INTERVIEW OF JOHN JAMES
Transcript Number 005

Welcome and greetings to you from the friends and veterans of World War II Remembered as they share their lives during the turbulent years of 1937 to 1947. Years that changed forever the political and economic thinking and the structure of practically every nation on the earth. Today the program concerns veterans who served their country with pride and distinction during World War II. In any branch of service, whether the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard or Merchant Marine, they all have a story to tell. Our purpose today is to inform the American public of the sacrifice and experiences of those gallant men. 
The interview today is from the Library at University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW). It's on tape so that their military duty and experiences will always be remembered by the citizens of the United States.




My name is John L. James. The L stands for Langley, but I don't have any relationship to any of the famous Langleys of history. My father was a ship master on a Gulf oil tanker carrying thousands of gallons of good lubricating oil up and down the East coast. I went through high school and graduated with nothing phenomenal. I've always been interested in air craft, since I was about nine years old, and went to my first international air race which was held in Hampton, about 1926, if I remember correctly. I met there a very dashing young Lieutenant, by the name of Jimmy Doolittle. He was stationed at Langley field, at the time. I had some beautiful pictures of him and the special airplane he had, which sold me on navigation from that day on, even though I was only nine years old. 
Later on, my family moved from an island in the Chesapeake Bay area, where I was born, to Philadelphia, where I completed high school. I enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania, but didn't get a chance to go very far, however. While I was in high school, I started flying lessons in what was known as a J-3 Piper cub with a 30 horse power engine. It was a pilot glider, but I learned to fly. I flew some strange airplanes in that period of my life, by hanging around the airport, getting coffee for the guys, sweeping hangars, refueling aircraft, and generally running errands. I didn't have money to pay for lessons, but I sure worked like the devil to get lessons. The fellows got to know me and I wound up doing little odd flight jobs for them. We had a Curtis Robbins; a museum piece, today and we had some Fairchild cabin planes, which are also museum pieces. In fact, everything we had, during that day, would be in a museum. They were old even for that day, but it was flying, it was fun, and I enjoyed it. 
As I completed high school, I enrolled in the mechanics school and was just about to finish up. I had about a month and a half or maybe a little less than two months to go, when this fellow from Canada came down. This was in 1941. They were looking for pilots and I had just gotten my commercial license, which only required that you fly for 200 hours and pass a test. I had just done that. He said, "Sign up with us, go to Canada, and we'll teach you to fly Lockheed Hudson's" -- the nice twin engine Lockheed airliners that were converted into bombers. "We'll teach you to fly them, you can fly them to England, and when you get back to Canada, each time you ferry one over, we'll give you $1,500." That was a small fortune in those days. I had a beautiful girlfriend, who I later married, but I was planning on marrying her at that time. I thought $1,500 --- two flights a month--- that's $3000 a month! Brother count me in! How soon do I go? He said, "Wait a minute, you are going to finish this mechanics school and then come to Canada. We'll sign you up right now, but don't report until you finish, because you'll be more value to us as a mechanic pilot than just as a pilot." So I thought what the heck, I want the mechanics rating too---I agreed with him and I did it. 

Well, some how, somewhere along the line, my draft board learned about it. I got a card in the mail one day, which said report to the Philadelphia Armory for a medical inspection, be sure to bring your tooth brush, and you may stay overnight. So, I reported fat, dumb, and happy and I stayed overnight. Fourteen months later, I got home. I went down at 9:00 o'clock in the morning and 9:00 that night, I was sitting in Camp ???? Virginia, in a uniform three sizes too big for me. I was a Private in the Army, hiding in the rear rank whenever I could, so the 1st Sergeant couldn't find me. There was no induction inspection physical and that was the way I went into the Army. That was May 12,th. 1941. It was fighting time and I went to Fort Lewis. Remember, I just got my license and just signed up to fly, so why did the Army put me in an anti-aircraft unit with 37 millimeter guns that couldn't hit the broadside of a mountain at ten feet? We fired at tow targets from airplanes and we knew where they were coming from, how fast they were, when, and could we hit them! We fired 5000 rounds one time at such tow targets, hit the targets 13 times, and broke an Army record. Anti-aircraft fire was a bit of a joke as we practiced it. We couldn't hit the broadside of the graf Zeppelin if the thing came overhead and stopped right up there. As they told us, anti-aircraft fire wasn't designed to hit airplanes, it was designed to confound the air crews. We also had 3 inch guns which weren't any better. They could hit far away patterns and we could make a nice pattern in the sky. This was pre-radar and everything was manual, but I don't think they were any better than we were with the 37's. 
Well that was not exactly the kind of thing that raised any interest in me, whatsoever. The little girls in El Paso were very pleasant. Juarez was even better -- you could get a steak, a quart of beer, and enough French fries for three people for a dollar at that time. Of course, the salary was a joke -- we got ten dollars a month. As a private, you were paid $21.00, but they always kept about $11.00 for what was called a battery fund. This included fees for your laundry, haircuts, and things of that sort. So, cash in hand, if you were lucky, was about $10 a month. We didn't eat many steaks, although they were good. The bull fight in Juarez was 50 cents a person. We had some entertainment and it was cheap. The theater was real good and a movie was 15 cents. That $10 dollars covered a right good range, so I couldn't complain too much. 
I did get in on the first radio controlled models to be used for anti-aircraft targets and it was a lot of fun They were built in Fort Lewis, which is in El Paso. That was an enjoyable assignment. My 1st Seargent thought I was a genius, as far as airplanes were concerned but he thought I was a complete blithering idiot, as far anything else was concerned. He and I didn't see eye to eye, on a lot of things. Of course, he was the boss. The result was, I ended up peeling a lot of potatoes -- KP was a frequent duty. He wasn't a bad guy and he was just trying to teach me the ways of the Army. I was a civilian at heart, if not in vain. It could have been worse by far. This went on the first whole year and I never got any leaves to go home at all the first year. 

I was supposed to go home December the 1st, but after Pearl Harbor, which was on December 7th, you know how that went. Our group went to Seattle. I had been filing requests to be transferred to the Cadet Program, since I got drafted. I filed nine altogether, besides heckling everybody I could possibly think of that might be of some advantage to me. When we got to Seattle, either my C.O. got tired of reading them, or the 1st Seargent got tired of reading them, and somebody along the line thought if this fool's that interested in getting into the Air Corps, let's put him in. My transfer came through and I was an aviation cadet! I was happy -- dumb me! Anyway, I went in and I was transferred to Maxwell Field. That was all ground stuff, but I was happy to be there. I had been wearing GI shoes so long, that when I put on a pair of low cut shoes, it promptly ate my feet up. I never had so many blisters on my feet in all my life, which quickly earned me the nickname of shuffle bunny. I couldn't walk for a long time, properly, and I was excused from marching. It made me happy, but I wasn't dealing with my blisters very happily, but I made it through that. 
Then we went to Dorr Field, Arcadia, Florida from primary, and that was good. We had PT 17s ---little steel ones that were a dream to fly. I almost washed myself out right in the beginning. On the first time I soloed, I didn't tell anybody at all that I'd flown before. I'd been warned not to let them know about it. So the first time I went up for a solo flight, I came in a little bit high and without realizing it, dropped the ship on its side so that you lose altitude right quick. I slipped down where I wanted to be, took her back up to a level flight, and made a beautiful landing. My instructor came over, looked at me, and said, "Where in the Hell did you learn to fly?" I looked real dumb and innocent and said, "You taught me." He said, "No, I didn't! I never taught you how to side slip and you just made one of the prettiest wings I'd ever saw. Don't give me any line man! You can fly as good as I can." So, then I said, "Well, I guess the cat's out of the bag," -- so I told him. His advice was not to ever side slip an Army airplane when anybody can see you. If you have flaps, it's very dangerous, and you can go into a spin right quick -- something I didn't know. If you know how to fly and the Army finds out about it, they'll throw you out. They don't want people who know how to fly and they want you to learn their way. So after that, I was very, very careful how I flew. The rest of the course wasn't bad. I got through it without any trouble, but it was an awful lot of work, though. We went from there to Bainbridge, Georgia, for twin engine training. Twin engine ships were AT10's, plywood beach craft ships. They were all wood except for the engines, which were nice to fly. That's about all I can say for them. That plywood was a mean thing to keep in maintenance, however, but I wasn't concerned with maintenance. I just knew maintenance, because of the mechanics of it. I felt sorry for the guys that had to keep them up. They were nice, from the pilots point of view, and they were nice ships to fly. Then we went to advanced, where we had AT9's. AT9's were made by Curtis and they had a very, very short nose. The propellers, in fact, were stuck out past the nose of the fuselage and they had a glide angle of a stream-line. It was supposed to have been a duplicate of the B-26 for flight characteristics, and I think they were right. You could fly up on the runway of that thing until the end of the runway disappeared, with this remarkably short nose, pull the engines back to idling speed, glide at about a 50 degree angle, and land on the end of the runway. They glided like they were stream-line rocks, but you always had to come in with some power on them. They were beautiful in the air, very maneuverable, and very nice. They had one bad feature -- the gas tanks were in the center section of the wing and every one I was ever in, leaked just a little bit. It leaked just enough to keep your cockpit smelling of gasoline, which was not really the thing you wanted to smell in the air. Otherwise, they were nice airplanes. They were built to carry two, but some of them had seats in the back for three other people. However, I never saw anybody carry them, because they didn't carry passengers at that time B we weren't allowed to carry any. The base commander had, at his disposal, a Lockheed Hudson, like I was going to fly to England. We were allowed to fly that, occasionally, just before we graduated. I got a couple of hours on that and that was training. 

I had put in for gunnery, so the last thing in my training, I went to Englefield Florida for two weeks for gunnery in an AT6. I didn't think it was too outstanding, but the guys running the school, thought it was phenomenal. They said, "Man, you're a great shot. You ought to go into fighters." I thought, "No, I don't want fighters." I almost wound up in P-38s, however, but I had been applying all the way through for bombers and big airplanes. I said "the bigger they are, the better." To my delight, I wound up at a place called Peyote, just south of Amarillo in B-17s. We had B-17 D's and E's -- the first of the big tail 17s. They were slow and they were not maneuverable. They were rugged, and if you got one in the air, it stayed there forever. You could do 15 hours if you got one in the air properly. We used to accuse them of having a balloon somewhere and you could tie them to it, turn the engines off, and rest. It wasn't that bad, but they could do 15 hours if you watched your fuel. I flew fourteen missions out of England and they were something else. We flew everyday and the weather didn't matter -- rain, steam, sand storms, or sunshine. If you didn't eat, you still flew. We racked up B-17 time like it was going out of style. 
I was in what they called a provisional group -- a hundred and ten crews in this group. They didn't know where we were going, and all they trained us for was flying. Bombardiers must have dropped a thousand bombs at targets. I had two humorous incidences while we were there. There was a little Texas town not far from us. Targets, at night, were lit up crosses on the ground from twenty thousand to thirty thousand feet, which is about as high as you could go. The object was to hit the sign of the cross with a practice bomb. This little town had two main streets. In the air, it looked exactly like one of the targets. Somebody, who wasn't in my crew, put five practice bombs within a fifty foot circle, where those two streets came together, at the sign of the cross. We were in the club when it happened and the phone rang. The sheriff was on the other end and wanted to talk to the base commander. He started out and said, "Colonel, one of your men is bombing Boysa City. He's dropped three bombs in the middle of the town. What are ya going to do about it?" Before the Colonel could say anything, you could hear him all over the club, and he said in a real loud scream, "Oh my God, here he comes again" and hung the phone up. The whole club roared with laughter, of course, and the Colonel hopped in the staff car and went roaring over there. It was only about 15 miles away. Sure enough, he found five practice bombs, right smack in the center of the city. The only damage that had been done, was one had gone through a garage roof. The rest of them hit backyards and one hit this fellow's front porch. We laughed about that for quite awhile. I flew so much, I really began to feel like it would be nice if we could have a hurricane or something, just to get a day off -- but no way. 

So, they came one day and said, "Ok, you're gonna get a break. In 24 hours from now, we want you packed and we're gonna put you on the troop train." Well, my wife had come out and I had since gotten married. So I told my wife, AI'm going overseas, I don't know where or anything. All they said was, "Get on the train." My wife looked beautiful as she always did, and said, "Don't worry, I'll be all right." So I gave her all the money I had, which wasn't much. On the train, I went along with the rest of my crew. We rode for two days, and I don't know what it is about troop trains, but I think they run backwards at night. Anyway, we pulled into this place and I'm sitting in the middle of this depot along with everybody else, and we're all wondering where in the hell we are. Nobody knew where we were, really, but we were at an army base, somewhere. We had just gotten there and this private comes out of the line and looks me up and tells me a Major wants me. I go in this Major's office and he's so mad he's spitting fire -- you could just look at the man and tell he was furious. He literally throws the telephone at me, I pick it up, and it's my wife. She's in town and the first question is when are you coming in town? I don't know where I'm at, even. It turns out we're in St. Louis and she knew all about it, when we're supposed to be there, how long we were going to be there, and the whole bit! The Major thinks that I knew all the details, that I had told her, and that she can told the other wives, so they could all be there. Anyway, they didn't shoot me, although I thought he would have liked to. We finally got squared away and I did get into town. I asked her how she knew about St. Louis, when we didn't know where we were. She said, "Oh it's simple, I asked the Seargent." I said,"Yes, he was in the same hotel," as there was only one hotel. "Well he wrote up your orders and he told his wife, his wife told us, I told the other girls, and that's how we knew where you were." I thought to myself, it's a pity you didn't tell me. It was typical war time story spreading. We were there for five days and then back on the train, again, to a place called Prestuall. It's on the border between Maine and Canada and it was the coldest darn place I ever was, in August. This was on the 7th of August, and 43 of us got there. We had all been in Peyote, Texas and the temperature was 110 in the shade. Anything three feet high, is considered a tree. In Maine, the temperature is 70 on a hot day and they had trees that were ninety feet high -- what a contrast. We were running around in our uniforms freezing. The girls, up there, were running around in shorts and halters and complaining about the heat. I thought I would freeze to death. In a few days, they loaded us all in DC-4's -- the airliner of the day. Off we went to England, with a stop on the ice cap in Greenland for refueling, We had three pilots and there were six pilots in each group. They carried thirty passengers in those things -- GI style. There were two pilots in each crew; so that's six pilots back there in the passenger line. This guy comes in for a landing on the ice cap in Greenland, and all you can see is this huge field of ice everywhere you look with a black stripe down the side and in the middle of it. There's no airfield and there's no markings. There's nothing but ice and this black stripe about a foot wide and he was landing on it. I was ready to quit flying with that character, that time. I came to find out, that was the way they marked airfields in the ice. You just picked a level spot on the ice and put a black stripe down it so the guys could see it in contrast. If the sun didn't melt it too far into the ice, you were in good shape. That was the airport. The black stripe was to let you know the level spot on which to land. You didn't stop outdoors. The ship stopped on the ice, skidded to a halt, taxied straight into the nearest hangar, they'd shut the doors, and then you turned the engines off. It was only twenty below outdoors and I'm glad I was never stationed around there. We refueled her, went back out in the cold, and took off again.

We then landed at a place called Prestwick, Scotland. This was my first encounter with the Germans. As we walked off the airplane, I could hear somebody calling roll on the speaker and as they got down to my crew, I became very interested. So, I checked with a guy in the tower who happened to be right near and asked who was calling roll and where to report. He laughed and said you don't report anywhere -- that's the Germans calling the roll and that's a little girl from Calais, France who's welcoming you over here. The Germans in France knew that we had just landed and that we were going to be in the office in the control tower. They broadcast all over Europe, so naturally, we listened to them. She broke into the music and went down the roster and called everybody's name and welcomed us to Europe. Then, she added that the Luftwaffe fighters would be waiting for us -- and they were. It was marvelous timing and that was an introduction to them. So from there, we went to London, where a Major gave one of the dumbest briefings I've ever attended. He kept telling us about how the Luftwaffe fighters could not go above twenty thousand feet and we were going to be flying higher. They could not climb up to where we were. After my first mission, I always wanted to take that so and so on a raid with us and say, "Buddy, you see that thing coming down on us? What is that? Where did it come from?" He obviously didn't know what he was talking about and what on earth he thought he was going to tell a bunch of pilots and aircrews -- all who knew better. I can't imagine, but we all sat there in blissful stupidity and listened to him for an hour. After all, he was a Major and the greatest rank we had was Lieutenants. So, he got through and we dutifully filed out and that was the end of him. 
Then we were assigned to groups. This was my first encounter with the Hundredth bomb group. I arrived on the 10th day of August, 1943 and my stay was not very long. We were assigned to the 350th squadron commanded by a Major Cullens who was two days younger than I was. He was a very nice fellow and I really liked him. We got there on the 10th and went on our first mission to Paris on the 12th. It was considered a milk run to go to Paris. It was only ninety miles away, which was practically next door. There was only one group of German fighters who guarded it, although they were a crack group. The flight was not too heavy -- we took fourteen aircraft that day and only lost five. That wasn't considered bad and that was our first introduction. In those days, you had to fly twenty-five missions before you could go back to the states. Out of 110 aircrews I went overseas with, I know one crew of ten men, that managed to fly twenty five missions and go back home. That's one crew out of one hundred, and ten crews that made it. As you can see, casualties were fairly high. To put this another way, according to the Boeing company, they shipped 4800 B-17's to Europe because of the war and when hostilities ended in England, there were only four hundred B-17's in the entire British Isles. So where are the rest of them? They are scattered all over Europe. It doesn't speak very well for the airplane, does it? That says we lost four thousand of the planes somewhere. 

I came in, as a replacement crew, for the first air raid made on the Regensberg. It continued as the Mr. Schmidt factory was making fighters for the Germans. We were the first group in a line of groups, and a total of five hundred planes, altogether, were in the raid. Out of eighteen planes that participated in the shuttle raid, none of them came back to England. They went to Africa and then they came back to England two days later. So the planes took off, bombed Regensberg, landed in Africa, refueled or repaired, and flew back to England. Now we sent out the 100th bomb group with eighteen B-17's to lead that group. After it was all over with, and they were back home in England, we got two crews and one airplane back. Two airplanes had made it to Africa, but one of them was so shot up and so damaged that they scrapped it in Africa. They pushed it in the junk pile and the crew got in the other airplane and flew home. We got two crews back and one airplane out of eighteen. As you can see, the Luftwaffe was not playing with us. Our losses in the ten missions I went on, averaged fifty percent or better, every time we went across the Channel. 

There were three occasions, counting one that happened the day after I was shot down, when we lost ninety five percent of all the airplanes that went out. The day after we were shot down, on the 9th of October, the group took fourteen bombers to a little town called Muenster. That was the first time the 8th Air Force ever bombed a city, rather than bombing something military or industrial. They got one airplane back from that mission and that had happened twice before. One mission, we only got three airplanes back, but it was not an easy thing to do. If you're wondering what happened to my flight, it was very simple. On the 8th day of October, 1943, we took off, and there were fourteen of the 17s to bomb the naval warehouses at what is known as Bremerhaven. This is the seaport for the city of Bremer, which was a principal naval base for the German Navy. We went up over Denmark, over the North Sea, cut across the Bering Sea, and came in over water as much as possible to escape fighters. We came in the harbor from the north, and as we approached, my navigator remarked on the intercom, "I don't know what's going on here, but I've got two islands in the harbor that aren't on my map." He said, "I don't know if they're islands or what they are, but they look like islands and they're not on my map." At that time, they lit up. He said, "They're not islands, they're ships and they're big ships." I don't know what ships they were, but I know one thing, they fired the biggest flack burst I've ever seen in my life. I think they were shooting at us with 8" inch guns --maybe bigger, but we flew right over them. We flew into the heaviest flack barrage I have ever seen. The Germans had no radar and they didn't track us. They simply flew pick up patterns. They'd make a perfect cube in the sky, for instance, and they knew you had to fly through it. Then, they filled this cube as full of lead as they could. Somebody said, they put up everything but the kitchen sink. Well this day at Bremen, they put the kitchen sink in, too. The flack was so heavy and the smoke was so dense, that we turned our navigation lights on -- what they called formation lights. There were three lights on top of the fuselage so that the other aircraft could see us. They also turned their lights on so as to keep us from running into each other in formation. It was not like night, but like a very bright moonlit night in the smoke. We had been told at briefing that they had five thousand 88 millimeter cannons, now, and I had no reason to doubt it. I've seen a lot of flack, but I've never seen what equaled that. I watched them shoot down nine of our ships and was wondering whether we were going to be tenth. By some miracle, they never hit us, but they did take out one of our engines, which forced us out of formation. We couldn't keep up speed with the other ships with the engine gone. We couldn't feather the propeller because it's based on oil and they shot the oil cooler out of our wing. We had no way to control the oil and all the oil ran out of the engine. We were forced to leave the formation and they just flew off and left us. We ran, I would estimate, 30 mph slower than the rest of the fellows. Once we got by ourselves, the German fighters had a field day and just used us for target practice. We fought our way across Europe from Bremerhaven to Holland, where we ran out of ammunition. Then, they really proceeded to work us over. We, then, got hit by night fighters, which normally didn't bother ships in the daytime. We were hit by twenty seven Faulkwell fighters, attacking us alone. That was one whole squadron shooting us up. There were five different kinds of enemy fighters, I counted, and they attacked us at one time or another. They literally cut the ship to pieces. I had gotten a hold of a piece of rubber cord, we called shock cord, and stretched it across one of the windows, and was taking the caps of brass B the part of the bullet that's left after its been fired from a 50 caliber gun. One of my gunners was taking that part of the shell and shooting it at the Germans as you would with a sling shot. I thought and said, "What in the hell do you think you're doing?" He looked at me and kind of laughed and said, "Well, I've got to do something. I'm not just gonna stand here and let these people do nothing." So I patted him on the shoulders and said, "Go ahead, I don't think you'll hit anything, but you're welcome to try." I don't know how much brass he shot out of it, but at least he was trying. Finally, we found we were losing five hundred feet a minute in altitude. We had a fire in the right wing from the fuselage to wing tip with flames coming back over the stabilizer. It was getting too darn hot inside the stabilizer, so the other fellow and I said, "It's obvious, we're not going to make it to the coast and we're sure not going to make it over forty miles of water to England, so I guess we'd better leave. At least the Dutch are friendly, the Germans aren't, and we might escape --- not likely, but possible, so let's go."

Trini and I went back in the waist to get the gunners out and to make sure the waist was empty. He would get the powerman, the navigator, the radio man, and the navigator bombardier out of the nose. Then he went back in the bomb bay, where the bombs were stored, and opened the bomb bay doors. I sat in the back door where I could see him when he did this and he could see me. We'd wave at each other if everything was fine and he would just step off after his roll forward, and be out of the aircraft. So, when he waved and stepped off, I just rolled forward and got off. During the course of all this foolishness, we wore detachable chest packs. The counterfeit part of the parachute could be taken off and hung alongside your chair. Something had shut the supports off the back of my chair and it had collapsed. It had also gone through my parachute canopy. One of my waist gunners had been killed. I had really planned to use his parachute, but the waist was such a mess when I got back there, that I couldn't find his parachute. So when it came to bailing out, I felt I had no choice, so I used mine, even if it did have a hole. The result was, I had this huge hole in one side and it made me swing like you wouldn't believe. I swung so violently at times, I could see the horizon over the canopy. When we got close to the ground, I was swinging backwards and forwards. I've often thought about this and have to laugh every time I think about it. As I came down on these back swings, I missed a Dutchman by inches. He was out there cleaning up the cow droppings in this pasture -- at least that's as near what I could determine he was doing. I missed that poor guy by inches. He looked at me as I went by, threw his pitch fork away, turned away from me, and made about four steps in one spot, before he moved. When his feet took over, you never saw anyone run so fast in your life -- he ran like the devil was after him. As for me I went up in the rest of that swing -- the chute, just barely missing the ground fortunately, and fell. I hit the ground so damn hard, I think I dug a hole in it. That knocked me out and when I came to, I don't know how long it was, a cow was licking my face. If you haven't been licked by a cow, you've missed something -- think of a piece of slimy sandpaper being rubbed over your face -- that's what it felt like. My left arm wouldn't work, and that few days before I got the use of it back, I had bruised it severely. I chased the cow away because I was afraid she was going to get hung up in the parachute. I discovered, later, that I had so much dirt on my face from the fumes of the guns firing, that it must have tasted like salt to her. She sure did like to lick my face and I sure didn't want any part of her licking, I'll tell you. I knew my leg was broken because I had an extra ankle where there wasn't one. It didn't hurt at the time, though, but it was so numb. A bunch of Dutch women showed up and some of them spoke English. They explained to me that they were from the underground, but there was nothing they could do for me because they had no medical supplies. So, I said, "All right, I appreciate the offer, but what am I going to do?" They said, "Nothing, just lay there -- the Germans will be along and they'll take care of you." One of them said, "You may not like it, but they'll take care of you." I thought to myself, that's very ominous. After a few minutes, these two German kids about eighteen or twenty, showed up. When they showed up, the women ran away -- I mean ran away. They acted like they were very much afraid of them. The first thing these two stupid Germans did, they laid their rifles against the tree, about thirty feet away. They didn't know what condition I was in and they hadn't examined me. They just saw me laying there. I didn't get up when they came up and they didn't know if I could or not, they just thought I couldn't. They had no idea if I was bleeding, how many bones I had broken, or what was wrong with me. They hadn't bothered to find out. Here they are, thirty feet away from their guns, and I had a 45 on my belt. I carried it with a full clip and nothing in the chamber, so I wouldn't accidentally shoot myself. Then this one particular teenager gabbers something in German. He points at my 45, indicating he wanted it. I let him have it, because, who am I to argue with him under those circumstances? He's looking at it like he's real proud of this thing, when the other drops the clip out and promptly puts it back. He and his buddy are acting like they have a gold piece, between them. I don't know what they thought they were going to do with it, but they were looking it over quite thoroughly. One of them pulled the slide back, which of course went all the way back to stop, and slipped out of his fingers and went flying forward, the way slides are built to do. He put a bullet in the chamber and he also cocked the gun. Then all he had to do was to breathe on the trigger real good, and it would fire. This was a soldier, supposedly, and he looked down the barrel! I never expected him to do anything like that. I didn't want him to shoot himself, so, I hollered at him. To my utter, absolute astonishment, he gave it back to me. I can think of him doing a lot of things, but I never expected him to give me the gun back. I dropped the clip out and I had only one hand, so I couldn't do anything else with a loaded chamber. I fired it into a tree, which of course locked the slide back. I gave it back to him, which seems even more amazing. They stood and looked at that thing for ten minutes.

Well, the next thing that happened after those two idiots showed up, was a Seargent showed up in a pick up truck. After taking the gun away from them over their protest, which he promptly did, and released the slide, he put the clip back in, after he took the bullets out, and put it in his own pocket. He then flattened my leg out, which hurt like hell, and put the broken leg on top of the good one. He had me put my hands together and grasping both hands, gave me a yank which put me over his shoulder. He then carried me over to the back of his pick up truck. He put the tail gate up and off we went. It wasn't the most gentle ride I'd ever had, but at least I have to give the guy credit, he was trying. It was about 4 o'clock in the afternoon and we rode around until night fell. I have no idea of how far we went, but it was a long ride. He pulled into a bunch of buildings, which I found out later, was the headquarters for one of the squadrons of planes that had been attacking us. A whole bunch of guys came out and proceeded to search me. I had no money on me, but I did have a few little interesting things like a wrist watch, which they took and a pack of cigarettes. The guy, that I thought must have been the doctor, checked me over. He didn't take my boot off and did put a couple of pieces of wood on the outside and tied them up a little with some string he had there. It was crude split. He gave me a shot of something, which was a big help and off we went again. About midnight, we came to this huge building. The truck backed up to what looked like a cement loading platform and the driver got out and very carefully slid me off the truck onto this loading platform and left me. I laid there for awhile and it was awful cold that night. Finally some guys came out in green hospital outfits. They were hospital attendants, I found out later. They picked me up and put me on a metal rolling table. We went into the building, which was nice and warm. Once we got inside, they proceeded to take all my clothes off. They just pulled everything down to my ankle on my bad leg, my pants, socks, boot, and everything, and just left them hanging. They took them off my good leg, though. Then, this fellow came in and he was short and pudgy. I presume it must have been a doctor. He just grabbed hold of my shoe and started pulling. When he did this, it hurt and I must have lifted up some and hollered. I remember this great big fist coming out of nowhere and catching me right on the end of my chin. That fist was as big as a small elephant and the next thing I remember was that they were putting cold plaster paris in the back of my leg and fussing at each other for taking so much time. There was a slightly overweight woman holding my head and my head rested on her bosom. She was kind of holding my head in both hands. Finally, they got through with the bandage and the plaster down there was wet. She let go of my head, stood back, said something, and hauled off and slapped the living daylights out of me -- first, one hand, and then the other. She really hauled off and let me have it and I had no idea why. It was a total, complete surprise. I thought she was going to take my head off and she was strong, too. She hit me about three times on each side. I saw stars, comets, and moons and then I found out when she walked around to the other side, that I had gotten blood on her uniform. My head was bleeding and I had cuts on one side. I found out later, I had been hit with a couple of tiny pieces of shrapnel and it made little scalp wounds. It was nothing to be concerned about, but enough that it had gotten blood on her uniform and she was mad. Then, they took me down the hall into another room and put me in a bed with a wire cage over this leg with the wet plaster. They put a piece of felt over me for a blanket and a dirty sheet for cover. I was never so blasted cold, as that night, in my life. My leg hurt and the plaster felt like it was freezing. To make matters worse, there were four beds in this place I was in. About twenty people came in and threw big heavy overcoats on the bed next to me. I couldn't get, for the life of me, my hands on one. I laid there and yelled, cussed, and moaned -- between being mad, cold, and freezing to death. It turned out, as my eyes got accustomed to the place, that at one time, it had been a chapel. It had a very high pitched, pointed roof and a huge fire place at one end which made all kinds of weird noises. It also had what looked like a pulpit in the middle of the floor. If you ever read Edgar Allan Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum," it reminded me of something out of that book. I kept expecting to see a big pendulum swinging out of the ceiling, but it never did. It had a balcony over my head. Finally, towards morning, it was beginning to get light, and a Dutchman came in and sympathetically asked me what was wrong. As he put it, the Germans would take my head off if I didn't shut up. So, I explained to him that if he would just give me something to get warm, I'd shut up. He said, "Oh that's all." He gave me three of those coats from the other bed, and that did it. I got warm and I went to sleep, a peaceful and wonderful sleep. About ten o'clock, they woke me up and gave me some brown bread, which was all they had and it was made of sawdust. I ate more wood in that country than you could shake a stick at. They also gave me some artificial jam that didn't taste like jam and a cup of linden leaf tea. They took the leaves off a linden tree and dried them somehow and then they soaked them in water and got a brew that looked something like tea. It didn't taste like tea, but it was hot B that was breakfast. An hour or so later, they came in, rolled me up nicely in a beautiful clean blanket and put one under me. They put me on a stretcher and off we went to the railroad station. They put me on the seat with such gentleness and nice treatment, you would have been amazed. Everything was fine until we crossed the border from Holland to Germany. Once we crossed the border, off came the blankets and they gave me my old parachute and said, "Wrap yourself up in this canopy -- that's all you get." From there to Frankfurt, that was all I got for four days of the trip and I thought we'd never get to Frankfurt. One day of the trip was particularly harrowing. We picked up some other fellows as we went until there were five of us. European passenger cars are not like American cars because they're divided up into little rooms. Down one side of the car, is a hall and each room has a door which opens into the hall on one end. At the other end, is a door that opens outside the train. So when the train pulls into the station, you can open this door and step right in at the station. Well, I felt it moving. You could open the door at the other side and walk into the hall and go up and down the train from one compartment to another. They put the five of us in one of these compartments and put me up in the luggage rack because there wasn't sitting room for everybody in the compartment. So, we had the four guys on one side, and I remember all of us were injured in some way -- broken legs, shrapnel wounds, and I forgot what was wrong with the other guys. I didn't even know most of them. I'd go out and sit on the other side. This particular guard looked like there was something wrong with him and he looked like he was dazed. We were all kind of scared of him, to tell you the truth. He didn't look like he was all there. He had a submachine gun, which was not uncommon. This guy sat there with this gun across his knees and for a day and a night and didn't bother to go to meals, didn't go to sleep, and just sat there and clicking the safety of this gun off and on -- click, click, click, click, click, click. That's all he did with this funny looking expression on his face. So finally, he was about to drive us nuts, because we were even afraid to talk. We got to Frankfurt, he left, and some other guys came in. We asked one of the guards, the new guys who came, "What was wrong with that guy who just left?" They looked over at me and said, "You're lucky to be alive." I said, "Yeah, how come?" He said, "That guy, the day before yesterday, lost his wife, his mother, his mother-in-law, and his two sons in an air raid. They should have put him in an hospital, but they kept him on duty. He's in a state of shock, and he doesn't even know where he's at. I don't know why on earth, they didn't put him in the hospital. If he had realized who you were, he'd have probably shot the whole bunch of you, because you're all Air force." I felt kind of upset for him, but I'm damn glad he didn't recognize who we were. That was one of the guards we ran into and some of those guards were shell shocked. 

Frankfurt was an interrogation center and we were just inside the city limits on the North side of the city. The only thing they wanted there, was to identify you. Once you were identified, they could have cared less -- that was their only interest. Then, they shipped you off to a camp. They had charts on what camp you went to and how you were treated, from there on out. It depended on where you came on the chart, on your nationality, your race, your rank in service if you were in service, and your branch of service. For reasons only known to the Germans, some branches of service ranked higher than others. The submarine corp, for instance, was rated much higher than the surface fleet, if you were a Navy man. They put much more stock in submarines than they did in surface vessels. The Air force was the highest rating in the bunch and they had great stock in Air forces. Officers were higher rated than enlisted personnel and the English and Americans were rated quite high on the list. Russians were rated very low, no matter what their rank was, and of course, if you were Jewish, you were a dog. The Jew received no respect and didn't count for anything. Your treatment varied, quite widely, depending on where you came on that chart. Everything had to have a place and had to be put in place. I had a German Major come in one day, always Majors it seemed like. He said, "Good morning Lieutenant. We know who you are." I said, "That's nice, who am I?" He said, "Oh you're Lieutenant James. We know all about you." I guess I must have looked skeptical. He said, "Let me show you. I know more about you than you know about yourself" and he tossed this loose-leaf notebook on the bed and said, "Look at that." He had newspaper clippings in there on everything I think I had ever done. He had all these little clippings out of newspapers about when I had graduated from high school and when I went in the Army. Every single thing you can think of, that had been in the paper, even if it was only one or two lines somewhere, that sucker had it. It was amazing information he had. So I asked him out of curiosity, "Where in the world do you get all this stuff?" He laughed and said, "If you went to Berlin, you would find there's a big building in Berlin filled with nothing but women, who do nothing but read your newspapers. We subscribe to everything you print. Hometown papers, anything else we can find. We get your papers by the tons and we read them." I had to give it to him. How they could keep track of all the men we had overseas, like that, I can't imagine, but I believe they tried. I'm not sure they did, but I really believed they tried. It was astonishing to me.

INTERVIEWER: That's amazing.

MR. JAMES: Incredible!

INTERVIEWER: Incredible is right. 


MR. JAMES: Yes. I knew one fellow in our camp that had gotten married to a girl in California. Later, he had been transferred to New York City and his California wife elected to stay home. She didn't want to go to New York. So while in New York, he had met and married another girl. He now has a wife in California and one in New York. He got captured and the Germans knew about it. They not only told him which wife he had where, but where they were living, what their addresses were, and the names of each minister that married them. It wass the kind of thing that can make a lot of difference. I don't know how on earth they could waste that much time reading.

INTERVIEWER: That's an awful lot of time. 

MR. JAMES: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Investigating and reading all the newspapers from the United States. 

MR. JAMES: That's what he said. I would think that they had better things to do with their time, but evidently, they thought it was worthwhile, but it was tricky. After they got through with that, they decided that my leg wasn't healing. I found out I had a bullet in my other leg. It started to fester up and was beginning to be a nuisance and I didn't even know I had it until then. They decided to send me, to what was jokingly called, a hospital. It was about fifty other guys and myself. They got a cattle car and it had openings on each side with flanks about two inches apart. There was plenty of room for air for the cattle, but they weren't designed for people. The Germans put about three feet of straw in the bottom of this cattle car and they put a layer of men in. Then, they put a layer of planks through these slots in the side of the cattle car. It made a floor maybe six inches above your face, if you were in the first layer. They put a nail in the end so that things wouldn't move around. Then they put another layer of men on top of those planks and more planks and another layer of men. They'd wind up with about four layers of men in each end in the cattle car, with a space in the middle for whoever happened to find it necessary to move around. There were no medical people, rest assured. They shut the doors in the cattle cars and off we went. It was rough riding and those slats weren't the easiest things in the world to ride on. The guys on the bottom of all that straw weren't too bad off. But, just think what happens after you've been there for 10 to 24 hours. The guys on top had to have some relief. 

INTERVIEWER: Absolutely. 

MR. JAMES: And the guys on the bottomY.

INTERVIEWER: Are catching everything.

MR. JAMES: They catch everything and it gets to be a problem, to put it mildly. 

INTERVIEWER: Put it mildly, is right. 


MR. JAMES: That is how we traveled. It was not the best way in the world to travel, but that was it. On top of that, it was October and it was cold. My parachute canopy was beginning to look and smell like something you didn't want to get around. They had given me a package they insisted I had to carry with me. I didn't know what was in it at the time. I found out later, it was my clothes. That was our train ride and it wasn't bad until it started snowing. Then, every once in a while, they would stop the train and put it on the side and pull us all off. We would wait until one of those passenger trains came along and stacked us all on one of those. There would be five to ten men to a compartment. Then, we would ride on that for a couple of hours and get warm. Then, they'd stop and put us back in those cattle cars again. It was a miserable way to go anywhere, but that was travel. During one of those stops, I had my first encounter with a S.S. man who would have liked to kill me. We were laying out on the loading platform and I was in the station, but you always stayed outside. I had strict orders from them not to open this package up, but I had found out what was in the package. I sat on the platform and got dressed, which wasn't easy, but I did. I never got my pants on over that plaster cast on my leg, though. I finally got dressed. This train came by and this Lieutenant had a Seargent go in the station to get some suitcases. This Lieutenant was mad about something and he was pacing up and down. Finally, the Seargent came back with all the suitcases and the Lieutenant took off his "Sam Brown" belt -- a three inch wide leather belt. He proceeded to beat the hell out of that poor Seargent and hit him across the face three or four times with that belt. There were S.S. men and they had black uniforms with death skulls for buttons, not to mention their other little cute insignias. I don't know what the deal was behind this, but the guy was sure mad about something. This poor Seargent with his arms full of suitcases, just stood there and took it. He had red whelps all over his face. Finally the guy got tired with that and put his belt on and went stalking across the station and hooked his toe in one of these shroud lines in my parachute. 

INTERVIEWER: Oh, no.


MR. JAMES: He didn't fall, but he sort of tripped and caught himself. If I had known what the he was going to do, I would have yanked on the shroud line and put him on his face. He got his balance, turned around, glared at everybody, and looked down to see what was going on. He traced the shroud lines back to me and came over to me. He said something I didn't understand, and proceeded to kick me until his leg got tired. He kicked me in the stomach and the back and I could not get away from him -- I couldn't stand, run, or walk. I urinated blood for quite a while after he got through. I don't know which one of my insides he ruptured, but he sure did damage to something. He fixed me up, good, and I had big bruises all over me. They got me back on the train and we finally wound up at this so-called hospital. The hospital had been a former Hitler Youth agricultural school. It had a basement with little cells in it. The ground floor was built like a square with two arms. The center of the square on the first floor was a big open spot in the center and around the sides and in the back, were stables. In the middle of the building was offices and a few wards holding about 40 men. It was a big building. Then the two arms that came out in front had the quarters for the guards. They were just one story buildings with a court yard in the middle. On the second floor, there were three big wards -- that's in the back over the stables. Towards the middle on the second floor, was the operating rooms, and there were two. On the next floor up, which was literally the attic, were the critically ill and the doctor's quarters. I don't know where the kitchens were, but they did cook meals for us. There was a Scotchman that was a male nurse and five doctors. This was their entire staff and all were English. They were captured at Dunkirk. It was like one of those MASH units, in the movie. They were a portable operating group that followed the ??? around. There was one German doctor there, as an administrator, but he did nothing medically. Once at month, he would come around to the foot of each bed with an interpreter who would tell him what was wrong with the patient, how long he'd been there, and what his general condition was. He would say, "Ya daz is gooden." He never did anything, otherwise, and I don't know why he even bothered to do that. There must have been 150 German guards there, from the German army. We were only 40 kilometers from Sweden and they had all kinds of threats about escaping, which most of us didn't take too seriously. We would have escaped if we had had half an opportunity. The German doctor was purely administration because he never seemed to do anything else. He wasn't associated with the town and he definitely associated with the Army, so that must have been his only function. He wore a uniform and looked very important, but I think that was as far as he went.

We did have a man there, though, which was the most irritating, aggravating, pathetic little imp I ever ran across in my life. I don't know what his name was. He was a German soldier and he stood about four feet high. He had an unusually large head with yellow buck teeth with a perpetual sneer on his face. The rest of him looked like an eight year old child. His legs were so short, from his knees, that his regular German issued army boots were cut off at the top because the distance between his ankles and knees were so short. A normal boot was too high for him. His story was, that he had been a 6'2" man and stepped on a Russian landmine. When they got through with him, that was all that was left. They said his skeleton, most of it, had been replaced with metal and he had an all metal leg, arm, and rib cage and that he was sort of, a medical experiment. He had some awful scars under his arms and legs, I know, but that's about all I could tell you, for sure, on that story. He thought Hitler was God's gift to the world and the greatest man the earth had ever seen. He believed that Germany was going to rule the world and they were going to win the war. He was a typical, 100 percent Nazi. He had a brother who was with Rommel in Africa, was captured in Africa, and shipped over to a prison camp near Utica, New York. His brother, of course, wrote letters from home, which we were all allowed to see. Not many of them got through, but he wrote. When this little imp first got his brother's letters, his brother wrote that New York was untouched and he hadn't seen a bomb crater. He wrote that everything was going marvelously well and that the city looked great. The imp said, "That's not my brother and he wouldn't write these things." Everybody knew that New York was like Berlin -- it was a shambles. The Luftwaffe had bombed it daily. That is what the newspapers said." He knew that his brother wouldn't write things like that and that had to be some American propaganda. Well, as time went on, the brother got homesick and began to write intimate things about the family. After a while, this imp became convinced and in the meantime, he harassed all of us. He was into everything, he was a pain in the neck, and he'd steal things. He became convinced that the letters were from his brother -- nobody else would know that much about his family and it couldn't be an American. The imp began to write back to him and things progressed smoothly. We used to kid him about his brother and asked him, "Why he wasn't more like his brother, more friendly?" One day, they had an air raid, which was not uncommon. We'd know when there was an air raid, because all the Germans, including this little imp, would run to the air raid shelter and leave us. They didn't care if we got bombed or not. This gave us a few minutes freedom from them, really. This day, there was myself and a couple of fellows in the latrine, and who comes in but the little imp himself. He motioned us over together and he tried to get our curiosity up. He said, "Look fellows, you got to swear not to tell anybody." We responded with, "What are you talking about?" He said, "I'm gonna tell you something, and if you tell somebody, I could be shot. You've got to promise never to breathe a word of this, because if my buddies find out about this, I could be shot." Well, we think to ourselves, somebody's gonna shoot this little so and so. We wanted to know what he was talking about, so we can tell the world and get him shot. We told him we wouldn't tell a soul and asked him, "What on earth do you have, that's so important?" He says, "It's like this. My brother, in Utica, tells me that he has meat everyday for lunch and he has two uniforms, and we don't have meat at all and I only have one uniform. He has a warm barracks and our barracks is cold because we don't have any heat. They let him play games and I haven't played anything in so long, I've forgotten how" -- he says in a tearful voice. He says, You're treating him so nice and I want to know how I can surrender, so I can go join my brother." He caught us all, so by surprise, that we all sat there and looked at each other. Hitler's greatest supporter wanted to surrender! Somebody was losing their marbles. Well, I have no idea what happened, because I left shortly after that, but to this day, I've often wondered what happened to that little monkey. I know one thing, if he went to Normandy, he surrendered to the first yank he ever saw and he talked so much with so much information, that he was some intelligence officer's dream. We told him the more he could tell, the more he knew, the faster they would send him to Utica to join his brother. He was without a doubt, the meanest little puppy I ever met. My first introduction to him was laying on that warm cement floor the night I got there, with a foot on each one of my wrists, while he went through my pockets to see what he could steal from me. They did do a lot of good at the hospital, but I felt very sympathetic for the doctors. They had as many as fifteen hundred patients between the five doctors, on one occasion. They treated everything, from one young lady having a baby, to setting every bone in the human body. Most of their cases were burns, shrapnel wounds, and broken bones from parachutes. These five doctors, who deserved a Congressional medal, certainly earned anything their government could give them. 
Now, I got myself in a little trouble because I got deeply involved in helping a French Count escape. The man was a very important designer of air craft. The main doctor emphasized that he had great potential for the Luftwaffe. He was France's leading aircraft company's owners/designers. I got caught and the S.S.court-martialed me. They threatened to hang me, but fortunately, they didn't. It was some quick work on part of the Swiss Red Cross that actually saved my neck.

But I did spend some time in, what I believe was Nicow. If it wasn't Nicow, it was a camp of that type. I watched a number of people get killed there -- mass production in a number of ways. I watched them kill a truck load of people, one day, with hypodermic injections. To this day, I can't stand a hypodermic needle and it takes considerable effort to get a shot. Another thing they used to do, which rarely gets to me anymore, they used to cut both sides of their cheeks open so as to expose their teeth, because any teeth with any kind of metal fillings were extracted for the metal -- preferably gold, but not necessarily. It's astonishing, the cruelty that mankind can impose on themselves. Anything you may have read or seen about this place, I can only tell you, is true. I got involved with two in my stay in Europe, but I can't say anything better about either one of them. The people that ran them were hand picked and were deliberately trained to be sadists -- it's the best way I can put it. Some of the things they did, you wouldn't believe. There was one thing I can't believe myself, and that's the fact that the people in those places would allow the sadists to do such things to them. I think they would have been better off if they had revolted and gotten killed in the revolt, based on what was happening to them. They couldn't kill them fast enough with gas, so they would dig big trenches with bull dozers, and they'd make holes 200 feet long, 20 feet wide, and maybe 10 to 20 feet deep. They would then put a little building on skids so they could move it along as things progressed. Starting at one end, they dug this trench and would pile the dirt up along one side of it so they would have a hill along the side of the trench. It would tower up, maybe, 10 to 20 feet higher than the trench. They would put a walk way up the side of the hill with a flat spot at the top. They put this building at the bottom and then they would pick out the people they wanted to kill that day and put them in the line. Ten people at a time, would go in this little building, men and women, and take off all their clothes. They would walk up this little walk way, to the top of the hill, and stand in a line at the top. There were men and women, completely nude, standing in line where everybody could see them. On the opposite side of this pit, was a machine gun. The gun would start firing, shoot them all, and they would all drop into the pit. Down in the pit, would be a couple to three men, who would straighten them all out and lay them nicely in rows in the bottom. They would throw a little lime over them and wait for the next group to come up, thereby filling up the pit. When the pit got to a certain level of fullness, the bulldozer would come along and scrape part of the hill away and cover them up. They would move the house up the hill a little ways, and repeat the process. After a month or more, they'd have the whole pit filled. Every pit had, maybe, 500 people buried in it. Everybody knew what was happening, but nobody ever did anything and no one ever revolted. Nobody put up a complaint and they were docile as sheep. 

INTERVIEWER: How many people ever did?

MR. JAMES: What?

INTERVIEWER: Understand why, you know. 



MR. JAMES: I don't know. I don't understand people. I was happy to get out of there. I didn't stay long, but I stayed too long. From there, I went to the regular POW camp and what a relief that was. The camp was up on the edge of the Baltic Sea and it was crowded. It had formerly been a Hitler Youth Camp and consisted of a mess hall, a small barrack site building meant to house six people, and 5 barracks buildings. These barracks buildings were laid out with a hall down the middle. Starting at the front end, there was a little room on each side that was 8' x 10', designed to hold one person. Then, there was a large room which was probably intended to hold ten people, a latrine, another large room for ten people, and another single room. Each side of the hall was the same, and in our case, they put four people in the little rooms and thirty people in the two big rooms inside the hall. So, we were a little crowded for what the buildings were originally designed for. There were roughly 1,500-2,000 people in each square. That was the original square and it had it's own private mess hall. The other squares were called compounds and didn't have a mess hall and each building had to do its own cooking. Each one of these compounds was about the size of a football field, with all these buildings jammed into it. They were surrounded by double ten foot high fences with coils of razor wire inside between the fences. This fence had strips of barbed wire woven in between, so that the barbed wire formed like a fabric all the way around. The loose razor wire, which would cut you to pieces, was inside. There were four of these compounds that formed the camp, with a road that went through the middle of the four, putting one compound on one side of the road and the other three on the other side. The German quarters, barracks, and the officers quarters were in separate buildings outside the barbed wire -- they had no fences around them, whatsoever. There was also what we referred to as a cooler, or the punishment jail, which was a separate building outside the barbed wire. The punishment jail was comprised of little cells 3 x 4 x 5 feet, which had a hole in the floor in the center, which did everything a hole in the floor in the center of the room can do, and it had a light in the ceiling that burnt all the time. You may be there for ten to twenty days. We had one poor fellow, who was there for almost six months -- this was better than being shot, which was what they originally planned to do with you. There was no communication between these groups and we were not allowed to communicate between groups. We were too far apart, really, so you couldn't holler from one group to the next with much clarity, and it was usually too darn cold to stand outdoors and holler. There were three guard towers on each side of the long side B one at each corner, of course, and then one in the middle on the long side. Each guard tower was manned by two men and there was a gate about middle way of the long side. We were counted twice a day and we had to line up into our regular formation -- five deep. The Germans could only count by five and we'd do everything we could think of to screw up their count. They never knew exactly how many of us, there were. It snowed from October until May, and frequently, it would snow on a beautiful clear day with not a cloud in the sky, waist deep. It was the weirdest phenomenon you ever saw -- light, fluffy, powdery snow. It was miserable, no matter how you counted it, and we had no fuel. We were allowed four lumps of coal a day and these were not just pieces of coal, but coal we were given in camp that was man made. They would take coal dust, mix it with glue, put it in a mold, and they came out with a lump that was 2" x 2 2" x 6". It didn't burn very well, but it did burn and it didn't give off a lot of heat, but that was beside the point. That ration of coal had to take care of anything that you needed fire for -- heat and cooking. In the big rooms where you had thirty or forty men, it wasn't too bad if you pooled all your resources. But in the small rooms, with only four men, there wasn't much coal. Sometimes, we'd buy some from the big rooms, because they had a surplus. The stoves were amazing and they were made of blocks of glazed fire brick, usually with a pretty little picture on each brick and held together with welded angle iron. They weighed a ton, to put it mildly, and each one sat on a square cement slab, which in turn sat on brickwork that went down to the ground under the building. It took us a very short time to determine that if we picked this stove up and moved it off the cement slab, we could then pick the slab up and have a beautiful entrance to a tunnel. All of this was heavy and hard to move, but believe it or not, we moved them as if they were paper wands and dug tunnels to every building, sooner or later. Weight was not a consideration, where a tunnel was concerned. For some reason, the Germans never seemed to catch on to that, but it worked beautifully for us, even if they did weigh a ton. They didn't give off much heat, though. That was the deal -- a twice a day count and tunnel digging the rest of the time. We controlled the camp about as much as the Germans did. We made the Germans very, very uncomfortable. As the war progressed, we stole some of their guns. We bought some and we found out that some of the Germans would sell their wives for enough cigarettes. So we bought the guns from them and we made some cross bows. Don't ever derate a cross bow because that's a deadly weapon. The last month of the war, we were all supposed to be killed. An actual order was sent out from Berlin that all POW's were to be exterminated. When the commander of our camp got the order, he called us all together, one group at a time. He informed us of the order, showed it to us, and said he would try not to carry it out because he knew we were organized -- which we were. He also knew we had weapons. His troops, at that time, were old men in their 70's and 80's or young teenagers. While he was sure his troops would make a good account of themselves, we would win the day and he saw no sense in having all these people killed on both sides when the war was that close to being over. I thought that was a very smart move on his part. He said that if it was agreeable to us and we would not start a fight, he would give us the order as he had received it, and pretend he had never received it. He said we could both sit down and look at each other until the war ended. We agreed that that was a very good thing to do. We took his copy of the order and it was later given to President Eisenhower -- General Eisenhower at that time. We all sighed a deep sigh of relief. We did however have one fly in the ointment at that time, too, which didn't help matters. About the time that we had reached an agreement with him, Heinrich Himmler and a brigade of SS men showed up on the scene. It turned out that Himmler had a summer home about five miles from us. We were not sure what to expect from them. Himmler, being the old devil he was, did actually inspect our camp. I got within five feet of him one time and there was something about that man that radiated evil, even if you didn't know who he was. He's the only man I'd ever seen, outside of cartoon characters, who had no eyes. His eyes were just black holes that had no expression and no feeling. The pupils of his eyes were too big and he wore glasses, which probably didn't help any. I was glad when he left and so was everybody else. Incidentally, it was ten days before he committed suicide, which was ten days too many, for us.

I've skipped a couple of things that I should, maybe, include about the camp, because they were humorous. Most of what I told you, so far, has no humor in it. We had a little problem, one time, tunnel digging. There was always a problem, when you dug a tunnel, as to what to do with the dirt B you usually had a couple of tons of it. It was a problem as to where to put it. We figured a way around that. We dug a tunnel in Group B's area, we'll say, and we put the dirt in Group A's area. The effect was that one day, the Germans noticed this building barracks in Group A was about ready to collapse -- the sides started to bulge and the roofs were trying to fall in. So, they went searching and in the attic was about five tons of dirt in Red Cross packages, nicely taped. Naturally, they took it out, emptied it out in the yard, spread it around, and took away the packages. Then, they started searching for the tunnel, because all that dirt in the roof of the building, could only mean there was a tunnel somewhere in that area. They hunted, probed, listened, and they dug. Eventually, they said, "We know what you're up to, you don't have any tunnels over here. You scraped this dirt up out of the yard and put it in these packages to make us think you were digging a tunnel, but you actually didn't dig any tunnel, over here. You just put this dirt in packages and put it in the roof to make us think so." So we agreed with them. We said, "Yep, you caught up with us. You got the idea, that's what we did." Well, a couple of weeks after that, we got almost forty men out of the camp and escapees were all over the countryside. Then, it suddenly hit the Germans what was happening. We had a tunnel and our men were escaping all over the countryside. One of the Germans paid us, I think, one of the best compliments I've ever had from a German. They found our tunnel, put a couple of dynamite charges in it, blew the top off, made it into a trench, and had us out there filling the trench in. So myself and several other fellows were out there shoveling and digging dirt in the tunnel and not killing ourselves, if we could help it. This German Major came out, and I must say I felt as close to feeling sorry for him, as I ever did for a German anywhere. I have great difficulty in feeling anything remotely concerned, where they're concerned. But for him, I did have a tinge of sympathy. He sat on one of these piles of dirt and looked at us. You could tell somebody had really taken that man to task. He was in sad shape, and for some reason, he elected to speak in English, I'm happy to say -- not German. I never did understand German too well, but he and I could talk in English. He said, "I don't know what I'm gonna do. You Americans are driving me crazy. I don't know what I'm gonna do with you! You can take a French man, a Russian, a Pol, or an Italian, it doesn't matter, and you put them on the garbage dump and leave them for three weeks, and what happens? They beg for their lives and they starve to death in three weeks. It's simple, no problem. But, I take one of you so and so's and I put you in the same garbage dump and leave you out there. What do you do? Do you starve to death? No! In three weeks you come out flying a home made airplane and try to kill me. I don't know what I'm gonna do with you people. You don't behave like anybody else on the face of the earth." I thought that was quite a compliment coming from him and he really was sincere about it. We never did tell him how we moved the dirt. Would you like to know? It's very simple. What they overlooked and nobody ever thought of, was so obvious, that they missed it. At five o'clock every morning, we got a bread ration. They insisted that our men push the bread truck, a two wheeled push cart. They would get bread from the town. The baker would come out in his truck and dump the bread out at the building on the floor. It didn't matter if it was dirty or not -- we ate it any ways. Our guys would come in and stack the bread in this bread truck, and then go to each compound and leave so many loaves of bread at that compound for distribution later that day. Well it was simple, when they came to our compound, where the tunnel was, they'd go in the building and dump all the bread out and put in a layer of dirt already in packages, pile the bread up on top of that, and leave. They never caught on to that and no guards ever came along.

The other thing we did --- we had a small space in the end of one compound---there was no extra space in it, but we had a small space at the end of one. They fenced it in one day, which cut out the amount of space we could use, considerably. The idea was that they herd us all in this little space fenced in, then they could get their pictures out once a month and come by and check us all with pictures. They had pictures of all us on a little card so as to make sure that we hadn't escaped. It not only took up most of the space we had, which we didn't have much to start with, but we didn't like the idea of making it that easy for them for the picture test. So, one nice, warm, spring day, a fight broke out in front of each guard tower. The guards should have known something was going on by that. There was a couple of guys in front of each tower hauling off and slugging each other terrifically -- fists were flying. Well it was against the law, rules of the camp, which everybody knew. Naturally, the guys in the tower start yelling, "Das ist Verboten," meaning that was against the rules -- that was forbidden. Nobody paid the least bit of attention and the fights proceeded. A crowd gathered around each pair of the three fights. People began cheering for one guy or another and it was like three little miniature prize fights going on. The guards, up in the tower, were hollering and telling them all to stop making threats, but nobody was paying a bit of attention to them. Then all of a sudden, almost by signal, the fights stopped. The fighters put down their fists and walked off like they were great friends. Everybody else, went back to what they were doing and everybody was happy. The guards settle back and take a deep breath that the crisis is over. Then, they look where the fence was, and there's no fence. It was just a row of holes where the fence had been. That started a small riot -- the whistles blew, the guards hop up in the towers, there was great hollering, and all kinds of excitement in the guard house. You wouldn't believe the noise that was created. The next thing we know, we're all being formally lined up, like they do for a count. The commandant of the camp comes out and stops in his place in the middle of the compound and demands to see the senior officer. The senior officer in each compound is responsible for the compound. The senior officer in our camp goes out as formally as possible. He walks up in front of the colonel and says, "Colonel Greeny," who happened to be our senior, "Where is my fence?" Colonel Greeny looked him right in the eye, just as serious as he was, and says, "Colonel, I think termites got it." That German Colonel looked at him, turned white and then turned red, turned on his heels, and stomped out of the compound with the guards following him. We went back to our barracks and nearly died laughing because everybody thought that was the most hilarious thing we had done in months. He knew where his fence went and it was under the barracks in a specially prepared tunnel we had for it. I'll never forget that. 

Then, one morning, we woke up and the Germans had locked us in the building, as they always did, and departed for points unknown -- the Russians were coming. So, needless to say, the doors lasted two minutes of a second, when we found out the guard towers are empty and we took over the camp. It was great! For forty eight hours, we sat there and all kinds of people went by us. You could see tremendous crowds of people going by. We couldn't figure out who on earth they were, because none of them came near us. They came up to the camp but wouldn't have anything to do with us. In the meantime, the telephone worked beautifully, and we found out we could telephone all over Europe. We could get Moscow, Paris, and anywhere we wanted to call on the telephone. So, we tried to get in contact with the Russian Army. We could get anything we wanted, but not the Russian Army. They were elusive as ghosts. Everywhere we called, we got held out. We'd ask to talk to the Russian commander, "Oh, he just left." AWell, how about the Mayor?" "Well, the Mayor just committed suicide, yesterday." "Well, where's the fire chief?" "Oh, he went with the Mayor." This kind of answer was all you got all over the place, but no Russians. Finally, we're about ready to quit and we hoisted an American flag we had made. We were sitting there wondering, and some joker on a white horse galloped right into camp. Low and behold he was a Russian officer. He was so drunk, it's amazing how he stayed on that horse. He was the drunkest man I'd seen in a long time. Needless to say, he didn't stay on that horse for very long and we had him off in nothing flat. We poured lots of coffee into him and got him sobered up real fast. When we did, we discovered he was a General's aid and his wife had just had a baby. He was out celebrating his new arrival, which was great by us, but we wanted to know where the General was. We told him who we were, where he was, and he almost had a fit because the Russians were going to shell the place. Then we found out they didn't know what an American flag was. They thought that we were some kind of special detachment group from the German Army. They had seen us in the towers and knew we had machine guns. They figured we were some suicide unit of the German Army. They were going to turn loose on us with some 88 shells and eliminate us. So we said, "Get back on your horse and we'll get one of us to go with ya. We're gonna straighten this out in a hurry." So, that's what we did. We rode back and got hold of Marshall Arkotofsky. He said, "Oh, you're Americans -- that's different, much different." From that time on, we had great sport with him and the Russians were there for a couple of weeks. We were liberated by the Russians on the 1st of May, but we didn't get out of there until the 10th of June. The Russians wanted to take us by truck to Rostock, but we said, "No, we are Air Force people -- we flew into this hole of hell and we're gonna fly out." There was a big German airfield right near us and no reason why the Eighth Air force couldn't come after us. The Marshall really surprised us when we found out that he couldn't make the decision. He had orders to take us to Rostock, and that was what he was going to do, but he didn't have to say when. He gave us a radio and we called London, London called Moscow, and Moscow called him to change his orders to let us sit there until the Eighth Air Force could come after us. They eventually did come and pick us up and took us down to LeHavre, France to Camp Lucky Strike, which was a very sad part of the Army. They put up tents and housing for about a thousand people and got eight thousand of us in that camp. They didn't begin to have facilities or doctors enough for us. They did have one thing that was good and that was a de-lousing station. I had never seen so many bugs on me in all my life, but they took care of them. Due to the fact that they had improper facilities, we had guys running all over Europe. It was pathetic, in a way but somebody said that if you went to an Army paymaster, you could get $1500 in French money. We had guys going from paymaster to paymaster signing all kinds of names. Of course, it was all French grift and didn't mean anything -- you couldn't give it away. I knew one crew that went to an airport and got a DC-3 and went to Cairo. From Cairo they went to Jerusalem and from Jerusalem they went to Capla, Turkey???? From there, they went back to Rome and from Rome they went over to Istanbul. They went back to Rome, again, and finally they came back to France. They hadn't flown an airplane in over a year -- either one of them. It was a madhouse and they hadn't planned for the war to end like that. 
I sat around France until I got fed up and I found a troop ship that was going back home and got on it. Nobody authorized it and there were about twenty of us that had done that. We docked in New York by accident, as much as anything, but I was glad to be home. They got us all together and took us to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey.

INTERVIEWER: New Jersey.


MR. JAMES: Excuse me? 

INTERVIEWER: New Jersey, yes? 

MR. JAMES: Yes. A Colonel, right away, wanted to search us. What did he think we were going to bring back? They didn't search the regular Army, why would they search us? What did we have that the regular army wouldn't have had? He insisted he wanted to search us. None of us had any proper uniforms and didn't have any insignia on. He was a Lt. Colonel incidentally. So, one of our Sergeants, who was smaller than I was, got up and claimed he was a full Colonel and threatened to court martial this guy if he tried to search us. That was the end of that! From there, I went home, which was very delightful. 

INTERVIEWER: Were you mustered out at Camp Kilmer?

MR. JAMES: We weren't mustered out. We had thirty days leave and were sent home with instructions to go to Miami. After I got home, they told me to take another thirty days leave, and then go to Miami -- which I did. I didn't really want to get out. I went to Arizona, to Texas, and finally Langley field, where they finally discharged me. 

INTERVIEWER: Langley field in Virginia?

MR. JAMES: Langley field in Virginia, yes. 1947, I got out.

INTERVIEWER: 1947? 

MR. JAMES: 1947. 

INTERVIEWER: That was a very, very interesting story, I'll tell you that, Mr. James.

MR. JAMES: Well, thank you. I hope everyone has enjoyed it. 

INTERVIEWER: I think so. We thank you very much for sharing time and your military experiences with us. It is a wonderful, wonderful story. Now I know, as a Veteran, you probably don't hear those words thank you, very much, you know. 

MR. JAMES: No. 

INTERVIEWER: Anyone in this country who has ever bought a home, gone to church, attended school, or started a business, holds a great debt of gratitude to you and so we thank you once again. Thank you, very much. 

MR. JAMES: That's quite alright. I simply hope it was worthwhile energy we've all put into it. 

INTERVIEWER: I think I want to showYcan I bend down?


VIDEOGRAPHER: You can go right in front, it's O.K.

INTERVIEWER: Can I go right in front?

VIDEOGRAPHER: Yes. 

INTERVIEWER: These are Mr. James's medals. This is purple heart, the air medal Distinguished Flying Cross. This is the European Campaign Medal, the American Campaign Medal, after the service, and the Prisoner of War medal, here. These are his wings, that he received from the Air force. Mr. James would you tell us about those medals and how you received them? 

MR. JAMES: These medals? 

INTERVIEWER: Yes.

MR. JAMES: Well, there's not a whole lot to be told about them, really. I can thank the D.F.C., of course, for putting in ten missions. The Purple Heart, the American medal, the cluster, right, is usually the same thing. We got one for every five missions that we succeeded. The clustering indicated two air medals. The Purple heart came from the fact that I was injured. I had injuries, of course, a broken leg and couple of bullet holes B that's what that was for. The POW medal was for the fact that I was captured for 19 months. This actually is not the full-sized medal, it's the half-sized medal. The full-sized medal is in the museum. The ribbons, of course, are special campaign ribbons which you got for being a part, being present at, and involved in. The other one dangling in the corner, the American Theater ribbon, is an interesting one to me, because it signifies the fact that I was in for a year before Pearl Harbor -- only a few got that one. But they're mostly, as some of my friends have them, being issued on the basis of being present and accounted for at the right times. 

VIDEOGRAPHER: Thank you.

INTERVIEWER: Thank you, John.