HELL ON EARTH
A True Prisoner of War Story
As Told By
Edgar Dwain Garwood
This is the story of one of the many thousands of men who had the misfortune of being taken prisoner of war during the great and long remembered "Battle of the Belgium Bulge".
This battle, as we all know, started a great push to conquer the world. They almost did a job of it until those well known "Yanks" came through for the final blow and put them in the place where all warlords and maniacs should be.
During this battle the "84th Inf. Div." was called upon to help stop this great push. We were moved from the Ninth Army, under the direct command of General Simpson, to General Hodge's great First Army.
We landed in the small town of Roquefort, Belgium, about eight kilometers from Marcie and thirty five kilometers from Bastogue, where we immediately started setting a perimeter of defense.
This is the story of one of the many thousand men who had the misfortune of being taken prisoner of war during that great and long remembered Battle of the Belgium Bulge. This battle started, as we all remember, at Bastogne, December 16, 1944. The Germans started a great push to conquer the world and almost did a job of it until those well know Yanks came through for the final blow and put them in their place where all warlords and sick maniacs should be.
During this battle the 84th Inf. Div. was called upon to help stop this great push, the Germans were staging. We were moved from the Ninth Army under the direct command of General Simpson to General Hodge's great First Army. We landed in the small town of Roquefort, Belgium, about eight kilometers from Marcie and thirty five kilometers from Bastogue, where we immediately started setting up a perimeter of defense.
We completed this task in exceedingly short time, for we had no way of knowing the exact whereabouts of our enemy at that time. We sent patrols, I was a member of the Scouting Patrol, to cover our front. We started out in the early morning and found a few snipers and forward scouts upon interrogation, we learned the One Hundred and Sixteenth Panther Division and a large group of SS troops were coming at us and would reach us about eight o'clock in the evening. This didn't give us time to call for any further aid so we decided our best thing was to form a delaying action party and; after stopping them and thinning them out as much as possible do a strategic withdrawal-The Yanks never retreat. All went well. The enemy came almost on time and we did our best to thin them and they had ceased fire and were all ready to pull back and set up on the other side of the town when we learned the only means of our escape had been destroyed.
This caused a lot of thought and uneasiness and we decided we would fight it out as long as possible with the thought that maybe by some miracle we would get help. This miracle never came and the Germans knew we could not escape and so they surrounded us. We ran low on ammo and still they closed in like a cat closing in on a mouse ready to make the final leap for the kill.
We waited for the proper time and then we opened fire and exhausted our ammunition supply. A few of them will never seek their enemies any more but the remainder of them came in and took us prisoners. We were extremely surprised at the treatment we got from these men that first took us prisoners. We weren't treated in the least bit harshly and we thought this was good. This didn't last for long for we changed guards at dawn and started on a forced march that lasted four days and nights.
This in itself would not have been too hard had we been given food and water and a few hours of rest each day, but we received none of these. We finally reached a small town and were put in an old school building and were given about a bushel and one half of half-frozen potatoes and ten gallons of water. After this is divided between one hundred forty six men, the portions for each is extremely small and seems even smaller when you haven't eaten for so many days and walked so many miles.
We stayed in this building just long enough for the interrogators to give us the once over and then we were lined up in the road again and started marching again. This march only lasted one day and we ended up in an old two-story stone warehouse that had somehow stood the bombing. This was to be our home. We were given what they called food. It consisted of four small biscuits that looked about like five dog biscuits and tasted about the same and a small piece of cheese. After we had eaten we were given a speech by a German guard who told us we were prisoners and would be expected to function as such. This means, as we soon learned, that we had to work or be punished.
The work we had was as follows: filling bomb craters in roads and railroads and replacing rails and ties in railroads, cleaning streets and roads, and recovering bodies and equipment from bombed buildings and burying the dead. We worked in shifts, ten hours a day. If you didn't work during the day it meant going out at night and working until morning. When we weren't working we were confined to the building and were only allowed out for latrine privileges. The so called latrine was an old manure pile that was about ten feet from our kitchen. This was the cause of so much dysentery and diarrhea in the camps.
We slept on the bare board floors with no blankets or covering. The temperature stayed at about 10 ยบ above zero and the only way we could get warm was by curling around each other like animals. We had no means of heating the building other than body heat; the windows were knocked out and the roof leaked so that body heat was very little aid to our chilled bodies.
Our food consisted of a small piece of black bread, about one inch square and three inches long, in the morning and a small container of flour and water soup in the evening. This container was about the size of a tea cup or slightly larger.
Due to malnutrition, poor living conditions and improper clothing, many of the men became sick with pneumonia and died. Others suffered from frozen feet and from lack of medical attention, gangrene set in and killed them. The death rate was about five a day out of a total of thirteen hundred encamped there at this Geroldstein Labor Camp.
We left this camp 1st of February 1945 because the Yanks were about twenty kilometers away and we could already feel the blasts of our own artillery. We were marched two days and then pushed into boxcars. Eighty-five men were placed in each car and the doors were locked. We were forced to stand and received no food or water for three days. The cars had no ventilation other than small holes that had been caused from bombing.
Many of the men lost their minds and many more died from thirst, starvation and suffocation. In the boxcar I was in, there were about three inches of horse manure on the floor. This plus the waste of prisoners on the floor was almost unbearable for we weren't even allowed out of the cars to relieve ourselves. We finally reached our destination with several less men and most of us were almost too weak to walk the distance to our new camp.
This camp was Stalag 12A at Limburg, Germany. The food situation here was slightly better and we were not forced to work. We were given blankets and allowed straw for beds. The camp had been a training station and we had latrines and even water where we could wash and shave. They gave us our first cigarettes and soap from the Red Cross packages about two weeks after we arrived. This was a real treat for most of us had not seen either since we were taken prisoner. We were interrogated again and then placed where we could not come in contact with other prisoners. We did very little work here other than try making our barracks livable and waiting for our food. Then came the work, the Yanks had crossed the Rhine and should be there in about ten days so the Germans got us out again and loaded us on boxcars again and started out. The next day the Airforce came over and blew up the railroad and strafed our train. The guard became scared and let us out. We shed our shirts and turned our backs to the sky forming the letters POW hoping upon their return they might recognize us as Americans and spare us. The plan worked. They came over and flipped their wings and flew away.
The Germans decided we would start walking on another forced march so at one a.m. we started out. We walked through a few towns and had not stopped for rest so we were almost exhausted. The night was dark and foggy and very cold. Having lost about ninety pounds I became weak and decided I should either take a chance now or never and I could hear American machine gun fire so I took a long shot, worked over to the edge of the road, jumped, and rolled into the deep ditch and lay their motionless until the column passed.
Thank God they had not seen me; I was on my own. I headed for where I heard the gunfire. I had not gone far when I came onto another escapee by the name of Bigley. He had the same idea so we ventured on together. At seven a.m. we decided to try for some food and coffee at a farm house. We had God with us for we found a friendly woman who gave us food and coffee and warmed us behind the stove and told us the Yanks were close by. We stayed there until eight p.m. then we heard vehicles approaching. It was the 7th Armored Division. We signaled them and was taken back to Regiment Headquarters. Once again we were among friends and had immerged from the Hell on Earth. We were given food and treated like kings.
If anyone ever says things are bad in the States, let me remind then that we are living in a Utopia and not a Hell on Earth as many have witnessed during the war. So thank God you are an American and live in Heaven on Earth.
Sgt. Edgar D. Garwood
Lest we forget, this happened to many thousand and will long be remembered by them, but many thousands will forget and let our enemies try again to accomplish what they failed. So, let's all remember "Meet they enemy and destroy them".
Sgt. Garwood was my grandfather and never talked much about the war. This is the only information he ever shared. It was a handwritten story in a small notebook. He use to give talks to the boy scouts and such about the war in the 50s. Grandpa died in March of 1985 from cancer. I have recently been searching for information about his time in the US army, but can't seem to find much. I thought I would send his story if you would like to post it, hopefully more people will submit info so those of us searching will be able to find more material. Thanks, for the best WW2 website I have found.
