The Wartime Memories Project - The Second War

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501304 Joseph M "Fuzzy" Wise from:Chesapeake Bay, Maryland I was a young kid working for Mr. Wise, known locally as "Fuzzy", as a commercial crabber near the Chesapeake Bay for several summers and I thought of him as a grandfather. He was a lot of fun, but one day he told me of his experience as a POW. I'm paraphrasing what he told me over 20 years ago. He died in 1988. He was captured at Normandy, put on a train and transported to Germany, where he lost 65 pounds during the trip. He was placed in a POW camp in Memmingen, Bavaria, where he was forced to work in a cheese factory. When he was told the cheese was being sent to the front to feed the Nazis, he gathered mouse droppings and threw them in the bin. He claimed that he shivered all night the during the first cold snap and that a kind German guard gave him a long winter coat that he slept in every night. He said that he would have died without it. He made friends with several German civilian workers in the factory and even continued to exchange Christmas Cards into the 1970s. He remembers being liberated and the POWs were allowed to enter a cave that was apparently full of valuables put there by the townspeople to prevent looting. The POWs were allowed to take "anything they could carry". Fuzzy remembered carrying several pairs of binoculars and cameras around his neck, with fine shotguns under each arm. Understandably, he became inebriated during his first night of freedom and passed out, only to find that all of his new valuables were stolen from him. Hopefully, some of the items made their way back to their original owners. This was all that he told me. I would love to know if anyone remembered this gregarious, fun-loving fellow named "Fuzzy" from Maryland. George P Wigginton Add to this record.  Related Content: Stalag 7B Prisoner of War Camp Can you help us to add to our records? Add a record to our website. The names and stories on this website have been submitted by their relatives and friends. If your relations are not listed please add their names so that others can read about them Did you or your relatives live through the Second World War? Do you have any photos, newspaper clippings, postcards or letters from that period? Have you researched the names on your local or war memorial? Were you or your relative evacuated? Did an air raid affect your area? If so please let us know. Help us to build a database of information on those who served both at home and abroad so that future generations may learn of their sacrifice. Contact us. Celebrate your own Family History Celebrate by honouring members of your family who served in the Secomd World War both in the forces and at home. We love to hear about the soldiers, but also remember the many who served in support roles, nurses, doctors, land army, muntions workers etc. Please use our Family History resources to find out more about your relatives. Then please send in a short article, with a photo if possible, so that they can be remembered on these pages.

The free section of the Wartime Memories Project website is run by volunteers. We have been helping people find out more about their relatives wartime experiences since 1999 by recording and preserving recollections, documents, photographs and small items. The website is paid for out of our own pockets, library subscriptions and from donations made by visitors. The popularity of the site means that it is far exceeding available resources and we currently have a huge backlog of submissions. If you are enjoying the site, please consider making a donation, however small to help with the costs of keeping the site running. Hosted by: The Wartime Memories Project Website is archived for preservation by the British Library Copyright MCMXCIX - MMXXIV - All Rights Reserved We do not permit the use of any content from this website for the training of LLMs or for use in Generative AI, it also may not be scraped for the purpose of creating other websites.