Christmas as a POW: Rick Render

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Rick Render. Render served as an Army infantryman during WWII, and was captured during the Battle of the Bulge. He spent the Christmas of ‘44 waiting in line to enter a German prison camp.

Rick Render:

The name is Richard, nickname Rick, Render, R-E-N-D-E-R.

We did not have any expectations of being home for Christmas. Definitely not. We were going into combat. Of course, for the first time I was a scout in an infantry squad. As Bill had told you, we went into position around the 10th of November and we were living in foxholes from that time until the Battle of the Bulge. Our activity at that point was mostly patrol activity. Being a scout, I was out on patrol approximately every other night, either recon patrols or ambush patrols, but that was about the extent of our activity up until the Battle of the Bulge.

We celebrated Thanksgiving again on an outpost, but the cooks had prepared a hot turkey meal for us with all of the trimmings and they were brought up by Jeep, and we had our Thanksgiving meal while still on outpost. When we went back to prepare for Christmas and building our log cabins, we anticipated the same treat for Christmas dinner. Of course, circumstances prevented us from having that Christmas dinner.

On the 13th of December, we were pulled out of the line for the first time and taken back about a mile. We immediately started filling trees and building log cabins and we were going to spend Christmas in a log cabin under a roof. Of course, we didn't get that accomplished. We were called back on the 16th, but we heard later that the Germans had used our log cabins that did not have roofs on them yet as staples for horses.

On the 16th, our platoon went into position about dusk. It was getting dark. We didn't know exactly where we were. They led us into the area. We found pre-prepared foxholes that had been used by the other unit. I was one of five on a platoon outpost. During the night, we could hear the armor on the road to our right. We didn't know whose armor it was, but there was considerable noise.

In the early morning hours of the 17th. I was sitting on the side of my slit trench looking through the woods, and I could see a line of Germans coming through the woods, the mist. They were coming along a railroad track that was to our left. They were crossing over the railroad track and we could see the helmets bobbing as they would come and go into view. I went to my squad Sergeant, Sergeant Bumgarner, and pointed out the Germans and he said, "Well, please go alert the rest of the platoon."

So I pulled back a little, crawled and walked, looking for the rest of the platoon. I could see the empty slit trenches, but there was nobody in them. I continued on until I could look out on the road and there was German tanks, half-tracks, artillery, troops riding the tanks all going on behind us. So the armor noise, the vehicular noise we had heard was actually the Germans going behind us. I knew that they had surrounded us or at least cut us off. So I crawled back to our original position. I laid beside Sergeant Bumgarner in his sled trench and was telling him that the platoon was no longer there, that we were left behind.

At that time, a German soldier came walking through the woods from the direction of the road towards the railroad. He had his rifle over his shoulder. He didn't expect anyone to be around. One of the men, Jim Klingenberger saw him at the same time the German saw Jim. Jim was a little faster. He dropped him. At that sound, the soldiers that were coming along the railroad track discovered our position. They formed a scrimmage line and came through the woods firing. We were five of us dug in. We had four M1 rifles, .30 caliber rifles, and one BAR automatic rifle. We opened up on the Germans. We did not hear our BAR. We yelled to Johnny, who was our BAR man, "Open up Johnny." He said, "I can't, I'm pinned down." Jim pulled a grenade, threw the grenade at the explosion. John was able to open up with the BAR.

About that time, they pulled back because we were taking casualties. They pulled back and from the direction of the railroad there was rocket fire. Panzerfaust, which is a disposable bazooka used by the German forces. It's a very splendid weapon, but they were firing Panzerfausts at us from the railroad. They were knocking down the trees, and it was generally blasting hell out of our position.

At about that time, our artillery started falling in the area, and under the cover of our artillery, we decided we'd better pull back. So we pulled back and kept the railroad to our right, the road to our left. We were pulling back. We came to an abandoned roadway and we climbed up and looked over the ridge and we could see Germans at this railroad station and we could see the tanks and the vehicular traffic meeting, and we knew that we could not get through there, but there was a standup culvert about, I'd say, four feet high and about three feet wide with a little stream running through it under this roadway. So we decided to hide in this culvert until night and try to get back to our lines at that time. There was water. It was not frozen because it was moving, but it was very cold snow on the ground. We waded into the water to try to wait it out. We were there, it seemed like a long time, but probably a matter of a couple of hours. When we heard German voices at the entrance to the culvert, what had happened, a light machine gun squad moving up to the front had stopped by this little stream to rest, and one of the German soldiers went to the stream to relieve himself, and he happened to glance in the culvert. He saw us. He stuck his burp gun in and [inaudible]. If he had touched that trigger, he would've gotten all five in that air of space. We could do nothing but kick our guns in the water and come out with our hands up.

And from that time on, the war was over for us. We were taken to a farmhouse waiting for nightfall. When nightfall came, they started moving us back into Germany. There were still columns of tanks and half-tracks moving up to the front. As we would walk by, the Germans on the tanks would laugh and point their guns at us, and our guards would say, "Next. Keep going. Keep moving."

I was 19 at the time we were captured.

I thank God I was single. I didn't have a wife or a family to worry about. I knew that my folks would be worrying because I'm sure that they would be receiving a missing in action notice, which they did. And it was two months after they received the notice until they finally were notified that I was a prisoner of war.

One tragic thing for my folks was that a high school buddy of mine who had been deferred under the farm program, was actually sent to my division after I was captured and he was trying to find me and he went to my company and asked the company clerk and was told that I was killed. And so he wrote his folks, asked them to send my folks flowers and his condolences. So even though they had received a missing in action notice, they were told that I had been killed.

We traveled by foot and by rail for the next seven days going deeper into Germany. On Christmas Eve, we were on a prison train. We were crammed into a small box car, not enough room to move around. We'd been on board for three days. We were cold, hungry. I had the equivalent of one loaf of black bread and a small piece of sausage and a few half frozen potatoes since the date I was captured. We were filthy. There was no way to clean up. There were no sanitary facilities, no toilet facilities, only a bucket in the corner, usually overflowing, seldom emptied. It was a dirty, stinking mess.

We tried singing Christmas carols. A few of the men thinking of their wives and family broke down. In the darkness, you could hear them sobbing. But there was a rumor that the next day, Christmas, we would be placed in a prison camp, and under the circumstances, that would've been the best Christmas present we could receive. Later that night, the train stopped, which was not unusual because it was always stopping and starting, but this time it did not start up again. And as the early morning light, the man closest to the wall of the boxcar could look through the cracks and tell that we were in a rail yard. Perhaps the rumor was true.

Later we could hear the guards moving outside the train, we could hear the boxcar doors being opened. The guards were shouting, “[Ordering in German]." "Move. Hurry up. Move. Move." The door to our boxcar was open. We climbed out. We were lined up and paraded through the streets of Lindberg, Germany. The townspeople stood on the sidewalks. They stared at us silent, grim. This was Christmas day.

Even the townspeople, as we were being paraded through the streets of Lindberg, they were sullen, grim, silent people. They were not happy. Of course, they weren't happy to see us either, but there was no feeling of goodwill.

When we got to the outskirts, when we looked down, we could see the prison camp. The tall barbed wire fences, the guard towers, the wooden huts with smoke curling out the chimneys. To us, it was a very pleasant sight. We moved down to the gate waiting to get in, knowing that once we were inside, we could get warm, we could get something to eat, we could clean up, medical attention for those that were sick or injured. We kept thinking we were going to be admitted to this prison camp and be fed, which would've been the first time we would've been under a roof since we went online the 10th of November because all of our time was spent outside.

We waited outside that gate, all that long cold Christmas day. At dusk, you could hear the moaning up and down the line. As we were turned around, marched back through the town, loaded onto those hated boxcars. The doors were slammed shut, and we continued on into Germany.

The guards were as disappointed as we were, and they told us later that we were not taken in because they had no room and they did not have the facilities to care for us. When we finally arrived at our prison camp in Nuremberg, we were the only Americans in that camp. The camp was filled with Russian, Polish, Slov. We were there approximately two months, and then were moved to another camp north in northern Germany, Hammelburg. Then we were moved again later back to Nuremberg, and then we made the long walk from Nuremberg to close to Munich, and that's where we were finally liberated.

Of the five of us that were captured together. The first to leave us was Dixie. We buried him in the camp at Nuremberg. Sergeant Bumgarner was separated from us when we were moved to another camp, and I never found what happened to him. I never had another contact with Sergeant Bumgarner.

The next, a personal friend, Johnny Taylor, the BAR man, died just as we were liberated and before he could be sent home to Chicago. That left two of us, Jim Klingenberger from Ohio and I from Kansas were together through three different prison camps and the long walk from Nuremberg to Moosburg outside of Munich toward the end of the war, and we went home together. We have kept in touch all these years, occasionally see each other. It doesn't seem possible it's been 51 years, but the memories are still vivid. So that was our Christmas of 1944.

We had in the camp a radio, and they would give us news, and we were told that... Of course, we could hear the artillery close by. We knew that it would soon be over. We were told that if the Germans tried to move us, that we were to set fire to anything we could and that there would be planes watching for it. We had P51s circling the camp every now and then. It was my old division, the 99th Division, that liberated us. First thing I saw was a tank coming through the wire. It was quite a beautiful, glorious sight. We got out of the camp in May of 1945.

After the war, I went to Camp Oglethorpe Chattanooga and ran into the platoon sergeant that was in charge of the platoon when he went into position on the 16th, and I asked him what had happened, why had they pulled out and left five of us on this outpost without telling us? He told me that he had sent a runner to alert us that they were pulling back during the night and that the runner reported to him that all he could find were bodies, but they were German bodies. So they reported to the company clerk that we were killed.

The first years back, you didn't think about it. You tried to forget it. You did have reoccurring nightmares sometimes and some bad thoughts, but as far as reliving it, no, we did not. We tried to keep it in the background.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Rick Render.

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Warriors In Their Own Words is a production of Evergreen Podcasts, in partnership with The Honor Project.

Our producer is Declan Rohrs. Brigid Coyne is our production director, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our Audio Engineer.

Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.