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Fellow prisoners of war had tried to escape, but the German guards spotted them and unleashed a barrage of rifle fire. One cartridge lodged in a two-by-four beam just 18 inches above where Perkins hid. He would have to wait for his chance at freedom. A B-17 flight engineer during World War II, Perkins fell into captivity when the Germans shot down his plane near Rotterdam on Aug. 19, 1943. Stationed in England, Perkins had conducted 13 bombing raids in France, Germany and Norway. His 14th proved the unlucky mission, though. Only six of the 10 crewmen survived the crash, and civilians who found Perkins hiding in a haystack the next morning betrayed him. Although they promised help, instead of the drink he requested Perkins soon found a bayonet thrust toward his face.
The veteran, now a Lampasas resident, received treatment at a hospital for his sprained ankle and broken ribs. In the afternoon, his captors loaded Perkins into a pickup, took him to a cemetery in Rotterdam and ordered him to help unload four coffins. The captors did not explain why they had given him the task, but he had no doubt. "I knew all the time that was my crew," Perkins said. The prisoner spent his first night in captivity in Rotterdam, then transferred by train to Amsterdam, where the Germans kept him for 10 days before shuttling him between Frankfurt and Munich on the way to Krems, Austria, near Vienna. Perkins finally entered the prison barracks at Stalag XVII-B and was not freed until almost two years later, when Gen. George Patton's troops stormed across Europe. With the Russians One of 4,600 American prisoners of war at the Stalag complex, Perkins found himself surrounded by 20,000 Russian POWs as well. English and American prisoners escaped some of the harsher aspects of imprisonment, but the Russians did not receive Red Cross assistance, Perkins said. Because the Russians didn't abide by the Geneva Conventions in effect at the time, the veteran said the Germans refused to grant Russian officers the exemptions from forced labor they allowed American and British officers. "The Russians, regardless of their rank, had to get out and work in the field," Perkins said. Prison rations, which included bread, potatoes and "dehydrated vegetable soup" -- actually just cabbage with worms inside it, Perkins said -- didn't appeal to most inmates, but the Russians were desperate. "They would take what we had thrown away and eat," Perkins said. "They were in tough shape." Some had been captured early in the war and endured six years as prisoners of war, he added. The veteran befriended a Russian B-17 pilot, one of three Russian prisoners kept in Perkins' barracks. Although the airmen talked only through the limited German Perkins knew, their experience as aviators gave them a common interest. "You could relate to him even though we didn't speak the same language," Perkins said. Trying to escape Although not confined as long as their Russian counterparts, the American prisoners still yearned for a chance to escape. The men worked in groups, moving the bunk beds in their barracks to dig a tunnel in the wall. Watchmen informed their fellow prisoners if guards were coming, and the POWs quickly shifted their piles of dirt out of sight, often hiding the evidence under their elevated barracks. To join a tunnel crew, workers had to provide references from other prisoners to ensure they would keep the escape plans secret. Nevertheless, Perkins' comrades never got a man out of Stalag. When they completed a tunnel, the prisoners drew numbers to decide the order in which they would flee the compound. Perkins drew number 56. One day before the planned escape, though, a "stool pigeon" betrayed the workers by reporting the tunnel to the guards. When two men tried to break free another night, they made it toward a fence before watchmen spotted them and began shooting at random. The guards killed both men who tried to escape, and a bullet struck the rear end of one prisoner near Perkins. "We used to kid him quite a bit," the Lampasas man recalled. "He saved our life with his big butt." Prison conditions Not all of the veteran's time at Stalag brought such stress. Perkins kept his mind sharp by studying business law from a lawyer imprisoned there, and he took Spanish lessons for more than a year from Johnny Gutierrez, a Houstonian whom Perkins befriended and still contacts. "I even got college credit for it when I got back," he said of his studies in the prison compound. Lights-out was at 10 p.m., but prisoners twisted shirts inside cans of oleo margarine to make candle wicks. With this illumination they could play cards throughout the night. Poker games gave Perkins a chance to win food or cigarettes. Because he was not a smoker, he often used the cigarettes to trade with other prisoners or even with the guards. The captives also built a crude crystal radio set and picked up the BBC news from London every day at midnight. One prisoner often read newspaper reports aloud to his fellow captives. News traveled slowly, though. Perkins and his wife Lillian, whom he married in December of 1945, had developed a friendship before the war and wrote each other while Perkins was in the German prison. All mail passed through government censors, which delayed the already slow delivery. A birthday card Mrs. Perkins received from Stalag took three months to reach the United States. "His family didn't know for about a month that he was missing" after Perkins' plane crashed, his wife said. Perkins' father used to say he hardly could eat supper for a month because of his worries about his son's safety. "I'm sure this is the same with families anywhere" during war, Leo Perkins' wife said. Working at an air base in Marfa, Mrs. Perkins often heard reports well before Leo Perkins did. "Actually I was better informed about what was going on over there than he was, because I got (information) straight from the Army, and he was kind of closed in over there," she said. Freedom Nevertheless, news of Patton's advance gradually reached Stalag. Coming within 30 miles of the prison, the Russians sacked Vienna in April 1945. "We could see the smoke going up 10,000 or 15,000 feet," Perkins said. Although the prisoners never knew why, the Germans decided to move them west toward the American lines. The captives carried their bedding and all their other supplies with them on the two-week march, which ended in Adolf Hitler's hometown of Braunau, Austria. Broken into groups of 500 on the march, the men moved nervously for three days, when members of Hitler's elite SS troops guarded the march. Rumors spread among the prisoners that two POWs had been shot. Once the SS troopers left, however, the men enjoyed some freedom to roam the countryside, as long as they followed the general path of the march and eventually rejoined the lines of prisoners. "It gave me an opportunity to see what the German civilians were like," Perkins said. He traded soap and tobacco with the Germans -- who had not had tobacco since the war began and had resorted to smoking Timothy hay -- to acquire potatoes, eggs and other food. One Sunday morning, Perkins surprised his fellow captives by dining on a bacon and egg breakfast. In Braunau, the Germans ordered their captives to draw water and build shelters along the confluence of the Inn and Salzach rivers. On the evening of May 2, as he completed his task at the water's edge, Perkins could hear the Germans blowing up their own bridges, trying to stop the Allies' advance. "I said, 'If we can just hold on one or two more days the Americans are going to be here,'" Perkins recalled. His prediction proved true. The next day, Patton's troops liberated the American prisoners. Perkins still remembers a sergeant's understated announcement of his release. "This sergeant said, 'Well, you guys are free now,'" he said. Soon his position reversed, as Perkins went from prisoner to near captor. The soldier "liberated" a bicycle, hunting rifle and a pair of German binoculars -- which he still owns -- and headed down the road toward Salzburg, Austria. There, 25 terrified Hungarians tried to surrender to Perkins. Remembering He spent about 40 days in England, then took a 13- day boat ride to Boston, where he stayed overnight before transferring to New York City. Perkins finally arrived in San Antonio in July 1945. The prison survivor has kept the memory of the four pilots who perished in the plane crash, as he, his wife and his daughter traveled to Europe in 1980 and visited the cemetery where Perkins' peers were buried. A cemetery official directed them to the graves of two men in Perkins' plane and pointed toward Row J, site of the third airman's burial plot, but he told the group there were no records for the fourth serviceman. Perkins' daughter laid a yellow rose on each of the first two graves, and the family decided to take a longer route to Row J than the path the official had shown. As the Texans moved about the cemetery, they walked directly past the headstone of the crewman they feared had been "lost." "I just had cold chills when we walked by that," Mrs. Perkins said. Her husband also keeps his own story alive, having shared his account several times at schools. Perkins and his wife never heard many narratives of World War I when they were children, and they hope to give younger generations the personal connection to history they lacked as youth. Now 90 years old -- still active, too, as a track athlete and a horse owner -- and preparing to celebrate 62 years of marriage, Perkins reflects on the faith that sustained him as a prisoner of war. A tough ranch upbringing strengthened him for the privations of Stalag, he said, and his wife credits Perkins' strength in prison largely to his keen sense of humor. The couple acknowledge Perkins didn't survive through his own strength alone, though.
"If the Lord wasn't with you, you could really get in
trouble fast," Perkins said. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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