Lieutenant Brooks Kleber sat in a taxi across the street from his uncle’s home in Trenton, New Jersey. As the motor ticked over and his hand rested on the door handle, Kleber looked across the street to the house that held so many prewar memories for him and hesitated.
Compared to some of his fellow kriegies, Kleber hadn’t spent long in captivity. Captured in June 1944, he’d arrived at Oflag 64 with Pop Goode that October. He’d marched with Goode all the way to Hammelburg. He’d gone through the high hopes and shattered expectations of the failed Task Force Baum rescue bid. He’d marched again with Colonel Goode, this time to Moosburg. And he’d sat in Camp Lucky Strike in France with 300,000 other RAMPs waiting to be sent home. He’d crossed the Atlantic back to the United States aboard the first convoy to sail without an escort since the war began. He’d taken a taxi from Fort Dix to his uncle’s door.
But, like many fellow soldiers, Kleber had been damaged by the war. Anxiety was his new comrade in arms. All the time his troopship, Mariposa, had been bucking across the gray Atlantic, Kleber had been watching for torpedo tracks as he worried that some U-boat commander who had yet to surrender might want to sink one last ship for the Führer. Ever since his liberation from German custody, whenever he saw a tethered dog, Kleber wondered what sort of life it led. Until recently, Kleber had led the life of a tethered dog. When he saw people who didn’t have enough to eat, he worried about them. He would never forget his own starvation diet in captivity.
To Kleber, the experience of liberation, and of freedom, was proving just as traumatic as his capture and dehumanization at the hands of the Germans. All Kleber had to do to reclaim his old life was cross that street to his uncle’s house. A street that seemed as wide as the ocean. Gathering all his strength, Brooks Kleber opened the taxi door, stepped out, and put one foot in front of another.
“The crossing of that street was my last psychological obstacle,” Kleber would later say. “I had made it home.”1
Other kriegies also had memorable homecomings. Soon after freed POW Captain William D. Robbins arrived back in the States, he made a point of telephoning a colonel whose son had not made it back. Robbins had been clambering into a halftrack on the Reussenberg on the morning of March 28 when the Hetzers opened fire. Like many others, Robbins had fled into the woods when the German assault began, only to be caught by Eggemann’s infantry sweep following the fusillade. Robbins had spent the night as a prisoner in the barn at Höllrich, after which Hauptmann Gehrig’s cadets had marched him back to the Reussenberg to take charge of the burial detail for American dead from the battle.
One of the kriegies Robbins had buried that morning was the colonel’s son. Robbins wanted to tell the colonel the circumstances of his boy’s captivity, about his brave escape attempt, and about his death. But the colonel didn’t want to know. To the colonel, capture by the enemy was a disgrace. He hung up on Robbins.
Private Jonel C. Hill, who’d been in the Oflag 64 hospital at the time of the camp’s January evacuation, had survived the journeys to Rembertów in February and to Odessa in March. At Odessa he’d had his first bath in months. Via Istanbul and Port Said, Jones had sailed with fellow Schubinites to Naples and the welcoming arms of the US Army. In April, he’d arrived back in the United States, landing at Boston. When he came ashore, reporters were everywhere, trying to get stories from this first shipload of returned American POWs. But the kriegies had been warned not to talk about their experiences, a warning reiterated by US Military Intelligence’s CPM section when it debriefed Jones at Fort Devens outside Boston.
Granted a ninety-day furlough, Jones first went home to Wyoming. There, the serenity of the plains overwhelmed him, bringing him to tears. After reuniting with his family, Jones visited a beautiful girl, his future bride. He’d brought home a photo of her that he’d been carrying when he arrived at Schubin. The photo bore a German stamp on the back: “Inspected, Oflag 64.” From there he went to Oregon to visit family and then on to San Francisco. In the City by the Bay, relatives took Jones to the historic Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill and up to Top of the Mark, the hotel’s penthouse bar and restaurant, which boasted a 360-degree view of the city. Jones was resplendent in a US Army uniform he’d had custom-made in Naples, complete with an Eisenhower jacket. He’d polished his boots so hard he could see his face in them.
Excitedly, Jones and his family members sat down by the window and drank in the stunning San Francisco vistas. A waiter came by and took their drinks order. And then the manager came over and introduced himself. This was some homecoming for a soldier, thought Jones, and when the manager asked him how old he was, the young man proudly volunteered that he was nineteen.
“Then I’m going to have to ask you all to leave,” said the manager.2
Jones was old enough to have fought and died for his country. But he was two years shy of the legal drinking age. Welcome home, kriegie.
* * *
WHEN LIEUTENANT COLONEL Jack Van Vliet told G-2 in Germany about the Katyn Massacre, he was quickly flown home to the United States, where he was debriefed at the Pentagon in Washington by Major General Clayton Bissell, to whom he handed over the photographs the Germans had given him at Katyn in 1943. Van Vliet was ordered by the general to never speak about what he had seen and heard. For many years, the official US government line on the Katyn Massacre mirrored that of the Soviets, that it had been a Nazi war crime. Only after Poland regained democratic government in the 1990s would the truth come out and Van Vliet’s suspicions be upheld: the massacre had indeed been carried out by the Soviets.
Van Vliet was one of a number of Schubin kriegies who remained in the US military after World War II, with many serving through the Korean War and the Cold War. Brooks Kleber was another. When stationed at Fort Monroe, Virginia, Kleber was frequently assigned to escort visiting generals of the West German army around the base.
“I was a guest of your government during World War II,” Kleber would tell the German generals. This would generate an awkward silence before Kleber broke into a grin, and they would all laugh. Kleber held no bitterness toward the Germans. To his mind, his time in POW camps had been a lesson in human values.3
Many Schubin kriegies went on to achieve high US Army rank and responsibility. Jerry “Dagger” Sage served as a special forces colonel until his retirement in 1972. Gentleman Jim Alger, head of Oflag 64’s escape committee, retired in 1970 with the rank of lieutenant general. Johnny Waters became commandant of cadets at the US Military Academy, West Point, and, in the 1960s, US Army commander in the Pacific; he also retired as a lieutenant general. Task Force Baum was a sore point with Waters, and he steadfastly held to the line that Patton’s raid had been designed to rescue all Schubin kriegies at Hammelburg, not just him.
Equally, Abe Baum never varied from the opposite view. He went into the clothing business following the war, and was deprived of the opportunity of wringing an admission from General Patton that Task Force Baum was all about rescuing Johnny Waters when Patton died after a road accident in Germany in December 1945. Not long before his death, Patton expressed a single regret about Task Force Baum. In memoirs serialized by the Saturday Evening Post in 1945, he said he’d made a mistake in not sending a 3,000-man combat command to liberate Oflag XIII-B instead of a 300-man task force.
After Jack Hemingway was freed at Moosburg, he made his way to Paris, where he celebrated VE Day on May 8, 1945. Returning to the United States shortly afterward, he traveled on to Cuba to reunite with his father and younger half-brothers, who were shocked by what they saw—Jack had lost seventy pounds in captivity. After the war, Jack devoted himself to his first love, fishing, and became a noted Idaho conservationist. He spent the latter part of his life preserving his father’s literary legacy.
Craig Campbell ended up being sent to Odessa by rail, where he rejoined fellow Schubinites. As the first RAMPs were being shipped out, both Campbell and escaper Bob Crandall, who’d reached Odessa by a roundabout route under NKVD supervision, succeeded in having themselves assigned to the troop transport Duke of Bedford, which was carrying mostly British personnel and heading for Western Europe when it sailed on March 15.
Both Campbell and Crandall disembarked at the French Mediterranean port of Marseilles, with Crandall determined to return to his unit and Campbell planning to make his way back to General Eisenhower’s HQ to report for duty. Campbell and Eisenhower had an emotional reunion before the general put the lieutenant aboard an aircraft bound for the United States. Mamie Eisenhower would write to Campbell’s mother from Washington, DC, on April 25 to say that Craig had passed through the capital that morning on his way home. “I know you are a happy mama today,” said Mrs. Eisenhower.4 Following VE Day, Campbell returned to Europe to resume duty as Eisenhower’s ADC, but by the end of 1945 he had left the military.
Ed Ward didn’t remain in the army long after the war, either. In February 1945, two days after the Moscow Trio had set off from Schubin, Ward had done the same, walking in a group of thirteen kriegies to Hohensalza, then taking a train to Kutno. From there, Ward had hitched rides to Warsaw, then to Lublin, where he’d fallen into NKVD custody. He’d arrived in Odessa on February 28 and was astonished to find unblinking female Russian attendants in charge of the men’s shower room. On March 7, he, like the vast majority of Schubin escapees, sailed from Odessa aboard the British troopship Moreton Bay, which took them to Naples. From there, Ward sailed to Boston aboard the Mariposa and on April 9 entered Camp Miles Standish in Massachusetts for ten days of quarantine and debriefing by G-2. Ward left the army that September.
Along with Ward, Kleber, Jones, Bill Shular, Dale Barton, Mays Anderson, Alfred Nelson, Tom Riggs and hundreds of other escaped Schubin kriegies, H. Randolph “Boomer” Holder and his escape partner, George Durgin, sailed from Odessa aboard the Moreton Bay. In Naples, Holder fell ill and was hospitalized. He missed the boat when Durgin and most of the other escaped kriegies sailed for the United States at the end of March. Once he recovered, Holder was flown home by the USAAF via Casablanca and Bermuda.
Holder landed at New York City, arriving back in the United States at much the same time as Durgin and the others. It would be another forty-five years before Holder and Durgin saw each other again. Following the war, Holder returned to his first love, radio. By midlife, he owned two radio stations in Athens, in northeast Georgia, for many years doing the breakfast session at one station. In his trademark deep voice, no matter what the weather, Boomer would always start his shift with, “It’s a lovely day to be in Athens.”5
After Frank Diggs got home he never forgot the Dudziak family, who had helped him and Nelson Tacy to escape in Poland. Following the war, Diggs corresponded regularly with the Dudziaks. When he learned that their one and only horse had died, he bought a horse in the United States and shipped it to them. He visited the family in the 1970s.
Not a few kriegies struggled with their wartime memories. Escapee Spud Murphy was among those who committed suicide. Mays Anderson feared a 1985 visit to Schubin would bring back postwar nightmares. Instead, it laid ghosts to rest. Many would never talk about their kriegie experiences. Alfred Nelson only opened up to his family about his Schubin break when he was in his eighties. Some, like Bill Ash, the first American to escape from Schubin, purged themselves of bad memories by writing successful books about their kriegie experiences.
Ash, who was liberated by British troops, settled in London after the war. He reckoned that one of the best things about becoming an author was all the free food at the book’s launch, which contrasted so vividly with the bread and water diet he’d experienced on numerous trips to the Cooler—an experience that contributed to the book’s creation. Clarence Meltesen, Boomer Holder, Reid Ellsworth, Frank Diggs, Herb Garris, an increasingly optimistic Billy Bingham and a number of other Schubinites also wrote books about their experiences. While they never became big sellers like Ash’s book, those works have provided vital resource material for World War II historians.
SAO Paul “Pop” Goode, the Schubin shepherd who cared for his men through months of imprisonment and grueling marching, remained in the US Army for another seven years until he retired, disabled, in 1952. He passed away in 1959 at the age of sixty-seven. “He was a marvelous individual,” said Brooks Kleber. “One of the most valiant men I have ever met.”6
The other player in this story, the town of Schubin, today’s Szubin, is even more of a sleepy backwater than it was in the 1940s. The train does not even run there anymore. Immediately after the war, seeming normality returned to the town just as a number of former expelled Polish residents returned. Józef Kapsa came back and reclaimed his home and print shop on Paderewski Street. He ran the printing business successfully again until Poland came under Communist control, after which it was taken over by the state in 1949, without compensation. Kapsa and his son were employed by the Communists to operate their own print shop for the government until it closed in 1970.
The print shop’s wartime owner, German printer Willi Kricks, also survived the war. He and his wife rented a print shop in Altmark before fleeing East Germany’s Communist regime in 1950 and settling at Worms, West Germany. There, Kricks established his own printing business. His son, and later his grandson, ran it after his death in 1988. A decade ago, Willi Kricks’ German granddaughter knocked on the Kapsa family’s door in Szubin. She asked to be shown the printery run by her grandparents during the war. Today, the Kapsa print shop building is used as a recording studio by Józef Kapsa’s great-grandsons.
A well-tended gravestone stands at Szubin commemorating fifty-nine Red Army soldiers, although only twelve are named. It records that they were killed in the liberation from the Nazis of Szubin and surrounding areas, most during February 1945. Local Poles well knew that the Wehrmacht had abandoned the town without a fight that January, and it has been suggested that, in reality, not a few of these deceased Russians passed out after drinking too much vodka, expiring from the combined effects of excess alcohol and exposure to the winter cold.
Brave Stefania Maludzińska resettled in the town of Toruń, east of Szubin, where she befriended Kazimierz Rakoczy, commandant of the local Citizen’s Militia. In 1946 the British government presented Stefania with a certificate of commendation in recognition of her efforts to help POWs escape. This attracted the interest of Poland’s Communist Secret Political Police, who arrested Stefania for links with a foreign government. She was released after spending two weeks behind bars. Her friend Commandant Rakoczy was fired from his militia post and sent to work in a coal mine for eighteen months. Both subsequently had trouble finding work. Thrown together by their shared adversity, the couple married.
Stefania Rakoczy passed away in 2014. She was interviewed by Polish radio when American former inmates of Oflag 64 visited the site in the 1970s. Those visitors found key parts of the camp, including the White House, hospital, chapel and commandant’s house, still in use. Following the war, the site again housed a reform school. Alfons Jachalski resumed teaching there and was the school’s principal from 1968 to 1974. The institution continues today as the MOAS, the Home and School for At-Risk Youth, and contains a scale model of the POW camp.
After making pilgrimages to Szubin, several former kriegies reported that nightmares about the war left them for good. The sight of the quiet little town, and the former camp site now minus its barbed wire fences and goon boxes, and with children playing where they’d lined up for Appell twice a day, made the whole idea of war, and prisoner-of-war camps, seem ridiculous. Which it is.
Visits back to Oflag 64 made other Americans remember the desperation and determination that had driven them to escape the Nazis, in the camp and on the forced march from Schubin. No German or Russian records exist covering that last big break. According to Pop Goode’s figures, 241 American officers and enlisted men escaped from the column as it was marched away from Schubin.7 Combined with the six men who hid in the camp when the column moved out, escapees totaled 247. To that number can be added several Schubin men, including Craig Campbell, who bolted east from Schokken at the same time. At 250-plus, this represents by far the single largest recorded Allied escape of World War II. The largest overall POW escape was by Japanese prisoners from a camp at Cowra in Australia in August 1944, in which 234 POWs died and 334 were recaptured.
It is impossible to say with accuracy whether every single one of the Schubin escapees made it home. One or two may have died, unrecorded, in hospitals in Poland or in confrontations with Russian troops, to be listed among the “missing.” But it is certain that almost all the escapees made home runs, making the Schubin break by far the most successful mass escape of the war, leaving the Great Escape well in the shade. All because of American stubbornness, pluck, and grit. And a common irrepressible desire to be free.