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Chapter 6 — Stalag Luft I - The Charles Reed Holden Story by Charles “Reed” Holden of a WW II shoot-down and POW experience as related by a B-17 Ball Gunner: Page 2 of 3 Pages |
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| Chuck Inlow, one of the guys in our group volunteered to do the cooking for the gang in our room. We kept our cigarettes and “D” bars and the remainder of the Red Cross Food Parcels were pooled and used to prepare our meals. A couple of the men rearranged our little wood stove to make it more suitable for cooking. Our morning meal consisted of oatmeal and a slice of black bread, toasted, for lunch we ate from the food parcels and the evening meal was a thin soup from our captors. We had a good group of guys and we all got along nicely. Our work detail was to sweep the hall of the barracks with a broom made with a bunch of small branches tied together. It reminded me of stories that I had read as a child in school. Another job we had to do was to take the sheets out to the “sheet house” where we did our laundry, which was on a point of land jutting out into the Baltic Sea. In the summer, the guard we called “Junior” let us take a swim in the sea which much to my surprise was very warm. One day our guard told us that he was going home on leave and that he lived in Berlin. During that time the “Mighty Eight” had heavily bombed Berlin causing a lot of destruction and when our guard returned to the POW camp, we asked him how it was to be back home. He threw up his hands and grunted in disgust. Our guard was all of nineteen and about six feet tall and was to be shipped out to the Eastern Front to fight the Russians who were crossing the Elbe River. We never saw Junior’ again. The younger guards were being replaced by men who were to old for combat. Another detail assigned to our crew was to empty the garbage dumpster. Four “Kreige’s” were assigned to the task. We were given a small wagon and a couple of long handle shovels to do the job. Following the detail, we were allowed to take a shower. The shower room was equipped with ten shower heads so the four of us enjoyed a nice hot shower. The next time the four of us had the garbage detail, we were allowed to go back to our barracks to get our soap and towels. I suggested as long as there are ten shower heads, lets use them all, so ten of us went back to the shower room. The old guard got mad and objected to the ten men, but after arguing for sometime and a few American cigarettes the old man relented and we all had enjoyed the luxury of a long hot shower. It wasn’t long and the old guard was replaced by a younger man who was a miserable SOB but to our advantage he had trouble with his arithmetic. He would yell at us that “Feur man albeit, zehn man shower”. I argued with him and finally won out . After that ten men went to the shower and we didn’t have anymore trouble. The nice long hot showers were about the only luxury we had and were most pleasant. In the summer time the Y.M.C.A. provided us with some vegetable seeds so we could plant a small garden. The soil in the camp was soft enough that you could till it with your hands and it gave us something to do to occupy our time. Two American Officers appeared on the scene which we named “Big and Little Joe”. Little Joe took over supervising the garden project. We made small dents in the soil and one seed was placed into each hole while Little Joe watched us . He was very meticulous about the planting and each day that it didn’t rain we watered the garden and in twenty one days we harvested nice sized radishes. We sold them for twenty five food accounts points and the rest of them tasted very good and were a pleasant addition to our meager menu. We tried to improvise in many ways to improve our lifestyle. Besides not getting enough to eat, one of the major problems were the bunks the Germans provided for us in our barracks. The bunks were made of wood with wooden planks for the straw mattress to rest on. Once you slept on it one time it flattened out and was like sleeping on a rock, it certainly wasn’t a “Beauty Rest” mattress, that’s for sure, and it was rough on the back and kidney’s. One of the guys in our group came up with an idea. We swiped some barbed wire and untwisted it and used the plain wire to replace the wooden planks to hold our mattress. We took the hooks off of the windows to bore holes in the end of the bunks and then stretched the wire in place and evenly spaced. Then we placed the cardboard from the Food Parcels over the wire to complete the support for the mattress. Once completed it made sleeping a little more comfortable. When we ran out of plain wire we broke the barbs off the remaining wire to continue improving the other bunks. We dumped the barbs in the dog run underneath our barracks where the Germans ran their dogs to prevent us from trying to escape. End of Page 2 of 3 Pages, Chapter 6 — Go To Page 3 Cover Page — Introductions — Table of Contents Chapter — 01 — 02 — 03 — 04 — 05 — 06 — 07 — 08 or Home - Contact Us - Cold War Hist. - 91st SRS Hist. - Stardust 40 Mission Story |
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