Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
9:05 | To Jim Bard, the orders were confusing. The inexperienced 106th Division was told to move out, then to hold. When his unit finally moved out in the opening days of the Battle of the Bulge, they were quickly pinned down and surrounded. As he tried to dig a foxhole in the rocky ground, the First Sergeant approached with some startling news.
Keywords : Jim Bard Battle of the Bulge German 88 mm gun Schonburg Germany St. Vith surrender Eric Wood
Very soon after Jim Bard was captured by the Germans, he was amazed when an English speaking officer said to speak up about any casualties known to be out in the woods. They were marched off down the road, where he saw the macabre aftermath of a tank battle that didn't go well for the American armor.
He had started school at Penn State and was studying metallurgy when the attack on Pearl Harbor jolted the nation. Jim Bard joined the Enlisted Reserve Corps and continued studying, but after a few months, he was called up and encountered his first challenge, KP.
After his call up, Jim Bard wound up at Fort McClellan for infantry basic training. To him, it was just an extension of the Boy Scouts and then he was sent to Auburn University, of all places. At the time, it was called Alabama Polytechnic Institute. It was the Army Specialized Training Program, an effort to build up the military's brain trust, but men were needed on the battlefield in Europe and the program was ended. He was sent to the newly formed 106th Division.
His Atlantic crossing was swift. The Queen Elizabeth could outrun any warship and delivered the men of the 106th Division to England in five days. Jim Bard had one furlough in London where he heard the explosions of V2 rockets. Ferried to Le Havre, the unit made it's way through France into Belgium.
The POW's were packed into boxcars and parked outside a prison camp where there was no room for them. When a British bombing raid began, Jim Bard bolted from the rail car and ran blindly in the dark right into a fence. Taken further down the line, he was almost a zombie when he arrived at another camp where British prisoners welcomed him.
After examining the prisoners to see who was healthy enough to work, those deemed usable were formed into work parties for German factories. Jim Bard was sent to a snowbound little town that looked like a Christmas card, where his job was to stack logs for a wood chipping operation.
The POW laborers were roused at night to see the firebombing of Dresden just a few miles away. It wasn't long before they began a road odyssey with their guards that took them around the area without apparent purpose. Then, the guards disappeared. Part 1 of 2.
The war was over and he had been freed when his German guards disappeared on the road, but Jim Bard and his buddies were stuck in Czechoslovakia with no contact. After staying with a German family for a while, they boarded a train that was supposed to take them to the American lines, but it kept getting sidelined. Finally they saw an American jeep with an American officer and they were on their way. Part 2 of 2.
