Reidsville veteran recalls life in German prison camp

By Miranda Baines

Published: July 3, 2008

Winfred Jones, 82, of Reidsville, wanted to see the man he was in prison camp with during World War II. So he packed up the car and headed to Glens Falls, N.Y., to visit Frank Bertram.

“I hadn’t seen Frank in about 15 years,” Jones said. “We correspond by telephone occasionally.”

Jones and Bertram served in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. They were attacking German troops on the border of France and Germany when they were captured by the Germans and taken to prison camp. Jones and Bertram formed a close bond during their time in the camp.

“They put us in this old building and the bed was about this wide,” said Jones, indicating a diameter of only a few inches across. “They put two of us in it (the bed). I’d wake him up sometime and say, ‘Frank, turn over,’ because I couldn’t turn over without him turning over.”

When Jones visited Bertram’s home in New York, it was only appropriate that the two of them share a meal together. While in the German prison camps, the men got so hungry that they wrote out menus on pieces of paper describing the foods they would like to eat when they got back home.

“I think just about everything that was edible, somebody brought it up,” Jones said. “Potatoes were the best thing we ever got a hold of (in prison camp).

“We ate some kind of a soup that tasted terrible. We got that twice a day. You stayed hungry all the time.”

Jones said the only time the men got something decent to eat or the occasional box of cigarettes was when the Red Cross brought in supplies from Switzerland.

“I’ve ate dandelions and I’ve ate leaves off trees,” Jones said. “Anything they didn’t nail down, we stole it.”

The men spent two weeks marching through the German countryside from one prison camp to another. The snow on the ground was deep, and morale and supplies were low. When the men finally arrived at the camp, they were suffering from a state of exhaustion.

“I was in four different prison camps, but one of them (Nuremberg) I was in twice,” Jones said. “The Russians were coming in on one side and the Americans were coming in on the other, so they had to do something.”

One of the camps where Jones was held was the same camp in which the son-in-law of U.S. General George S. Patton was a POW. Task Force Baum, led by Patton, made a rescue attempt of the camp but was unsuccessful.

Jones was among the thousands of POWs in the Moosburg camp that the U.S. 14th Armored Division led by Patton liberated on April 29, 1945. Germany surrendered in May.

After the war ended, Jones and the other American troops sailed back to New York.

From there, Jones reported to Fort Bragg, where the Army gave him a furlough to return home. He took a bus to Greensboro and walked the four miles to his home in Brown Summit in the middle of the night.

Because of delayed communications, Jones’ family did not know of his whereabouts. The Army kept the soldiers’ families informed through telegrams, which took a week or two to get back from Europe.

“That was the fastest thing they had back then,” Jones said. So when Jones knocked on the front door of his house in the middle of the night, his mother, three brothers and three sisters all came to the door, wondering who was there.

“They expected it, but they just didn’t know when,” Jones said.

The veteran finished out his time of service in the Army and settled into a normal civilian life, working at American Tobacco Company in Reidsville. But after his war experiences, Jones wasn’t one to sit around. He and his wife Ruth traveled extensively.

He’s been back to Europe twice since the war. On one of those occasions, he visited the prison camp from which he was liberated 50 years earlier. Ironcially, out of all the countries Jones has visited, he said Germany, the very place where he was held captive during World War II, is the one where he would most like to live, other than the United States.

Staff Writer Miranda Baines can be reached at or 349-4331, ext. 35.