Ed Hays, of Ridgewood, N.J., was a tail gunner in a B-17 that was shot down over Denmark on his 13th mission.
We evacuated Stalag Luft 6, which was in the Pomeranian section of Germany, and they transported us by train to a seaport and put us in the hold of a ship. Two thousand five hundred of us were put in the hold, with nothing. You get down there, they close the hatch. They put so many of us down there that they had to keep some people on deck, so there were some guys that got lucky and rode up above. We were down there for two and a half days with nothing. They’d lower a bucket with drinking water, and when it went up it went full of filth and slop. And that was it. So when we got out of there we were pretty happy guys. But then they put us on a train and took us to a railroad station, and then they handcuffed us together. Two men. My right wrist and my partner’s left wrist. I don’t know why they handcuffed us; they’d never done that before.
My partner was Bob Richards from Chicago, who had lost an eye and had a glass eye, which the Germans had given him. He was shot down earlier than I was, and he had a badly dislocated leg. It just didn’t work. I was handcuffed to him, but we thought we were gonna walk to the next camp. We started out, and we ran into a bunch of German guards and this wild Nazi captain who was completely out of his mind. He incited the guards to make us run, and if anybody stumbled they were beaten or bayoneted. They had police dogs on leashes, which they siced on each guy. They were hoping to get us to break ranks on them, so that they could have an excuse to shoot us. They had a machine gun emplacement every hundred yards or so along that road, in the forest.
You could see the machine guns, so we were smart enough to know not to make a break. But two and a half miles is a long run with a pack, our belongings. And we were handcuffed together. I went down with Bob. We fell down twice, and both times we were beaten. I was hit in the head, and I was hit in the shoulder and the collarbone, by rifle butts. We were lucky we weren’t bayoneted. We were lucky we weren’t bitten by the dogs. Many guys suffered dog bites and bayonet wounds, and we had several hundred badly injured men when they got to the camp.
When we got there, they put us out in a field, and we sat there for the rest of the day in the hot sun while they processed us into the camp. And I never did get any medical attention. There were other guys that were more seriously hurt than I was, but we were both badly beaten. I consider myself lucky that I wasn’t bayoneted. And although there was only one death – this fellow died later on from bayonet wounds – we were very fortunate.
That got to be known as the Heydekrug Run, and the case was taken to the Nuremberg trials. Three men were indicted for that, the Hauptmann – the captain – and two German guards, but there was never enough evidence applied at the trial and in the indictment, so it was dropped. They had more important cases to take care of in Nuremberg, but nevertheless, they got those three guys into court. So there was some revenge.
