In One Profound Transformation--From Hero to Villain

Doug Graves © 2008
“This was also the day when I turned, in one profound transformation, from being a hero to being a villain,” said former First Lieutenant Gerhard G. Hennes. The former Afrika Korps soldier under legendary Field Marshall Erwin Rommel was describing the day that as a prisoner of war in Crossville, Tennessee he and his fellow POWs were assembled in a movie theater and shown documentary films depicting the carnage and inhumanity of the German concentration camps in Europe.
“I had no idea of the extent and ferocity [to which concentration camps were] murdering innocent people. I have never totally recovered from the shock sustained in that dark and suddenly uncomfortably hot movie theater in Crossville.”
Hennes, now 86, and Wendall A. Phillips, 84, were at the Lehigh Valley Heritage Museum on January 26 to share experiences with local citizens of all ages.
Phillips who, as a U. S. Army Air Force – Air Transport Command radio operator, had twice during World War II been a prisoner of war—once a prisoner of the Germans in or near the French-Belgium border and later a prisoner of the Japanese in Shanghai.
Phillips and Hennes, who had never met, were sitting side by side, both speakers in a living history symposium organized by museum director Joseph Garrera.
The attendance exceeded expectations of the museum staff and the overflow lined the walls and jammed the entrance to the lecture hall. Museum staffers quickly arranged a second session for later in the afternoon. The second session was also crowded with local residents who wanted to hear the stories of these two remarkable veterans.
Hennes, after his capture in North Africa had been in 16 POW camps in six countries when he finally was transported on the Queen Mary across the Atlantic Ocean and finally to Crossville, Tennessee.
He described his experience as a POW in America in generally positive terms even to the point of describing how his father, also a POW held in Colorado, had paid the train fare for himself and a guard and got himself transferred to Tennessee to be with his son, Gerhardt.
Phillips, telling his own improbable story to the standing room only audience, described how he had the bad luck to be a prisoner of war of both the German army and later of the Japanese army.
After enlisting in the army in November of 1942, Phillips, then a student at the Crane School of Music, was trained as an infantry soldier and then as a radio operator.
As a radio operator he found himself transporting ammunition and other supplies in a two-engine C-47 cargo plane from a base in Grove, England to American Army forces fighting their way through France and Belgium.
“We would land on steel mat landing strips, and after unloading our supplies, we would hang stretchers with wounded men on the cargo straps, and place ambulatory wounded on canvas flight seats and fly them back to England,” said Phillips. “Those were some of the first air evacuations of wounded from a battlefield.”
“In September, [1944] on my last trip, we had problems in one of the engines. The pilot landed safely and we off-loaded our supplies. The pilot decided not to take wounded out on this trip because of the engine problem—he wasn’t sure we would make it back. We took off but immediately lost power in one engine. We were having trouble making altitude and were flying low when German ground fire took out the other engine.”
“Pilots had parachutes. We [radio operators] did not. We were expected to go down with the plane--but we were too low for the parachutes.”
“We crashed in a field and both pilots were killed. I was still strapped in my seat with a dislocated shoulder when German soldiers captured me.”
Phillips was loaded on a truck and taken to a temporary prison hospital compound which he believes was in Belgium.
“There were other prisoners there. Germans treated us well. They took our uniforms and gave us one piece jumpers to wear. They took our shoes and gave us old worn out shoes. We didn’t have socks or underwear. We had bunks and a pot-belly stove. Three of us, me from New York, a guy from Arkansas and, I think, a guy from Oklahoma, decided to escape. We saw that the fence was questionable where two sections were overlapped. It had an electric wire running through it but that didn’t matter; we were going anyway.”
“It came a foggy, foggy night. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face and it was snowing hard—wet, heavy snow. We waited until the guard and the dog had gone by. We waited, then we hit that fence right beside the post were we thought it was weak. It broke apart. We got a little electric shock but we went out anyway. We split up three ways. I started running—all night. I hid during the day.”
On the fourth day Phillips found himself in a goat barn owned by a sympathetic farmer who brought a friendly French Catholic priest who had been educated at Notre Dame. Soon after, he was back with the Army.
Gerhard Hennes, a lieutenant in the German army, was, like Phillips, in communications. He was in the Afrika Korps and fought in the Battles of Tobruk and El Alamain.
Hennes started his narrative by describing his first visit to a prison of war camp, one run by the Germany army in Europe.
“I was the Officer of the Day [at the army base] in Baumholder [in Birkenfeld, Rhineland-Palatinate] and one of my duties was to see the prison camp hidden away on the base. And so I decided to go there.
“When I came to the gate the sergeant snapped to attention. ‘Is every thing in order, sir?’”
There he saw Russian prisoners starving and living in squalor. “I thought I should report in my daily sheet saying that I thought a superior officer should examine the condition of these camps. But then I had second thoughts.”
“They [his friends that he discussed it with] thought I had better not say any thing.”
Hennes went on to describe an incident after the tables were turned and he himself was first interned in a POW camp in Africa. He was being punished for attempting to escape and was serving 30 days on bread and water in a barbed-wire compound.
“A French first lieutenant came up to the fence with a loaf of bread in his hand. He said something clearly rehearsed. ‘I was a prisoner of war in Germany. The wife of a farmer gave me a piece of bread. Here it is returned to you. I don’t want to owe you anything!”
It was later toward the end of the war when, as a POW in Tennessee that Hennes and his fellow POWs were ordered into the movie theater to see documentary films about the death camps that the Nazi’s had operated.
“We saw emaciated bodies and empty eyes of those who survived. We saw the piles of naked bodies. We saw mass graves. We saw ovens where tens of thousands had been cremated.”
“We saw and stared in silence—struggling, but unable to believe what we Germans had done to Jews, Gypsies, prisoners of war and any others deemed inferior or expendable. None of us that were in Crossfield, Tennessee will forget it, that documentary.”
Meanwhile, as Hennes was sitting in an American POW camp, Phillips had just begun the incredible bookend to his story. Having escaped from the German POW camp in Europe and made his was back to American lines with the help of the French-Catholic underground, he was reassigned to the China-Burma-India theatre.
There he continued his career as a radio operator on C-47s and C-46’s flying from China to India and back ferrying supplies over “The Hump”—the Himalayan Mountains.
“Pilots really learned to fly there,” he said. “We didn’t fly over the mountains but through them--in all kinds of weather.”
After 116 flights through the Himalayans his luck ran out again. While ferrying supplies from bases to base inside China, the aircraft lost hydraulic power. “The C-47 leaked hydraulic fluid,” he said. “I always carried an extra five gallons of hydraulic fluid.”
But with no hydraulics the plane was uncontrollable, according to Phillips. The airplane crashed in a rice paddy in China killing both pilots. The C-47 was quickly surrounded by Japanese forces which captured Phillips and literally “tossed” him into a truck.
He was imprisoned in the International YMC in Shanghai. Here he was beaten, starved and tortured while being kept in a closet deep within the building in Japanese-occupied China.
It was here, suffering at the hands of Japanese guards that he began to compare his treatment with that that he had received at the hands of the Germans. “The Japanese were animals,” Phillips said, his voice full of remembered fury.
Then one day in August 1945 his tormentors quit coming to his locked closet and for three and half days he lay in the dark, starving. Then a military police team, a Brit and a GI, kicked the door open. The war was over.
The seminar featuring these two veterans from opposite sides in World War II ended with the rapt audience giving them an ovation, followed by intense questioning. Many were there who had themselves been POWs and a few asked questions and shared their stories.
Though both live in Whitehall, Phillips and Hennes, who immigrated to the United States in January 1953, did not know each other until they met at the Heritage Center in Allentown.