RSSMarching with the POWs
'I guess I learned to take care of myself,' captured soldier recallsYakima Herald-Republic
GORDON KING/Yakima Herald-Republic WY Thomas Jefferson Strange, Jr.
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The foreign names and long-ago dates take a while to remember, if they can be remembered at all.
The details of the events that occurred 65 or more years ago in places that can be difficult for a kid from Kansas to pronounce are retreating into the foggy mental recesses where memory doesn't always reach.
"I've forgot a lot of it -- tried to," the old soldier says.
But a shadowbox in the living room shows off shiny medals. A scrapbook contains telegrams and black-and-white photos. And a notebook -- only a few of its pages filled in -- details the food the Germans allotted this onetime prisoner of war.
It wasn't much.
Wednesday, March 28, 1945 -- Breakfast: Lard, coffee, bread, sugar. Dinner: Beet soup. Supper: Pea soup.
Tuesday, April 3, 1945 -- Bread, horsemeat.
April 23 to 27, 1945 -- Bread.
Thomas Jefferson Strange Jr. isn't bitter.
"I have no regrets," he says. "I came out of it alive."
The 88-year-old East Valley man -- a great-grandfather, retired mechanic and former member of Company F of the 7th Infantry, 3rd Division -- fought his way through North Africa, Italy and southern France, where he was captured by German soldiers.
He spent the last two months of the war as a prisoner, marching.
"They didn't have any place to put us," says the former World War II POW. "They had to keep us moving."
Tom Strange was born in Missouri, and grew up in both Missouri and Kansas. He was going to aircraft school, learning to work sheetmetal -- he wanted to build airplanes -- when he entered the Army in 1941. He was 22.
He took basic and advanced training in California, and more advanced training at Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, before shipping out to North Africa in 1942. He participated in the invasions of Casablanca and Sicily and Anzio beachhead, and was awarded two Silver Stars and a Bronze Star, among other campaign and victory medals and honors, which hang today in the living room of his modest home near Moxee.
During the fighting -- Strange describes it as loud, scary, confusing -- soldiers lived in pup tents and foxholes and tried to stay alive. In between invasions, he got to go home to Kansas for 30 days of R & R. Halfway through it, he met his future bride, Maxine Rush.
"We just hit it off," Strange says. "I made a date with her for the next night."
They saw each other for about two weeks before he went back to war. They exchanged addresses. She waited. They wrote. He got captured.
The German soldiers kept Strange and about 100 other POWs on the move.
"I'm not sure where we were headed, toward the Swiss border, I think. We was marching all the time, keeping ahead of the Americans," he says.
They were marching, marching, always moving, with nothing or little to eat.
"I remember one time we went three days on three baked potatoes: A potato a day," Strange says.
Sometimes, there was meat: "They said it was horsemeat. I don't know whether it was or not," Strange says.
"We had about one slice of bread. And a chunk of lard for butter."
According to his notebook, which reads "gift of the European Student Relief Fund, Geneva, Switzerland" on the cover, POWs were given more food early on in their captivity. As time, and they, marched on, they were given less and less to eat.
"It wasn't easy. It's just something you had to do, so I don't think much about it," he says. "You didn't have any options. You were just hoping you'd end up somewhere."
U.S. troops caught up with them at the end of the war, gave them clean clothes, and got them showers and food and a trip back home, where Maxine was still waiting.
They married in July 1945. He's wearing his uniform in their wedding picture.
A month later, Strange, a staff sergeant, was honorably discharged. He'd put in two years, seven months and 20 days of foreign service, and one year, five months and 21 days of continental service.
"You forget a lot of it," he says. "And you don't meet up with anybody that can talk the same language as you do, the fighting and what have you. I don't believe people know much about the fighting we done."
The Stranges moved to the Yakima Valley from Kansas in 1953. They were married 61 years before she died in December 2006.
The old soldier doesn't live alone, though. He got a dog, an energetic border collie named Penny.
He doesn't think about the war much, but he does say he learned something from it.
"I guess," he says, "I learned to take care of myself."
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