Lightning Down by Tom Clavin

Author:Tom Clavin [Tom Clavin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

17

The airmen got to experience a truly long Appell that evening. The camp guards were unusually disorganized, still processing the humiliating insult and destruction of the Allied air raid. They needed extra time to complete their paperwork because of the dead, wounded, and otherwise missing prisoners.

Bolstered by their sabotage that day, the airmen felt pretty good during the hours at Appellplatz. And the regimen Colonel Lamason insisted upon was easier to follow. “We stood together,” wrote Joe Moser, “as still and military-like as our weakened and tired bodies would allow. We were Americans, and Britons, and Canadians, and Aussies and New Zealanders and more. We would win this fight. We might no longer be able to contribute much, but by God, we would do all we could. They could starve us, treat us like dogs, humiliate us and torture us, but they could not break our fighting spirits.”

Incredibly, the morning following the destructive air raid, with portions of the manufacturing plants still smoldering, the airmen were asked if they would help repair them. Initially, after the roll call had been completed, an SS officer harangued the flyers as though they had been responsible for the raid and that such miserable and vile creatures as themselves represented the vermin who made up the Allied forces. But once the officer got that out of his system, he calmed down and through a translator asked for volunteers. Specifically, he wanted to know who among the airmen had skills as a plumber, carpenter, or electrician to offer.

Fortunately, the men managed not to laugh. When no one raised a hand, the officer, translator in tow, stepped from one prisoner to another, asking the same question. He received the same response every time: name, rank, and serial number. The officer finally gave up, tossing several last insults at the airmen before ordering them back to their rocky barracks.

For the following two weeks the Allied flyers continued to share thin blankets and sleep, as best they could, on the stony surface. Once it was lights out (except for the tower searchlights) the rocks offered at least some comfort, having been warmed by the day’s sun. However, as the nights wore on into September, they shed their remaining warmth and “the night chill nearly overcame the increasing pain in our stomachs.”

Thomas Childers writes that “the men sank gradually into the brutal routine of the tent camp: the endless roll calls, the savage beatings, the starvation rations, the filth, the vermin, the disease.” Conditions became more crowded within the barbed-wire-enclosed Little Camp, yet every day “new prisoners—Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Jews—were tossed into the already horribly crowded tent camp. They wandered around the barren compound, trying to find a place to sit or sleep, a place to escape the surprisingly brutal sun. It was impossible to take more than a few steps without bumping into another dismal soul, and vicious fights broke out over scraps of food, draining away even more energy from the starving men.”

As best they could, the men tried to tolerate their cruel surroundings.

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