John Edwin Fridley was in the 70th Infantry Division, 275th Regiment, 3rd Battalion, Company I, assigned to the left flank of the 7th U.S. Army. His unit fought in the Vosges Mountains, the foothills of the mountains of Alsace Lorraine. The Vosges had never before been fought across, not even by Napoleon. Fridley was captured, between Philipsbourg, Alsace Lorraine (France), and Bitche (Germany). Co. I was involved in the Nordwind Campaign, started by the Germans to take the pressure off the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge by making the Allies spread their forces thinner.   Following are excerpts taken from material Ed dictated to his mother and father, Archie and Vesta Fridley, when he returned to Anna in the latter part of June 1945. He had been held prisoner for 135 days.

It was New Year's Eve in 1945, and our Company had moved up the hills by trucks to Saarbrucken, Germany, having come from Strasburg, France. It was cold, snowy, and disagreeable. We climbed out of the trucks and marched about five miles on up the hills where we dug in. We were ambushed and we retreated; several men were wounded. Then we came under artillery fire. A bunch of greenhorn soldiers had their first taste of the real war.

Two of us and our squad leader went back in a Jeep to Philippsbourg to get orders. The Germans found us and took us prisoner. The Germans were so excited to find a carton of K-rations in the jeep they almost got into a fight over them. We were taken by Jeep, under guard, back into the hills where Company I had been fighting. Many of our Company were taken prisoner.  We stopped to pick up two of our wounded men and took them to their headquarters. The Germans loaded the wounded into a horse-drawn wagon and took them to a German hospital nearby. This was typical of the type of equipment the Germans had remaining. They were considerate of the wounded men.

We marched for five days, sleeping in old buildings, sometimes so crowded we couldn't all lie down. Always under guard. Once in the four days, we got a bowl of good soup, otherwise it was a piece of dark bread, maybe a bite of slimey cheese. The Germans tried to find us food, but there was nothing.

For elimination, we passed someone's steel helmet and we tried to throw it out a small round window near the top of the boxcars. We took turns sitting down. We had no food and no water. We would reach out the little windows and break off an icicle. We tried to divide it among the men. We were always locked in.

The train traveled only by night; by day we sat on the tracks in some city, locked in and guarded. The Americans bombed by day, and the British bombed by night. On the fourth day, we unloaded and were given a half loaf of German bread, a quarter pound of some kind of sausage, and no water. This was the only time we got sausage. We scooped up snow to drink. We were marched again to a POW camp, Stalag V A, close to Ludwigsburg.

We were five days and five nights on the train enroute to Stalag XIIA. This boxcar was even more crowded. Same procedure, same treatment, same sparse food, lots of questions. We were issued POW dog tags to wear around of necks. Biver was kept at this POW camp because he was crippled.

Our last train ride was more endurable. Some 300 prisoners were crowded into the 40 and 8’s with around 60 men in each car. We were allowed to get out and exercise and they gave us ice for water. But it was the same sparse food. We were all dehydrated.

It was a beautiful wooded area, on the banks of the Elbe river, about 25 miles downstream from Dresden. Same drab wooden barracks were divided into rooms or huts about 15 feet square with 25 or 30 men in each. We were issued a blanket, a bowl and a skilly ticket for our bowl of "dishwater" soup. For breakfast we got a cup of barley coffee and a small chunk of dark bread made mostly of sawdust. We would lick it and stick it on the side of the stove in our hut and toast it. This was possible only if we were fortunate to have found wood for a fire. For supper we had a pint of hot water with a small potato, if lucky. Occasionally we got a bite of slimey cheese.

We were put to work digging a trench to bring a water line to our camp. It was February and it was cold and raw. While working on the trenches, we would sneak over to huge mounds of vegetables, rutabagas, potatoes, and onions. They were covered with leaves and dirt. We would pilfer what food we could, hiding it in our loose and baggy clothes, which were getting baggier every day. The guards would fire over our heads; we would drop our loot (most of it) and run back to the trench to work. Hummingbird, a native American, was never caught.

We had nicknames for some of the guards. There was Snake Eyes, Bull Neck, Sacramento (because he kept yelling what sounded like "Sacramento" to us as we worked). There was Redhead; I was a carrot top also and it caused me to be interrogated more often than some others. They thought I was of German ancestry.

We were counted every morning. Old Mort was always slow in getting out of the hut. On this particular morning, Snake Eyes went inside to fetch him out. He placed the muzzle of his rifle beside his rear and shot off a blank. Scared Old Mort so bad he never dallied after that.

We could hear the bombing of Dresden and see the B-17s fly over. They would rattle our barracks.

Poor Food, Illness
There was constant dysentery among the men. I had pleurisy twice and nearly died from it the last time. Then I got yellow jaundice. While in the hospital, my buddy, Stan, would bring me a cup of tea, and I would give him my soup for I couldn't drink it. We were all a skinny, scraggly bag of bones. I could reach around my arm any place with my thumb and middle finger touching. During this ordeal, I went from around 160 pounds to 96 pounds. Once Stan went with a detail to get a dead horse. Then we had good soup for a day. The Germans had little food to offer; we envied the food our pets got at home. Food was always on our minds.

Religious Services
We had frequent worship services. Stan usually read scripture, someone would read from his Catholic prayer book, and we would sing a hymn and pray. We didn't know how we could survive much longer on so little food, but the prayers were uplifting and they strengthened our faith. It made us wonder why we had survived this long; what was our purpose in life?

Easter, 1945, will forever stand out in my mind. Around noon, some 200 forlorn men, British and American, gathered for a worship service in the open area. Johnny Hampton, who had been a vocalist with a big name band, sang Easter Parade. It was a tear-jerker. Here we were in this deplorable state. We remembered what living once was like.

By the first of May the Russians had taken Dresden and were within 25 miles of us. Flyers were circulated among us by the Germans asking us to volunteer to fight the Russians. Big joke. The Germans did not want to be taken by the Russians. On May 7, the guards started marching us toward the American lines. We were too weak to hurry and the Russians were breathing down our necks. So the German guards just scattered. We had been in Stalag IV A 96 days.

After several days in Kuhm the Russians ordered us to march to Teplice, a town a few miles up the road. There we boarded a train headed for the American lines. But the train ran out of fuel even though they conserved steam by blowing the whistles by mouth. We stalled across a road. But our prayers were answered; along came an American patrol, who radioed for help. Shortly, a locomotive came for us. It was run by the U. S. Corps of Engineers and took us a’flying into the headquarters of the Red Ball Express (RBE). They blew the whistles all the way and not by mouth, either.

Two weeks later, we boarded a ship for the States. Twice we had boiler trouble, and had to sit for a couple of days. Both times they had to let the boiler cool so they could work on it. Queen Elizabeth passed us twice, coming and going.