The Oflag 64 Record: Duty first: Service and captivity account of LTC John H. Van Vliet Jr.

by John H. Van Vliet III

Dawn broke on the morning of 17 February 1943 and revealed a column of German armored vehicles, artillery and infantry moving along a road. The Germans were directly between a group of American forces and their objective. The Americans, the 3rd Battalion 168th Infantry, were seeking to return to Allied lines after having been encircled by Rommel’s forces in the opening stages of the Battle of Kasserine Pass in North Africa.

When the battle of Kasserine Pass started, the battalion was defending DJebel Kasira near Faid Pass. The Americans thoroughly blunted the one serious attack the Germans launched at them. Having failed to kick the Americans off the high ground, the Germans moved on, cutting off and encircling all of the American forces defending near Faid Pass. A few days after the encirclement, a light aircraft dropped a message instructing the Americans to break out and rejoin Allied lines. The night was their friend, and the Americans trudged through the darkness, evading a German armored force, and arriving at dawn on 17 February near their objective, but confronting that German column.

Cadet John H. Van Vliet Jr.

Tired, hungry, thirsty and without any anti-tank weapons, the exhausted soldiers watched the German armored vehicles deploy from the road and open fire. Without any means of stopping a tank, the Americans saw the battle dissolve into a round-up. Virtually all of the committed forces of the 168th Infantry Regiment had just been captured. For LTC John H. Van Vliet Jr., commander of the 3rd Battalion, 17 February 1943 was the start of a period of captivity marked by boredom, hunger, three escapes, and, significantly, a trip to the Katyn Forest to observe the results of the Soviet massacre of thousands of Polish officers.

John H. Van Vliet Jr., nicknamed “Jack” or “Van”, came from a military family. He was born in Texas City, Texas and lived on a variety of military bases and foreign postings. Graduating from West Point in the Class of 1937, he followed in his Great Grandfather’s (Class of 1840) and father’s (Class of 1913) footsteps. He was commissioned in the Infantry. He followed a typical career path for an Infantry officer until September 1941 which found him in civilian clothes in the United Kingdom observing the British Army and taking specialized British Army courses. He briefly returned to Fort Benning as an instructor at the Infantry School before traveling again to the UK to take command of 3/168th Infantry and to lead it during the invasion of North Africa and the Battle of Kasserine Pass. That command ended on the North African plain as the German soldiers took charge of their fresh prisoners of war.

The Germans searched and disarmed the officers and men of the 168th. The new POWs were formed into a marching column and found themselves on the road back to Faid Pass. They all suffered from thirst and were greatly relieved to be “watered” at the end of the day. They were processed, separated, and shipped across the Mediterranean to Italy where trains took them on to their POW camps. LTC Van Vliet and several of the other officers ultimately arrived in Szubin, German-occupied Poland where they were interred in Oflag 64.

Front l-r: LTC Jack Van Vliet, LT Emanuel Robertson;
Back l-r: LT Al Casner, LT Woodley Warrick, LT Floyd Saxton.

Camp life at Szubin was orderly. The Germans had their required roll call formations, and the POWs filled the rest of the day with a mixture of activities all conducted within the command structure established by the POWs. Officers with skills or knowledge would conduct classes to pass on what they knew. Instruments provided by the YMCA permitted the creation of a band. Serious discussions took place about how to prolong the usefulness of the limited number of razor blades. (Can you really sharpen a razor blade by stropping it along the inside of a water glass?) Food, or its lack, was a major issue. POWs were authorized a subsistence ration the Germans provided to people who could not work. (The officer POWs were in that category as, under the Geneva Convention, the Germans were not permitted to use officers as workers.) Jack would later tell stories about food in the camp. The thin daily soup filled seventeen carefully counted spoons full. The meager German rations were supplemented by food from precious Red Cross parcels. (Jack would faithfully make contributions to the American Red Cross for the rest of his life.)

Jack focused his thoughts on escape. The American officers, naturally enough, organized escape efforts and created escape committees to coordinate activities to spring some of the men. Jack was involved in several escape attempts, and quite a bit of information has already been published about those attempts and the support for those attempts. Jack steadfastly refused to share many details about those attempts and about the support. He was furious at those men who “spilled the beans” by talking about techniques, ideas and experiences. As he told me in response to some of the publicity, “Son, a POW has nothing to do all day except to find a way to escape. If a way can be imagined, the POWs will find it. Guards, on the other hand, just have the normal incentive to do a job. Why help future guards by giving them a book with all sorts of ideas about how POWs escaped in the past? Nuts!”

LTC Van Vliet in Katyn (behind Capt. Dr. S. Gilder; the officer in glasses), May 1943.

Jack’s time as a POW included his and Captain Don Stewart’s connection to events in the Katyn Forest. One day, German authorities asked LTC Van Vliet and CPT Stewart to accompany them to the Katyn Forest to observe the exhumation of thousands of bodies of Polish officers who had been murdered by the Soviets. The two Americans wanted nothing to do with what they imagined would be a propaganda event. They refused parole, declined to go, and were then ordered to go. Their story is told in other places, but the essential part of it is that their personal observations confirmed the fact that the Polish officers had been murdered by the Soviets.

Col. John H. Van Vliet Jr., 1950s and 1987.

The Red Army had captured thousands of Polish officers as it invaded and conquered the eastern half of Poland while the Nazis were conquering the western half. Those officers represented educated elements of the Polish people, and the Soviets saw them as a threat to their plans for future domination. Stalin had almost 22,000 of Polish nationals murdered and buried in mass graves at several places including the first discovered in the Katyn Forest (Soviet Union). When Hitler invaded the USSR, his forces occupied the area around Smolensk, and were directed to the site of the mass graves. German officials wanted allied officer POWs and others to come to the grave site in order to observe what the Germans had found. The Germans searched the bodies for letters, diaries, newspapers and anything with a date on it to show the men had been murdered while the area was under Soviet control. LTC Van Vliet and CPT Stewart worried about deception, but they independently confirmed the time frame of the murders by noting the condition of the uniforms, particularly the boots. They had learned to judge a person’s time in captivity based on the condition of the uniform, and all of the signs confirmed the Polish officers had only been in captivity a short time, which matched the paper evidence.

The Officer’s Cross of Merit of the Republic of Poland posthumously awarded to LTC John H. Van Vliet, Jr., Warsaw, Belvedere, April 8, 2015.

LTC Van Vliet and CPT Stewart made no statements and refused to cooperate in any way with the Germans. Even so, the event was shocking, and they knew the information needed to be shared with the US government. While in captivity Jack escaped three times. As he would say, “That tells you something about the effectiveness of the first two.” After his last escape, he made it through German territory, entered American lines, and quickly made his way to Washington where he reported details of the Katyn Massacre to MG Bissell, Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence. In Washington, he was ordered to say nothing about Katyn, an order he followed until he was called to testify before Congress.

LTC Van Vliet was awarded the Bronze Star with "V" for valor in recognition of his actions while a POW. He later fought in the Korean War and retired from the Army as a Colonel. He died in February of 2000, survived by his three daughters and his son.