“I hated every minute of the Army,” he said. “I was 23 years old and already set in my ways. It’s good for a younger fellow, who they can mold a little bit. I didn’t care too much for that. There’s a lot of wasted time in there. You’d spend a lot of days not doing anything, actually.”
Capture
Altman found himself assigned to the First Infantry Division, known as “The Big Red One” after their insignia, pushing back the Germans from North Africa.
His company was in Tunisia on the evening of Jan. 27, 1943, four days after he’d been promoted to corporal, assigned to secure a mountain pass.
“The intelligence officer and his driver went up there and came back with the report that all was clear,” he said, “That we could move up five or six miles.
“The next morning, three German companies hit that pass and there were only 200 of us.
“It was rough, hilly country,” Altman said. “The Germans held the high ground and we were pinned down in the low ground and we were sitting there in our ditch around five or six in the morning.”
The shooting got pretty heavy after that and a platoon of German soldiers marched past and engaged them from about 200 yards away.
“Pretty soon the lieutenant cried out that he got hit in the ankle, then different guys started hollering ‘I’m hit’ or ‘So-and-so’s hit.’”
Altman read a report later that said his company lost 79 men that day. His company was down to five men, and they all surrendered when the German platoon finally over-ran their position.
Planes and trains
A few days later, Altman took his first airplane ride as his captors moved him from North Africa to Italy.
From Italy, he and 40 other men were loaded in a boxcar to be transported from Naples to Munich, Germany.
“Four days and nights,” Altman said. “One five-gallon lard can for your toilet facilities for 40 men. That was a stinking mess. It was a strictly bread and water routine. No food. Five men on a loaf of bread every day. Once a day they would let you outside for toilet. Most of the time you spent in the box car.”
After two weeks in Munich, it was another four day trip to Stalag 3B in Furstenberg near the Polish border, where he would spend the next 23 months.
Because he had just made corporal, he didn’t have to do work detail.
“If you were a private in a war camp, you worked 12 hours a day, six days a week, cleaning up after bombings, working on railroads, like slave labor,” he said, “and they did that on the same ration of everyone who was sleeping all day long. They had it pretty rough. All we did was play ball.”
The food was pretty bad most of the time. His barracks got a big tub of what they called coffee every morning, but it wasn’t real coffee and it was so weak that some of the men used it to shave. They did get Red Cross rations, but a lot of that was taken by Germans, and what was left was often used as currency for gambling or buying newspapers and crystal radios from the guards.
“We could keep up with the news pretty good,” Altman said. “I could read German and speak some, understand some. You could get a German newspaper from one of the guards for two cigarettes every day. They kept pretty accurate news articles in the paper. But instead of admitting a loss, they’d call it a strategic retreat.”
There were secret radios in the camps, crystal sets, where he could listen to German news, which he would translate for his fellow prisoners, or to the Berlin Philharmonic.
Winter march
As the war began to wind down, in February, 1945, the prisoners at Furstenberg were marched east to Luckenwalde, about 35 miles south of Berlin, as the Russian army advanced from the west.
“They didn’t want us to get liberated,” Altman said. “Later on we heard that wanted to send all of the prisoners to Berlin where they would be bombed by the Americans and British in retaliation for the bombings that were going on.
“We walked the first 24 hours without stopping,” he said, in blizzard conditions, temperature about 20 below zero.
“At the end of the 24 hours, we were pretty miserable,” he said. “They put us up in villages in big barns. It felt like heaven getting into the big pile of hay, getting warm. Then the next morning they started marching us again, but they’d only march us from eight to 10 hours for the next six days.
As they approached Luckenwalde, Altman saw a collection of big circus tents, their new home.
“I asked a guard what kind of beds do they have in those tents, and he laughed, and said ‘Beds? You’ll see.’
“There weren’t any beds, just piles of straw.”
The conditions at Luckenwalde, the last three months, were the worst of the entire ordeal, Altman said.
There were 1,500 men, four or five hundred to a tent without heat except for body heat.
“But you had to lay there for three months without a bath and very little food,” he said
“You had one faucet out in the middle of a field for all 1,500 men to wash and bathe,” he said. “They dug slit trenches for defecating. German people would walk right by the fence and they could watch you.
“Red Cross boxes came in slowly at that time, the war drawing to a close. The Germans were taking some of the food and keeping it for themselves,” he said.
When the Russians came, the Germans just left. The prisoners were left to their own devices. Altman and a buddy would wander in and out of the camp for several days before they decided to find the River Elbe and some Americans.
Altman finally made it home just before the war ended in the Pacific, and he was finally discharged.
He came back to Hamilton, married Dorothy, his high school sweetheart, and joined the Hamilton Fire Department, advancing to the rank of Captain.
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