THE FIRST SCHUBIN ESCAPEE HOME RUNS
By February 2, at Wegheim, Ernest Gruenberg and Frank Colley had itchy feet. Thirty escaped American POWs, including Craig Campbell from Schokken, had limped into the Wegheim hospital by that time via the Rosen estate and Schubin and were in need of medical attention. In addition to tending to them, Gruenberg noted down all their names.
Gruenberg now received permission from Colonel Millett at Schubin for Frank Colley, his new escape partner, John Dimling, who’d turned up at Wegheim after staying at the Rosen estate, and himself to attempt to reach Moscow. Millett was by now planning to shortly make his own run east and would set off within days. Armed with Millett’s approval, Gruenberg asked the friendly female Russian major running the Wegheim field hospital to help Colley, Dimling and himself get to Moscow under their own steam.
Late on February 2, the major produced a rail pass from the local Polish authorities that would allow the trio to make the first leg east to Kutno in the Łódź district. The following morning, Saturday, February 3, the convivial major and Exin Poles treated the American trio to a hearty farewell breakfast in the town. As they waited at Exin station through the day, Gruenberg, Colley and Dimling were joined by twenty-six other Schubin escapees.
One of these fellow travelers waiting on the platform at Exin was First Lieutenant Herbert L. “Herb” Garris from North Carolina. He’d been captured not long after parachuting into Normandy with the 101st Airborne on D-Day. Handsome, personable Garris had tunneled into the hay in a Rosen barn with two others on the first night of the march. The following day, he’d charmed his way into a bed in the house of Stanisław Mankowski, the estate’s Polish manager, who had several unmarried daughters, including the attractive Urszula. But even Garris had tired of the young woman’s attentions. He was ready to go home, one way or another.
At 10:00 that night, a crowded train with the twenty-nine Americans among its passengers pulled out of Exin, heading a hundred miles south to Września, after which it would turn east for Kutno. As the train steamed through the night, Ernest Gruenberg got into conversation with some of the Poles aboard, including children of school age. To his horror, he found that ten-year-old Poles could neither read nor write. Fifteen-year-olds had only a basic education and were working ten-hour days in factories. Since 1939, the Nazis had banned Polish children from attending school. Considering all Poles subhuman, they had even prevented them from marrying until they were in their mid-twenties, to keep the Polish birthrate down.
At Kutno, the twenty-nine Americans split into three groups. Herb Garris was in a party that would end up in Warsaw and then at the displaced persons camp at Rembertów outside Warsaw. Administered by the Russian NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), the camp was in a former Polish military school. Gruenberg, Colley and Dimling had heard bad things about that camp and chose to avoid it. With their goal still Moscow, the trio hitchhiked east into the western Soviet Union, finding rides on empty Red Army supply trucks, wagons, horse-drawn sleds, and sometimes on trains, with no officials ever asking to see passes or tickets. At each stopping place, locals gave them food and a bed.
Altogether the journey took the Gruenberg trio two weeks after they left Exin, with the last leg aboard a troop train that took them to a station in the central northwest part of Moscow. After they stepped down from the train on February 17 and emerged from the sprawling station looking lost, they were approached by a Red Army soldier who spoke basic English and asked where they wanted to go. When the Americans said they were looking for the United States embassy, the young Russian said that it was not far away and volunteered to lead them there.
Through the peaceful streets of central Moscow tramped the American trio with their Russian guide. Around them, the city was cloaked in winter gray, and no smiles creased the faces of the passing Muscovites as they hurried to and from their jobs. Yet, to John Dimling, after all the destruction and despair they had seen in Poland, Moscow was a paradise.1 The helpful Russian soldier led them to Novinsky Boulevard and an ornate nine-story building that had been the US embassy since the United States recognized the Soviet Union in 1933. Pointing to the door, the soldier grinned.
“You’re a true boy scout,” said one of the Americans.
“Yes, boy scout,” the Russian agreed.2
Thanking him sincerely, the trio proceeded inside. American embassy staff looked at them in horror. In nondescript uniforms, they had neither shaved nor washed since leaving Schubin more than three weeks earlier. With beards and long hair, they looked, and smelled, like hobos. But once they spoke and identified themselves as US Army officers who had escaped the Nazis, they were embraced by embassy staff.
General Deane, the chief of the American Military Mission, did not meet Gruenberg, Colley and Dimling until that night. By that time, the trio had bathed and shaved, had been given haircuts, and had been allocated clean uniforms with insignia of rank. They once more looked, and felt, like US Army officers. By the time Deane saw them, the staff of the American Military Mission had fed the trio a veritable feast and opened more than one bottle of whisky. They were partying hard.
Three days earlier, Deane had received advice from the de facto Polish ambassador in Moscow that 1,000 escaped American POWs were in various Polish cities liberated by Soviet troops, although no names or details were given. This news had excited Deane, who readied the American POW recovery plan he had prepared six months earlier. Yet his Russian counterpart, Lieutenant General K. D. Golubev, had not notified him that any Americans were in Russian hands.
This didn’t surprise Deane. His relations with Golubev had become strained. The previous year, the Russians had agreed that USAAF bombers of Eastern Command (ESCOM) would be permitted to operate out of three airfields in Soviet territory. In June, the Luftwaffe had caught American B-17s on the ground at Poltava in central Ukraine, destroying fifty and damaging nineteen. The Soviets had undertaken to provide ESCOM with fighter and antiaircraft protection, but few Russian fighters or AA guns had been sent to Poltava. ESCOM had subsequently pulled its bombers out of bases in Soviet territory.
So as Deane spoke with Gruenberg, Colley and Dimling at their liberation party, he was keen to learn from them just how many Americans were genuinely on the loose in Soviet-occupied Poland and the western Soviet Union. Gruenberg estimated that, at most, 200 American servicemen were at that stage under Russian control. He based that figure on the number he knew to have been with Colonel Drury, the small number of escapees with Colonel Millett back at Oflag 64, and the thirty escapees he’d seen at the Russian field hospital at Wegheim.
Gruenberg, Colley and Dimling mentioned that they had bumped into other small parties of American Oflag 64 escapees roaming free in eastern Poland. All had told the trio of unpleasant experiences with Russian troops who had stolen their watches and sometimes roughed them up. Those Americans were actively avoiding Russians and ignoring Red Army signs they had seen in various Polish towns that directed escaped Allied servicemen to Russian assembly camps at Rembertów, Września, Lublin, and Łódź.
At this point, Gruenberg handed over to General Deane the list of names he’d compiled of the hospitalized Americans at Wegheim. Deane had those names transmitted to Washington that night, so that families in the United States could be notified that their loved ones had escaped from the Germans. The three escapees also told Deane that, as far as they knew, the general’s old friend Colonel Goode was still leading the Schubin column west into Germany under German guard, accompanied by Lieutenant Colonel Waters. Deane made sure that G-2 promptly received that information.
Deane waited until the next day, February 18, to debrief the Gruenberg trio in detail, after which he met with General Golubev and demanded to know why he had not been notified that Gruenberg, Colley and Dimling had been liberated by the Red Army and authorized to travel to Moscow. This was news to Golubev, who said he’d never heard of the trio. And he was privately furious that they’d slipped through to the US embassy unnoticed. The NKVD had orders to intercept and corral all Americans on the loose, and would now prove even more diligent in that respect. Very few additional escaped American POWs would succeed in reaching Moscow’s US embassy after this.
In this meeting with Deane, Golubev did admit to knowing that 450 American POWs were now in Red Army hands. Deane didn’t trust this figure, relying on the Polish ambassador’s estimate of 1,000 Americans on the loose. Golubev’s figure was actually reasonably accurate, taking into account the Drury, Gans and Millett groups from Oflag 64, the men from Oflag 64-Z, the men in the Red Army hospital at Wegheim, and escapees from the Schubin column now in Russian hands.
Golubev told Deane that it was his government’s intention to send all these Americans, and any others who fell into Russian hands, by rail to a large transit camp for former Allied POWs at the Ukrainian port of Odessa on the Black Sea: from there the Allies could ship them home. Should the need arise, said Golubev, a second transit camp would also be opened at Murmansk, north of the Arctic Circle on the Barents Sea. Deane immediately sought Russian permission to dispatch contact teams of three to five US military personnel to a number of centers behind Russian lines. Under Deane’s plan, the USAAF would fly emergency supplies into these centers from the ESCOM base at Poltava and fly out seriously ill escaped kriegies.
The Russian general responded that one American contact team could be sent to Odessa to receive Americans funneled there by the Red Army, and another could be sent to Lublin in Poland to make sure all Americans went to Odessa. Lublin was the location of the Communist “provisional” government of Poland being supported by the Soviets—in opposition to the Polish government in exile that had been based in London since 1939.
This was the extent of Russian concessions. General Golubev also specified that Deane’s American contact teams would have to be flown in Soviet aircraft while inside Soviet territory. Months before this, Deane had negotiated what he believed a hard-and-fast agreement with the Russian Foreign Office over American access to, and repatriation of, their liberated POWs. On February 11, the Yalta Conference in the Crimea between Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill had wrapped up, and the leaders’ agreement spelled out how Returned Allied Military Personnel (RAMPs) would be treated by the United States, the USSR and Britain, in much more liberal terms than Golubev was now offering.
Deane was extremely unhappy with Golubev’s limited concessions. “I felt it to be a serious violation of our agreement,” he would say.3 Returning to the US Military Mission, he chose the personnel who would make up the Odessa and Lublin contact teams. Then, that afternoon, he chaired a press conference in his office, a press conference apparently called, at least in part, to embarrass the Russians into being more helpful regarding escaped American POWs. The star attractions of the press conference were Gruenberg, Colley and Dimling, who would soon be dubbed the Moscow Trio by the American media.
As these were the first Americans to have escaped from German custody and passed through Russian hands to reach US government hands, Allied pressmen, including Eddy Gilmore of the Associated Press, eagerly plied them with questions. Having been briefed by the general to be circumspect when it came to the Russians, the trio was careful not to say anything bad about them. Instead, they spoke at length about their capture and treatment by the Germans, reserving special mention for one German transit camp at Chalons in France, which they referred to as “Starvation Manor.”
It was the trio’s forced march from Schubin and their escape from the column that most interested the reporters. Gruenberg told the pressmen about the road outside Oflag 64 being choked with fleeing German civilians for days before the POWs joined that exodus west.
“It was some scene,” added Colley. “And, mind you, this wasn’t a main road, but a secondary road.”
“How many refugees would you estimate there were?” asked one reporter.
“I would say there were thousands upon thousands of them,” Gruenberg answered, unable to relay the fear, distress and despair they had seen on that road day after day.
“Did the German civilians mind you being mixed up in their refugee column?”
“Oh, a couple of women cursed us,” Gruenberg replied. “But the Poles let us hitch our sleds and carts to their wagons. They gave us a wink.”4
Gruenberg also mentioned that other Schubin escapees were on the loose in Poland, Germany and Russia, although he couldn’t put a figure on the number involved. He mentioned several stories he’d heard from Americans and Poles en route to Moscow of Schubin escapees, including Captain George H. Dunkelberg of the 101st Airborne, who joined up with Soviet troops going into Germany and fought the Germans with borrowed Russian weapons. Gruenberg said that, to overcome the language barrier, Dunkelberg used a “grunt and point” system of communication with the Russians.5
The wires hummed with the pressmen’s reports, and the day after the Moscow press conference, the story of the Moscow Trio’s escape from the Germans, and of the plight of American POWs still marching in Nazi custody ahead of the Red Army’s advance, appeared in newspapers large and small across the United States. For the first time, Americans at home would appreciate the desperate straits in which thousands of American prisoners found themselves even as the Allies were closing in on Berlin and the end of the war in Europe was in sight.
The Moscow Trio was soon on a USAAF transport aircraft flying out of Moscow and heading for the United States. Within days, they would be the first Schubin escapees to set foot back on home soil. The press was subsequently kept away from them, as it would be from all returning POWs, for US Military Intelligence now put a blanket ban on former kriegies talking publicly about their experiences. Too much had already been said by the Moscow Trio. When debriefed by G-2’s Captured Personnel and Materiel (CPM) Branch, American RAMPs would be required to sign an acknowledgment that, under the Espionage Act, they could not reveal anything about their captivity or their liberation. This was to ensure that morale at home was not affected, that war crimes proceedings following the war were not compromised, and that the Russians weren’t offended.
* * *
SCHUBIN TUNNEL KINGS Bill Cory and Spud Murphy had traveled with Colonel Drury’s Oflag 64 hospital party to Rembertów. Their traveling companions, Bill Fabian and Hervey Robinson, had been hospitalized, and Cory and Murphy quickly became disenchanted with Rembertów’s conditions and the NKVD guards, so they decided to escape Russian custody and head for Moscow and the US embassy. They were joined by Peter Gaish, who’d hidden in the hay at Baron von Rosen’s estate before returning to Schubin in time for the exodus with Colonel Drury. Gaish had Serbo-Croat heritage and could speak a little Polish and Russian.
In early February, about the same time that Gruenberg, Colley and Dimling had set off on their push to Moscow, the Cory trio slipped by inattentive Russian guards at the Rembertów camp. For days, they walked and rode sleds, hay wagons and trucks, heading steadily east through southeast Poland, until they reached the city called Lvov by the occupying Soviets (Polish Lwów). As soon as Russian troops in Lvov saw the disheveled, unshaven Americans in nondescript uniforms, they accused them of being German infiltrators and handed them over to the NKVD, who tossed them into the local jail.
Vladimir Belayev, an inquisitive Russian journalist, found the trio there. After covering Allied naval operations into Murmansk, he’d developed a liking for Americans and Britons. Bringing a Jewish woman to act as his translator—she’d taught English at Kraków University before the war—Belayev questioned the trio and became convinced that Cory and his companions were genuine US Army officers. He in turn convinced the NKVD lieutenant in charge to parole the trio into the care of the senior Red Army general in Lvov. That general had been a prewar Soviet military attaché in Washington, and he, too, loved Americans.
The genial general took the three Americans under his wing, installing them in the best hotel in town, the George, and organizing hot baths and a feast for them. While Cory, Murphy and Gaish were being entertained by the general, word arrived that another five Americans were in the hotel lobby. The Cory trio rushed out to greet who they expected would be more escaped kriegies but found that the Americans were USAAF personnel from ESCOM at Poltava. Led by a Major Nicholson, the airmen said they were in Lvov to locate aircrew and bombsights from American bombers shot down in the area.
The ESCOM men spent the next few days haggling with the general and the NKVD over the fate of the Cory trio before finally convincing the Russians to hand them over. Cory, Murphy and Gaish were flown the 1,500 miles from Lvov to Poltava. From Poltava, the USAAF flew them to Tehran in Iran, where they were spruced up in new uniforms before being flown in stages across the Atlantic to Miami. Cory, Murphy and Gaish landed on American soil on February 28, becoming the second group of Schubin escapees to reach home, close behind the Moscow Trio. On G-2 orders, they arrived without the media’s knowledge or any fanfare.6
For the many hundreds of other Schubin inmates both on the run in Poland and still in German custody, getting home was not going to be anywhere as easy as it had been for the Moscow and Cory trios.