My Grandfather Journaled During His Time in a German POW Camp. More Than Anything, He Wrote About Food
Dreaming of soup and bread, scalloped potatoes, chop suey, and Champagne kept him going
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In 1984, my grandfather again visited Pontevico, Italy. He, his commanding officer from World War II, and their wives took in the Oglio River at the edge of the small town and walked out to the abutting farmlands. He hadn’t been in 40 years. The last time he entered the village was the day his plane fell from the sky.
They visited the Po River to the south, and went to the bridge the two men had been ordered to destroy that day, when shrapnel from a friendly bomb or unfriendly flak gun — they never could pin the source — ripped through the aluminum wings of my grandfather’s P-47 Thunderbolt single-seat bomber. Rather than attempt to land the plane, now on fire, my grandfather threw himself from the cockpit 1,000 feet above the ground. He parachuted down to a farmer’s house and hid in their barn. He waited there for a few hours before mounted German soldiers rode up later that afternoon. He considered staying hidden, but remembered the advice given to him that it was better to be captured by members of the German military than SS troops. They knew how to treat prisoners of war. He walked out of the barn with his hands raised. By the time he went back those years later, the bridge had been rebuilt and would have been marked on any local road map. But of the Pontevico buildings he recognized only one on sight: the garrison the soldiers took him to, where he shared a glass of Champagne with Sergeant Schultz, the noncommissioned officer who then sent my grandfather, Second Lieutenant John Edward Thompson, to Stalag Luft I, a prison camp in Barth, Germany, along the Baltic Sea.
In two square cobalt journals given to him by the YMCA following the crash, he wrote about the Champagne. It cropped up again in a short, spiral-bound autobiography he self-published for friends and family in 1999, 54 years later, almost to the day. It was New Year’s Eve after all, the day his plane fell from the sky, and he…
