POW Info:
Record 1522
Speas, Kenneth R. (Bill)
Rank: 1st Lt
ASN: 1166615
Captured: 4 Feburary 1944
Where Captured: Italy
Camp: Oflag 64
Status: RMC
Location of Oflag 64 in German occupied Poland:
This photo illustrates to me the very cold winter conditions that Kenneth had to endure at Oflag 64.
The following is a very interesting history of the
prisoner of war camp where Uncle Kenneth R. Speas was imprisoned beginning
February 4, 1944.
The source is http://www.indianamilitary.org/
The Camp as We Saw It:
"A German prisoner of war camp is something
you never forget, and Oflag 64 was a very special one. Here is a look at those
grim, and not-so-grim, days a half century ago.
Who would have thought 50 years ago that the
survivors of Oflag 64 would be celebrating the anniversary of the place that we
wanted so desperately to get the hell out of? Nobody.
But it was a unique, unforgettable experience. No
question.
It taught us a great appreciation for some things
we had always taken for granted - a decent meal, a warm room, a bed with more
than three slats to hold you up, the therapeutic value of a good bull session,
even an occasional martini.
Just being there was a great shock. Americans do
not take kindly to captivity. Sid Miller expressed the almost universal
reaction like this: "The last thing I ever expected was to be captured; it
never entered my mind until it happened." But there we were, prisoners of
the enemy in a camp completely isolated from the rest of the world and
dependent on the ruthless, unpredictable Germans for everything.
What we did have, though, was a disciplined
organization within the camp, run along U.S. Army lines and headed initially by
a tough, no-nonsense Army colonel, Thomas Drake, a veteran of World War I, who
set the tone of our relations with the Germans right from the start.
As Bob Bonomi tells it - and he swears it is true
- Col. Drake was called in for a conference with Oberst Schneider when the first
group of Americans arrived. The action went like this:
The American colonel and an interpreter entered
and were seated. The German Oberst rose and began speaking in a "voice of
command." Col. Drake rose, beckoned his interpreter and started for the
door. Oberst Schneider said, in effect, "Was is loss?"
Using his interpreter to emphasize his position of
rank, Col. Drake said, "I am a colonel in the United States Army. One does
not address and American colonel in that tone of voice. When you have learned to
act and speak as an officer and a gentleman, I will return for the
conference."
Schneider never again raised his voice in speaking
to Drake. The senior American had established a control which turned out to be
a great benefit to us in the nearly two years ahead.
It was a small camp at that time, in June 1943,
with only about 150 American officers in the 10-acre compound. By the time the
Oflag was evacuated in January 1945, the roll call had reached 1,400 - still
far less then the big camp at Stalag Luft 3, where more than 10,000 shot-down
American flying officers were held, or the several Stalags for thousands of
American enlisted men.
But the Oflag 64 group was full of interesting characters. Most of them were young lieutenants or captains, but there were enough field grade officers to maintain discipline. The average age was 27. Most were college-educated, many with advanced degrees. They included men who in civilian life had been doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, journalists, artists, ranchers, musicians, and even a former commandant for a U.S. military school. There was talent everywhere, and much of it was utilized in one form or another as the camp activities were organized and carried out.
All the activities were designed to keep the
restless young officers occupied and preserve their sanity. There was a
remarkably professional theater group that put on Broadway-type plays and
concerts. Bob Rankin, the camp's talented music maestro, organized a fine
symphony orchestra, a jazz band and a glee club. They played at frequent
concerts and were well received.
For the conscientious kriegy with time on his
hands, though, this was a chance to learn something. And he did. An elaborate
program of classes was set up by several of the prisoners with academic
backgrounds. Called the Altburgund Academy, it was designed as a college
curriculum under Capt. Hubert Eldridge, who had had 22 years of experience as a
teacher and school superintendent.
At the start, many kriegies signed up for the 14
courses taught by Americans. The classes included German language course, with
a view of communicating with the natives after the Americans' certain escape.
And a surprisingly well-attended course was "Salesmanship," taught by
Maj. Jerry Sage, the kriegy who held the record for the most escapes from
various camps since his capture.
Then there were organized card games (played in
the cold Polish winter with gloves on), a greenhouse where some gardeners
actually grew a few things to eat, a well-supplied library, a tailor shop, a
shoe-repair shop manned by some talented kriegies, and sports activities of
many kinds.
All of these projects, including the theater, were
arranged by the International YMCA and Salvation Army - not the Red Cross. The
civilian representative of the "Y," Henry Soederberg, visited the
camp every few months and managed to have long lists of things shipped in,
unfortunately not including food. He was the only civilian we ever saw and he well
deserved his title of "The Welcome Swede."
The books themselves were a Godsend. At the end
there were 7,000 of them, mostly used fiction. On average, the librarian
figured that each kriegy took out and read one book every three days.
We had three ways to keep up with things on the
outside. The secret radio, which was actually built by a kriegy inside the camp
and was kept tuned in on BBC every day, was the most effective. With guards
posted to warn of prying Germans, the "bird" was tuned in every afternoon
in the White House attic, notes taken and the news read that evening in each
barrack.
The camp newspaper, of course, was The Oflag Item,
printed in a local Polish print shop by a German guard and his wife who had
confiscated the place. It came out monthly an was full of news of camp
activities, notes from home and humorous columns and
cartoons.
But there was a daily newspaper of sorts, too.
Called "The Daily Bulletin," it was hand-lettered, the size and
general appearance of the front page of an American newspaper, and tacked up on
the camp bulletin board each morning. This was largely news of the war as
gleaned from German newspapers, magazines and radio reports, with the
propaganda deleted and maps showing just where the latest glorious German
victories had moved enemy troops backwards. There was also news culled from
letters from home reviews of the latest camp shows, and often a "Special
Features" page. Needless to say, it was widely and closely read by both
the kriegies and the English-speaking German guards.
So as prison camps go, Oflag 64 had a lot going
for it. There was no torture, no solitary confinement, no officers were forced
to work, and the camp was run more or less by the senior American officers,
except for the twice-a-day "appel" when everyone lined up to be
counted and were sometimes lectured to by the German colonel.
But there were two overpowering problems that made
life hellish for everybody. You simply could not get enough to eat, and there
was no way to stay warm during the bitter cold, northern Poland
winter.
The Kriegies became obsessed with thought of food.
When the camp first opened, Red Cross food parcels were distributed every week.
This was supposed to be just a food supplement, but contained enough to subsist
on for a week: things like powdered milk, instant coffee, a chocolate bar, a
tin of some kind of meat, and the like. Soon they began to arrive at the camp
every other week, then every month, then almost not at all. The Germans
explained that the supply trains from neutral Sweden and Switzerland were being
bombed by those cursed Americans.
Then we had to live almost entirely on the German
ration. This amounted typically to only hot water for breakfast, a thin barley
soup for lunch and perhaps some wizened turnips and a shriveled-up carrot for
dinner. With this menu went a couple of inches of German wartime black bread.
The accepted technique was to slice the bread as thin as possible and toast it
over our famous "smokeless heaters," made from old Red Cross powdered
milk cans.
The camp doctors figured that all this amounted to
about 700 calories a day, so they started weighing each kriegy once a week.
When the Red Cross parcels virtually stopped coming, the average prisoner lost
more pounds very quickly. By the end of the war, most of the old-time kriegies
had dropped 30 to 50 pounds.
This diet sapped the prisoners' energy, of course.
And it made the awful winter cold even harder to take. The only warmth provided
by the Germans came from large European-style porcelain stoves place in each
barrack. The Americans were given pressed peat bricks which they ignited and
place inside each stove. The tiles on the outside then would become slightly
warm, but never hot.
"I always thought," one of the Americans
muttered later, "that it was the kriegies huddled around those stoves that
kept them warm."
Frostbitten legs and sometimes frozen hands and
feet were the result of these prolonged periods of cold, augmented by the long
march ordered by Hitler in the icy winter of 1945. Fifty years later, many
former prisoners are still drawing disability payments from the U.S. Government
for the after-effects of such ailments back at Oflag 64.
The cold and hunger reinforced the urge of all the
Americans to escape from the camp and somehow get out through Russia or the
Baltic or somewhere. The Escape Committee redoubled its efforts while the
kriegies came up with all sorts of clever, unique and sometimes desperate plans
for approval.
A tunnel was the obvious answer and that project
involved almost everyone to some degree. The engineers in the camp devised and
ingenious plan for the tunnel to start inside one of the barracks and wind deep
underground beneath the barbed wire fence, surfacing in an unlikely place on
the outside. The project took many months and the Germans sought in vain to
create a cave-in. But they never found it.
Diggers sent the dirt back up in old Red Cross
boxes which were then stored in the low attics of the barracks until they
threatened to break through the ceilings, which happened on one occasion. Then
the clever tunnelers sewed sacks inside the trousers of some of the kriegies
and filled them with dirt. As the kriegy walked around the 10-acre camp, he
would pull a string releasing small quantities of dirt from time to time. That
worked too, getting rid of tons of debris.
To shore up the roof of the tunnel in the sandy
soil of Poland, slats of wood were required, so one slat was removed from the
eight-slat bunk of every kriegy. Soon another was needed, then another. At the
end, everyone was sleeping with great difficulty in a bunk with only three
slats holding him up.
Other things were needed for an escape. Kriegies
with special skills began making maps and forging documents for the potential
escapees. Civilian-type clothing was manufactured. Classes were conducted in
colloquial German and Russian.
Meanwhile, an almost identical tunnel was being
dug by the American and British fly-boys at Stalag Luft 3, a huge compound also
located in northern Poland. This one was completed first and was the scene of
the "Great Escape" of motion picture fame. It was, unfortunately, a
great disaster as well. The exit came up a bit too close to the German guard
barrack, so that only three men actually got away, all of the rest being
recaptured within a few hours, and 50 of them shot upon Hitler's orders. These
murders convinced our Escape Committee to close down the Oflag tunnel
project.
A number of other escape attempts were made,
including one in which the escapees pretended to be drunk and raised so much
hell in the middle of the night that they were taken to the small jailhouse
outside of camp, which is what they had in mind. They broke away, but not for
long.
Then on January 21, 1945, the whole camp of 1,400
officers, was moved out in a blinding snowstorm and marched slowly and
painfully back into Germany - all except the 100 or so men in the hospital who
were deemed unable to march. They were left behind and eventually picked up by
the Russians, trucked to a refugee center near Warsaw, then moved by box cars
across Russia to Oddessa and by British freighter to Egypt and Italy.
Another 100 or more were able to escape from the
marching column and hide out with Polish families until the Russian army swept
along. These men all managed to join up with the hospital group at Warsaw and
return with them.
After the war, some kriegies stayed in the Army,
all of them reaching the rank of at least Lt. Colonel, and three of them making
General. But most returned to civilian life as quickly as possible and began to
make their mark in many fields.
Now, 50 years later, Who's Who is replete with the
names of former kriegies. They have produced big Broadway shows, become editors
of major American newspapers, sat on the boards of large corporations, become
engineers of great renown, owned and operated radio stations, written books,
been on White House staffs in Washington, D.C., and excelled in many other
fields.
But none of us has ever forgotten those hungry,
challenging, cold, educational, friendship-producing days at Oflag 64, a half
century ago."
