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TI: And so you and about a hundred other men were captured?

LP: Oh, there was more than that in the whole area. And the group I was in was about a hundred guys, but there was a lot more 106th Infantry, but we were scattered over like a twenty-mile front.

TI: Now when you were captured, were you worried for your life when that happened?

LP: Was I worried about my life? You bet I was worried about my life every minute I was up there. They wouldn't mind killing you. We killed them and they killed you back. That's what war's all about, there's got to be a better way.

TI: So when you surrendered, how did they treat you? What happened next?

LP: Well, we marched back towards Germany for three days and three nights. And then they put us in boxcars, and when we went back to... Bad Orb was the name of the little town we were in in Germany. And we were in, like, three big warehouses up there in the mountains and the snow. That's where the prison camp was at.

TI: And what were they, kind of the living conditions? In a warehouse, what was that like?

LP: A warehouse. It had one forty-watt light up in the middle of a building that was about a hundred feet long. And bunkbeds, no mattress, straw. Your toilets were ditches that they dug outside, that was it. Ten months over there, or about ten months.

TI: And in that warehouse, were they all Americans or different Allied...

LP: Well, in the area where I was at Americans, but there was another one next to us that were Polish or some other race, I don't know what they were. But they were all Americans where I was at. Probably all 106th Infantry, I'm not sure.

TI: And so you said ten months you were there.

LP: Something like that.

TI: But it was a long time.

LP: From the latter part of '44 into the middle of '45.

TI: Now once you were captured and in this prisoner of war camp, at that point, did you ever fear for your life, when you were there?

LP: Yeah, when you weigh 160 pounds when you go there and you weigh 96 when you get out of there, I guess you fear for your life. You think you're gonna starve to death. And there's guys that died right alongside of me. They just didn't wake up the next morning. They died of hunger. They'd be laying there and everybody's getting up, and they wouldn't get up. We lost a few of 'em, not a lot of 'em. But everybody was, the bigger guys were worse, I guess it took more food. It was worse for them. We got one canteen cup half full of potato soup, and two slices of black German bread once a day. That was at eleven o'clock every day and that was it. People say you can't live on potatoes alone, but that's not true.

TI: And what did you do the rest of the day? So eleven o'clock you were fed...

LP: Nothing. Nothing. It would have nice if we could have had enough to eat and went out and did something like the Americans did with the German prisoners. Like when I came back I pulled guard duty on the German prisoners at Vandenberg. Well, they go out on work details. They're working the laundry and all around. But they got fed regular meals and they wore our clothes. So it was not good being there, but it was nothing like what we had to put up with.

TI: So when you say do "nothing," what's that like?

LP: Nothing.

TI: You mean you just sit there?

LP: No books, nothing. And their prison was, they had about a twenty foot high barbed wire fence, and then they had about twenty feet beyond that and another one, and then everything in the middle was barbed wire. I don't know how the hell they ever put it all in there. But if you wanted to escape from that, you were going to have to cut through twenty feet of barbed wire rolled. And we didn't have any pliers or anything, couldn't have did it. And besides, if you went out there up in those mountains, how long could you last without any food? We were stuck.

TI: And in terms of organization within the camp, were there, was there like a hierarchy? Was there like some prisoners who were in more control or anything like that?

LP: There was one German guard that would come through there, and I can't believe this guy carried a rifle with him. He's in there with all these people that... why would you carry a gun in a place like that? I mean, we could have taken the gun away from him without any trouble at all, but why would you carry a gun? But they did not -- in our camps here, if we went into the compounds where the German prisoners were, we didn't carry a gun. I don't know. I guess wars are crazy.

TI: When you were in Europe, at any point, did you ever hear about the Japanese American soldiers?

LP: No.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.