Gifford B. Doxsee
Communications Platoon,
Headquarters Company,
423rd Regiment, 106th Infantry Division

November 18, 2005 - One of the lucky ones - War survivor shares his story.

MOUNT PLEASANT — Gifford Doxsee said he is one of the lucky ones.

Despite being a prisoner of war during World War II, despite fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and being involved in the bombing of Dresden and despite starvation, he survived relatively unscathed in a war that touched most of the world and killed 57 million.

On Thursday, Doxsee shared his story at the Iowa Wesleyan College.

"My generation had almost nothing to say about the experiences of war for a whole generation," Doxsee said. "It was the publication in 1969 of 'Slaughterhouse–Five' that led me to start talking."

Teachers and professors around Doxsee's town of Athens, Ohio, were assigning the book to their students when they found out Doxsee had been with author Kurt Vonnegut in Dresden. They began asking him to speak to their classrooms.

"I've never stopped talking," Doxsee said.

During World War II, Doxsee was a private in 106th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army, a training division that was sent to the front lines of war on the border of France and Germany in late 1944.

Five days after landing in France, on Dec. 16, 1944, the Battle of the Bulge began with the 106th Infantry at its center.

"On the first morning, we were surrounded," Doxsee said, and after the fourth day under attack, the Germans told them they had 30 minutes to surrender or be blown to pieces.

Col. Charles Cavender decided to surrender.

"That's why I am here today," Doxsee said. "He wrecked his career ... but that's another story."

After surrendering, the 150 men were registered and loaded onto 40 and 8s, railroad cars meant for 40 men or eight cattle. Sixty men were loaded into the cars that were sent into Germany to Dresden.

"We were in that car for eight and half days," Doxsee said. "We were taken to a place called Stalag 4B, a prisoner of war camp for enlisted men."

On the way there, they were told their guards would not speak English; they were older men who had grown up long before the Nazis came to power.

"They treated us very decently for the most part," Doxsee said. "But we had one teenage Hitler Youth who we nicknamed 'Junior.' "

At that time, a captain among the troops said the POWs would need an interpreter, and he asked the POWs if any knew the German language. Four men stepped forward. One was Vonnegut who was elected to the position, which he served for about a month.

At the end of that month, Dresden was bombed.

"The American people never got the significance, the magnitude, of this destruction," Doxsee said. "The thing is, Dresden was a cultural city. It had less military significance than most German cities."

And most of the city was still intact at that point.

However, on Feb. 14, 1945, both Valentine's Day and Ash Wednesday that year, Dresden was bombed and reduced to nothing. After the bombing, the POWs were ordered to clean up the rubble and look for the bodies.

"Approximately the same time as the fire bombing occurred, a group of five men were kept back one day to scrub down with hot soap and water and brushes the tables and chairs in the ... dining room," Doxsee said.

One of the five men had a severe case of diarrhea, and the guard in charge kept yelling at him to work harder.

"Kurt explained to the guard that this man was sick and was doing his best," Doxsee said. "The guard refused to pay attention. ... Finally, he hit the soldier and Kurt lost his patience and said under his breath 'You dirty swine.' Well, the German word swine and the English swine are practically the same."

The guard knew what Vonnegut had said, and Vonnegut was immediately demoted from his interpreting position. For the weeks following, Junior followed Vonnegut around as he cleaned up blocks of Dresden. Whenever Vonnegut stopped to catch his breath, Junior would poke and prod him with the bayonet on his rifle.

"He was taunting Kurt and hoping he would lose his patience and either strike back or say something," Doxsee said. "Kurt knew if he did anything like that he would pay for it with his life."

"Kurt came out of the war bitter," he later said.

That bitterness led to "Slaughterhouse–Five," a novel based on Vonnegut's time in Dresden. Vonnegut wrote the novel in 1968 after a two–year residency at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Though most of the book is fiction, various parts of the book are true.

For example, Billy Pilgrim's character was based on a man named Edward Reginald "Joe" Crone Jr., a man who wanted to be an Episcopal priest. Crone died of starvation at the end of World War II.

In the middle of April 1945, when the Russians were advancing from the east and the Americans from the west, the Germans took Doxsee and the other POWs to Hellendorf, a German town near the border of Czechoslovakia.

There, Doxsee met Frau Hinni Hippe, a woman who housed the 150 men during the last four weeks of the war. She and her husband took three POWs who were near death into her house.

At the same time, she snuck food to the other POWs, who were eating grass and dandelions to stay alive.

"I didn't know any of this at the time of the war," Doxsee said.

On May 8, 1945, the Germans announced their surrender, and on May 13, 1945, Mother's Day, Doxsee was back in American hands.

Years later, Doxsee returned to Germany and found Hippe, who shared her story as well.

"Even amidst the second World War, there were individuals who could rise above the hatred and be humane," Doxsee said.

After the war, Doxsee became a history professor at Ohio University. He's analyzed the war, studied it and is more than willing to offer his reflections of the experience.

"We won the war," Doxsee said, about one of his reflections. "But the margin of victory was a lot narrower than most people would assume."

SHAWNA RICHTER, Burlington Hawk Eye - IA, United States

Bio:

I was born on Long Island, New York, on July 4, 1924, attended public schools in Freeport, NY, and graduated from Freeport High School in 1942.  I enlisted in the Army Reserve on November 13, 1942 while a freshman at Hobart College, Geneva, NY, and was called to active duty June 9, 1943.  I received Infantry Basic Training at For McClellan, Anniston, Alabama, during the summer of 1943 and in September of that year began ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program) at Auburn University, then known as the Alabama Polytechnic Institute.

At the end of March, 1944, the army closed down the ASTP programs throughout the country, and most of us at  Auburn were shipped to Camp Atterbury, Indiana, where we joined the 106th Infantry Division and received training for combat during the following months.  My 423rd Infantry Regiment was shipped to Europe aboard the Queen Elizabeth I, sailing from New York on October 17, 1944.  We were housed in Britain for several weeks just outside Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, until shipped to France at the end of November.  We arrived at the front, in the Siegfried Line just inside Germany, on Monday, December 11, 1944, five days before the Germans launched the Battle of the Bulge against us.  Ordered to evacuate our position and go to a rendezvous point near Schonberg, Belgium, we reached our destination but were not "rescued" as planned.  Our Regimental Commander surrendered the remnant of his regiment on Tuesday afternoon, December 19, 1944, to save us from death by German artillery fire.

Processed as a POW by the Germans at Stalag IVB, Muhlberg, I was sent as part of an Arbeitskommando of 150 men to Dresden on January 12, 1945 where we were billeted in Building Number Five of the Dresden Slaughter-House Compound, later made famous by Kurt Vonnegut's classic novel which was based on our common experiences.  After the firebombing of Dresden, we were moved by our guards to the suburb of Gorbitz, and in mid-April, our guards marched us to the hamlet of Hellendorf on the Czech border, some 35 miles or so SE of Dresden.  There we awaited the end of the war and the arrival of the Russians in whose zone of occupation we found ourselves.  I returned to the US Army control on Mother's Day, May 13, 1945, and was given an honorable discharge from the army at Fort Bragg, NC, on November 25, 1945.

After the war I returned to college, graduated from Cornell in 1948, and then began graduate study in the history of modern Europe at Harvard.  I received the M.A. degree in 1949 and the Ph.D. in 1966, having in the interim taught for three years at The American University of Beirut, Lebanon, 1952-1955, and subsequently at Ohio University, beginning in 1958.

I married Mary Letitia Cowan, a faculty colleague at Ohio U. on June 9, 1964, and we both continued our teaching careers at Ohio in the city of Athens.  Mary had done a year of post-graduate study in textiles at Leeds University, Yorkshire, England, and her field of specialization thereafter was textiles in the Ohio University School of Home Economics.  She retired officially in 1982 but continued teaching part time until 1989.  I took early retirement in 1993 and retired fully one year later. The University honored Mary at her retirement by naming the assemblage of textiles and clothing the "Mary C. Doxsee Costume Collection."

My service to Ohio University included chairing the Energy Conservation Committee in the 1970's and directing the graduate program in African Studies from 1983 to 1991.  Our travels included numerous trips to Europe as well as professional travel to the Middle East and North Africa, the focus of my later teaching.  Since retiring, I have served as adjutant/treasurer of the Mid-Ohio Valley Chapter, American Ex-Prisoners of War since 1996, as as JVC of the Department of Ohio since 1998.