To Kingdom Come (37 page)

Decorations usually led to promotions.

Bob Travis was aiming for the top.

Reb

Monday, 25 December 1944
Krems, Austria
Stalag 17
Barracks 18B
Sergeant Olen “Reb” Grant

Dearest Mother,

It’s night here, but you probably haven’t sat down to eat Christmas dinner yet. We had plenty of snow this morning and the sun came out nice and bright. By noon it had clouded up again. I sat up until three o’clock last night thinking of you and Sis and Dad and Hugh and Lamar.... A man does a lot of thinking here and I have found all the mistakes I have made and I’ll see that they don’t happen again. Mother, when I get home we will celebrate Christmas all over again. Until then God bless you all and keep well and safe. All my love, Olen

The 1944 Christmas dinner menu at Stalag 17 was neither mouth-watering nor expansive. It consisted of cabbage soup, raw carrots, a slice of coarse bread, and cold tap water. The prisoners enjoyed the same meal almost every day. On special occasions, the soup was flavored with small chunks of horse meat.

Reb Grant was celebrating his second Christmas at Stalag 17. Since November 1943, he had lived in Barracks 18, a one-story wood-frame building that housed five hundred men. They slept in three-tiered bunks that ran along the rough-board walls. After six months of captivity, he had secured a prized second-tier bunk near the center of the building, which remained slightly warmer during the harsh winters.

The barracks had no stove. Warmth was provided by the body heat of the men. There was a wash room in the center of the long building that had a half dozen cold-water taps. There were no sinks. The water ran into an open trench beneath the barracks floor.

A walkway ran down the center of the building. With the snow and mud, it had several inches of packed dirt along much of its length. There were no brooms or mops to clean up the mess.

Lice, fleas, and bedbugs ran rampant. Most of the men hadn’t been able to bathe in months. The smell of their bodies was ferocious and constant. Dysentery was common, and the latrines were some distance away. If a man needed to relieve himself at night, there was a two-seat privy at each end of the building. No man left the barracks at night. Several had been shot doing so.

For Reb Grant, the conditions weren’t all that intolerable. He was used to hard living. During the Depression, his whole family had lived in a single tent with no running water after his father, Eli, had gotten a job wildcatting at an oil field near Longview, Texas.

Aside from the stinging cold, he hated the boredom more than anything else.

In one important way, this Christmas was different from the last one in 1943. According to the camp rumor mill, there was a big battle going on in the Ardennes Forest, with the Germans claiming they had driven the Allied army back to the sea. Of course, one couldn’t accept anything they said at face value.

It was clear to all of them by then that the Germans had lost the war. It was only a matter of time before either the Americans or the Russians broke through. The prisoners simply had to survive until that day came.

Their principal fear stemmed from another rumor that Hitler had ordered the execution of all the captured bomber crews that had wreaked so much death and havoc on the Fatherland. There was no reason to doubt that this order could still be carried out.

All in all, Reb thought he was pretty damn lucky. It was a miracle that he had survived the crash of
Yankee Raider
. After regaining consciousness in the Paris hospital, he had slowly regained his strength. Once he was able to sit up, the nurses transferred him to a chair next to his bed. He had spent many hours gazing out the window of his ward.

The converted military hospital was located next to the Seine River. A soccer field separated the hospital from it. Every day, the Luftwaffe air defense units that manned the antiaircraft batteries around Paris would be marched to the field for calisthenics and soccer games.

The Germans would always arrive in marching order singing military songs so loudly that the music carried straight up to his window. After the games and exercise periods were over, they would reassemble to march back to their units, still singing. Reb decided that they were the singingest people in the whole world.

There was one German nurse who he found very attractive. She was the blond assistant to the doctor who was treating his wound. Even with the right side of his face blown away, he thought there was something going on. The old rebel still had it, he decided.

“Here is the Englander,” she would always say in a sarcastic tone when he arrived to have his dressing changed.

“I’m not English,” he would reply hotly. “I’m an American.”

Behind all the sarcasm, Reb was sure she liked him.

In October, they brought in two American pilots from a downed B-24. The fliers had been splashed with leaking hydraulic fluid inside their burning plane, and the fluid caught fire before they bailed out. Their bodies were terribly burned. To Reb, it looked like their faces had melted away. When the first one regained consciousness, he glanced at himself in a hand mirror and said he could never go home again.

In late October, Reb’s doctor told him that the infection in his head wound had been stabilized and he would soon be able to leave. A few days later, he was escorted to the main entrance of the hospital to join three other Allied airmen who were being released the same day.

They were loaded into the back of a truck and taken to Saint-Lazare train station.

On the train platform, a shoe shine boy, as black as the children Reb had grown up with in El Dorado, Arkansas, came scrambling through the sea of passengers. He stopped at Reb’s feet and, using sign language, asked if he wanted his shoes shined. Looking down at the little boy’s searching eyes reminded him of home, and he found himself crying.

It was snowing by the time the train left the station, and they traveled all night. When the train arrived at Frankfurt, Germany, Reb smelled the smoke before he saw the fires that were raging across the city. It had been bombed the night before, and panic-stricken Germans were lined up at the station, waiting to take the same train he had just arrived on.

The four Allied prisoners were being escorted by four German soldiers, all of them armed with light machine guns. Reb had made a joke in the train about the need for four Aryan supermen to escort four invalids who had just left a hospital.

On the platform, his thinking changed.

The fear on the faces of the Germans turned to rage when they saw the men under guard, including an RAF flier in his flight suit. Word coursed through the crowd that these were some of the men who had bombed Frankfurt.

The mass of frightened people suddenly became a raging mob. They surrounded the small group and began screaming for vengeance. The German guards shoved their way through as the mob kicked and clawed at the airmen.

Two men began dragging Reb out of the slow procession and into the clutch of the others. He knew they would beat him to death. It was a close result. He was only reprieved when one of the German soldiers opened fire with his machine gun into the air.

The four were taken to a holding camp outside Frankfurt. It was surrounded by barbed wire. Inside the camp, he was placed in an unheated five-by-eight-foot cell with an iron door.

In his first interrogation, he was told that since he wasn’t wearing a dog tag when he was first captured, the Germans had to assume he was an American spy. Spies were shot.

Reb tried to explain why he didn’t have his dog tag: that he had taken the tag off back at his base in England before taking a shower. The interrogator said he didn’t believe him.

The next morning, Reb heard the sound of gunfire and his imagination began to run wild. Along the cell block, the iron doors were being opened and slammed shut. Were they taking men out into the field and executing them?

In his next interrogation, the interrogator again demanded to know who he really was. Over the next few days, he kept repeating the same story while continuing to give them his name, rank, and serial number.

By then, his facial wounds had become infected again. The dressing over his eye had not been changed since he left Paris. An RAF doctor who was also a prisoner in the camp finally changed it a week after he arrived.

Reb was being held in another cell when he saw that some of the recent Allied prisoners had scratched their names on the wall. His good eye was drawn to one of the names.

“Sgt. A Valcour,” it read. “384th BG.”

Al Valcour had been shot down on the Hamburg mission back in July. Finding his name on the wall was like a letter from home. Old Val was still alive. Maybe Reb would even catch up to him. The discovery gave him a new injection of hope.

After a week of solitary confinement, he was finally released from the holding camp. Another train took him through the bomb-devastated cities of Nuremberg and Regensburg before crossing over the border into Austria.

His new home of Stalag 17 was located in Krems at the confluence of the Danube and Krems rivers. A German army garrison was quartered in the same town. When Reb and about fifty other prisoners arrived at the rain-swept camp, its “Main Street” was lined with hundreds of American airmen, all hoping to recognize a new arrival who might have fresh news of crewmates or friends.

One of them was Eldore Daudelin, the other waist gunner on
Yankee Raider
, who had left Reb for dead aboard the plane before he bailed out and was taken prisoner by the Germans.

Awestruck, Daudelin gazed at him like he was Lazarus risen from the grave. His pleasure at Reb’s survival was quickly replaced by a sense of guilt at what he had done. Reb told him to forget about it, but the other man continued to blame himself for leaving him behind in the doomed bomber.

In February 1944, Reb’s facial wound became infected yet again. The right side of his face became paralyzed, and he lost his sense of smell. Considering the ever-present stench in the barracks, that wasn’t all bad, but the infection continued to grow worse.

He was sent under guard to a military hospital in Vienna. There, a surgeon told him the infection would continue to fester unless he removed the shrapnel embedded in the bone of his nose and the shattered eye socket. He proposed to remove some of the shrapnel, and then cut away a large section of skin on his forehead and fold it over to cover the eye socket. He would leave a tiny opening in the skin so that Reb could use an eyedropper to suction out the ongoing drainage from the wound.

In the weeks he was there, continuous trainloads of wounded German soldiers arrived from the Russian front. When Reb left, they lined the floors of all the corridors and anterooms.

On April 5, 1944, he turned twenty-one years old.

Six months later, word began to spread through the camp that representatives of an international repatriation commission were coming to Stalag 17 to interview prisoners whose wounds and injuries rendered them incapable of serving as future combatants. Prisoners who met these conditions were to be exchanged for German prisoners currently held by the Allies.

Reb added his name to the list, and after several interviews, the doctors working for the commission approved his participation in the exchange. In late December, he joined the fortunate few who would be leaving for America.

They traveled by train to Leipzig, passing one desolate, bombed-out place after another. At a former officers’ training school, he was issued new clothing by the International Red Cross and permitted to take a bath, the first one he had enjoyed in more than a year. Reb reveled in the hot soapy water for more than an hour, only emerging when the aroma of roasting meat drew him toward the nearby mess hall.

From Leipzig, the prisoners traveled by train to Marseille, where the exchange took place near the port. Reb watched the downcast faces of the German prisoners as they filed past. He didn’t think they were very thrilled to be going home.

Reb and the other American prisoners were ferried out to the Swedish ocean liner
Gripsholm
, which was waiting for them in the harbor. Soon, they were on their way across the Mediterranean Sea.

On February 20, 1945, the
Gripsholm
arrived in New York. Many of the returning Americans had predicted that the dock would be thronged with cheering crowds, but the huge pier was almost completely deserted.

At the foot of the gangway, they were greeted by three GI musicians who played “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” over and over while an officer checked off their names on his clipboard. They were herded onto several buses and driven to Halloran General Hospital in Queens.

Two days later, Reb received his first pass. Howard Wood, a friend of his from Stalag 17 who had been repatriated to the United States a year earlier, picked him up at the hospital with his new wife and drove him into the city for a night on the town.

They had also arranged a blind date for him.

Her name was Priscilla Hutchinson, and she was a slim, lovely, strawberry blonde. Twenty years old, she worked as a receptionist at an advertising agency on Madison Avenue.

She wasn’t at all put off by his facial disfigurement.

“You have the look of eagles in your face,” she told him later that night.

They had two more dates over the next two nights. Then he received his travel orders. The army was sending him to O’Reilly Army Hospital in Springfield, Missouri, for the first of many operations to rebuild his face.

That night, Reb told Priscilla he was in love with her, and asked her to marry him. Priscilla told Reb that she had also fallen in love with him, and tearfully accepted his proposal.

On Monday, February 26, 1945, six days after his return to the United States, Olen Grant and Priscilla Hutchinson repeated their marriage vows at John Street Methodist Church. Reb’s best man was Sergeant Tom McDonald, who had spent a year with him in Stalag 17.

As soon as he got out of the army hospital in Missouri, he was planning to head west with Priscilla. In his long months of captivity, Reb had often dreamt of roaming the high country in Colorado and California. Wherever they ended up, he planned to savor each and every day for the rest of his life.