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Newspaper recounts man's story of days as
POW
The
following comes from a newspaper account of the day:
"Sgt.
Robert Burns related his experiences as a German prisoner of war stressing the lack of
food as one of the worst features of prison life.
"Burns
said he dropped from 215 to 130 pounds before he was back in American hands. Food consisted largely of soup with occasional meat
and a loaf of bread for five to 10 men per day. That
was about two slices for each man.
"He
said he thought the Germans probably couldn't increase the quality of the food given the
prisoners but he felt they could have increased the quantity.
"Red
Cross boxes did much to keep the men alive, he said, but disrupted transportation often
prevented arrival of the boxes.
"Burns
suffered a leg wound but it would not have been serious except that it became infected on
a five-day march to a prison camp. He also
sprained his ankle on that march and he spent much of his life as a prisoner in bed
thereafter. In fact it was not until he was liberated and in American hands that he
recovered.
"Hospital
and medical facilities were poor, he said, and disease caused much trouble but few deaths. The barracks in the prison camp were heated with a
weekly coal ration that lasted about an hour. Beds
were wood with straw-filled ticks and many lice.
"During
his stay in camp near Berlin he could see the fleets of bombers pounding that capital
city.
"One
camp he was in had no chaplain, but American soldiers conducted services regularly. The morale of the men was good all the time, he
said.
"Liberation
came during the night. The Americans didn't
know the Russians had captured the camp until morning.
Not a shot was fired. After two
weeks under Russian administration, American trucks and ambulances arrived to start the
prisoners on their way home.
"I
just couldn't describe the feeling when those American trucks and their American flags
arrived," he said."
Burns
was known around Flat River as Bob Burns. He
worked at Krogers as a butcher before the war. He
is now deceased.
Sgt.
Burns recuperated at the O'Reilly General Hospital in Springfield and was discharged on
Sept. 5, 1945. He joined the Army on Sept. 8,
1942.
