Don’s Snatches
by Donald E. Phillips
Sketched by fellow POW, in camp January 1944
After Don died in December, 1995, his wife Sally found three sheets of paper which indicate Don had intentions at some point in his life of writing his story of being a POW. The three snatches are included below.
In the event that my book progresses beyond the ‘someday-when-I-have-time’ stage…
Foreword
War breeds many things, both abstract and concrete. For some inexplicable reason it brings forth hordes of hitherto unheard-of writers, some of whom go so far as to publish best sellers, thereby encouraging other hordes of younger and still less talented embryo writers to invade the already overcrowded field. Of this last group, a few manage to find publishers willing to put their books into print, thereby encouraging still more…but you grasp the general idea. Already the saturation point has been reached. What harm, then, in my adding a brief contribution, a grain of sand in the Sahara, a drop of water in the Pacific.
o o o
Far ahead and 25,000 feet below us, the English Channel beckoned hazily. Beside, above and below us, bombers of our own and other groups were tucked in neatly, wing tip to bombbay, stacked as nearly as possible in an impregnable defense. Far above a few Foche-Wolfe 190’s watched our progress, content to sit well out of range but ready to swoop should a straggler lose the formation and fall behind. Another ten minutes would see us over the channel with a good possibility of returning unscathed. All in all we should have been breathing easy.
We weren’t.
Probably at one time or another in your driving career you’ve found yourself miles from the next town, with the gas gauge hovering around the empty mark. You recall the uneasy feeling it gave you as you wondered if you might be stranded miles from the nearest station. Let’s add another worry. Suppose that the country through which you had been driving was inhabited by an enemy people, and to stop meant possible imprisonment. You wouldn’t have been breathing normally either.
That was our predicament. If prayers were fuel we could have flown nonstop to New York or San Francisco. Despite the best efforts of our very capable engineer, kept busy transferring gasoline from one tank to another, and our pilot, desperately trying to lean down the mixture and gain another few miles, we were still a good twenty-five miles from the channel when the first engine coughed protestingly.
To Pete, our pilot, fell the decision of bailing out or crash landing. To crash land meant giving the plane to the Germans practically intact, and it meant further that any alert troops below could follow our descent fairly accurately and possibly capture all ten of us in one process. To bail out meant that we would be scattered out over a larger area, thus augmenting our chances of escape. This latter course was the one Pete chose and later developments proved that his choice was a good one.
Somehow the thought of one day relying on my parachute for the extension of my happy life had never seriously occurred to me. All through our training a parachute was something you were required to carry with you to the plane where it was tossed in a pile in the corner with others and forgotten until the flight was over and it was time to check it in at the chute department. I recall cursing the darn cumbersome thing as I lugged it around in my various travels from Texas to England. Suddenly it looked goldplated. I jettisoned the escape hatch in the nose of the ship and looked down. Proper procedure dictated that I dive out headfirst into the slipstream. A definite aversion to high diving prompted me to go feet first, which I did. The sensation is unique. As I pushed my feet out tentatively the wind swept them back and sucked me out completely.
The silence was deafening. One second before all was hubba-hubba, now (this is where the sketch ends in mid sentence)
o o o
My first look at the place seemed to confirm my worst suspicions. As we approached the massive barbed wire enclosure, the sight of the blood-red Nazi swastika billowing arrogantly above the gate stifled momentarily any fond hope I may have had of making the place seem as much like home as possible. Inside I could see huddles of men, attired in various and outlandish garbs, and looking out at us in a wistful, silent sort of way. It was as though we were one step nearer freedom than they, by mere virtue of the fact that we were still outside the final fence that was to bound our world for the next twenty months.
Still, as we came within speaking range, it was almost like a homecoming for many of the twenty-five men in our “purge”, as we later came to call them. Almost all of them knew fellows inside, had flown, drank, and stood inspection with them in what now seemed almost another age. There were glad cries of “Bill, you old bastard, I heard you were dead!” “J.B., you sonuvagon, I thought probably you’d finished up and gone home!” “Is Johnny still with the group?” “Did’ja lose a lot of the squadron on Schweinfurt?”
Fragments of conversation fell like confetti. “We were flyin’ deputy lead…sprained it landing…got it right over the target…no, he got out…got on my pinks, you louse,…number two supercharger ran away…did my clothes get sent home…damn lead navigator took us right over the flak area”
That is all that Don wrote, so we, too, are left with only fragments of his conversation about his POW experience. There are a few other writings by Don about his POW experience. One is a poem written in camp. Second are letters written to his parents during his internment and the third are postcards he wrote to his niece Theresa during the last two months of his life.
Camp Poem
Are you weary of the present?
Home or business life unpleasant?
Do you long to stow it all and get away?
Taxes eating up your income?
Bonds depleting it, and then some?
Draft board calling louder every day?
Some blonde siren with a bubble
On your trail and brewing trouble?
Wife and in-laws getting in your hair?
Tired of getting up at seven?
Swing shift working you till ‘leven?
Looking for the life without a care?
Stalag Three’s the spot for you, boy!
Hop a thousand bomber convoy.
Come and live the life of Riley for a year.
Sleep the clock around on Monday;
Sleep the week around till Sunday.
Let the Krautheads feed and clothe you while you’re here.
Rest assured that blonde tornadoes,
Salesmen, wives, and desperadoes
Cannot storm this haven on a hill.
Barbed wire serves as insulation
To the woes of civ’lization.
Hawk-eyed Super-guards complete the bill.
One important stipulation…
When you leave your present station
Hold it open for me, will you please?
Because for me this life has cloyed
And I’d be damned well overjoyed
To peddle apples in that land across the seas.
