the Battle of the Bulge campaign and how he was captured by older German soldiers. He said they treated him OK and how they took half of his Bull Durham tobacco and left him the other half. He spent the rest of the war as a POW in Stalag 4B.
Some of his accounts while being a POW in the camp were: He nearly froze his feet after his boots were taken,
what bread they got was full of sawdust as filler so you had to heavily toast the bread on the camp stove and scrape the sawdust off in order to eat it or you would get "bound up" constipated. He was made to work on the local railway while under guard. He was scared he was to be executed, it turned out he was getting an injection for some illness going around.
Sneaking out of his barracks at night to look for food in a building they thought housed food only to find it housed corpses. Meeting Max Schmeling, who toured the POW camp. Dad said Schmeling spoke good English and told them all that after the war is over he would box heavyweight boxer Joe Lewis again.
His POW camp was liberated by the approaching Soviet Army. Dad said the morning of the day of liberation, all the Germans were gone when they awoke and that he thought they were just hiding, waiting for someone to try and escape. Dad and other POWs left the camp while the Soviets were coming into camp because, as he would say, "the Soviets were drunk and shooting in the air".
I have Dad's Purple Heart, Bronze Star, Stalag 4B dog tag and his other medals not listed here. Dad passed away Jan 1992. I so wish i would have encouraged him to let me write more of his events endured while defending our country even though it was a short time.
Respectfully on Memorial Day 2015
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