List of my May WWII Blogs on “Where were my Dad and his men 80 years ago today?”
June 3, 2025
June 17, 1945 — Phil’s first visit back home with his parents in Memphis was a media firestorm
June 17, 2025June 16, 1945 — Phil and his best friend Ross are reunited and Phil learns how Ross survived as a POW
In case you missed the last blog, about what happened on May 25, 1945, when Phil received one of the most shocking phone calls of his young life, here’s the follow-up to that phone call:
As his recovery progressed, Phil became an expert at ambulating with crutches and a wheelchair. By mid-June 1945, he’d recovered to a point where he was awarded a thirty-day leave. The first thing Phil did with his newfound freedom was to take a train to Nashville, where he enjoyed a wonderful visit with [his best friend] Ross [Calvert] at Thayer General Hospital.
Ross explained what had happened when the Germans overran the village of Holtzwihr in the Colmar Pocket.
“Several of us sheltered in a barn near a house. We later crawled into the hayloft and covered ourselves with hay. That was a miserable night. The Germans put a CP in the house and billeted their men in the barn. One of my men snored, so I spent half the night choking him. Somehow, we got through the night without being discovered,” Ross remembered, laughing.
“The next day, the old Alsatian who lived in the place crawled up to the loft to throw hay down for his stock. He uncovered a GI boot, let out a yell, and fell back. Pretty soon, a voice, in excellent English, said that we could either come down or he would burn down the barn, but if he set the barn on fire, they would shoot any man trying to escape the flames.
“Of course, we came down, cold, tired, and sleepy. I wasn’t too worried because I knew the Germans had a POW enclosure in Colmar and that Colmar would soon be encircled. Again, too much knowledge is a dangerous thing. They marched us straight to a ferry to cross the Rhine.
“A squadron of French fighter planes tried to blow up the ferry, but they never got a direct hit. We were taken to POW camps in Stuttgart and then Hammelburg, near Bad Kissingen, and that ended the war for me.”
“Did you ever try to escape?” Phil asked.
“Hell, yes! Actually did, but developed severe double pneumonia, and I was weakened to the point where I had no run or fight left. I’m told that I was easily recaptured walking down the middle of a paved road, but I don’t remember that. I finally ended up in a POW hospital in Nürnburg. I overheard an American medical man say he didn’t think it likely I would last much longer. But to hell with that, I thought.”
The men laughed together.
“I was there when the 3rd Division took the place. I couldn’t make contact with anyone from the division and was evacuated to Nancy, Paris, New York, and finally here to Thayer.”
It was there that Phil and Ross began to strategize how they might work together in the Army.[1]
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[1] Larimore, At First Light, 278.
Learn more about my book about my father’s heroics and exploits at Amazon’s First Light page here. You can also read more of my WWII blogs here as well!
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