Published April 2000
Hendersonville Times-News

http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20000417/EXTRAS02/4170317/0/search

Veteran Lives Past Fear

By Mitch Sandos
Harry Garren thought he was going to face a firing squad on that cold October night in Holland in 1944.
He and the six other soldiers on his patrol believed they were returning to their unit’s headquarters. Instead, the unsuspecting patrol had walked right into German hands.
The Americans were carrying one comrade who had been wounded in a skirmish that morning. They were ordered to take the wounded man to a nearby school and leave him.
“I never did find out what happened to him,” said Garren, 79, as he reminisced about his World War II experiences. “We never saw him again.”
Then his German captors ordered the men to march behind a barn, where they were lined up against the wall.
“I thought they were going to shoot us,” Garren said.
Instead, the lieutenant in charge talked to them for a while.
“He had a brother in Chicago. He could speak English as good as we could.”
Garren had only returned to his unit, the 87th Reconnaissance A Troop of the 7th Armored Division, the day before. He had caught a piece of shrapnel in the chest near Metz, France, during fighting on Sept. 6, 1944. The Army sent him to a field hospital at Verdun, where he spent a month recuperating from his wound.
By the time he rejoined his unit, it had moved to Venraai, Netherlands. The war had taken its toll on the troops. Garren said he only knew two of the six men with him on the patrol. The other four were replacements.
That night was uneventful, but the next morning the patrol got into what Garren called “a little skirmish” with some German troops. One member of Garren’s patrol was shot in the leg during the fighting. After the Germans withdrew, Garren said the patrol hid in a Dutch farmhouse until nightfall.
Under the cover of darkness, the patrol struck out for what the soldiers thought was friendly territory. In the meantime, however, the Nazis had overrun the position. Garren’s unit had pulled out so hurriedly that some equipment was left behind.
“Some of our jeeps were still sitting there. We walked right up to one of them, and then realized the person sitting there was a German,” Garren said.
Most of the patrol surrendered, but Garren and another man ran. They jumped into a canal in an attempt to hide, but it didn’t work. Garren said it was soon obvious the Germans knew where they were.
“I had a handkerchief, so I tied it on a rifle and stuck it up,” he said.
He spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of the Germans.
All three of Garren’s brothers also fought in World War II, but Garren was the least fortunate.
“Momma had four sons in action at the same time – two in Europe and two in the Pacific – four sons getting shot at. But I was the only one who got hit, and I was the only one who got captured,” Garren said.

Harsh conditions

Things didn’t start out so bad for Garren. A Henderson County native and a 1937 graduate of Hendersonville High School, he was working at the Grey Hosiery Mill on Fourth Avenue and Grove Street when he was drafted at age 21. He entered the Army in 1942, two months after Pearl Harbor.
He was assigned to the 3rd Armored Division at Camp Polk, La., and reassigned to the 7th Armored Division when it was activated. He began his Army career as a motorcycle escort for convoys. But after he wrecked a motorcycle, the Army sent him to mechanics school at Fort Knox, Ky. He worked in the motor pool until the division was sent to Europe, when he was moved to a mortar squad.
The 7th Armored Division got into the war late, leaving for Europe on June 6, 1944. Three months later, Garren was wounded, and another month later, he was a POW.
Garren said he and his comrades were sent the morning after his capture to a stalag. They were moved several times, passing through Berlin in a boxcar on Thanksgiving Day 1944, on their way to Stalag 17B near the Austrian border. Conditions on the trains were bad, Garren said. There was no room to sit or lie down, no place to go to the bathroom. The trains only moved at night, so during the day the boxcars sat on sidings awaiting darkness, and the prisoners stood inside.
“They only let us out one time, and that was only for about five minutes,” Garren said.
Conditions in the POW camps weren’t much better. Garren said there was only one soup line a day and if you missed it you didn’t eat. Each camp had between 4,000 and 5,000 men in it, and barracks were crowded with 300 to 400 people in one room. Prisoners had only the clothing they were wearing when captured.
“You had to sleep with your clothes on or somebody would steal them,” Garren said.

Work camp

When the Germans came around seeking people for a work detail, Garren volunteered, figuring conditions might be better where there weren’t so many people. He and 18 others were sent to a small work camp near Rostock, a port on the Baltic Sea.
Garren said he spent the rest of the war cutting down beech trees with four-foot crosscut saws. He said the work detail’s three guards told prisoners the wood was used to make cloth. As long as prisoners cut the trees as close to the ground as possible, the guards didn’t bother them too much, Garren said.
“Sometimes it would snow and we’d cut ’em high. Then when the snow melted, they’d get on to us because we cut ’em too high,” he laughed.
Although better than at the stalags, conditions at the work camp were grim. Garren compared the camp’s barracks to a chicken house. It had bunks around the walls and a furnace in the center with a small kitchen area off to one side. Bedding consisted of straw ticks and one blanket.
Food rations were sparse. Garren said each man received a daily ration consisting of a few potatoes, some sugar beets and a seventh of a loaf of bread. They had no meat or salt, he said.
“We got coffee, but it was made out of sawdust. Ersatz. It wasn’t good,” Garren said with a grimace.
All three guards could speak some English, Garren said, and one could speak it fairly well, having been a POW in England during World War I. They generally treated the prisoners well, he said.
Civilians they encountered weren’t so nice.
“Sometimes civilians tried to take us away from guards when they were moving us. If they’d have took us, they’d have killed us,” Garren said.
He said they wanted revenge for air raids in the area.
When Christmas arrived, the guards allowed the prisoners to have a tree. It was decorated with bits of tin foil someone had saved from old cigarette packs. The prisoners got no tobacco, no mail, “no nothing,” Garren said.
“We were supposed to get stuff from the Red Cross,” he said, “but they would be short by the time they got to us. Sometimes we got some canned goods, but the guards would punch holes in them so we that we had to eat it up. They figured if they didn’t, we’d hoard it up and take off.”

Russians were coming

Garren was a POW for seven months, most of it spent at the work camp near Rostock. In late April or early May of 1945, the guards learned Russian troops were drawing near the camp. The guards decided to move.
“We came to a big lake and they took off their uniforms, put on civilian clothes, threw their rifles in the lake and told us we were on our own,” recalled Garren.
The band of prisoners began walking toward what they hoped would be British or American lines, but the rapidly advancing Russians soon caught up with them. Garren’s bunch spent the night with the Russians, partaking of a feast prepared after Russian troops slaughtered hogs and chickens. The next morning, the Russians told his group they were again on their own.
The group found a couple of horses and a wagon and piled on, reaching British lines later that day. The British then gave them transportation back to American lines. The POWs were flown from Bremen in Germany to Le Harve on the French coast, where the Army had set up Camp Lucky Strike.
Garren and his comrades spent three to four weeks there, recovering from malnutrition. At first, he said, the ex-prisoners received small portions which were gradually increased until they could eat complete meals.
“They were afraid we would get sick if they just started feeding us regular meals,” Garren said.
Near the end of his stay, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower came to the camp and told the soldiers there they could wait for better transportation, or they could take Liberty ships back to the United States. Most of the soldiers, eager to get out of the war zone, opted for the Liberty ships, even though it meant a 15-day crossing in cramped quarters.
Garren was sent first to Fort Dix, N.J., then to Fort Bragg. From there, he was sent to Miami for 30 days of rest and relaxation. Then he was stationed at Fort Myer, Va., while awaiting discharge. He spent his last days in the service as a driver for the War Department, chauffeuring officials around the Washington, D.C., area.
Garren said of all his World War II experiences, the constant feeling of fear is the memory that stands out.
“What do I remember the most? Not knowing what you faced, what your circumstances were going to be,” he said. “You didn’t know if you were going to be killed the next day or the day after. Living in doubt, I guess you could say, or fear. You didn’t ever know what was going to happen.”
Garren said few people can fathom what the GIs of World War II went through.
“People find it hard to believe,” he said. “Few of them have any experiences that would allow them to relate to it, when they hear these tales. But they aren’t tales. They are the truth.”
After his discharge, Garren returned to the hosiery mill, which had to hold his job for him while he was in the service. The mill job was a good one, probably the best-paying work in the county right after the war. But in the ’50s, the plant began having problems. First, it laid off workers, then it began curtailing production.
So Garren got out, taking a job with the U.S. Postal Service. He was a city mail carrier for 17 years and a rural carrier for another 11 before retiring in 1981.
Never married, Garren, who will turn 80 on Tuesday, lives with his sister on Clear Creek Road.