Post by connie on Apr 6, 2013 2:41:13 GMT -5
Doxsee, Gifford B. Cpl., 423rd, 3rd BN HQ Co, POW IV-B, Slaughterhouse 5 3rd Battalion Hq Co, Signal Corps Unit; POW IV B, Slaughter House 5, Gorbitz, Dresden
Indiana Military Site info: www.indianamilitary.org/106ID/SoThinkMenu/106thSTART.htm
Type Gifford Doxsee's name into the search engine on this page or check out the alphabetical list of bios in the column on the left
Overview of POW Camps that held Members of the 106th: 106thdivision.proboards.com/post/752/thread
Stalag IV-B 106thdivision.proboards.com/post/4946/thread
Slaughterhouse 5: 106thdivision.proboards.com/post/4801/thread
Ex- POW site: Gifford Doxsee's bio: www.axpow.org/bios/doxseetemp.htm
Here is a portion of that bio: (click to enlarge)
Cub Magazine tells of Gifford Doxsee's Return to Slaughter House 5 (beginning on p. 17): www.indianamilitary.org/106ID/CUBs/AllCubsSearchable/CUB-2000-Apr-May-Jun-s.pdf
Veterans History Project Interview: 76 minute video interview from 2011: memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.21407/
Cornell Magazine Ezra: Volume III #3 Spring 2011. Doxsee recalls experiences at Slaughter House 5
ezramagazine.cornell.edu/SPRING11/People.html
Doxsee also recalls the bombing of Dresden in this college publication: www2.hws.edu/article-id-16319/
Doxsee ’46 recalls the Bombing of Dresden
February 13th, 2013
On the 68th anniversary of the Bombing of Dresden, the Colleges asked one of their most esteemed alums to recall his experience as a World War II prisoner of war held in Slaughterhouse Five.
On a bitter December morning in 1944, Private First Class Gifford Doxsee ’46 and his comrades in the 106th Infantry Division trudged over miry fields, weighed down with a weariness brought on by weeks of waiting for the arrival of artillery from the devastated Le Havre. “It was just us and the cows,” Gifford recalls as an afterthought, as if remembering a vivid dream. He was young, an inexperienced officer 4,000 miles from his mother and father in Freeport, N.Y. and worlds removed from life as a first-year student at Hobart College. “General Bradley knew that we were green troops, so he put us at a quiet sector of the front – which also meant that we had five times as much front to cover.”
Five days later, the German offensive launched an assault in the Ardennes mountain range that has become known by many names, among them The Battle of the Bulge. For four days, Doxsee saw firsthand the chaos of battle before being taken prisoner by the German Army. Doxsee and his infantry were captured and marched across countless frozen miles to Gerolsteain, Germany, where they were loaded into freight cars bound for Muhlberg, Germany, where a prison camp loomed eight days ahead.”When we got there, we were registered Prisoners of War,” Doxsee says. “Then we had to wait.”
Two weeks later, a starving Doxsee arrived in Dresden on a transport with less than 200 fellow prisoners. Rules of war dictated that the German Army could force captured soldiers to work – so long as they were not laboring over weaponry. Brought to a desolate building, a concrete monstrosity that had been used to house and butcher livestock prior to the war, Doxsee worked tirelessly for the Axis Powers. Schlachthof Funf – or Slaughterhouse Five – became his home. Imprisoned with Doxsee was another Hobart student, Edward Reginald Crone Jr. , as well as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. who would go on to write one of the 20th century’s most important anti-war novels based on his experiences in Dresden –Slaughterhouse-Five. Crone, who died of what Vonnegut would later call the “thousand mile stare,” was the basis for the novel’s main character, Billy Pilgrim.
Doxsee, Vonnegut and Crone, along with their fellow POWs, were jostled awake on the night of Feb. 13. The city was quiet, but guards seized the prisoners and marched them across town and down twisting stair cases into an underground bunker. “We must have gone down at least two or three stories. I remember that we had been told Dresden had been spared because the Germans wanted the city to be the capital so we weren’t expecting a raid.” As Doxsee sat, waiting on the cold floor of the underground storage facility, there was silence – silence followed by a tremble. “The whole building shook and plaster from the ceiling started to fall on our heads,” says Doxsee, who is quiet for a moment. “When the guards got us above ground…it was – I hadn’t seen anything like it. The whole city was on fire.”
To this day, the utter destruction of the Bombing of Dresden remains unparalleled. In the two waves of firebombing, 25,000 inhabitants lost their lives, and 15-square-miles of the city center were decimated. Whole rows of buildings engulfed in flames resulted in a firestorm, creating gale winds that pulled in those too close, a gruesome burning death that Doxsee witnessed. “We watched the city burn for several days, then we had to carry corpses to funeral pyres – sometimes we had to go into air raid shelters.” Fire raid shelters created gruesome tableaus – whole families huddled – men, women and children – waiting to emerge from beneath the ground. “I remember moving bodies and an arm or a leg would break off – it was like carrying brittle wood.”
“From the very first moment, the human psyche is quick to adapt – you had to remember that it was our airmen who were dropping the bombs and these were the bodies of the enemy,” Doxsee explains. “If the bodies had been my relatives, the task would have been very different.”Months of digging through remains for bodies and working to clean the fallen city didn’t come to an end until the war was breathing its final sighs. In the middle of April 1945, the prisoners at Dresden were evacuated under fear that the city would be shelled in further Allied advances. The men walked for two days, stopping in the town of Hellendorf near the Czechoslovakia border. Two weeks passed with little to eat. Grass and dandelions helped to keep Doxsee alive until the arrival of Allied troops finally freed the prisoners of their torment.
Days later, Doxsee recalls finding a bicycle and joining a fellow prisoner of war in returning to Dresden. What they found as they peddled around the west side of the city was a space unrecognizable; a void filled with rubble and hardly a standing structure with no trace of life.It was a quiet return to the world for Doxsee and his comrades. “On May 8, not one of us had any idea that the Germans had surrendered. Across the sea, Americans were celebrating, but it wasn’t until the next day that we realized the war was really over.” From an American hospital in France, Doxsee wrote his mother to let her know he was alive; it was Mother’s Day.
It was 38 years before Doxsee returned to the place that had been his home and prison, and Dresden was much changed. In the process of reconstruction, it was a depressing urban space shrouded in Soviet utilitarian style, a drab and depressing place that Doxsee says was nothing like he remembered.It wasn’t until 1999 that Doxsee found himself in Germany again – hosted by a German family – that he saw a glimpse of the picturesque Dresden that had been suffocated all of those years ago. “After reunification, it was totally different; it had been repainted, made beautiful. It was a wonderful experience. I saw the city through the eyes of Germans – think about that!”
In all of those years between his escape from what was a hell on earth to his return to a tranquil, still recovering city – Doxsee rebuilt his own life. He returned to college, earning a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University, and a master’s and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He went on to become a professor of history at Ohio University, educating students for 25 years. And today, Doxsee continues to share his story with young students and veterans groups across the country.
Vonnegut’s own response to his experience in the Dresden Bombings came in the form of the novel Slaughterhouse-Five. A prolific writer in his post-war years, Vonnegut also served as a professor at Smith College, and received his honorary degree from Hobart and William Smith in 1974.
Crone’s tale is considerably more heart-breaking. The shy, young man – who had hoped to use his time at Hobart to become an Episcopal minister – died in Dresden. Refusing food and water, Crone succumbed to what has been described as “general despair.” After a five-year search for his remains following the war, his parents were able to bring him home to be buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, N.Y. Every Memorial Day until his own death, Vonnegut sent flowers to be placed on Crone’s grave.
Discussion Board notes on Vonnegut: 106thdivision.proboards.com/post/2991/thread
list of people at Slaughterhouse 5 provided by the author of the book of In the Shadows of Slaughterhouse 5: 106thdivision.proboards.com/post/4800/thread
Ohio University Remembers Professer Emeritus Gifford Doxsee: www.ohio-forum.com/2017/07/university-remembers-history-professor-emeritus-gifford-doxsee/
Parkersburg News and Sentinel (quoted under Ohio University notes: reporter Jody Murphy captured the tale of Dr. Gifford Doxsee, a U.S. Army veteran and former Ohio University Professor of History. Doxsee spoke on Veterans Day at the Belpre Senior Center about his time as a POW in a German camp in the later days of World War II. “He was part of a large group of soldiers who surrendered to the Nazis after being surrounded during the Battle of the Bulge,” Murphy wrote.
Doxsee’s division was deployed to west Germany five days before the Nazis launched their offensive. After several days of fighting, Doxsee’s unit was surrounded by Germans. The Nazi commander issued an ultimatum; surrender or die. Doxsee said his commander sacrificed his career instead of their lives and surrendered.
The POWs were taken to a camp near Dresden. Doxsee was held in Slaughterhouse Five alongside fellow soldier Kurt Vonnegut. Doxsee said Vonnegut, the tallest man in the group, served as an interpreter between the Americans and the Nazi captors.Vonnegut would later write about the experiences of the POWs in his critically acclaimed novel Slaughterhouse Five.
Doxsee said as long as they obeyed the Nazi guards, they were treated well. The guards were older men in their 40, 50s and older who were too old to fight, Doxsee said. “Our problem was lack of food,” he said.
The POWs spent several weeks in Dresden before moving to a village in the Czech Republic.“We were woken up and told the Russians were coming from the east and the Allies were coming from the west,” he said. “They were worried we would be shelled.” The POWs—already weak—marched 35 miles in two days to the village. Still, there was no food. Doxsee said they survived eating grass and dandelions. He lost about 50 pounds during his captivity. Doxsee said the POWs retained hope throughout their imprisonment. A soldier made a short-wave radio out of a can and they were able to pick up BBC broadcasts to hear the progress of the war rather than rely on the lies of their Nazi captors. “It kept our hope,” he said.
Truman Library notes on Gifford Doxsee's memories on the bombing of Dresden during his time as a POW there: www.trumanlibraryinstitute.org/wwii-75-marching-victory-2/
* Note that the 18 page letter referred to in that collection can be viewed below in the Ohio Memory Collection
Ohio Memory Collection: 18 page letter on Gifford Doxee's WWII experiences written in 1981: ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p267401coll36/id/8037/
Obituary: We lost this amazing man in July of 2017: www.jagersfuneralhome.com/obituary/4343667
Here is a segment of that obituary:
The town of Athens (Ohio) lost a good friend when Gifford B. Doxsee, age 93, died on the evening of July 16, 2017 at OhioHealth O’Bleness Hospital, Athens.
Gifford was born July 4, 1924 in Bay Shore, NY; the son of the late Robert Lenox Doxsee and Jessie May Gifford Doxsee. Gifford grew up working hard in his father’s clamming business, Doxsee Sea Clam Company. He graduated from Freeport high school in 1942, and that same year Gifford enlisted in the United States Army; eventually he served in the European Theater, 106th Infantry Div. 3rd Bn HQ Co., 423 Infantry Regiment in World War II. He was a Prisoner of War in Germany for 5 months, billeted in Dresden, Germany in Slaughter House 5, where he met fellow Prisoner of War Kurt Vonnegut, who later wrote the novel Slaughter House Five which was inspired by their experience.
After the war, Gifford attended Cornell University, graduated in 1948, then attended Harvard University for graduate studies in history of modern Europe. He earned his graduate degree in 1949, taught at The American University in Beirut, Lebanon from 1952-1955 and later earned a Ph.D from Harvard University in 1966.
Gifford moved to Athens in 1958 to teach European, African and Middle Eastern history at Ohio University. He married his wife Mary Letitia Cowan, who was also a professor at OU, at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in 1964. During his years at OU, Dr. Doxsee was considered a scholar of Middle Eastern History, he served on committees for the University, including chairing the Energy Conservation Committee in the 1970’s and directing the African Studies graduate program from 1983-1991, and is remembered by many students as a supporter and encourager who helped his students achieve their goals. Dr. Doxsee enjoyed attending OU basketball games with his wife and friends, traveling, telling stories about his life, and being part of the OU community. After 35 years at OU, Dr. Doxsee retired from teaching and became Professor Emeritus of History. He and his wife chose to stay in Athens after their retirements...
Discussion Board Mention granddaughter of Pfc John P. O'Meara 423rd/ red Bn / Hq Co. mentions note of Doxsee in her grandfather's papers and also note of her grandfather in Doxsee's writings: 106thdivision.proboards.com/post/4920/thread