On Wednesday, September 23 at 7pm, Friendswood author Paul Hoesl will share information from his new book Amazing Journey: One Man's Adventure from Nazi Germany to America. Walter Zehl's story provides a rare, firsthand glimpse into a German soldier's life during World War II. This autobiographical narrative is much more than a war story. It describes Walter's early life in pre-war Germany and tells of his daring escape over the border to West Germany, immigration to America and his struggles in pursuit of the American Dream---from the book cover. Walter Zehl, subject of the book and a Friendswood resident, will be on hand to share his story and answer questions.
The
excerpt below is from Paul Hoesl’s book AMAZING
JOURNEY: One Man’s Adventure from Nazi Germany to America.
WOUNDED IN BATTLE
Several
others from Walter’s unit were also killed in the exchange. In the midst of the
chaos, one young German soldier stood up in the live fire waving a white
handkerchief in an attempt to surrender. Instead of ceasing their fire, the
British soldiers just kept on shooting back and forth from one target to the
next across the battlefield. When the firing focused back on Walter, a bullet
hit him with a thud. It felt as though he had been hit with a hammer blow. Pow!
The fifty-caliber round was so powerful that it had gone completely through
both thighs and exited his body. Soon after Walter was hit, the firing stopped,
as the British had emptied all their rounds.
Walter was
scared that he was going to die. Thoughts of never seeing his parents or sister
again overwhelmed him. He just put his nose deep in the dirt and prayed to come
out of this nightmare alive. After the shooting stopped, one of the Tommies
said, “Let’s go. You want to go to Berlin? (an obvious jab at the defeated
German captives).
When Walter
got up to walk, mostly fueled by adrenaline, he made it about ten feet toward
the British soldiers before his legs gave way and he collapsed. His legs were
bleeding profusely from the four open wounds. He had left everything behind,
including his machine gun and helmet. A truck soon arrived and two soldiers
picked him up and laid him down near two Tommies drinking tea. One felt sorry
for Walter because he looked so young. He gave him some tea from his cup. He
held it down for him to take a drink. Walter took a few sips of tea, smiled,
and said, “Danke” (thank you) since
he did not speak English at the time.
It was a
surreal experience for Walter to be in the throes of a firefight one minute and
to be having a civilized cup of tea the next. The unit that captured Walter was
part of the British Fiftieth (Northumbrian) Infantry Division. The two Ts in
their insignia represented the boundaries of its recruitment area between the
northern England rivers Tyne and Tees. The Fiftieth was a war-hardened division
who fought in North African campaign, Operation Overlord, and Operation Market
Garden, sustaining twenty-one thousand casualties during the war.
The Fiftieth
Infantry Division employed a fleet of armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) equipped
with water cooled Vickers fifty-caliber machine guns mounted on their roofs.
The Vickers machine gun typically required a six- to eight-man team to operate
and was well-known for its reliability. By combining the mobility and carrying
capacity of the armored vehicle with the devastating firepower of the gun, the
British created an extremely effective fighting platform. In stark contrast to
the trench warfare of World War I, World War II was a war of mobility and
required innovative uses of available technology to be successful. The British
would locate new targets during the day and then reposition their vehicles
under the cover of darkness to surprise, confuse, and overwhelm their enemy.
The British worked this method of operation to perfection in destroying
Walter’s unit.
Walter was
hoisted onto the top of an armored carrier and laid out flat. He was driven
back about a mile to a farmhouse that served as an improvised first aid
station. Some Tommies lifted him off the truck, carried him into the farmhouse,
and laid him on an empty stretcher. Several British medics were busy attending
to wounded soldiers. They were uniformed officers wearing white coats equipped
with cardboard boxes filled with medicine and all kinds of medical supplies,
syringes, and bandages.
Passing the
Test
One medic
searched Walter’s pockets and got out his soldier log book (Soldbuch) and began to inspect it. Simultaneously,
he took his pistol out, cocked it, and held it a foot away from Walter’s head.
Walter said to himself, “What is going on? Don’t shoot me now. I have gone
through so much.” Finally, after what seemed to be an eternity, the medic gave
Walter his book back and said something in English to the other medic before
finally reholstering his pistol. Walter was incredibly relieved that his life
was spared, but he had no idea why the medic had done this.
Walter did
not realize it, but the medic was looking to see if Walter was a member of the
Waffen SS, a feared unit of the German army who had taken an oath to Hitler and
served as the armed wing of the Nazi Party. The SS were trained killers who
made it a point never to take prisoners. If Walter was found to be part of the
SS, the policy was to execute him on the spot. The irony of the situation was
that at the time, Walter was not even aware that SS units existed. You can only
imagine the confusion he had over why he was nearly executed by the medic who
was supposed to be rendering aid.
Walter does
not have much memory of what happened after that, but the medics must have
given him anesthesia so they could operate on his legs and stitch up his four
wounds. Although Walter was wounded badly, he actually turned out to be quite
lucky. The bullet passed straight through the upper thigh muscle of both legs
and exited the other side. It hit no bones or major arteries, and since the
bullet had left his body, it required no extraction.
He had lost
a lot of blood, but would not sustain any permanent loss of mobility. The
half-inch-diameter bullet could just as easily have severed one of his vital
arteries and he would have bled to death, or he could have been fatally shot
somewhere else. Considering the size of the fifty-caliber bullet and the amount
of damage it could cause, Walter had been delivered from the clutches of death
once more, and was grateful to God that his life had been spared.
To this day,
Walter can show you two large indentations on each of his legs where the bullet
entered and exited. His wounds affected his quality of life in later years,
giving him pain and stiffness, especially when the weather changes.
On the Road
to Recovery
From the
farmhouse, the medics put him in an ambulance and drove him to Brussels,
Belgium, to a large hospital. Walter recalls seeing some men with horrific
battle wounds. One soldier lay dying with an open chest cavity, all his bones
visible. Walter could not fathom how he could still be alive.
The hospital
staff freshened his bandages and put him in another ambulance that drove him to
Diep in northern France. His interim destination was a Canadian tent hospital
staffed mostly by Canadian nurses. They rebandaged him again and put him on an
American hospital ship for the trip across the English Channel to dock at the
port city of Southampton.
The normal
procedure for processing prisoners of war (POWs) included sending them to one
of nine command “cages.” The POWs would be held in a cage to be interrogated
prior to being sent to one of the POW camps spread across England. The point
was to extract any useful information from the prisoners and to assess their loyalty
to the Nazi regime. They were graded by a colored patch that would be worn on
their uniform. The white patch signified that the prisoner had little Nazi
loyalty, and the black patch was reserved for the most hard-core Nazis, SS
paratroopers, and U-boat crews, who would be sent to more remote POW camps.
Surviving members of Luftwaffe flight crews were given special attention as
they had a higher probability of possessing useful intelligence. It can be
assumed that Walter skipped this step because of his wounded status. His
destination was a hospital for recuperation. Under different circumstances,
Walter’s POW experience would have been very different.
The British
took him directly off the ship and put him onto an ambulance train with many
other wounded German POWs. There was a mixture of patients, including some
wounded American soldiers. One American soldier walked through the aisles
calling for souvenirs in trade for cigarettes. Evidently there was a healthy
market for war mementos.
Nobody had
any cigarettes, and Walter was hard up for a smoke as well. He didn’t have any
war items, but he managed to trade a comb for a few cigarettes. He cut the
cigarettes in pieces and smoked them a little at a time for comfort. It was a
very long train ride to Manchester. He had been through much and was glad to be
alive, but he was worried about what was in store for him now that he was a
prisoner of war.
In
Manchester the wounded were loaded into ambulances. A heavy fog set in, the
likes of which Walter had never seen. He could barely see his hand in front of
his face. Even the local ambulance driver was disoriented and had to frequently
stop to ask which direction the hospital was in. After a tense drive through
the fog, they finally made it to the hospital, which had a big section reserved
for German POWs. This section held about twenty wounded prisoners, ten to each
side of the ward…
