The Cold, Endless Road

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

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          [Lightning Down: A World War II Story of Survival was released in hardcover last November and this week sees the publication of the trade paperback edition. The young American pilot Joe Moser was shot down and captured in France in August 1944 and endures horrible living conditions, including being a prisoner along with 167 other Allied airmen in Buchenwald. In this excerpt, it is late January 1945 and prisoners are being forced to leave a German POW camp before it is liberated by the approaching Americans or the Russians. The winter of 1944-45 was one of the most brutal Europe suffered in the 20th century and the exodus of the prisoners became known as the “Death March.”]

It had been dark for several hours when the orders were finally issued to begin marching out of the Stalag Luft III, compound by compound. It was not the turn of Joe and other residents of the North Camp until almost 4 a.m. “Stepping out into the strong northern wind, being hit in the face by a million stinging pellets of icy snow and sucking in my breath as the frozen air torched my lung tissue caused in me a sense of dread and fear that brought my Buchenwald days quickly to mind. Oh no, I thought, here we go again. I just hope I can make it.”

When the march out of Stalag Luft III began, the temperature was nearing 20 below zero. It would dip to 28 below by sunrise. Even robust, well-clothed men would have been in danger, and Joe Moser and the thousands of other prisoners, despite their preparations, were not clothed well enough to long endure such extreme conditions.

In a column that stretched for five miles, the prisoners marched hour after hour. There was some degree of hope that they would not be pummeled by the cruel wind too long. “We still thought it might not be too far to our destination,” Joe noted, which could turn out to be a train station. “We were freezing, but such misery had to be temporary. It had to be, because if it was not, we would die in it, and then, even then, the misery would be temporary.”

They were not the only ones heading away from the Russian advance. Hundreds of residents of the Lower Silesia region, who expected vengeance would be visited upon them by the Red Army for the atrocities perpetrated by the German Army in Russia, were also on the move. Families with everything they could pack into a cart struggled alongside the prisoners. Few sights would have been more pathetic.

The Allied prisoners were grateful that they had erred on the side of caution and now wore every piece of clothing they could and still move – two layers of pants, three layers of shirts, as many socks as would allow their feet to fit into shoes, and an extra pair of underwear stuck in a pocket. Still, the relentless cold wind managed to seep in, finding the tiniest openings.

Joe trudged alongside the six other men from Block 104. They took turns pulling the sled they had constructed. It was not heavy so much as clumsy and hauling it added to the weariness all the marchers were soon feeling. “We took turns, two of us at a time pulling it through the rough, frozen tracks in the snow. But the snow kept coming down, and now there was at least six inches on the ground. Deeper and deeper furrows were being cut with the edges becoming as sharp and unyielding as iron in the 28-degree-below temperature. The sled sapped our energy and we had so little left to spare.”

For a time, the men marched four or five abreast and tried to talk to each other to keep their spirits up. But some of the prisoners began to fall back and the violence of the wind “sucked the air out of our lungs,” Joe reported. Few noticed the subtle change in the sky to the east as dawn approached. “Step by step by crunching, slipping step” the Allied flyers pushed on, trying to keep some semblance of a formation, but “we soon slid slowly into an interminable line of single-file, hunched-over, dog-tired, frozen men. The line snaked for miles through the ice-encased countryside. Light came finally, creeping up slowly, but it brought no heat or comfort.”

Dawn also brought a fresh snowstorm. The wind-driven flakes struck the faces of the marchers like shotgun pellets. When they could see their surroundings, there was little to see – a farmhouse, outhouse, abandoned structures. When allowed to rest the men simply dropped into the snow. There was nowhere to go for shelter anyway. Frozen fingers struggled to find within bundled clothing on sleds a small package of crackers or candy. For water, they dropped a handful of snow in their mouths. The white lumps took painfully long to melt.

The front lines of the marchers reached the town of Halbau at 9.15 a.m. that first day. However, there was to be no respite – the German guards told them they had to stagger on to the next town, Freidwaldau, which turned out to be over 10 miles away. Yet when they arrived there, at noon, no adequate shelter could be found. The prisoners pushed on another six miles to the village of Leippe where they were finally allowed to rest in barns. They had marched more than 35 miles.

            The afternoon offered no respite from the horribly cold conditions and the all-consuming exhaustion. Joe came upon a body that had been dragged off and left on the side of the road. He expected to see more, and he was right. Joe could not tell if they had died as they marched or, faltering, were dispatched by the Germans. The guards were not faring much better: “Their rifles hung across their shoulders, no longer at the ready. The disparity between prisoner and guard disappeared in these inhuman conditions. Now we were all just men forced against our will to endure conditions that would test even the strongest to the limit.”

            Given the inattentiveness of the guards, escape might not be that difficult. But escape where? Clearly, the only chance of survival lay in keeping together, helping each other, goading each other ever onward. To a few men the attempt to escape was appealing only because during it one of the guards might care enough to shoot.

            Joe’s fatalism turned gloomy as he shuffled past more bodies on the sides of the road. The prisoners had endured so much, then each had become “a snow-covered mound. Would that be me soon? Would I just be a frozen lump to step over or around? Would someone bury me in this tiny field? Would a marker ever find its way over my rotting bones, or would a starving farm dog haul what was left of me into the dark woods over there?”

            He tried to banish such thoughts because certainly they were not helping him keep up with the ragged column. Where were they going anyway? No one knew. Maybe the guards did but it was too much effort to ask.  And what did it matter, they would not get there anyway. To Joe and the thousands of other prisoners the road they were on “meandered it seemed without purpose or design, sometimes passing through small villages of a few pitiful houses. Sometimes it would go uphill, making the effort to put one foot in front of the other an act of sheer willpower . . . each step was an act of courage and tenacity, each hour an eternity.”

 Darkness fell. Incredibly, the men, on sheer willpower, kept marching. No longer were there lone bodies on the sides of the road, they were being found in twos and threes then as many as a half-dozen. During the day some of the bodies had been hauled up onto horse-drawn wagons driven by guards, but there was no longer any room. Then the bodies of prisoners that had been on the wagons had been tossed back into the snow to try to preserve the strength of the horses. However, they too were beginning to give out, dropping in their tracks.

At last they came to a village and the column was allowed to halt. Better yet, the guards informed them that they would spend the night there and they should find whatever accommodations they could. Joe and his six roommates from Stalag Luft III, who had continued to take turns dragging the sled, found an old movie theater. This would be their home for the night. The interior of the cinema with its empty seats and stage was almost luxurious: “It was out of the wind, out of the blowing snow and we were not marching, we were lying down, backs against the heavy wood covering the walls.”

They pawed through the packages on the sled to find food that was not frozen and could be eaten. As they chewed, they discussed the sled and determined it made no sense to keep dragging it along, wasting valuable energy that could not be recouped. Each of the men dug out a shirt and turned it into a small pack, filling it with a few tins of food and packages of biscuits. “We knew by now that we would die of cold and exhaustion before starvation could ever catch us,” Joe reasoned. Soon afterward, pressed together for warmth, Joe and his companions fell asleep.

            The familiar “Raus!” was heard at dawn. Joe, his body one seamless ache, wondered if as at Buchenwald some prisoners had died during the night and others, too weak to get up, would be shot. There was nothing he could do about that. Once up and moving around he did feel better from having slept and managing to swallow the bits of food. Outside the theater he and his companions were greeted by a dull-grey sky and wind-blown sheets of snow. Those not being left behind, the dead or barely alive, once more formed into a long column that set off down the road.

            After some time, all that kept Joe and most of the prisoners going was the routine of marching forward and the inability to think of anything else. “Keep one foot in front of the other,” he thought. “What would be would be, keep it going, think of nothing, no plans, no hopes, just one foot in front of the other. Then one foot in front of the other.”

            One mile, two, the one after that, the frozen and exhausted men shuffled forward. Every so often one dropped and a guard would drag the prisoner to the side of the road, out of the way. Sometimes a gunshot would follow, sometimes a bullet was not necessary. The hint of the sun through the clouds was directly overhead, then it crawled through the cruel afternoon. Joe idly wondered which step would be his last, when he would finally find it impossible to put one foot in front of the other, when he would fall to his knees then pitch forward onto his face. And then a guard, perhaps with an ounce of sympathy, but probably only a heavy weariness, would haul him off to the side of the road.

            However, as though a miracle was occurring, later in the afternoon Joe began to feel better. It was like he had broken through to the other side of pain and exhaustion. He experienced “a growing warmth and with it a growing sense of well-being. Something deep inside me seemed to be saying that I was going to be OK, I was going home, and it would feel so good.”

That feeling expanded within him: “What started as a surprising sense of acceptance and peace slowly began turning to a kind of euphoria. The snow and cold and wind seemed to fill me with a kind of joy and anticipation. It was almost as if I was outside myself watching myself getting warmer, more peaceful and even joyful. It seemed the sky was lightening. It didn’t seem so hard now. I could go on like this forever. Forever and ever.”

Joe was not aware that the euphoria was the sensation experienced by those about to die from the combination of hypothermia and exhaustion. After a few more unsteady steps, darkness flooded his mind, and he collapsed. A final thought was that his fear of being left to die on a lonely road in a country thousands of miles from home was about to be realized.

[Faithful readers: If you want to know what happens next, you’ll have to read the book!]

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 18 books, including Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America’s First Frontier. The next collaboration with Bob Drury, The Last Hill: The Epic Story of a Ranger Battalion and the Battle That Defined WW II, will be published by St. Martin’s Press on November 1. Please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com to pre-order a copy.