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Editor's Note: The following story was taken from Vernon Kruse's participation in a World War II History Round Table program in October and also from an interview conducted at his home in Edina.
By Al Zdon
Vernon Kruse last talked about his World War II experiences to a church group in 1946. Fifty-five years later, he again told his story to the World War II Round Table at
the Ft. Snelling History Center.
That story involved his service in Europe, his capture by the Germans, six months in a POW Camp, and a walk across Poland to freedom.
Kruse grew up in St. Louis
Park and graduated from high school there in 1943. "You didn't have to wait long in those days before you were inducted."
His draft board sent him to Ft. Snelling for induction, and Ft. Snelling sent
him to Ft. Knox, Kentucky, for basic training and armored force training as a radio operator and repairman.
"That had been my hobby since I was a little kid, building radios, devising my own
circuits," Kruse said.
He was sent to the East Coast and assigned to the 42nd Cavalry Reconnaisance Squad, a unit designed to do scouting for tank divisions. His squad was sent overseas on an ocean
liner, and arrived in England on May 1, 1944, just before the D-Day invasion.
The unit landed in France on July 21, six weeks after D-Day and assumed its position on the right flank of the Fourth
Armored Division, part of Gen. George Patton's Third Army.
Kruse's main job was to keep radios operational. Each forward tank had two radios, and if one went down, Kruse was assigned to find the tank
and fix the broken radio. For this task, he was assigned his own jeep.
The early action was slow moving, Kruse said, but after the fall of Paris the Germans began retreating much more quickly. "It was
go, go, go after that point."
The recon squad was often 30 miles beyond the American lines, and many times German units would be between them and the main body of the U.S. Army. "We would scoot back
and forth between different tank battalions. We were constantly on the move and rarely stayed in one place for more than a day."
The squad never dug a foxhole, and rarely set up tents. "We just pulled
a pup tent over us, or slept under the tanks. We were up at dawn heading for somewhere else. We often had to find our own food along the way. It took forever for our mail to catch up with us. We were
really out there in no man's land."
When there were no radios to fix, Kruse often became part of the reconnaisance team, heading out in his jeep to see how close the German units were.
On one
occasion, he was sent ahead on a road, only to have a car come back at him at a high speed. "There were civilians in the car, and they were all shot up. One guy in the back was just full of bullet holes.
They asked for medical help, but all I could do was give them my pain killers."
The French civilians warned Kruse about a sniper in a barn ahead. "When I got to the barn, I sped up and just scooted
past that barn. I check out the road ahead, and then raced back down the road past the barn. "I didn't see or hear anything, so I figured the sniper had left."
When he got back, one of his buddies
pointed out a bullet hole in the utility box on the back of the jeep. "That could have been a close one."
Another time, the tank unit Kruse was with chased a group of German bicycle troops to the bank
of a river. The dozen or so Germans paddled across the river in wooden boats, but an American tank loaded cannister and fired a couple of lethal rounds at the enemy just as they landed on the other side.
"Every one of those soldiers fell but one, and they just lay there on the beach. I asked permission to go across the river and try to get a prisoner."
Kruse and his driver and good friend, Joe,
took a boat across and first checked a nearby farmhouse, trying to find the one German who had escaped the murderous volley. They then came back to the beach and began checking to see if any of the
Germans were still alive. "I saw one reaching for his gun, and I hollered at Joe to shoot, but he didn't. The German made a quick move and I shot him. I felt bad that I did it, but I had to."
Seconds
later, another German began pulling a "potato masher," a German hand grenade, off his belt, and Kruse shot him too. Two other Germans who were wounded then yelled, "Comrade," and surrendered.
"They were elderly fellows, probably in their 50s. All the younger troops were up in the lines. We put them in the boat and headed back. Joe had to row like crazy because the boat we took was full of
bullet holes."
On shore, the GIs and the Germans had time to talk, and Kruse said the German soldiers were taking pictures of their grandchildren out of their wallets and showing them around. Kruse,
whose grandparents had come from Germany, spoke a little German.
The prisoners were joined with three other POWs and loaded into the back of a truck. In a freak accident, an unmanned
machine gun on top of the truck hit a tree branch and discharged, hitting every one of the prisoners. "It just mowed them down. I could hardly look at that. I don't think anybody survived."
Life
was frantic for the recon squadron as it raced across France and into Belgium. The unit twice was strafed by American planes. "After that we learned to get our big, orange recognition panels out as soon
as we heard a plane approaching."
At one point, Kruse's unit was heading into bivouac for the day, when the commanding officer asked Kruse to deliver an envelope to another unit about 10 kilometers
away. Kruse and his partner Joe set off.
They stopped at a farm along their way to find out if any Germans were ahead. The French civilians thought the Germans had left, and one of the men volunteered
to come with. "His wife pleaded and cried, telling him not to go, but he was determined to come with us."
The three of them crowded into the front seat of the Jeep with Joe driving, the Frenchman
holding Joe's carbine, and Kruse holding his "grease gun," an automatic weapon. Along the way, mortar shells exploded in the fields around them, but none of them came very near.
They entered the
town, and it seemed deserted, but as they drove down the main street, Kruse saw Germans hiding in the recessed doorways and between the buildings. The Americans picked up speed and tried to exit the town
on the other end, but ran into a dead end. They had no choice but to try and escape back down the road they had just come.
"By now the Germans were out on the street and they were shooting like crazy.
Lead was flying from both directions. Joe was racing down the street, the Frenchman was firing the carbine, and I emptied both clips in the general direction of the Germans."
The jeep, zig zagging
wildly, made it out of town, but then Joe, who apparently had been hit in the arm, lost control of the vehicle. The jeep spun around and ended up on a sharp angle in the ditch facing back toward the
Germans.
"None of us had been hit except Joe, and I can only figure that they were shooting at the tires. They were more interested in taking us prisoner rather than killing us."
The Frenchman took
off, and Joe ended up lying next to the Jeep in the ditch. "I tried to find my ammunition, but it must have flown out of the jeep during the zig zagging. I was lying in the jeep facing forward. I looked
down at Joe, and just then he took a bullet in the neck. I don't think he knew anything after that. He was hit two more times."
Kruse kept down, but a bullet ripped through the back of his field
jacket. He peeked over the hood of the jeep and saw a German approaching with a concussion grenade. "I figured that was enough. I grabbed my raincoat and waved it over my head and yelled out, "Comrade."
The shooting stopped and Kruse was ordered out of the Jeep. The vehicle was loaded with food and other provisions, given as a gift to the Americans along the way from the liberated French people. It
also contained several German guns that had been also liberated.
"I thought they wouldn't like that I had accumulated those souvenirs." Instead, Kruse was treated very civilly except for one German
officer who charged at him in a rage. The German had been shot through the throat, either by Kruse or the Frenchman, and was determined to get his revenge. Other Germans pulled him off, though, and Kruse
was spared.
Kruse never did find out the Frenchman's fate, although there was a single, menacing shot, fired sometime later. Armed civilians were generally shot on the spot by the German army.
As
the Germans retreated, they took Kruse with them. He rode on the front of a tank, just over the treads. "This was a big tank, and the treads were huge. I just hoped I wouldn't slide off. It would flatten
you like a pancake."
Kruse was captured on August 30, 1944, and stayed about week near the front. He was treated well by the Germans, and they even shared a roast pork meal they had concocted.
He was allowed to sleep in a barn on soft hay.
His only problem came when the Germans discovered a knife he had concealed in his boot. "I had found the knife in a barn. The problem was that I was
part of Patton's Army and we wore our pants legs just so. If you were going to get shot in Patton's Army, you were going to look good. When I was stepping off a truck, a German officer saw the knife
sticking out. He was pretty mad, but I told him it was just for eating. I don't think he believed me."
Kruse was first taken to Luxembourg, and later taken to a transition prision camp, Stalag 12A in
Limberg, Germany. From there he was taken in a boxcar, standing up, all the way across Germany to Stalag 3C near the Polish border.
The camp was divided into different compounds housing different
nationalities of prisoners — American, Russian, Polish, French and others. The food was tolerable, and the prisoners ate just what the guards ate. The coffee was made from sunflower petals.
"On
Sunday, we got this bean soup, and it was crawling with bugs, but we ate it. It was protein."
The guard for the compound was an older soldier. "This may sound dumb, but he was the twin brother of Sgt.
Schultz in Hogan's Heroes. And the commanding officer looked just like Col. Klink."
At Christmas, the Germans served horsemeat as a treat for the prisoners. "I traded my share for cigarettes. I just
couldn't stand the thought of eating horse."
Kruse only saw one GI die in the camp, a prisoner who was trying to get some vegetables off a truck and slipped and fell under the tires. The Germans
buried him with full military honors including an American flag on his casket.
One day, on his way to the mess hall, Kruse glanced at column of other prisoners from another compound heading back. He
couldn't believe his eyes. There was Jerry Jerome, a high school classmate from St. Louis Park.
He yelled at Jerome, and the next day he wrangled an appointment with the camp commander. He convinced
the commander to allow him to transfer to Jerome's compound.
Kruse said the treatment overall was good. He was able to put a radio together from parts bought from the guards. The men followed the war
by listening to the BBC.
As the war got into late January, 1945, the sound of shelling drew nearer and nearer each day. On January 31, the Germans assembled all the prisoners for a march headed back
into the interior of Germany. Kruse and Jerome's barracks was the first one to leave the camp, and the two were marching five ranks back of the front of the column, just behind the German officers.
Guards marched along either side.
The column hadn't gone far when it marched right into a Russian ambush. The Russians captured the officers, shot every one of them, and opened fire from tanks hidden
in hedgerows at the Americans. The Soviets apparently thought it was a column of German soldiers.
The Americans scattered into the plowed field on either side of the road, but with the machine gun
fire and the shells exploding, Kruse and others soon found themselves on their feet running pell mell toward a line of trees.
One shell cracked right over their heads, and the next shell exploded
right between Kruse and his friend, Bill Emge, a friend Kruse had known since training at Ft. Knox. "My legs went out from under me. It just knocked me silly."
Eventually Kruse found himself in a
small farmhouse nearby. After he recovered his senses, and the shooting had stopped, he became determined to find a back pack he had abandoned on his wild flight away from the Russian attack. The pack
contained a diary that he had carefully kept during his five months' imprisonment, plus all his other possessions.
He didn't find his backpack, but his found his friend, Emge, who he had been
running with. "He had just fallen in a clump. He couldn't talk. He was completely white from loss of blood, and I think every bone in his body had been broken."
Kruse ran up the Russian line and tried
to get medical help for his buddy, but the Russians only ordered him in the opposite direction. "To this day I feel bad that I couldn't help him."
Behind the Russian lines were thousands of former
prisoners all trying to find their way back to their nation's army. Some headed for Moscow, some for the Baltic coast. Kruse and others began walking toward Warsaw.
They walked 30 miles the first day,
and then took up residence at a huge resort building in Kurstrine, Germany. They stayed for six days, deciding what to do. Kruse found that he had taken some shrapnel in his leg, and he was also hobbling
on one bad foot, probably caused by being frozen in the POW camp.
At the resort, Kruse found a day book that he converted into a diary, and he began to recreate the diary he had lost. Kruse still has
the book.
While there, and at other places along the route, Kruse and the others had nervous encounters with the Russians troops. "They were half plowed all the time. They were wild men. I was much
more afraid of the Russians than I ever was of the Germans."
To help stay out of harm's way, Kruse sewed a small flag from bits of cloth and attached it to his overcoat. "There were so many uniforms
everywhere you looked, I wanted the Russians to know I was an American."
The men trudged on through one of the coldest winters in European history, finding food where they could, and often selling
what few possessions they had for something to eat. Kruse kept up the best he could, walking with the aid of a crutch.
A highlight of the trip was when they were able to hop a Russian train, and
the Russians invited him to join the Russian wounded in a coach car. "They had a pot bellied stove for heat and good food."
In the end, they walked and caught the occasional train in a journey all
the way across Poland to the Soviet port of Odessa. There, they hopped a ship to Marsailles that was taking French former POWs home, and then it was on to Naples, Italy, where they were able to find a
troop ship heading back to the United States.
Kruse spent the remainder of his time in service at Ft. Riley, Kansas, and got his discharge in November of 1945. While there, he met his future wife,
Helen, who was a WAC handling Army paperwork.
The two were married in 1949, and they had five children, two girls and three boys. Kruse was a radio repairman for Sears Roebuck and retired in 1984.
He and his high school and POW friend Jerry Jerome have kept in close contact through the years.
Kruse's voice breaks and his eyes well up when he talks about his friends, Joe and Bill, who died
in the war. "I've often thought of trying to get hold of their families to tell them how they died, but I haven't been able to. It's been so many years."
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