When Pearl Harbor was attacked in December 7, 1941, Private Charlie Smith and his fellow soldiers in the First Armored Regiment, First Armored Division, 47th Medical Detachment, Company B, knew things were going to change for them. And they weren’t wrong: By April 1942, they had been moved from Fort Knox, KY, to Fort Dix, NJ, in preparation for transport to an overseas theatre of war.
Smith and his fellow soldiers traveled by ship from New York to Northern Ireland, then to Liverpool and on to Scotland, docking along the way for training that was not the kind Smith’s medical detachment had grown accustomed to. Said Smith: “It involved going over the side of a ship, down a large rope ladder, and into an LST (landing ship, tank).”
When they left Scotland, Smith did not know where they were headed. The only official word he and his fellow soldiers received was, “destination unknown.”
Days later, an exhausted Smith went to sleep, and when he awoke “somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean, …there were ships as far as [he] could see.” The ship he was aboard had met up with about 500 others with hundreds of thousands of military personnel from the United States, England, Australia, Canada, and other Allied Forces.
Although Smith didn’t know it then, he was headed to North Africa for Operation Torch: an invasion at Algiers November 8-16, 1942. The operation cost the First Armored Regiment, to which Smith’s Medical group was attached, “305 total casualties, including 191 killed, 105 wounded, and 9 missing.”
On November 25th, Smith and his men were part of the push to Tunisia. Just west of there, at Kasserine Pass (in the Tebessa Mountains), six German planes flew over Smith and his medical attachment, then turned around, and opened fire while flying over them again. Smith and his men holed up all night, and the next day – Thanksgiving (November 26, 1942) – Smith, a doctor, a chaplain, and six enlisted men transporting the wounded from Kasserine, when they took a wrong turn and walked right into the German lines. The Germans drew their guns, patted down Smith and fellow GIs, and led them a mile and half away to enemy headquarters.
Smith and his fellow captives were transported to Italy where they were put in Camp 66 as POWs (Camp 66 was about ten miles from Naples).
Smith remembered spending a week at Camp 66 with British soldiers who had been held so long that they were catching and eating cats and dogs if one dare strayed within reach of them. Smith said the Brits “had been so unmercifully starved that they were nothing but skin and bones.”
Smith remained at Camp 66 until December 6th, on which date the Italians began to transport him and the other members of his medical detachment to Camp 59, in Servigliano, Italy. He arrived at Camp 59 on December 8th.
Once there, he survived on Red Cross food parcels, which were not regularly delivered, whole-wheat buns which were distributed for lunch when the Italian guards had them to distribute, and “a piece of meat [at dinner] that was as tough as a boot.” (Earlier in the war, POWs at Camp 59 had been given new clothes upon their arrival and were allowed one bath a week. But by the time Smith arrived, that privilege had been revoked. He received neither a bath nor a new set of clothes throughout his entire captivity.)
Nine months after Smith arrived at Camp 59, Italian King Victor Emmanuel surrendered to Allied Forces (September 8, 1943). At that time, the word Smith and his fellow POWs received was that they would be handed over to British Forces in 10 days. However, Smith noticed that mass confusion followed the King’s surrender, and the Italian guards who had been assigned to Camp 59 began abandoning their posts one after another.
Fearing that German soldiers would take advantage of the disarray and come take the camp over before the British arrived, Smith and his fellow captives decided to escape. Thus, on September 15, 1943, thirteen hundred of the POWs at Camp 59, including Smith, knocked holes in the prison’s exterior walls, crawled through them, and made a break for freedom.
Of the thirteen hundred POWs that escaped, Smith had made plans with five of them “to go together and stay together” once outside the prison walls.
Smith’s eyes watered when he told me, “We were going to make the line” (by which he meant that he and his handful of men were headed to the safety of the British lines).
But instead of making the lines, Smith and his men ran out of food in the steep Italian mountains. Hungry, and threatened by the German planes that were flying overhead, the escapees found a cave in which they could hide and reformulate their plan. They soon realized the cave was going to be their home for the foreseeable future. Smith shook his head in disbelief as he told me: “We lived in a hole in the side of a mountain.”
The new plan was to spend the days on the mountain and wander into the yards of houses on the edge of an Italian village in the valley by night. In the village they hoped to scavenge food from trashcans, backyards, etc. It was a risky plan, but it was all they could do.
On one of their first trips to the village they were spotted, and assumed the villager would report them immediately. Instead, one of the escapees walking with Smith, a soldier named Charles Gallo, began talking in Italian to the villager and the tension vanished. After hearing of their plight, the villager told them he would leave food out for them at night and in time, other villagers joined in feeding Smith and his men.
The POWs stuck to their habit: the mountain by day, the valley by night. And although this sometimes meant Smith had to trudge through snow that was hip deep, without a coat and in shoes that were literally rotting off his feet, he did what he had to do to survive. Smith’s eyes watered again when he told me: “That food saved my life.”
Shortly after Smith’s capture, the War Department sent his parents a letter informing them that their son was a POW, held by Italians. (Date of letter December 19, 1942.) Upon his escape from Camp 59, they received another letter informing them that their son’s whereabouts were unknown and that it would be prudent for them to refrain from sending parcels to him or trying to contact him in any way. (Date of letter, October 1943.) Then on July 3, 1944, they received a letter which brought them great joy: “It is a pleasure to inform you that Corporal Smith has returned to military control and is being returned to the United States.”
Almost to the day, Smith had spent 9 months, 15 days in a POW prison camp. Thereafter, he and his fellow escapees made it to the Allied lines after all, but only after another 9 months of hiding in the mountains of Italy by day and treading through the valley of the same by night.
Corporal Charles Webster Smith died in Texas in April of 2007. He, and others like him, deserve to be remembered and honored this Memorial Day.
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