Army vet recalls horrors of POW camp

  • Published
  • By Kent Cummins
  • 47th Flying Training Wing Public Affairs
LAUGHLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Texas (AFPN) --  Dec. 23, 1944. "It was the saddest day of my life," said Guillermo Serrano.

It was a numbingly cold night with Christmas Eve just hours away when young Army Private Serrano was captured and imprisoned by Germans during the early stages of World War II's Battle of the Bulge.

The battle began Dec. 16, 1944, and by the time it ended Jan. 25, 1945, more than 76,000 Americans were killed, wounded or captured.

A few years earlier, in November 1942, Mr. Serrano, a Del Rio, Texas, native, joined the Army. After basic training at Camp McCoy, Wisc., he transferred to Fort Knox, Ky., to become a combat engineer. Soon after, the young Soldier headed overseas.

"We were stationed near Manchester, England," Mr. Serrano said. "I arrived just two days after the invasion of Normandy."

Mr. Serrano said he knew they would be in the thick of battle soon.

"We trained hard, and I was a combat engineer, but I was a Soldier first."

In December 1944, Mr. Serrano's unit joined the 600,000 Americans fighting the Germans in the heavily forested Ardennes region of eastern Belgium and northern Luxembourg. He said the conditions were brutal.

"We were a part of Gen. (Omar) Bradley's force," he said. "I remember the cold ... it was 25 below most of the time."

It was on one of those frigid nights Mr. Serrano's life changed.

"It was cold, it was dark," he said. "I can still hear the (fellow Soldiers) crying out in pain, but I couldn't see anything ... then they captured me."

Mr. Serrano was a prisoner of war.

"We walked for two days to a concentration camp," he said. "I was wounded, but my buddy was worse than me. I helped him along and told him not to fall down. Keep walking, I told him, if you fall, they will shoot you."

When Mr. Serrano arrived at Stalag VI-G in Bonn-Duisdorf, Germany, his captors separated him from his friend.

"But I heard later once I got back to Texas that he made it," said Mr. Serrano.

One bright spot in his dark recollection of events was the help he received from an Army doctor at the prison camp.

"An American doctor helped with a bad infection I had in my knee," said Mr. Serrano, who added the conditions were atrocious.

"There were no restrooms. It was terrible, just terrible," he said.

"Many soldiers had severe frostbite; we slept on hard straw mats," he said. "There were lots of insects, mice, lice and ticks.

"Sometimes they would give us soup, potato soup, once a day, sometimes nothing," Mr. Serrano said. "When I was captured, I weighed 180 pounds. When it was over, I weighed 130 pounds."

Mr. Serrano and the other POWs did whatever it took to survive.

"Any animal that would get through the fence, we would kill it, and we would eat it." 

His five-month struggle would soon end.

"We didn't know (the war) was ending 'til we saw the British coming," he said. "The British Army liberated us. We were so happy to see them. I remember them throwing bread to us over the fence."

April 16, 1945. "It was the happiest day of my life," he said.