War is never a pleasant experience, but it is even worse for those unfortunates who find themselves captured by the enemy and forced to spend the balance of the war in a POW camp. In Americans Behind the Barbed Wire, journalist J. Frank Diggs shares with readers his unique view of WWII from inside Oflag 64, a German POW camp located in Schubin, Poland.
The author, representative of a generation of Americans who were tempered to hardship during the Great Depression, takes the reader on a complex journey from combat, to capture, to prison, and finally to escape and repatriation. He and his fellow kriegies, German slang for prisoners, demonstrate a resoluteness and sense of purpose shared by his generation. As kriegies they worked and plotted for more food, searched for more heat and warm clothes, worked to improve themselves and their condition, and established a camp newspaper to help improve the flow of information and relieve the mind-numbing boredom. They never stopped working for their freedom. This truly amazing book offers a glimpse of history that never made headlines, but was just as real as the aerial bombing, submarine warfare, and amphibious landings. The last portion of the book includes a diary of the author s escape from the Germans and, along with many of his fellow prisoners, their involvement in the Russian/American repatriation crises at the end of the war, as well as their eventual return to the United States.
The author, representative of a generation of Americans who were tempered to hardship during the Great Depression, takes the reader on a complex journey from combat, to capture, to prison, and finally to escape and repatriation. He and his fellow kriegies, German slang for prisoners, demonstrate a resoluteness and sense of purpose shared by his generation. As kriegies they worked and plotted for more food, searched for more heat and warm clothes, worked to improve themselves and their condition, and established a camp newspaper to help improve the flow of information and relieve the mind-numbing boredom. They never stopped working for their freedom. This truly amazing book offers a glimpse of history that never made headlines, but was just as real as the aerial bombing, submarine warfare, and amphibious landings. The last portion of the book includes a diary of the author s escape from the Germans and, along with many of his fellow prisoners, their involvement in the Russian/American repatriation crises at the end of the war, as well as their eventual return to the United States.
