Local Airman Tells Of Playing “Cops And Robbers” with SS
There’s something about the story that sounds like boys playing cop and robber through fields outside Leeds of Brighton or Tarrant. That is, if you’d omit the 90mm shells and answering 88s that freight-trained over their heads while they crouched in a farmhouse cellar. And if you left out Sagan, and a forced march from Sagan to Muskau, trudging through the snow in frozen and cracked boots. Also you’d have to skim over the fact that if two of those boys who slipped out of a barn last April 6, and walked during the nights toward what they hoped were American lines and hid during the days I thick scrub pine, had been caught by SS troops instead of the Wehrmacht – well, John H. Combs, Jr., of Homewood, wouldn’t be telling the story today.
But here is Johnny Combs to tell his own story of escape from the Germans.
“Back in January when the Russians were moving up from the east to the Oder River, orders came to the prison camp at Sagan that prisoners were to be marched to Nurnberg. It was Saturday. It had been snowing and the temperature was down to 20 degrees below zero. At midnight they started us out on the march.”
All night long through the heavy snow the American fliers and the other prisoners marched. Came daylight, the Germans not wanting to be caught on the road by strafing American planes, stopped in a town. While the German guards went inside for warmth, food and rest, John Combs and the other “kriegies” stayed outside in the streets and sat or lay in the snow. Sunday night they marched all night again. By then their shoes, frozen solid, would crack open as they walked.
“When we marched into Muskau a lot of the men just passed out from exposure, cold, hunger and just plain exhaustion. Their arms would just curl up and they’d fall over. All of our feet were frozen.”
Two days they stayed at Muskau and then moved on to Spremburg—still marching. “We just couldn’t walk any further than Spremburg, so the Germans got some boxcars. The capacity of those cars was 40, but they piled 50 in each car.” The prisoners rode jammed in the boxcars for two days and two nights.
“At Nurnberg, we bivouacked a mile and a half from the main choke point of the German railroad.” For the American airmen prisoners this meant sitting for two months, February and March, under the heaviest bombing any German city had yet has while their fellow airmen flew over twice a day, dropping bomb-loads dangerously close. “the Germans started moving us out on April 6 and that night while we were bivouacked in a barn, West (Lt. Sam West, of Austin, Texas) and I just walked away.”
That part sounds easy. But there followed eight days and eight nights without food, hiding behind sick young pine scrubs during the day and walking at night. “We could steer by the stars and just before dawn we found a place to hide and rest for the day.”
“But then the Wehrmacht caught us.” Young Combs said it could have been worse. “The SS troops didn’t just turn you back into a prison camp. But the Wehrmacht did. We were sent back to Nurnberg. The Luftwaffe had moved out and gone to Moosburg and had taken the whole camp with them except a few Wehrmacht troops and the Serbian general staff who were prisoners. We were put with them.”
At the end of the week, by which time other escaped prisoners of war had joined their ranks, orders came through that prisoners were to be marched out. The orders didn’t say how many or where they were to be sent. “If the Germans get orders for ‘prisoners’ to be moved they have filled the order if they move two. So lots of the fellows played off – said they were too sick to march. We knew the Americans would soon take Nurnberg so left as many as could get by with staying, but to keep the Germans happy 16 of us went along.”
So the 16 prisoners and their 15 Wehrmacht guards set out and it’s an even bet as to which gave the other more trouble. “We kept complaining about not being able to walk, so they got a hay wagon and horse for us,” ex-PW Combs related. “We knew American troops were fighting around Nurnberg, so we finally put our cards on the table, and I, being ranking officer in our group, told the German first lieutenant ‘Why don’t you surrender to us?’ He wasn’t much for it, but the way we finally worked it out, we’d march just a few kilometers (about eight miles) a day just so we’d keep moving and it would look like we were going some place. That was in case any SS troops should turn up. The SS would have shot us all – prisoners and Wehrmacht.
“We also made an agreement with our guards that when we got to a German town and they would go in and commandeer food in the name of the Reich, that they would bring it back and divvy it up with us. We’d tell them that they’d better look after us ‘cause the Americans were coming.”
But the German guards didn’t need their prisoners to remind them that the American Army was near. They could hear the American artillery. And one evening during the round-in-circles march, German troops started moving down from Nurnberg through the little town where the wandering group had bivouacked.
“Always before this German soldiers we had seen had their ties on, their shoes slick, their equipment polished, but these came through that town looking beaten, pulling their clothes and personal effects in little wagons. And these weren’t refugee civilians, but the German Army getting the heck out of there. There was a Frenchman with us and he said that in the three years he had been in Germany, he had never seen the Germans so completely beaten as they were then. We went on into a farm that the Germans took over, and we bivouacked there for three days. To the south of us was the town of Ickstadt. American troops were to the north.
“On the nigh of April 24, the Americans laid down an artillery barrage that went right over us. We stayed down in the cellar together with our guards and some refugees from the town. Some of the shells landed within 25 yards of the house.”
Those shells landing close might have had “made in America” or “made in Germany” stamped on them. Shells were soon going both ways. “We’d hear the American 90’s go over. Then we’d hear the 88s come back. The Americans knocked out the German emplacement before the Germans got them. We figured the Americans would start a mass attack at dawn and then they would find us. When morning came everything was quiet.”
Not knowing what they would find outside, the prisoners and their guards emerged from the farm house. “And there, lined up as far as you could see were GI trucks. They had moved in without a fight. The German first lieutenant got a piece of white cloth from inside the house and he and 14 other guards surrendered to us – their prisoners.”
Courtesy: Elaine Combs
