At the Rosen estate, Jerry Sage and the other escapees hiding out at the farm had kept under cover through Monday in case German frontline troops put in an appearance. The Americans only emerged that night, going into the rundown manor house in search of food. The estate’s Polish farmworkers welcomed the escapees, soon cooking up a huge pot of vegetable soup for them. The kriegies reciprocated by sharing their Red Cross chocolate and coffee rations—luxuries the delighted Poles had not seen in more than five years. The next morning, the Americans in the house heard the unmistakable clatter and rumble of approaching tanks.
“Lord, they can’t be Jerry tanks,” said John Dimling, who could distinguish one tank from another by the noise of their engines and clanking treads. “They sound like M4s—Shermans.”1 The Red Army used Lend-Lease Shermans.
Jerry Sage, the most senior officer then at the estate, volunteered to take a look and hopefully make contact with the Russians to arrange truck transport for the escapees. The previous day, Sage had removed a pair of small silk US flags that had been hidden in the lining of his battle dress since before he’d been captured and sewed them prominently on the upper arms of his uniform. Walking down the estate’s driveway, Sage saw a massive tank churning toward him. Smiling, he waved his arms back and forth above his head.
The tank came to an abrupt halt in front of him. Its turret turned, pointing the tank’s big gun at the manor house. The monster’s two 50-caliber machine guns both pointed at the American major. With a clang, the turret hatch was thrown open, and out popped the largest Russian that Jerry Sage would ever see in his life.
Sage now used the little Russian he knew to tell the giant Russian tanker that he was an American major named Sage. When the tanker frowned and pointed to Sage’s shoulders, the American explained that these were US flags. Apparently, the Russian was unfamiliar with Old Glory.
“Amerikanski officer, escaped prisoner,” Sage tried to explain. “Where is Marshall Zhukov?”2
The giant pointed back over his shoulder, indicating that the Russian commander was somewhere to the east. Sage was now joined by a Pole from the estate—possibly the same man who’d helped Bingham and Kroll. The Pole satisfied the tank commander that Sage was who he said he was, and the giant broached a broad grin. Declaring that he was on his way to Berlin and couldn’t stay to chat, he retreated inside his metal monster. Spewing smoke from its exhaust, the tank withdrew back down the driveway.
Back at the manor house, where the other American escapees waited nervously, a Pole suddenly burst in. “Russkie! Russkie!” he exclaimed with joy, having seen Sage talking with the Red Army tanker.
The Poles in the house sang a hymn in thanks, after which John Dimling, joined by his American kriegie comrades, sang “God Bless America.” “And how we meant it!” Dimling would say.3
Jerry Sage remained at the estate gate as more Russian tanks rolled by on the road that was still carrying thousands of refugees, who were now going east. After a while, a Red Army lieutenant stopped to question Sage, and the American asked for trucks to start his comrades and himself on their way to Moscow.
As the lieutenant drove off toward Exin, Sage returned to the manor house. There he got into conversation with the newly arrived Lieutenant Colonel Charles Kouns, who had escaped from the column and made his way back to the estate. Kouns, an 82nd Airborne officer from Ardsley-on-Hudson in New York, had been captured in Sicily in 1943. The pair agreed that if no Russian transport turned up that day, they would walk into Exin the following day to see what they could organize.
During the afternoon, a Red Army tank lieutenant walked into the house. Speaking with Kouns, with a Pole interpreting, the Russian said he was very pleased to see the Americans. He proceeded to shake hands all around, then produced a bottle of vodka, which he shared with the kriegies. In return, they gave him cigarettes. Then with a salute, he went out the door.
“Got to keep going to Berlin,” he called back over his shoulder in Russian as he departed.4
* * *
IN THE BARNS at Eichfelde on Monday night following the departure of the Gans group, almost unbelievable news had spread through the column. Oberst Schneider and his guard company had departed, apparently to take part in the fight against the Russians. Only Hauptmann Menner was left with the column as a token Wehrmacht representative. Colonel Goode and his staff promptly moved into the best house in town to access hot water for their men and to plan what they should do next with the column.
Most kriegies happily went back to sleep, convinced that by the time they awoke the next morning, the Russians would have arrived. But Colonel George Millett received permission from Pop Goode to head back to Schubin with another group of around one hundred men who were eager to seek out the Red Army rather than wait at Eichfelde for the Reds to come to them. Major Merle Meacham, MO Ernest Gruenberg and his escape partner, Frank Colley, were in this group of one hundred. Hauptmann Menner had no objections, and few other kriegies noticed when the party slipped away.
At sunup on Tuesday, January 23, Colonel Goode ordered his remaining men not to wander off; he wanted to ensure that they presented to the Russians as one manageable group. But hopes of imminent freedom were dashed when, around 1:00 p.m., instead of Russians appearing, the hated camp security officer Hauptmann Zimmermann marched back into Eichfelde at the head of a detachment of a dozen tough infantrymen from a Latvian unit of the Waffen-SS. Resuming control of the POW column, Zimmermann ordered the Americans to prepare to march to Germany at 3:00 p.m.
Leery of the murderous reputation of the SS, Boomer Holder and George Durgin took this turn of events as their cue to go into escape mode. Burying themselves in hay in the middle of an Eichfelde cattle barn, they had their friend Captain Bucky Walters cover them.5
First Lieutenant Alfred C. Nelson from Kentucky, who’d been captured in Italy the previous July while leading a deep penetration behind German lines, also decided it was time to “go native.” As the column reformed in preparation for the 3:00 p.m. restart to the march, Nelson and a new acquaintance, Lieutenant Nicholas Munson from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, prized a board from the back of their barn and slipped through the gap.
Hiding behind a haystack in the compound, Nelson and Munson avoided detection by Zimmermann’s dozen guards, who had their hands full managing 1,300 prisoners. Once the column marched from sight, Nelson and Munson scurried from the compound and made it to a nearby pine forest unseen. There they built themselves a lean-to bivouac from pine branches. They would spend the next three days there in the forest before setting off to find the Red Army.
Holder and Durgin, hiding in the hay, had also avoided detection as the SS men made a cursory check of the barn. Long after the column had marched off, they remained where they were, continuing to hide even when farmworkers later came into the barn. After several hours of silence, the pair emerged and identified themselves to a little old Pole feeding the cattle.
“Amerikanski?” said the old man, beaming.
Aided by local Poles, Holder and Durgin, joined by a young escaped Russian POW, would remain there in Eichfelde for several days. Their escape odyssey was just beginning.
* * *
AS THE MEN in the column tramped on through the afternoon of that third, reduced day of marching, four kriegies slipped away as the marchers passed through a thick wood, with comrades screening their departure from the diminished guard. The column paused in the middle of Charlottenburg (Polish Falmierowo) on the last of its ten-minute rest breaks before bedding down for the night in the massive barn of a large dairy farm on the outskirts of town. Following a distribution of black bread, the kriegies were ordered to sleep in the barn’s haylofts.
This farm compound was surrounded by a ten-foot barbed wire fence, and SS sentries were posted at its entrance. As usual, inside the compound, the Americans were left to their own devices. This suited Frank Diggs and Nelson Tacy, who changed into their escape outfits of German soldier and Polish worker. In the twilight, the pair hauled their packed sled from the barn. Tacy then took over the hauling, with Diggs following along behind, posing as Tacy’s escort as he brandished his “rifle” and cursed him in German. Snow was falling lightly as they headed for the farthest, darkest corner of the compound fence.
Out of the blue, a patrolling SS guard yelled something to them. Diggs waved dismissively, and the pair kept going. The guard ignored them, turning away. On reaching the fence, Tacy climbed to the top. With a monumental effort, Diggs hoisted the sled up to him, and Tacy managed to get it over. With a thud, the sled fell to the snow on the far side. Diggs climbed to the top, and then both men dropped to the earth outside the compound. Standing with ears pricked, the pair heard not a sound. No shouts, no shots. Getting onto a road, they headed away from the farm, with Tacy continuing to haul the sled alone and Diggs bringing up the rear, still in the guise of an escorting soldier.
Hands thrust deep in his pockets, a Polish civilian heading home after work hurried toward them through the falling snow. Diggs and Tacy stopped him.
“Do you speak English?” Diggs asked.
The surprised Pole shook his head.
“Amerikanischer offizier,” Diggs then said, to explain who they were. In his rough German, he went on to say they needed a place to hide.
The Pole nodded. In German, he replied that, at a farmhouse a few kilometers down the road, there lived a Mr. Dudziak, a member of the Polish underground. Mr. Dudziak would be able to help them, the workman assured the escapees, describing the house they should look for. Thanking the Pole, the pair moved on, both of them hauling the sled now, as the snow began to thicken on the ground. For close to two hours they labored, until, outside the village of Wirsitz (Polish Wyrzysk), they found a farmhouse fitting the description given to them by the man on the road. Hoping it was the Dudziak house, they went up to the door and knocked. The door opened a few inches.
“Mr. Dudziak?” said Diggs. “Amerikanischer offizier. Can we come in?”
The door was flung open by a weathered farmer in his fifties, and the pair was hauled indoors. So too was their sled. They found themselves inside a basic, three-room farmhouse.
“Momma, food!” cried the farmer.
Mrs. Dudziak, a tiny, industrious woman, quickly rustled up something for the Americans to eat as the couple’s children clustered around—two boys in their twenties, plus a boy and a girl in or close to their teens. In the light of a kerosene lamp, Diggs and Tacy ate and answered a barrage of excited questions from the Dudziak family. The Dudziaks, devout Catholics, were more worried about the coming Communists than they were about the departing Nazis. When Diggs and Tacy asked to stay in the barn, the Dudziaks would not hear of it. The Americans were led to the residence’s double bed and told they must sleep there. As Diggs and Tacy eased wearily down onto the bed, they found themselves lying on a feather mattress for the first time in years.6
* * *
BACK AT THE column’s overnight stop in the giant dairy barn, more kriegies were progressing with escape plans. Ed Ward and five friends from Schubin’s Block 3A found hiding places in the barn and waited for dawn.7
A dozen guards were always going to struggle to contain so many prisoners, and the Latvians had their hands full the next morning just forming up the column. With neither the time nor the manpower to conduct detailed searches, and with head counts a thing of the past, Hauptmann Zimmermann got the column under way after just a cursory search of the barn, which failed to find Ward or his colleagues.
Ward’s party remained in hiding in the barn through the day, joined by another eight kriegies who escaped from the column while it was on the march that day. The fourteen escapees would remain in the barn for the next seventy-two hours as German patrols passed by and Russian aircraft bombed unseen German targets in the vicinity.
* * *
REID ELLSWORTH WAS still at the Rosen estate. He was not impressed by Colonel Gans when he arrived with the party of sick kriegies from Eichfelde. Deciding to remain at the estate, Gans took over as SAO there. Ellsworth considered Gans indecisive and lacking in the qualities he expected of an SAO in their situation. Several more Russian tanks had rolled past the manor house during the day. Sending a junior officer to locate the Russians and have them send an officer to him, Gans produced a homemade American flag he’d been carrying with him, spread it on a table, sat down and waited for Russians to arrive.8
Later that day, the Red Army sent word that trucks would be provided for Americans at the estate in three days and that the kriegies should sit tight until they arrived. Roy Chappel, former Van Vliet escape team member, was another who hid out at the estate, and he now became involved in cooking for the growing group of Americans there, slaughtering one of the baron’s sheep and commandeering some of the Rosen vegetable supply for a veritable feast that night.
Reid Ellsworth had already decided to remain in the army after the war, and he began to worry that his insanity project had been too successful and that, back in the States, fellow Oflag 64 inmates would tell the US Army he was mentally unstable. He was delighted that Major Merle Meacham had returned to the manor house during the day; taking him aside, Ellsworth begged the major to tell the others present that his craziness in camp had all been part of an approved escape plan. Meacham happily complied, and after their fine dinner that night he addressed their fellow escapees and passed on the insanity project secret that he and Ellsworth had shared.
“I’ll be damned!” exclaimed MO Ernest Gruenberg, who had spoken with Ellsworth in the course of his charade. “The only thing that would have gotten you out of the camp faster would have been a sloppy suicide attempt.”
“Such plans had been in process, doc,” Ellsworth replied, bringing hoots of laughter from his comrades.9
* * *
JERRY SAGE AND Charlie Kouns walked back to Exin from the Rosen estate the following day, on a road now clogged with Russian military vehicles. Ernest Gruenberg and Frank Colley accompanied them, and while Sage and Kouns spoke with Russian officers at Exin about securing trucks for the kriegies at the estate, Gruenberg and Colley kept on walking to nearby Wegheim. There Gruenberg and Colley found a Red Army field hospital busy with Russian battle casualties. The Russian MO in charge was a female major, and when Gruenberg offered to help out, she welcomed his aid. For the time being, Gruenberg and Colley remained at Wegheim.
Meanwhile, Alfred Nelson and Nicholas Munson had left their forest bivouac. They pushed east in the night only to come upon a series of German machine-gun nests that were almost invisible in the snow. Fortunately for the Americans, the German troops were looking east, and the pair was able to crawl by the positions. Once clear, Nelson and Munson disagreed on which direction to take. So, with mutual good wishes, they split up. Nelson continued on alone for several days, at one point slipping on the ice and cutting a knee to the bone. Limping on, he spied a light on the other side of the frozen Bromberg Canal (Kanał Bydgoski).
“That’s for me,” said Nelson to himself and, slipping and sliding, he crossed the ice to the far side of the waterway.10
The light was at a Red Army encampment, but Nelson didn’t receive a warm welcome from the scruffy Russian troops he encountered. Suspecting him of being a German deserter, the Russians stripped him of his clothes, tied his hands behind his back, and put him against a wall. A firing squad lined up.
“Stalin! Roosevelt! Churchill!” the terrified young American kept repeating to the Russians as he attempted to convince them he was an ally.11
Ignoring his protestations, the Russians had their rifles aimed at Nelson when a Red Army officer arrived on the scene. He put a stop to the proceedings, saving Nelson’s life. Not sure whether to believe that Nelson was American, the officer took him to the nearest town—Nelson had no idea what town it was—and lodged him in the basement of the mayor’s house with a sentry at the top of the stairs. After a time, Nelson noticed that his guard had disappeared, and, taking his chances, he crept from the house in darkness. Locating railroad tracks, he jumped a passing train and hoped and prayed it would take him to someplace where he could link up with fellow Americans, and keep him out of the hands of the Red Army.