Private First Class (PFC), B Company, 38th Infantry, 2nd Indian Head Division, US Army. Thomas served his country in WWII from 1943 – 1945.
Thomas carries with him a piece of history that not many others have. The tag that reads “Stalag IV-B” reminds him of hard days of labor, malnutrition and questions of how much longer he would live. There were many people that were issued the tags, but as Thomas puts it, “hardly any” are still around to talk about it.
Though he was there for less than a year, what he saw and experienced in World War II has remained with him through seven decades. There is not a day that passes that he does not think back to his time there.
“It was an adventure,” Thomas says with a smile.
The journey began with Thomas, who grew up in Livingston, when he was drafted at the age of 18. When the war began, men between 21 and 45 were registered for selection. That was extended to 18 to 64 after Pearl Harbor.
He had a few months in Livingston before reporting and chose to spend that time working for Shell Oil Company in Deer Park. Soon after, he headed to Houston, where he rode the rails to San Antonio for over a year of training.
“We trained hard,” Thomas recalled.
“I thought we were going to give out before we even started fighting.”
A second training stop sent Thomas to North Carolina Camp Butner before loading onto a boat for Liverpool, England.
“We were there as replacements after the invasion. In England, there were planes flying all the time. I don’t know how those Germans stood up to all that bombing. It was something to watch.”
Thomas and his unit boarded another ship to cross an extremely rough English Channel onto Normandy Beach.
“I didn’t land until about four days after D-Day. We were suffering a lot of casualties all the time. Every day somebody is going to get hit. There were few days that we didn’t.”
Thomas was in Sainte-Mere-Eglise, off the coast of the English Channel when he and his unit entered France. He said the first battle he fought was in Saint Lo, about 30 miles South.
“That was a bad one. We spent about two weeks there. The Germans were not going to give up. All that time, we are losing men. We thought we weren’t going to get out of there without being killed or wounded.”
Through six and a half months of battle, Thomas carried around a M1 Garand .30-06 with ammunition strapped to his person. The young soldier also served as a scout and recalls one of his last days of battle.
“We knew the Germans had lined up tanks, because one morning we heard the motors on a real clear, cold day. It was real still. We went about 5 or 10 miles and they had tanks everywhere. The Germans were everywhere, but they didn’t know that we were Americans. We got back the next night and reported all of that in. They didn’t do anything about it. One of the generals had heard rumors (of enemy troops’ whereabouts), but there wasn’t any rumors when we were telling him facts!”
When his group was sent out to help a unit that was not in the area, Thomas and his allies were in a bad spot.
“I got captured.”
Thomas said death or injury was the way soldiers figured they would leave the war. They never thought about getting captured. But, now they were – by Nazis.
“That night it was in a little building over there and they were the same Germans that we had fought in Saint Lo. So, they didn’t like us. They wanted information and we didn’t know what they were talking about.”
The Germans wanted to know something that they believed these Americans could tell them. With a great quantity of motors running low or out of fuel, the Germans needed to find gasoline.
“That’s what finally stopped the Germans, they ran out of fuel. They put us in that building and when they would interrogate somebody, you would hear a shot. It was getting pretty serious. The next one would go out and then they would shoot.”
Thomas said several tense moments were spent in the building while waiting to be questioned. As each was taken out to give answers, a shot would follow.
“If you don’t tell them something, they are going to shoot you,” Thomas said the Americans were thinking. “Us knowing the Germans, we knew they would do it.”
What the captured eventually found was not as bad as they had imagined.
“They were shooting into the ground, but we didn’t know that.”
The next morning, the captured were sent marching – for 7 days.
“On all of those marches, if you fell out of line, you were shot. You heard it. They waited about an hour or two and then you would hear that shot.”
With no food and an occasional drink of water, Thomas and the others walked to Bonn, Germany from the Belgium-France border.
“We got in Bonn on Christmas Eve. It was always snowing and the temperature down close to zero. I don’t know how we didn’t freeze to death. They gave us a bowl of turnips and we ate that. The next day, you got two slices of bread.”
The prisoners of war were put on a train and given a bucket of water to sustain themselves.
“We left there and we were gone several days. An American fighter plane came in and knocked out the engine. So, we were sitting there for 10 days before we got to IV-B. We were there 10 days and not a bite. There was blizzard weather the whole time.”
Stalag IV-B was a camp at Mulhberg, Brandenburg which lies in the east of Germany. With a bowl of turnips, two slices of bread, and the occasional drink of water in nearly three weeks, the POW’s were sent to work. And the Livingston native was not exactly accustomed to cold weather.
“You got half of a blanket. There were two of you on a bunk. They put us to work on a railroad in a labor camp. That was tough. The guards didn’t like to stay out there too much either, but they did. We had them (prisoners) dying in that camp. There were some every day – starvation. They put you on a diet of one 12-ounce can every day of boiled rutabagas.”
His small meal of heated vegetable mush had Thomas dropping body mass at an alarming rate. The 160-pound soldier that was sent from the United States just a few months before had shrunk to 82 pounds.
Ukrainian and Polish women POWs were stationed not too far from where Thomas was assigned. Information they received from the women kept moral from completely fading.
“Those girls tried to help us. They got fed better than we did. They would leave us notes and draw us a map of where the Americans were and where the Russians were. We were pulling for both sides – somebody hurry. They were getting closer every day.”
When the day finally came, Thomas said he and others could see out of a factory window. The sight was of an American infantry marching down the street.
“We said, “Hey, we’re Americans! Shoot the lock off the door.” There were probably 140 of us in the factory. We had about a dozen that were bedridden, waiting to die, and nothing you could do for them. They told us “we don’t have ambulances.”
“We said “just get a truck; we’ll put them on the bed of the truck” And, they did. We went back and one of them said, are y’all Americans?” We must have looked bad.”
When the captives asked for something to eat, large boxes of food were unveiled.
“I got me a can of beanie weenies. I took about three or four bites and it came right back up. Finally, we learned that you had to have bland food and the Americans had plenty of that.”
Dehydrated beans and peas, and powdered milk were palatable for the malnourished digestive systems. Thomas soon found himself back in France, this time in a hospital to recover.
“I spent a month in there and the war over while I was in there. I wanted to go home so bad. They finally turned me loose and gave me my papers. We got on a train to go to Paris and on down to La Harve (a port city in northern France).”
Thomas said there were many who would speak of never getting out.
“And a lot of them didn’t. We had a lot of them that died in the camp. When we knew that the Americans were moving and that the Russians were moving, that gave us hope.”
With 140 in his camp, Thomas estimated that at least 30 did not make it.
“It was quite an experience. It kind of amazes me how cruel they were. Germany had to be Hitler’s cult. Right up to the last, the streets would be lined up with kids and women, and they would throw rocks and spit at you. I had my 21st birthday in prison camp. I said, “I ought to be out chasing girls.”
The local hero has received a collection of medals, including the Bronze Star for Valor and the Purple Heart for his role in the conflict.
Nowadays you can find him back on the north side of Livingston hanging around Marston Road at the Painted Cottage or his old homeplace Thomas Mercantile.
On June 28 & 29 Thomas is more than excited to be making his first Honor Flight to Washington, DC to see the WWII Memorial.