This book is about Robert Lee Pugh, what he saw and was victim to during his 6 months of Prisoner of War captivity in Europe during the tail-end of WWII. You will read about prisoner starvation, brutality and other acts that were it not during war time, would be deemed as out-right mass murder. This perspective on what happened to thousands of American POWs has barely been touched in movie and television programs dealing with the subject. Even Stalag 17 and Bridge over the River Kwai tread relatively lightly on the topic of POW brutality. But it did happen. Yet the lack of publicity has made WWII prisoners almost an unknown factor. Some people believe these acts of madness are too graphic for publication. But the truth should not be censored or abridged. You should read this book to judge for yourself...Everyone should read this book.
About the Author: Robert Lee (Bob) Pugh was born in 1924 in Crawfordsville, Indiana where he lived a typical American boyhood until 1943 when he enlisted in the United States Army. Soon he was on his way to France to fight the World War 2 Germans. One life-changing day while engaged in combat, Bob's unit became vastly outnumbered by its German foe and was taken as a "Prisoner of War". He remained a prisoner about 6 months until May of 1945 when he was liberated by the Russian Army, then turned over to the Americans. During that imprisonment the young Private Pugh personally witnessed and frequently fell victim to atrocities beyond human imagination. But somehow Bob survived where many of his fellow POWs starved to death. Over the immediate years after liberation Bob answered questions indicating the public had little knowledge of the events you are about to read. So, he penned a manuscript primarily to pass on to his children and others with a similar interest. However the depiction of POW life got worse, fueled a great deal by entertainment venues on television and in movies. He was encouraged to publish his work, but declined. More recently, during a casual conversation, the POW topic came up. Someone said "Tell me some of the funny things that happened.". "What do you mean funny?" Bob replied. "Well you see on Hogan's Heroes all the fun they had with the German Commandant and his people, you must have been in on some of that." Perhaps the man was joking. But Bob Pugh doesn't joke about that subject. He can't see the humor in having but one meal a day, every day, consisting of a slice of awful tasting black bread and a scoop of something called "soup" thickened by sawdust. Nor the time he had his face, head and upper body bashed about by the butt-end of a German rifle. Waking up in the morning to hear one of his POW mates had finally given up hope of rescue and committed suicide may have been typical but not funny. Instead Bob gave the questioner a copy of the manuscript he had written many years earlier and requested he take it home and read it. A few days later the man returned, apologized for his lack of understanding and made fifty copies of Bob's manuscript to distribute on his own. That lead Bob to publish this fact-filled manuscript within these pages. Learn more about his long journey into Hell. And remember... the movies and TV shows are fiction...this is all TRUE. - Dick Munro -