Sgt. James Delameter Bates
United States Army 143rd Infantry Regiment
from:Caldwell, Texas
Sgt James Bates left North Africa in early September 1943 and landed on the beaches at Salerno, Italy on the morning of 9th September. Over the next few days they fought their way inland. On 11th September the 143rd was ordered to an area between the Sele and Calore Rivers and encountered heavy resistance. On the night of the 12th German tanks surrounded the area and on the morning of the 13th began pounding the 143rd.
Dad's company was pinned down in a trench. The machine gunners on the German tanks shot into the dirt piled in front of the trench, knocking the dirt in on them and slowly burying them alive. There was nothing they could do but surrender. Dad removed the bolt from his machine gun and threw it away so the Germans could not use it, and as the Germans rounded up the prisoners, dad slipped into the communications tent and disabled the decoder.
After several days travel, Dad arrived at Stalag IIIB in Furstenberg, Germany where he spent the remainder of the war. His recollection of his time there was limited, but he remembered always being hungry and miserably cold in the winter. The usual meal was a small piece of bread and rutabaga soup, which consisted of mostly water with a few rutabagas thrown in for flavor. Dad recalled one on the men receiving a package from home which contained a set of sheets. The men boiled the sheets and drank the water off them for the starch. In one letter to my mother he says that they had an unusually good soup on Sunday with some meat in it because one of the horses had died.
Cigarettes were a big commodity and could be used to bribe guards for various items. Dad once told me that he bribed a guard to let him out to go to a nearby town. Once there, he bought a full suit of clothes from a tailor for a few cigarettes. He didn't try to escape because he was so far inside Germany he didn't believe he would make it out.
Sgt. James Bates survived the POW camp and came home. He passed away at age 76 in 1987.
