Tim Dyas: (reading) "At 1 a.m. an insane soldier is brought in from commando. Gave me a cold sweat to lie in bed and listen to him rave. God pity him. Find out he’s from Rockville Centre, Long Island. Name Funk."
What I did at the end of the war – the commando is the farmhouse he was working on – they sent his belongings in and I grabbed them in the post office. And I had a suitcase with a false bottom; I had somebody make it for me. And the Germans would check everything but they didn’t know the false bottom. So I brought his papers back to the States, and I knew he lived in Rockville Centre, so I was living in Queens, which is not very far from Rockville Centre. I called up the Red Cross over there, and they said the family had moved to Hastings on the Hudson. Well, the widow of my best friend – he was killed while I was a prisoner – there were three of us, we used to run the mile for Jamaica High School, and we had a race in 1937 when two of us were juniors and one was a senior. The senior finished first. I finished second. And the other junior finished, third, and that’s the way we went. The senior got killed on July 9, 1943. I got captured on July 10th, 1943, and the guy that finished third got killed July 11th, 1943.
Aaron Elson: All in the 82nd?
Tim Dyas: No, no. They were in different outfits. They were in the Air Force. I didn’t know this until I got home.
Aaron Elson: What a bizarre coincidence. What were their names?
Tim Dyas: Ray Murray was the senior, who was a fine miler. And Ken Kinniss was my closest friend; he had married a girl that he had been, they had been sweethearts in high school, she was a lovely person. And her family was very good to me after the war. They helped me a great deal.
But this Funk boy, when Irene Kinniss, Ken’s widow, worked for Pepsi, she had to go around and service various accounts, so she drove up to Hastings on the Hudson. I called up the family. I got the mother. No way was I going to see any mother. So she gave me her husband’s office number.
Aaron Elson: Did you tell her who you were?
Tim Dyas: I just said I had known her son overseas.
Aaron Elson: And he died in the camp?
Tim Dyas: Yeah, well, he went insane. They put him in a mental hospital, and he died there. That’s another story. Oh my God. He gets captured. He’s in a prison camp, and there’s a bomber crew there. So they got talking to each other. A guy says, "Funk, that’s a very unusual name. We had a navigator by the name of Bill Funk."
It was his brother.
He said, "but he didn’t make it."
So I took his belongings and I made – his father I think at that time was the vice president of some big corporation in the Wall Street area, and he cleared his desk and I came in. I didn’t tell him his son had gone insane. I just said he died and these were the things that I was bringing back. So he got up and he had a picture on the back wall he showed me, "They were my sons." He put his head on the desk and started crying.
I walked from there to Central Park before I saw a goddamn thing. I wrote a poem I call "Emotions and Motions" about that.
Aaron Elson: Now, let me ask you, you not having known your father, that must have made a scene like this doubly hard.
Tim Dyas: It certainly was. That poor man.
Aaron Elson: Before he went crazy, he met the…
Tim Dyas: He met the crew from his brother’s plane, and they told him his brother was killed. This was the second day he’s captured. So it’s preying on his mind and he goes crazy.
You know, surprisingly, the mental resiliency of the POWs was remarkable. I can only think of about three or four other guys that really had psychiatric problems. We all had them eventually, but at that time. The resilience was absolutely amazing.
"Saw record card of Russian prisoner who had died. Date of birth, 1930." This is 1944. "Civilization. Bah."
"Thief caught." Boy, if you stole anything, and it was understandable when you were starving, they put his head down in the latrine. The GIs did this. I put down, "Punishment a little too drastic." Head in the latrine, they could have done anything to him, but that was terrible. Here, "Just brought six men in from the commando where a guard beat them with a rifle butt, breaking one’s eardrum." Put them in the jail.
Aaron Elson: Why was that called the commando?
Tim Dyas: I don’t know the reason for that, but that’s what the Germans called these arbeitskommand, work groups. "All Russian officers were automatically executed." "All Russian officers were immediately executed by order of the German high command." "The best conditions befell those who were assigned to farming because they usually lived in one of the outbuildings where they slept on wooden bunks, perhaps even on some old beds which the farmer had dug out from the attic, or some other odd place and furnished with thick mattress and warm woolen blankets. The farmers were obviously of the opinion that their POWs deserved a good night’s sleep after a hard day’s work. Furthermore, the food was much better and richer in the country than in any other place." And as a Serb once told me, "It’s quite all right if we boil a few extra potatoes and have a small drink of milk when we’re milking a cow."
See, the big camps were the stalags, and then hundreds of hostels, these were the arbeitskommandos.
Here’s where I bought a new suitcase with a false bottom for ten packs of cigarettes. I crossed out the false part in case anybody found this, I just had, "Bought new suitcase with bottom for ten packs."
Hey, there’s an interesting article in the current issue of the POW magazine. This guy, a retired lieutenant colonel, talks about how the tobacco was a great weapon; unfortunately, it was fired at the American soldier, getting them to smoke, free cigarettes and so forth.
We even had a softball team at one time. Thanks to the YMCA. The Germans could never figure out what the hell we were doing. Hit the ball over the fence and send a guard to catch it if a guy ever hit it over.
"Hitler’s birthday and Grebenau’s. We all pray it’s Hitler’s last and Grebenau’s last in Germany." He was one of our POWs, from Wisconsin. We wanted it to be his last birthday as a prisoner. We wanted it to be Hitler’s last birthday, period.
Aaron Elson: What would you do to celebrate when it was somebody’s birthday?
Tim Dyas: Well, let’s see, what the hell did we do there? Anything. We usually didn’t have much.
Aaron Elson: At what point did serious hunger begin?
Tim Dyas: It was worse in the first few months after your capture. For this reason, I recommended to the Army when I returned from being a POW that they furnish all men going into combat some auxiliary energy device, not device, food of some kind, glucose tablets or something like that for example, because the policy is, you keep the prisoners, you don’t give them anything. They’re thirsty, they’re hungry, they’re weak. They can’t do much of anything. This is what the Germans did to us and I’m sure we did the same damn thing to the Germans we caught. If they had furnished us with some auxiliary stuff in our pockets that we possibly could have taken, people might have had energy to do more things, maybe run or escape or something. I never was fed properly.
(Reading) "Funk of Rockville Centre, 54 Sheffield Street, died." That’s when the information came in, on May 10 of ’44. That’s when we found out about it. That was the guy that went crazy.
"Sleepless night, my 24th birthday." That was May 25, 1944. This year, you know, in honor of my birthday they’re having Memorial Day on the same day.
Aaron Elson: Why was it a sleepless night?
Tim Dyas: I don’t know, I just, comparing here I am, for God sakes, 24 years old, and what am I doing? And the thing is, you don’t know, you’re not sure you’re gonna make it. This is the thing. You may die before you get back..
Aaron Elson: Were you married yet?
Tim Dyas: No, I was dating a couple gals, but nothing serious. And then on June 6th, 1944, "Invasion! God help the boys. Much cheer among French. Greatest thing in history. Sweating out the PM news bulletin."
Aaron Elson: How did you hear about it?
Tim Dyas: Somebody had a radio someplace, remember I told you what I was carrying? "Go to doctor with my fever sores only to find out it’s a case of trenchmouth."
"Seems guard gave Sternberg a chance to pray before killing him. Yellow sonofabitches. They’ll pay."
Aaron Elson: Who was Sternberg?
Tim Dyas: One of our POWs.
Aaron Elson: Jewish?
Tim Dyas: I would guess. You know, at my class at church yesterday, the young rabbi from the temple here came over, and he was pointing out to us, I don’t know why he has to point it out, Judaism isn’t a race, it’s a religion, like you can be a Christian and be black, green, purple, Oriental or whatever. But a lot of people assume that Judaism is a race. So I guess he was. I really don’t know.
We even had a movie one time, "George Washington Slept Here," with Jack Benny and Ann Sheridan. That’s the one. First one we ever had.
"Jerry arrogance. One control unterofficer wants to take Brogan’s tobacco parcels and distribute to the men doing the best work."
"Letter from Irene with pictures of Ken," that was Ken Kinniss and herself, that was the gal that he married, he went in the Air Force and was shot down, killed the day after I got captured.
"July 6th, both Mother and Dad critically ill."
Aaron Elson: July 6th?
Tim Dyas: 1944. That’s almost a year after I got captured.
"July 10th. One year today at 3 p.m."
Aaron Elson: Now wait, both Mother and Dad critically ill, but your mother was dead already?
Tim Dyas: No. Apparently, the news I was getting from home, who the hell really knew? A letter from my brother dated March 22nd, see, it was months before, so. "Bad news. Both mother and dad critically ill."
Aaron Elson: And you didn’t even know your dad at this point?
Tim Dyas: No. I don’t know how the hell he found out about it. From the VA I guess, because he spent most of his life in VA hospitals, my father.
"July 10th. One year today at 3 p.m. Feel horribly depressed." So that’s when they caught me. It was at 3 p.m. We jumped at, oh, 10 o’clock at night or so, and we fought until 3 p.m. the next day before we were caught.
Aaron Elson: So you were aware of a depression?
Tim Dyas: Oh.
Aaron Elson: That must have put you into a real funk.
Tim Dyas: Oh, please. Well, I hear on July 6th and July 10th, "One year today at 3 p.m. Feel horribly depressed." You could hear guys sometimes in their bunks crying silently, you know, at night.
(Reading) "Five hundred new POWs from Italy, all beaten up." Oh, "Kuhn," that was one of the men in my unit, "gives me drawing done on polished bone by a Polish officer." It’s right up there, it’s a beautiful piece of work. God, he did beautiful work.
Aaron Elson: Polished bone?
Tim Dyas: It was part of a skull. There was lots of that around.
Aaron Elson: (reading) "Sicily. 9-7-43."
Tim Dyas: Here, on September 1, "Long talk in French with Eiteit, former conductor at La Scala in Milan." I’ve got his name here someplace. He told me he was a conductor at La Scala; I had no reason not to believe him. I’ve been meaning to write to La Scala and ask them about him.
"The captain gives an autographed copy of ‘Invitation to a Dance,’ for souvenir. Promises to play it Friday on piano." Remember I told you that? Of course he never showed up and I don’t know what happened to him.
"Captain Zanni" was supposedly the conductor at La Scala.
Here’s a weird thing: "Wailing song of Mongolians lends touch of East in the air. These were Mongolians who had been captured by the Germans and then joined the German army." And when the Americans invaded in Normandy, there were a lot of them there.
Aaron Elson: Really?
Tim Dyas: As I understand, I wasn’t there. But I know these guys were in there.
Aaron Elson: These were Mongolians captured by the Germans. Now, at this point were they prisoners?
Tim Dyas: They were prisoners who joined the German army. You know, I can understand it. They were starving. In this camp alone, 40,000 Russian prisoners were starved to death, in Stalag 2B. Forty thousand.
Then I got sent from 2B to 3B. "Visit Scot captain with vertigo." I had it then. I think I’ll show this article to the doctors down there [at the VA], because this obviously is not fake.
Aaron Elson: What’s that about vertigo?
Tim Dyas: I saw some Scotch captain; I had vertigo. You have you no sense of balance, you can fall on your face. I’ve had it three or four times in the last ten years I guess. One time Corinne had to drive me back from Massachusetts because I was in the seat next to her with the seat flat while she did all the driving. I couldn’t get my head off the pillow. I carry a special medication for that now.
"Arrived train late, through Frankfurt, modern station, arrived 3B, 9 p.m. GIs ripping" – this is something here – "GIs ripping field jackets up to prevent confiscation." You know why they did that?
Aaron Elson: No.
Tim Dyas: Remember the Battle of the Bulge? The Germans wearing American uniforms? They had mortars and machine guns all around the barracks. The GIs ripped all our clothes up, and all that went out was a big truckload of torn rags. One German came and talked to me, where the hell is this thing now, before the Bulge. I was in 3B I guess.
"…1st, 1945, notice to be ready to evacuate at 3:30. Snow, rain. To get away from the Russians we walked 50 kilometers all day and night." That’s a long distance, for guys that have no food. "Civilian police. Sleep 500 in a barn. Shoe pissing." Some guy got up during the night, I didn’t take my shoes off, but it’s a good idea if you can in the cold because your feet don’t get as cold. Some guy pissed in this guy’s shoe. By mistake, he didn’t mean it.
"Sleep good, barn. Next day we slept in a better barn." This is one of the grimmest things of my life. There was another paratrooper, Carl Johnson. We were exhausted. We had no food, we were sick, it was cold, my God it was cold. He fell down. Before I could get over there the guard shot him dead. And when I got over there the guard reversed the rifle and smashed me across the leg with the butt.
Here we are. "Shoe pissing. Butt stroke. Good barn. Carl Johnson shot." There were evacuees in the road, you couldn’t make a movie, the scenes that were on the road. Nobody would believe it. Everybody and his brother was moving all over Europe at that time. It was incredible.
Aaron Elson: What kind of things did you see?
Tim Dyas: Well, here’s a Polish Jew shot. "English speaking frau cooked soup." We must have gotten some soup from somebody. "Soldiers front and civilians to the rear. Sleep on school steps." Sleep with question mark "on the school steps that night. See dead Jew in woods. Sleep in a village artillery range. Good barn. Asked if we want to walk to 3A at 6 p.m. 390 men arrive 3A at 11 p.m. Good barracks. First shave since start. Thin soup and spuds." Ugh. "Eight hundred of us to leave for a new camp, 18 more kilometers west. Walked 35 kilometers." You know, they would, "Viefiel kilometer? Ein mehr, ein mehr," Ya bastards, it’s a hundred more. "See 15 year old soldiers," German soldiers. They were desperate at the end of the war, they were getting kids and old men there. "Fifteen kilometers south of Berlin," that’s how close we were, to the bombing of Berlin. "Radiator in room. Fleas and bedbugs." I got thrown out of that camp. I got thrown out of one camp for telling the new prisoners the rights they had.
Aaron Elson: What would they do to you when they threw you out of a camp?
Tim Dyas: They made me go to another camp, that’s all. They’d get a bunch of us together and say we’re going to another camp, what the hell could we do?
"Men in 3A pushed around. Sweating." Then I made up a false piece of paper to give myself, I still have it somewhere in the house here, a false ID that I could prove I was an NCO.
"First day of spring. Terrific raids. The SS shakedown." They came in and shook us down, took everything away we had. "Bath. Burn wooden latrine. Good Friday service in an air raid shelter. Morale super. They’re bombing the Christ out of us."
Aaron Elson: How many days in a row did you go through bombings?
Tim Dyas: Forty days and nights in a row. (Reading) "On Feb. 3 one of the most fierce and extensive air raids was launched on Berlin."
"The evening meal is brought in a large metal container. The usual thin vegetable soup which the POWs had every day and consisted of water rather than vegetables."
I have the same, I have "a heavy raid on March 18," and he has [a book Dyas has about the POWs], "On March 18 the YMCA had its last staff meeting. Before we even got around to business the air raid alarm sounded and we had a strong formation of enemy aircraft were flying over on the approach to Berlin." 1,200 heavy bombers and 1,000 fighter bombers at a time. And I have "heavy raid" We got so goddamn used to it. That’s when the guys stayed in the barracks, and at the last minute ran out, and the guys who were at the top couldn’t get down so they were looking upward and the guy fell right on his face.
Aaron Elson: Were they injured?
Tim Dyas: A couple guys had bruises on their face. Nothing serious. You had to lose a leg or something to take it seriously. "April 4th, bomb close." And so was the plane. "Air raid. Air raid. Air raid."
Aaron Elson: When you say close, how close was it?
Tim Dyas: I would think maybe a half-mile at the most or maybe a quarter-mile. A quarter of a mile I would say probably."
Aaron Elson: Could you feel it?
Tim Dyas: Oh yeah, the ground shook. Oh, God, you could really feel it. That’s a frightening thing, my God. "Terrific raid in the afternoon from 10 p.m. until 3:30 a.m. Piggyback plane" – we saw jet planes there before they ever knew they existed in the States. "Another all night job."
Aaron Elson: What do you mean by piggyback plane?
Tim Dyas: We saw two planes flying together. I guess that maybe had something to do with their jets. But we saw jets flying there before the States I think even knew they had them. "Long night raids. Jerry armor passing on the highway. Trucks and ambulances, sound as if firing. Air tense. Roosevelt dead." We knew about that. A German told me, "You know, we lost too."
"Plane buzzing overhead. Trucks over the embankment as the plane buzzing. Terrific air raid. Dive bombers. Fighters. Plenty of antiaircraft. Hit ammo dump. Air raid. Air raid." That’s all it was in that place we were. "Terrific daylight raid," April 20th.
"Across in three hours?" "Unbelievable." About the SS letting us go. "To cross today?" Across the Elbe. "At 6 p.m. Across Elbe. Free!"
Aaron Elson: Were you crossing from west to east or east to west?
Tim Dyas: From east to west. I’m trying to think of the American outfit that was on the other shore when we got over there. We had to keep yelling "Americans! Americans!" Because the front line was there and the Germans were on the other side of the river, and one guy made some comment, "Where the hell were you? We’ve been waiting for you for two years over there on the other side of the river." Then they took us to a hospital right away and they wouldn’t give us much food, because, you know, our stomachs. One of the guys from someplace in the South, we go to our barrack after the meal they gave us, he says, "The hell with this." He goes back and sees the colonel; he says, "Colonel. I promised myself when I got out of that god damn prison camp I would never go hungry again. Right now I’m starving!" So he ate some more food.
I have the metric system on the back of my notebook, and we always used to ask the Germans, "Wieviel kilometer?" And in those days the English pound was worth four dollars and eighty six cents.
- - - -
Aaron Elson: You must have seen some instances of brutality, with the guards.
Tim Dyas: Yes, more out on the roads than in the camp. They didn’t, I think, want too many witnesses to brutality. But I know that they took place out on the commandos; there was this one guy that was shot to death and they gave him a chance to pray before they killed him. I think it was restricted more out there and on the marches than in the camps.
Aaron Elson: Did you see that take place when they did that?
Tim Dyas: No, I didn’t see that take place. This is when guys came in, they told me about it.
Aaron Elson: Did you ever try to escape?
Tim Dyas: I did in the beginning, on the train, but we didn’t coordinate; we couldn’t very well coordinate, Dixon and Sheridan knocked down the rear of their freight car and got out. We thought we’d wait until we got into the Brenner Pass, because supposedly we would be close to Switzerland. I’ve since heard, I can’t prove it, that if you did escape there and get to Switzerland, the Swiss would give you right back to the Germans. I don’t know, that was the rumor that went around, and having met the Swiss and so forth, I’m sure there were some Swiss who would do it. I’m not enamored of the Swiss.
Aaron Elson: What about, you mentioned earlier crabs and lice.
Tim Dyas: Ugh. We tried, we were in the barracks at 2B, and in the middle there were sinks, and we would go in there and wash ourselves as best we could. And most guys did their damnedest to take care of themselves. That last camp I was in, right next to our compound were a group of Czech slave laborers, and they had typhus. Did we sweat that out. Like that (snapping his fingers) we would have been decimated. But we did our best, and most GIs, to their credit, did their best to look clean and take care of themselves, and the Germans respected them for that. One thing you have to have in those circumstances, I think, is pride. One time, and this I have in a poem that was published, "Improbable blessings," the Germans one time marched most of our compound over to the Russian compound, because that’s where the X-ray stuff was, and we knew we were going there, so we took everything we possibly could from our pockets and stuff, and when we got over there, we marched as if we were up at West Point. We got over there, and then we could fall out of ranks and stuff, we formed a big circle, and the guys in the middle dug, we passed them food, and dug and pointed for the Russians, and when we left there, and the Germans marched us back, the Russians came digging like a bunch of chickens digging what we left, the poor bastards. This is the camp where they killed 40,000. Unbelievable. Man’s inhumanity to man.
Aaron Elson: Tell me now about your father. How did you get in touch with him?
Tim Dyas: After the war ended, I wrote to the Veterans Administration and got the hospital he was in. And when he got out of the hospital, I figured out he was living in, oh, I’m embarrassed, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, I’m trying to think of the town near Fort Sill. He was living in that town. I think he married a nurse, who was an American Indian. She came from a family that was highly educated, and she had two sisters working in the foreign service; they’d all gone to college. And at that time he had a business as a hearing aid salesman. He was good at selling things. I liked him. He seemed to be a nice guy. He had sent me the tickets. That was funny. I lived up in Boston, and I was a grad student up at Harvard, and just before Christmas we’re all sitting around the table, What are we gonna do for Christmas? And I said, "I’m going to go to Oklahoma," and one of these old proper Bostonians said, "Oh-kla-hooo-ma!" As if the Indians were gonna get me.
But he was a nice guy. I saw him one more time in life, and then didn’t see him again until I received word from one of the VA hospitals that he had died, as a patient. So I made a contribution to the hospital’s fund, they could use it for whatever they wanted.
Aaron Elson: Did he try to be like a father, or more like a friend?
Tim Dyas: More like a friend when we met, because he knew apparently that he’d blown all the opportunities to be a father. I was 28 years old and I’d been through a war, and gotten a lot of education. I finished my undergraduate degree in three years, and I spent a year taking my graduate degree up in Harvard.
Aaron Elson: And what did you study?
Tim Dyas: I studied history up at Harvard, and in my undergraduate work I did a lot of history too, but with the idea of teaching it, which is what I eventually did.
Aaron Elson: And where did you go into teaching?
Tim Dyas: Well, when I first finished at Harvard, there was a job with the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council, which was the predecessor of WGBH, and I worked for them for a year. But I didn’t quite like that because I was producing a show called "America at the Crossroads," with a buddy of mine, he was the producer. I worked as the assistant producer. I had to get members of the faculties of Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, Boston College, Tufts, etc., to appear on the program as the experts, and then we would get people from the street to come in and ask questions of them. But I didn’t quite like that, so I left at the end of the year and I went down to Panama and started a six-year career with the Army as a civilian educational adviser, and that’s when the Korean War broke out. I volunteered immediately, and they said, "No way. Your back." I even had the attorney general trying to get me in. No way. Thank God.
Aaron Elson: What made you want to do that?
Tim Dyas: If you had a background such as I with the patriotic lore, you felt you had to do this sort of stuff. There was nothing that could stand in your way. And here I was going to get married in a few months, and I’m volunteering to go to combat. Insanity.
Aaron Elson: How did you and your wife meet?
Tim Dyas: When I was in Boston, at a social gathering.
Aaron Elson: Did your father talk about his World War I experience?
Tim Dyas: He never mentioned anything about that. And you know, it bothers me, because I was told all my life growing up that he came from Savannah, Georgia, so a number of years ago I got very interested in finding out about his background, and I wrote to the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Savannah and they had no record. Then I wrote to the state of Georgia, and they had no record of him. So I don’t really know. I know my mother was born in Brooklyn, to Irish parents.
Aaron Elson: What kind of health problems did he have as a result of being gassed?
Tim Dyas: He had terrible respiratory problems. He was never a very strong man as a result of that.
Aaron Elson: Did he ever talk about the divorce?
Tim Dyas: No. I don’t know what the heck they did in those days very frankly; I don’t think they got a divorce, I think they just separated. And he never remarried until my mother died. My mother could never have gotten a divorce; she was a strict Roman Catholic. She was a very pretty woman; it’s a shame, I’m sure she could have remarried. I wish she had, because I’d have had a father.
Aaron Elson: Do you have children?
Tim Dyas: Yeah. Well, this is my second marriage, and we have five children between us. One is a medical doctor, one is a lawyer, one is a professional musician, one works for UPS.
Aaron Elson: Bob Levine had said that your POW experience had contributed to the breakup of your first marriage.
Tim Dyas: Oh yeah, there’s no question. PTSD. I became a workaholic. I would work at the high school and give very little concern at home, although I was trying to be a good father to my sons, and I would take them, when they were old enough I took them mountain climbing up Mount Washington, and I have a very fine relationship with them today, but it left my wife very lonely because I was pouring myself into my job. A lot of people do this in American society. It’s unfortunate. But this is very typical of PTSD. I also had 13 different jobs. None of them were, let’s see, there’s only one job I ever lost, but all the others, I just made a change myself. Decided to move here, move there. I was a principal in New York and in New Jersey, vice principal, teacher, oh, all over the place.
I think it’s better to work for one place for a long time. The last 13 years I stayed in one school district, Millburn. And if you note, do you get Newsweek?
Aaron Elson: I heard, they got one of the top…
Tim Dyas: Second in the nation. It’s a marvelous school system. It was then and it continues. Very nice people in the community down there.
Aaron Elson: And you taught history?
Tim Dyas: No, there I was vice principal.
Aaron Elson: As an educator, did you ever talk to students about having been a POW?
Tim Dyas: Yeah, I go up to Northern Highlands High School every Veterans Day, they invite me up there, and I – last time I went up there I talked about, the first time I’d ever done it, I talked about the POW situation and what it meant to a POW, and I spoke about how the Russians were treated and I read a couple of my poems. One time when I talked they asked me to give the benediction as well, so I went home and I sat right down and I wrote "Benediction," and in this poem there are three protagonists, Mars, the god of war, a young soldier – and parenthetically aren’t all soldiers young who are gonna get killed? And Mars again, and here another victim of the war, the soldier’s mother. Mars starts off by saying, "Soldier boy, you’re gonna die."
And back came the futile cry, "Why? I sweated and slaved in that training hell and they told me I did very well."
"You see unfortunately you joined the very best, and their battles put many to their final rest.
"It is ironic, I agree, that war takes the best and sends them out to take that final test which results in the gore that mankind calls war.
"When I see your name up on the memorial plaque all of me screams despairingly, Come back. Come back."
The kids really liked it. My church published that in its bulletin.
Aaron Elson: Were there any services in the camps?
Tim Dyas: Yeah. Occasionally we got services. We were very fortunate. One camp we had a priest actually, and that was very rare, it depended upon the commandant. If you had a decent human being as a commandant, you certainly had things like that. Occasionally. But there weren’t very many of them around.
Aaron Elson: Did you have any rapport with any of the guards or the camp personnel?
Tim Dyas: I’ll tell you, this is a poem too, it’s called "Accent." Prior to the Battle of the Bulge a group of young German soldiers spread through the camp to talk to us. And this guy that came to talk to me sat down. He was a very nice young man. He started talking. Something clicked in my mind. I said, [with a thick British accent], "Old boy, what do you wish to know?"
He said, "Do all Americans talk like this?"
"Of course they do." I said, "We speak the King’s English too."
And I said, "You know, your face is the map of Ireland."
He said, "You’re right." He said, "My father was an Irishman in World War I. He hated the British so he joined the German air force, and when he was shot down over Germany and in a hospital, he met my mother and they got married and he stayed in Germany and I’m his son."
And I’ve often thought, with a sense of guilt about it, he was going to walk into the American lines talking, "Hello American fellows, how are you out there?" Well, he was going to be dead in about three seconds.
They were trying to pick up colloquialisms. Now I don’t know why I did it, but I sensed something.
They were trying to prepare themselves, that was their last hope, the Battle of the Bulge. And we had a 106th Infantry Division, which from what I’ve read everywhere was scattered, it wasn’t any fault of theirs, they were so thin on the lines they didn’t have much of a chance, the poor guys. The Germans took a lot of prisoners there, the 106th. They were brave as any soldiers that ever lived, but they were scattered covering a long distance with a thin line.
Aaron Elson: Were there tunnels and things in the camp? Were you in one of the camps where people were always preparing some form of escape?
Tim Dyas: There was only one camp that I knew where they really tunneled a lot. We knew about that the next day. "Seventy two guys escaped." We had a funny one. We had a young Oriental come in. Chinese. I don’t know how he got in our army. He was a law student at Columbia. So he gets into our army, and his sergeant also got captured with him, and his sergeant’s telling me, "We’re up in the front lines, so I go over to him, I says, ‘Clean your rifle.’ I come back five minutes later and he’s got it field-stripped. I said, ‘What are you gonna do?! The Germans are right over there! Here’s another rifle! Don’t take this one apart!" So they get captured. This Chinese kid spoke fluent German. So he goes out on the farm and walks away from it. Everybody he meets assumes that he’s a Jap. And he speaks German. And he’s going through Germany like nothing. His feet gave out, and he had to turn himself in. I’d have walked forever. Of course I didn’t know any German and I didn’t look like I was Japanese. One time in the classroom I asked a kid, oh, the teacher asked a kid while I was observing a class, he said to this Oriental kid, "Which are you, Japanese or Chinese?"
The kid said, "I’m Chinese."
The teacher said, "Well, how do you tell the difference?"
He says, "I always ask the guy."
But we all thought he’d make it. So here he comes back. His feet gave out on him.
Aaron Elson: They sent him back to the same camp?
Tim Dyas: They did that time. Well, it was a lesson to the people who were there, too, I guess, that there’s no sense trying it, you’re gonna get caught.
Aaron Elson: At what point did you learn about your mother?
Tim Dyas: I didn’t really know until I got home. When I was in Fort Dix, Ken Kinness’ widow came down to visit me, because we knew each other in high school, we were good friends, and she’d married Ken. And she came and she told me. She was shocked. She thought I knew about it. Oh, she was so sorry she had told me. I have a poem I wrote, "A Mother’s Lament." They published that; they made me poet laureate of the 505th Regimental Combat Association a few years back, so I have a deadline all the time to write a poem. Not that it’s hard. I’m usually way ahead.
Aaron Elson: What was it like riding in the boxcars?
Tim Dyas: That was pretty damn grim, because you had no sanitary facilities. To this day I don’t remember how we took care of those things. I think we had a bucket in the corner, and we had a little window up above, and it was all covered with barbed wire. That’s why my friend John Dixon and Sheridan knocked out the back of the damn thing to get away. And they had guards all over the train and on top.
We saw a P-38 get shot down, a British one, and about a half hour later they’re bringing the pilot into our little compound where the prisoners were. This was back in Italy at the beginning. He was a wing commander in the RAF. Burned to hell. Because he had scrambled in North Africa, and he didn’t have time to put on his flight suit, he just had shorts on. What a mess. So he’s in the boxcar. You never heard a complaint from him the whole damn trip. Then when we get to the camp, we’re GIs, you know, unruly and stuff, and the Germans tell him that if we don’t stop it they’re gonna shoot all of us. He said, "You damn right well might get all of us, of course, but we’ll get some of you before you kill all of us."
They got him out of that camp. This was a camp for enlisted men; they got him out of there in a hurry and sent him to one of those Air Force camps. He was incredible. What a man.
Aaron Elson: He was badly burned?
Tim Dyas: Oh yeah. He was a mess. He was a marvelous; he was the epitome to me of the best of Britain. I never did know his name. But the boxcars were incredible. I forget how many we had in there. The first trip from southern Italy to Hammerstein was about seven days and we were jammed in there. I don’t even remember, I think we must have gotten some food someplace but I wouldn’t bet on it. "Train to Naples. After Naples, train up to Germany. Hot." It was hot as blazes the first day because we were in southern Italy, around Naples.
It’s very, very warm down in southern Italy. Oh, they had Italian guards on us while we were in this … they had a barracks for the Germans off to one side. The guard, the Italian guard shoots. Everybody ducks. It goes right through the German barracks and hits one of the German soldiers in the leg. Oh … and then we had of course a number of American soldiers who were Italians and spoke it and they used to give these Italian guys hell. They were so funny. And then there was a lot of bombing taking place there, too, of Naples. But you know, you seized upon any deviation from the norm to try to make it something of humor, because this is a way of keeping your sanity, I guess human beings do it everywhere, and it seemed to work. None of us really, and I don’t think in those days anybody knew anything about PTSD, it was always a little bit of shellshock, and there are people today who obviously have gone through this and have PTSD and don’t know it. I didn’t know it. I had no idea I had this. No idea.
Aaron Elson: What things would you do that were funny?
Tim Dyas: Well, it’s like this. Shooting the poor German guard in the leg, we thought that was hysterical. Let me look in here, anything you could get out of the ordinary that you could get a laugh out of, like getting the Frenchmen and the Italians to argue, this was hilarious to us. And another thing, we all wore clogs. And it was not at all uncommon to see two pair of clogs in the middle of the street here, one Frenchman chasing another, and he jumped out of his clogs to chase the other guy, and this was hilarious to us. And then the French, too, they could insult you. Two Frenchmen would call each other everything. Nobody ever struck a blow. We GIs used to shake our heads and say what the hell is with this, how do they do that? Two GIs would be killing each other.
Aaron Elson: What would you fantasize about?
Tim Dyas: Food. Period. I know a number of the guys told us when they got home, let’s see, after I came back, that’s another thing, coming back. I was in the hospital, in Camp Lucky Strike in France, because of my back. And so when we got on the troop ship to come back I was in the hospital, in the sick bay. I’m lying down in the sick bay off Newfoundland someplace, and a member of the crew was sick down there. All of a sudden the ship gives a certain signal. He says, "Grab your clothes we’re sinking!" So I grab my clothes, I don’t know anything. We dash up on deck. We had just slithered off the side of an iceberg. By the time I got to New York I was shaking like a leaf. One ship I think hit it and went down. And here we’re on our way home after going through all this. Better yet they should kill me on the way over there, then I wouldn’t have gone through all this stuff.
Here’s another one. "The Germans are issuing confiscated Old Golds and Raleighs for soldiers. Suggestion: We do without our food boxes rather than let the Jerrys get cigarettes. Would gladly do without mine, but stomach rules. Great argument pro and con. Refuse to take part in anything because of the attitude on the boxes." Those guys wouldn’t back me up on that.
Aaron Elson: The attitude on the boxes?
Tim Dyas: Well, the fact that the Germans were doing what they were doing with these boxes. I wanted the Americans to say, "No, we won’t take it, we’ll go on a hunger strike." They didn’t want any part of that, and in a way I don’t blame them.
Aaron Elson: Because the boxes were broken into?
Tim Dyas: Yes.
Aaron Elson: So as hungry as you were you were ready to go on a hunger strike?
Tim Dyas: A man has his pride. That wouldn’t have been hard to do, come to think of it.
----
Tim Dyas: We had a visit one time by Berlin Betsy. Do you know who she was?
Aaron Elson: No.
Tim Dyas: She was an American who went over to Germany, as far as I know, and on the radio all the time spoke to the troops giving them all the Nazi propaganda. "Visit of Berlin Betsy. Tell her office the boys won’t give her the worst treatment possible. Silence." In other words we should have just given her the silent treatment. But they wouldn’t do that so we all booed the hell out of her. We "cheer" on the way out. Cheer in quotes.
"March 27th. Rumor 74 American officers have been thrown out of Germany by Jerries. Serb goes over the fence but recaptured." See, I’d make a comment, "The end of the war will never stop my hatred of them." That’s not quite true.
Aaron Elson: At what point did you forgive?
Tim Dyas: Oh, I think many years after the war. I’ll never forget running into a person I worked with, and he was telling me that he had been an American in charge of a part of a German stockade, and how tough they had been for the Germans. At which point I told him off. I said, "Well, that was easy to do, wasn’t it? It took a lot of courage. These men had no weapons or anything. Boy, you were brave." I got very angry over it.
Aaron Elson: So you felt compassion for the German POWs.
Tim Dyas: I have one poem. We were on the road one time and a flatbed truck went by filled with German wounded. And this guy – guys had no mouths, they’d been hit in the chins and stuff, how could you not have compassion? He was a human being. He wasn’t a German soldier, he was a badly abused person. While I was there I hated them, but the German – I would love to be able to find the name of the German captain who took us to the river and said "Go." That took a lot of courage, I’m sure. But it was chaos in Germany at the end of the war. Oh my God.
Aaron Elson: Did you have any encounters with SS troops?
Tim Dyas: Just that one where I told you, the day before we were out they made us dig the hole, and then let us just go back. They didn’t do anything further.
Aaron Elson: Would you make up menus and things?
Tim Dyas: Yeah, occasionally we would. Not a menu in so many words. It was hit and miss. But for a certain day, I have something here, oh, the first Christmas day where the Belgians fed us; a woman who lives in Ridgewood here is from Belgium, and she tried to get her brothers to find out about some of these Belgians that I knew there. I suspect that they were considerably older than I was, so they’re probably dead now. They had the coffee royale, this was Christmas eve dinner, I put "Noel, Dec. 24, 1943." They had the rabbit and one fruitcake. I guess they must have had some potatoes or something. That was Christmas eve dinner. But generally what people did is, two or three guys got together and, they had a very interesting, have you ever heard about the new stoves they invented?
Aaron Elson: No.
Tim Dyas: They were incredible. These guys, one German said, "Jesus, don’t give them any more tin cans over there. This guy’s gonna build an airplane and fly out of here. I don’t know whether the British did this first or who did it.
Aaron Elson: The POWs invented it?
Tim Dyas: Yeah. We used to carry them around, they were stoves. I’m not very good at drawing things, but it was a flat board like this, and here they had propellers, you did this, and this started the fire in there, and you put your food on there and zzzzhooom. You’d see guys going down the road with these hanging down their backs. Everybody had them. Usually two or three guys would eat together and pool their resources, and this made it a little bit easier. I ate with a guy named Charlie Baker who was from the Chicago area, and Tom McInerny who also was from the Chicago area. I visited Tom way back a number of years ago when I was out that way in Indianapolis; he has since died. There are not too many of them still alive that I knew there. Very few. I write at Christamstime to about four or five of them.
I want to go to my high school one of these days. There’s supposedly on the wall, up above, they have plaques, bronze, with the names of all the people from that school who were in, I guess, all the wars that our country has had. But any silly thing would be exaggerated, because you seized upon anything to have a laugh.
Aaron Elson: And how did you hurt your back?
Tim Dyas: When I landed. I just landed like this and my head smashed into the ground. That’s why I say I was out for a while and my neck. On the way back from overseas they had doctors who had also been POWs on the ship, Army doctors, they did physicals on us, and when we got to shore they had already turned in this stuff to the Veterans Administration. So I’ve got papers upstairs that show my grandmother getting a big pension of eight dollars a month, because she had these eight children; she got a dollar per child when her husband died from his Civil War wounds. Our government always has been so kind to veterans. This is in 1902, of course.
Aaron Elson: How were you treated after the war, by the VA?
Tim Dyas: I would think that initially the people who worked there were fairly good people. The people on the front lines. But I think that right now it’s very, very – I have no complaint about the individuals, the dentist who’s worked with me, the psychiatrist that sees me and so forth, but I think the very top, this managed care business, is really wrecking care for the veterans. And I’m comparitaely healthy, my problems are all psychological, but some of the guys with physical problems I feel sorry for them. You’ve heard Joe Klapper talk about throwing people who’ve been in the hospital fifty years out.
Aaron Elson: What about the attitude of Americans when you came home toward POWs? You remember you had expressed a fear of how you would be received?
Tim Dyas: Yeah. I had about three real shocks. I walked down my neighborhood. "Hey, You’re dead! But you’re obviously not." That’s what they heard, I was dead. Then I, walking down 42nd Street one day, one guy from my unit comes along and says, "You’re dead!" And people stop and are staring around. About three people thought I was dead. I go down to my old high school and they thought I was dead. Because they heard I was missing in action and that’s the last any of them heard. Oh no, I didn’t encounter any hostility from anybody. I had a funny one happened, another buddy of mine, we ran together on the same track team in high school, and his father was originally from some British colony, and he was married and he said my wife and I are going to go out tonight, my cousin’s visiting from England, would you like to come? I said "Sure." So I get in the back of the car with this Englishman. He said one word, right away, we’re [talking a mile a minute]. So we get to the place and my friend takes me aside and he says, "How did you get him to talk? He’s been here three weeks and we haven’t heard two words out of him."
"Oh," I said. "He was a POW also."
Here we’re yakking away comparing food and the guards and marching through Germany.
Aaron Elson: You mentioned the three of you who had run the mile. Do you remember what the time was?
Tim Dyas: I know the senior finished first because he was fast. I would suspect the time was somewhere around five minutes, give or take. It was early in the season; it was a practice mile. And the senior was better. Now the guy that finished third could beat me in the half-mile but I could beat him in the mile.
Aaron Elson: And what was your best time in the mile?
Tim Dyas: In high school? I think about 4:54. It wasn’t really very good. We had a very great runner in New York City in those days, Leslie McMitchell, God, he was one of the top. Four-twenties in high school. And when they took him in the service, he got a physical, they wouldn’t let him fly because when he exercised his heart slowed down, and they didn’t understand athletic hearts at all. So here’s a guy, probably the best-conditioned guy they had in the U.S. Navy and they wouldn’t let him fly.
Then I had another thing happen. There were two of us in elementary school who competed for the history medal, a guy named Wally Craig and I, and I got it. I’ve written about this too. Wally Craig took off from his carrier in the Pacific and they never saw him again. So, I got the medal, but…
Aaron Elson: He was the hero.
Tim Dyas: That was tough coming home. A little kid I knew had both legs blown off, he’d been in the Marines. You’d walk around, see who came back.
And I wrote a poem about that; it’s called "Getting too old too young." I said, When I was a kid I used to hear these older men talking about how they didn’t have any friends anymore, they’d all died. So I said, That happened to me when I was young, not when I was old. The closest friend I had was killed.
I just wrote a poem, I think I told you about it before, about this sergeant getting my commission and getting killed. That was a real blow.
Aaron Elson: There are so many unusual circumstances. In the tank battalion there were three separate instances in three separate platoons where a soldier accidentally killed another soldier, the same way, where the machine gun wouldn’t stop firing because they didn’t close the cover. In all three instances, the person who accidentally did that was later killed. How do you explain that?
Tim Dyas: You know, they’ve had this crazy stove thing here, some of the early POW meetings and conventions they used to have, I understand some guys would show up with those. Americans are very inventive guys, very flexible as a rule. This was I think a little difficult for the Germans to understand. They were kind of rigid in their ways, very thorough, very mechanical, and they found it somewhat difficult to cope with the flexibility of the Americans’ mind and spirit.
Aaron Elson: Some Americans who captured Germans, and I’ve heard this from the German veterans I’ve met, one of them said, "You Americans don’t know how to fight a war. That when you’re fired at with machine guns you’re supposed to hit the ground." And they would just keep coming in a marching fire.
Tim Dyas: Yeah, there was some of that took place, there’s no question about it, but we knew all the rules, about hitting the ground, everybody gets taught that.
Aaron Elson: And the other thing was that they would laugh.
Tim Dyas: The GIs? Oh yeah.
Aaron Elson: One fellow I interviewed said, "We didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so we laughed."
Tim Dyas: Exactly. The Germans are fine workmen, I mean the cars they make that come out of Germany, the Mercedes, the Audi, the BMW and so forth, magnificent pieces of work. But this is what always got me: How could a country that produced Brahms, Beethoven and Bach, have Belsen and Buchenwald? That’s what appalled me. I had a lot of respect for German culture and still do. How could a country with that cultural background today come out with a Belsen and Buchenwald?
Aaron Elson: When did you become aware of the concentration camps?
Tim Dyas: When we were out on the march, and we saw people from the concentration camp working along the road. When I first came home, you’d better not come around me with the striped pajamas, I’d start to shake like a leaf. I really had an aversion to that because I knew what it meant. I’ve written a poem called "A Pond of Ashes," there’s a group, you know Ron Lauder? There’s a group established to save Auschwitz, and I had read this tremendous article in the New Yorker by a very fine writer, and my response to it was to write this poem and I sent it to him. He was in Salzburg I think, in Salzburg Seminary, I sent a copy. He wrote right back and praised it. And I sent one to Lauder and he also praised it. Because I, you know, it’s, what the heck is this: "Picture of dead Jew" on the side of the road. And then we’d see them working sometimes when we were marching all over Germany. The Germans would have them out there working on the roads.
Aaron Elson: Was there any contact or communication with them?
Tim Dyas: I never had any contact with them, but some of the GIs may have had contact with them. Oh, this Tom McInerny I mentioned before – when the war ended it was chaos in Germany, so he and another guy liberate this German truck, and they open it up, and the whole rear is filled with fur coats. There are all these Russian women walking down the road starving, so they open the truck and yell, and they’re throwing the fur coats out to these women and they’re grabbing them, putting them on, and walking away. That was a scene you couldn’t put in a movie, nobody would believe it. Things that took place there you couldn’t put in a movie. Nobody could ever, ever describe the situation in Germany the last few months of the war because it was absolutely impossible for a person to believe that these took place. We saw a Polish Jew shot, the body lying there, in those outfits. And then we did see them working alongside the road. So we knew what was going on.
And then … read that line:
Aaron Elson: (reading) "An Exultant Reply: Rows of GI Pows weak from hunger sit in lines before their captors in a Nazi stalag in Pomerania under a cold August sun in 1943. Already accustomed to the countless roll calls life in the stalag dictated. This apparently was to be just another. But then electricity galvanized us all for as we stood there we heard the names of our buddies who were Jewish being called out and they were ordered into their own formation. Instincts to act were blunted by the fact it was our captors with the guns. As the stalag commander through the interpreter asked the first GI in line, a bearded paratrooper, his religion, striding forcefully forward, his reply echoed on the air, in our hearts, and into history: ‘I’m a Jew.’ As the Germans, stunned, walked away.
Aaron Elson: Everybody said that they were Jewish?
Tim Dyas: No, just the first guy. He shook his head and walked away, and that was the end of the whole damn thing. This one guy. Now I don’t know, maybe if they’d hit somebody else maybe it would have been different, but they hit this guy, it was a squat little guy, paratroopers were funny. They were tall and slender as I was, or they were short and powerful. And he was short and powerful.
Aaron Elson: But they were going to separate out the Jewish prisoners?
Tim Dyas: We didn’t know what was going to take place. But they realized that the rest of us wouldn’t put up with this garbage. This I think was a shock to them. They tried to divide us. Towards the end of the war they were saying that the Russians are advancing, you don’t want to be with them. The reason we’re fighting the war is to protect the west from the influence of the communists and so forth. We knew that fascism and communism were birds of a feather. Oh, some of the things those crazy things guys did just to retain their sanity.
Aaron Elson: What sort of stuff would they do?
Tim Dyas: Well, I think of, it comes back, one time we had a roll call; somebody had escaped, and they brought everybody out there, and they had pictures, you know, they have records, when you arrive. So this one GI, he goes like this, "Which profile do you wish?" And the rest of us laughed like hell. They couldn’t understand, they’re crazy these Americans, crazy in the head. But guys like that, they stand out because they had a sense of humor. Or on the way overseas, we’re on the deck of this ship we were sleeping. The convoy is attacked by submarines, it’s dark as hell, and we had a guy – every outfit had a sad sack – and somebody steps on our sad sack and he wakes up; they explain what’s going on, he said: "Why don’t they come out and fight like men in the daytime?" And everybody, the whole ship starts laughing. If you don’t remember things like that, I think if you remember the grim part, you would be a sullen, depressed human being, and would be incapable of functioning. Mankind has a capacity, I think, to cope with ghastly situations, and somehow most come out of it with some semblance of sanity left.
Aaron Elson: Was there a time over there when you got extremely angry over anything?
Tim Dyas: Oh, yeah. We used to get furious about the food. The food was so atrocious, and I didn’t drink coffee to begin with and they gave us ersatz coffee, what garbage. Oh, and then I would get more angry at what was done to my men; for example, like they threw that poor guy in the stockade for something, they put him in solitary because he cut his jacket down to make it more comfortable, and here they throw him in for seven days. Oh, boy. And then I used to get angry sometimes at some of the G Is, they would sneer at the French, "Look at those French!"
I said, "How long have you been a POW?"
"Five months!"
I said, "How long has he been a POW?"
"Five years."
I said, "Wait till you’re here five years and see how you act towards the Germans." Because some of them were a little obsequious. Five years? There was one poor Yugoslav, in World War I he was a POW three years. World War II he was a prisoner five years. He had two teeth. And he kept a cigarette thing in between them. He was an old man. The Germans offered to let him go home; he says, "I’m not going home. If I go home, either Tito’s people or Mihailovich will get me. I’m staying right here."
Aaron Elson: I guess it’s not funny but it seems funny.
Tim Dyas: Yeah. It was pathetically funny. You milked everything to get some humor out of it because if you didn’t you’d go out of your mind. You did that anyway in some ways.
- - - -
Interviews