Don Veitch, Former POW

Veitch escapes from World War II prison camp
By Kris Todd, Daily Reporter Staff

The Greenville native, with expressive eyes and a subtle smile, can paint a rosy picture for even the grimmest of tales. Don Veitch's long-held philosophy is: "There are no bad days. Some days are just better than others."
The 86-year-old Spencer resident was handed a "real low number" over six decades ago, which meant he didn't have very long to wait before being drafted.
"The National Guard had just been called up in February, and I went in April of '41," Veitch said. "I was drafted (into the U.S. Army). I went into it and I ended up in a National Guard unit."
Veitch was among 10 local young men ordered to assemble at Fort Des Moines.
"They gave me the papers of the group to carry down," he recalled. "We got in there and then we shipped out to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri. That's where we got our uniforms, got ourselves put into the Army, and they said, 'You're in the Army now.'"
From there, he was shipped to Camp Claybourne, La., for basic training.
"We were there until Pearl Harbor," he succinctly said. "Then we knew we were in the Army for sure.
"We just went in for a year, because the draft was for one year. That's what they tell you, you know. But, that (Pearl Harbor) changed everything real fast. Then we knew we weren't going to go home at the end of the year, because that was Dec. 7."
Instead, Veitch found himself transferred to another battalion, bringing it to full strength. They were then shipped to northern Ireland.
"There was no place for troops to go at that particular time of Pearl Harbor, because I don't think they really had any idea how they were going to be able to start this thing," Veitch said. "I mean, it (World War II) was started, but what do we do about it right now? But they knew things were going wrong in Europe. Hitler was dancing around over there. So, we went into Ireland."
After training in Ireland from the latter part of January to the first of July, he was transferred to Scotland with his original battalion members in the 168th Infantry, 34th Division, which was part of the Rainbow Division during World War I. They underwent amphibious and commando training there.
"That's when things really started getting bad," reflected Veitch. "Of course, we knew we were going to make an amphibious landing somewhere, because that's what we were trained for. We got on the ships and had no idea where we were going, absolutely none whatsoever. We spent almost four weeks on the water. Thought we were in the Navy for awhile."
Little did Veitch and his peers know, but the naval convoys were assembling for their surprise landing.
"We went through the Strait of Gibraltar. Our company made our amphibious landings at Algiers (on Nov. 8, 1942)," he recalled. "We had to work our way from the Mediterranean shores up to into Algiers. We took that in about three days. We did a pretty good job there, I guess. Anyway, we got it done."
Tunisia is where Veitch's unit once again squared off with German soldiers and the notorious German Gen. Irwin Rommel, referred to as "the Desert Fox."
"He fought from one end of northern Africa to the other. They had all their weaponry, thousands and thousands of troops, and transportation," Veitch said of Rommel and the German troops. "...But when we came in from the further west to the east, we didn't have any equipment to speak of. We hadn't been tested or really worked out. But, the test was almost there."
The real exam occurred when Veitch's unit ran out of supplies the following February. Veitch collaborated with Sgt. Don Shea in an attempt to get back to their own lines.
"When they said, 'Get out the best way you can,' we did pretty good for about two and a half days," Veitch said. "They caught up with us (on Feb. 17, 1943). We joined a lot of others."
The then-Pfc. recalled both he and his sergeant crying upon being captured by enemy forces.
"The thing is, you've lost everything that you thought you ever had. And talk about having nothing," he chuckled in retrospect. "You have no weapons. You have nothing. But, we had our lives. No, we had no idea (if we'd keep them). But, you get yourself put back together and go on, wherever it is."
The newly captured prisoner of war remembered taking everything on a day-by-day basis. Yet, Veitch said he constantly pondered what he could do in order to escape, where he would go if he were to get away, as well as how he could snarl his captors' plans.
Over his next 27 months spent in captivity, Veitch transitioned between seven different World War II prison camps. The first, Stalag VII-A, was near Munich.
"Being a lowly Pfc., private first class, usually I got assigned to work camps, and we worked at different things," he explained.
"...You tried to drive the Germans nuts. If an old (German) got upset, he'd start screaming. And the more upset he'd get, the higher his voice would go. It would go up and up and up," Veitch chuckled. "We tried to get them there."
This was easily accomplished, he added, by simply not doing what the guards ordered.
"You're out there working and you don't understand it. You do, but you don't. And you always try to slow up the pace and do whatever you can to slow it up," Veitch said with a knowing smile. "And they couldn't understand us because the old Germans said, 'Arbeit. Arbeit. Arbeit.' 'Work. Work. Work.' They couldn't understand anything except work. That's the way they were built."
Veitch laid railroad track as a member of one work crew. It was at that particular camp that he recalled taking one guard past his point of no return. Tenderly rubbing his lower lumbar area, Veitch explained he's still paying for letting his mouth run when a train approached.
"Every fender on a locomotive had the words on it, 'Rader rollen fur Sieg.' 'Wheels will roll for victory,'" he recalled. "We were all pulled back from up on the top of this big ditch. I didn't know anybody was around, and I said, 'Yah. Yah. Yah. Rader rollen fur Sieg.' This guy behind me hit me. ... It took me awhile to get my breath. That's all there was to it. But, you know, I could have looked around and I could have let that one go."
Another prison camp detail had Veitch and others building a power plant. While situated there, he and "Doc" Streeter, another American POW, planned an escape over a three-month time period. Part of their strategizing involved trading cigarettes and whatever else they could for concentrated food, chocolate and seeds.
"We got down into one of the areas that hadn't been filled with sand and dropped out of sight. The rest of them marched up to the camp and we took off from there. We had all of our stuff stashed away, so the guys would help bring them down," he recalled of their successful escape attempt. "We were pretty lucky on that too because it was pretty well guarded and we had a small bridge to go across. We sat there for quite awhile to see what the pattern was, and then we took off."
The pair traveled at night only and remained on the lam for 17 days. They were picked up over 100 miles away in Czechoslovakia and returned to another prison camp in Dresden.
"I think it was Stalag III-B where we went out of on our work detail," Veitch said. "But we never got back to where the rest of them were that we were with. They don't let you do that. We got 30 days of bread and water, solitary. But, they let Doc and I stay together."
With his sense of humor still intact, Veitch said he ribbed the guards about how the food presented to them tasted like sawdust.
"To this day, I can not eat caraway. I bite into a caraway seed and it just runs around my mouth," he said. "They had rutabaga soup, and it was dried rutabaga and reconstituted. It was terrible. And, it was just double ugly."
"All the Germans had to feed us was 2 percent above starvation," Veitch added. "When I got out of prison camp and back to our troops at the Elbe (River) in Germany, I weighed 100 pounds."
He and other American soldiers were eventually liberated in May 1945.
"By the Russians, of all things," chuckled Veitch. "...We had a problem, because the Russians wanted to repatriate us through Russia. Our troops, when they took Russian people, they just turned them over to the Russians. But Russia always wanted credit for this or for that."
Veitch returned to Greenville on July 4, 1945.
"I could have got home earlier, but I had people to see," he grinned, referring to his travels abroad for a few months.
As soon as Veitch arrived home, he telephoned his girlfriend, Dorothy, in Oregon. The two had initially met about five months before he was drafted. They continued to correspond by way of letter during his tour of duty.
"I called her and she said, 'I'll be right home,'" Veitch said as he lovingly smiled at Dorothy. "We got married the 12th of July.
"...I wasn't out of the service yet before we got married. They sent us down to Florida because I had to go on a rest and recuperation. So, we went down there so we could have a hurricane," he chuckled.
Veitch was eventually honorably discharged from the military in September 1945.
Today, the Spencer veteran still has his discharge papers, which refer to him as a "Browning Automatic Rifleman." Although he misplaced a little red address book several years ago in which he captured special dates and maneuvers during his time abroad, Veitch's memories remain crystal clear.
"There are no bad days. Some days are just better than others," he confided pensively.