Thursday, January 1, 2009 5:16 AM EST
By PAUL POST, The Saratogian
SCHUYLERVILLE — For 1st Lt. Edwin Ivy there was no Rose Parade, bowl games or family gatherings.
He spent New Year’s Day 1945 on a forced march from Stalag Luft III in Sagan, Poland to a railhead at Spremberg, Germany, following more than seven months of internment as a prisoner of war.
Ivy’s camp was the same one depicted in the 1963 movie, "The Great Escape," starring Steve McQueen, which told the real-life story of a March 1944 Allied prison break.
An Army Air Corps navigator, his
B-24 bomber was shot down over Vienna on May 29, 1944 — one week before D-Day.
"We thought when D-Day came that we’d be out in short order," Ivy said. "It didn’t happen that way. I spent 11 months in a POW camp. We were cold and hungry most of the time. It was sub-zero weather. I was down to 125 pounds from about 150."
Christmas brought a brief reprieve.
"One bowl of soup with a piece of meat about as big as your thumb," he said.
To the west, Germany had launched a major offensive — the Battle of the Bulge — designed to counter the Allied advance through Belgium, France and Luxembourg. Meanwhile, the Russians were closing in from the east.
"The Russians were about to over-run our camp," said the 90-year-old Ivy, recalling events with vivid clarity. "So the Germans moved us to a railhead. We didn’t know if we’d be treated as friends or not. This was war."
To reach their destination, POWs had to march four days through extreme weather.
"That’s how I spent New Year’s Day," he said. "The first night out I took my GI shoes off. They were sopping wet from melted snow and they were frozen solid when I tried to put them back on in the morning. So I didn’t take them off again till we got on the train at Spremberg. When I took them off, my toenails came off from frostbite."
From Spremberg, prisoners were shipped to Nuremberg, the site of a huge railroad marshaling yard that came under constant attack from Allied bombers.
"So we had a ring-side seat to the action for about a month," Ivy said. "The U.S. Air Corps was bombing every day and the RAF (Royal Air Force) was bombing every night. Flak kept falling like hail. It was pretty exciting stuff."
Stationed at Cerignola, in the "ankle of Italy’s boot," Ivy had flown numerous missions including Anzio and the infamous Raid on Ploesti, before being shot down while trying to bomb a German rail yard near Vienna.
"They had a lot of anti-aircraft at Anzio," he said. "We came back with 75 holes in our plane and the right tire was shot out. We had sort of a semi-crash landing. The flak was heavy, accurate and intense."
On its fateful flight over Vienna, Ivy’s plane was knocked out of the sky shortly after delivering its payload.
"All of our crew got out alive," he said. "I parachuted and got to the edge of a forest, hiding behind a fallen tree. Things were pretty quiet for a while, so I stuck my head up."
Unfortunately, a pair of German soldiers were standing nearby with a guard dog at their side. In their best English, they told Ivy, "For you the war is over."
His worst ordeal, however, was just beginning. Following a week of interrogation, he was sent to Stalag Luft III, where Allied Air Force personnel were held.
"We were in rooms with about 12 people each," Ivy said. "We could walk around outside, but we didn’t have the energy to do real exercise. We were starving most of the time, because the Germans kept half of our Red Cross parcels. The only thing we had enough of was coffee and tea. I learned a few things — I don’t waste food for one thing and I hate to see other people waste it. It made a deep impression on my habits for a long time.
"We saved every crumb we could."
Invariably, barracks conversations always centered on food.
"We used to sit around and talk about what we were going to eat when we got out. Our commanding officer would get tired of it and tell us to change the subject. So we’d talk about cars. Then someone would say, ‘Boy! I’d like to have one with mashed potatoes and gravy all over it,’ " Ivy said, laughing.
From Nuremberg, he was transferred again to Moosberg, Germany near Munich where he was finally liberated.
"An American tank rolled over the fence and that was it," he said. "The last few nights the artillery was going right over our heads."
That was followed by a flight to Rheims, France where Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief-of-staff of the German High Command signed unconditional surrender documents for all German forces to the Allies on the morning of May 7, 1945. From there, Ivy was sent to Le Havre, France where he was evaluated medically and given all the food he could eat before sailing back home aboard a U.S. troop ship.
"I’d eat a half-chicken for lunch with malted milk and ice cream," he said. "When we waddled back into the registration center in New Jersey everybody looked at us and thought, ‘Well heck, you couldn’t have had it too bad.’ It was more than I’d ever weighed in my life, about 165."
Ivy credits German Luftwaffe officers with making sure American aviators were treated with at least some degree of human decency.
"They went out of their way to take good care of us," he said. "They were very protective of us. The Wehrmacht — foot soldiers — would have hammered us good if they could get their hands on us. We made out as well as could be expected."
Following his discharge, Ivy went home to Waco, Texas.
"I sat on my ass for about three weeks," he said, smiling. "Then my mother started saying, ‘What are you going to do?’ "
During his imprisonment, Ivy had passed the time reading Red Cross-supplied books. One of them was about how to pursue a career in advertising. So he contacted its author, Mark O’Day, who invited him to New York and offered him a job on Madison Avenue.
Later, he became assistant director of advertising and public relations for Universal Atlas Cement Co., a subsidiary of U.S. Steel.
Through the years, he became acquainted with upstate New York and now he and his wife, Terry, live in Schuylerville where she runs Ivy Associates, an art gallery, at 140 Broad St. The couple, with five grown children and four grandchildren, just marked their 62nd anniversary on Dec. 18.
They were married in 1946 at the famous "Little Church Around the Corner" in New York, after meeting somewhat by accident at a Greenwich Village party. "I had a date who I thought had stood me up, so I called a friend who was having a party in the Village and she said, ‘Come on down! Everyone here is from Texas,’ " Terry recalled. "Edwin had a date, but she was quite the buzz, surrounded by all the men, so he and I ended up talking in a corner and he asked me to dinner the next night at the Biltmore Hotel.
"I was from Florida and he was from Texas. It just seemed like a natural."
Her support and understanding proved invaluable to his successful adjustment to post-war America, worlds apart from his German captivity.
"Everywhere we went was being bombed and the roads were being strafed," Ivy said. "Our lives were in danger all the time. It took years of reconditioning to get back to what I’d say is normal."
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