A Thimbleful of Moldy Sugar

Lou Putnoky

   Lou Putnoky called me on Saturday afternoon. Since his wife passed away a few years ago Lou tends to call every three weeks or so, usually on a Sunday or on Memorial or Veterans Day. He always asks me if it's a bad time to call, and I always tell him it's never a bad time to call. Those of you who've read my book "A Mile in Their Shoes" should be familiar with Lou, a World War II veteran of the Coast Guard who was a radio operator on the USS Bayfield, the flagship of the Utah Beach invasion fleet.

   It was rare for him to call on a Saturday, but Lou suffers from post traumatic stress disorder and perhaps depression as well. He wanted to tell me his birthday is going to be in a few days, I forget how many days he said, but he's going to be 90. I told him to hold on while I placed an order for several shares of stock in a candle company. Then he asked me if he'd ever told me the story about Andy Baumgartner.

   I told him he hadn't.

   Before he enlisted in the Coast Guard, Lou said, he took part in some kind of a four-year program in which he trained during the summer, and if you succeeded in the program, at the end you would receive a commission. The program was cancelled in 1940 after Lou had spent two summers in it.

   He said there were two units that took part in the training, one was the 18th Infantry and I forget what the other one was. And he said Andy Baumgartner, who ran a hardware store in Carteret, where Lou grew up, was in the 18th Infantry on Corregidor when it fell and that Andy took part in the Bataan death march

   He said Andy lived across the street from a very good friend of his, so he would see Andy from time to time, although Andy was a little bit older and they were never that close. But one day Lou called Eli Holtzman, a writer for a local paper with whom he was friendly, and asked if Eli would be interested in doing a story about Andy.

   Andy had suffered a stroke, and was not in good condition. He sat hunched over in his chair and could barely make himself understood when he spoke, and his daughter Nancy helped out and filled in a lot of his story.

   Andy was a cook while he was a prisoner, preparing what little food there was for his fellow prisoners. When they captured Corregidor, the Japanese confiscated a supply of Carnation evaporated milk. Andy would carefully remove the paper labels from the cans, and he used the blank inside part of the labels as a diary.

   Lou noticed that there were several names in the diary with diagonal lines drawn through them. He asked what they meant.

   I don't know if Andy told the story or his daughter told it for him, but Andy had discovered a bag of moldy sugar, and he hid it from the Japanese. He also had a thimble from a sewing kit. He would fill the thimble with moldy sugar, and one at a time he would take it to his fellow prisoners. He would tell them to hold out their hand, and he would empty the thimble full of moldy sugar into it. They would ask him what it was, and when he told them, they would hurriedly raise their opened hand to their mouth and gulp down the thimbleful of sugar. Then Andy would put a little chit by their name.

   What was the chit for, Lou asked.

   He said Andy struggled to get the words out, but he said that he told the prisoners that if they ever got out alive, they would owe him a dollar for each thimble full of moldy sugar.

   Lou said he could see a tear rolling down Andy's cheek. And then he kind of smiled, and said that after the war, at a reunion of the survivors of the Bataan death march, one of the other former prisoners came up to him and gave him two dollars.

   Happy birthday, Lou Putnoky!

Lou Putnoky aboard the USS Bayfield

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On the Road Again

During the last three weeks, I drove 7,500 miles, interviewing World War II veterans in Florida, Dallas and Arizona, and making a stop at the Atlanta Armor Modeling and Preservation Society's annual show on my way back East.

It's been an emotional journey, never mind the 60 miles of icy slush in Maryland and the driving snow between Memphis and Little Rock, or the record snowfall in Dallas that greeted my arrival.

I don't have any sponsors, but I do feel a debt of gratitude to Hertz for providing me with a reliable car -- a relatively new Mazda 3 that got more than 35 miles to the gallon on the highway (okay, so I avoided the tempation to go 80 mph even when that was the posted speed limit in parts of Texas), and to McDonald's for their free wi-fi and senior coffee (I still can't bring myself to ask for a "senior coffee," but most of the kids they have working there recognize my antiquity).

Above all, I thank J.R. Lemons, a veteran of the Kassel Mission, for arranging a series of interviews for me in Dallas. J.R. is a member of the Happy Warriors, a group of mostly World War II veterans who gather on the fourth Friday of every month to share their experiences. I was unable to plan my trip so I could attend a meeting, but J.R. set up the interviews. One was with his pilot on the Kassel Mission, James Baynham. Another was with Louis Read, a survivor of the Bataan death march, and a third was with Bob Cash, who was the only survivor when his B-17 was shot down and told me of his experiences in Stalag Luft IV and the 90-day march across Europe. J.R. also set up an interview with a veteran who flew in a B-24 on the first Ploesti raid.

A prime reason I took this trip was to meet and interview John Sweren in Mesa, Arizona. John was a tail gunner in a B-26 that crashed in France. He was one of three survivors among the six-man crew, but other planes on the mission counted only two parachutes, so John's parents were informed that he was killed in action. He was sent to Stalag Luft IV and also took part in the 90-day march, and when the Red Cross helped him make a phone call to his family upon being liberated, his mother angrily asked who he was ... until he told her he couldn't wait to have some of her pierogis, upon hearing which she dropped the phone and fainted.

Now I'm faced with what I think a sound technician would call "white noise." Before I left, I started writing a book about the battle for Hill 122 in Normandy. I also began digitizing and editing an interview with Jack Sheppard, a former company commander in my father's tank battalion that stretches out over six 90-minute cassettes, for an audiobook to accompany the book on Hill 122. While in Florida I promised Sybil Swofford, the wife of a pilot on the Kassel Mission, that I would write a book about the mission; Sybil chastised me for taking so long because everybody in her church is waiting eagerly to buy a copy. Add to this the need to revise and update my web site, and all the changes coming to eBay, and I don't know where to turn first.

The conversations on this trip were recorded with my new Zoom H4, a digital recorder which produces a clearer sound than many of my earlier recordings. I plan to post excerpts from the new interviews at audiomurphy.com just as soon as I have them available.