Americans Behind the Barbed Wire: World War II : Inside a German Prison Camp

War is never a pleasant experience, but it is even worse for those unfortunates who find themselves captured by the enemy and forced to spend the balance of the war in a POW camp. In Americans Behind the Barbed Wire, journalist J. Frank Diggs shares with readers his unique view of WWII from inside Oflag 64, a German POW camp located in Schubin, Poland.
The author, representative of a generation of Americans who were tempered to hardship during the Great Depression, takes the reader on a complex journey from combat, to capture, to prison, and finally to escape and repatriation. He and his fellow kriegies, German slang for prisoners, demonstrate a resoluteness and sense of purpose shared by his generation. As kriegies they worked and plotted for more food, searched for more heat and warm clothes, worked to improve themselves and their condition, and established a camp newspaper to help improve the flow of information and relieve the mind-numbing boredom. They never stopped working for their freedom. This truly amazing book offers a glimpse of history that never made headlines, but was just as real as the aerial bombing, submarine warfare, and amphibious landings. The last portion of the book includes a diary of the author s escape from the Germans and, along with many of his fellow prisoners, their involvement in the Russian/American repatriation crises at the end of the war, as well as their eventual return to the United States.

J. Frank Diggs was born in Hagerstown, Maryland in November of 1917, graduating from American University in 1938. After receiving his Master s Degree in Economics from the George Washington University and an early stint as a writer for the Washington Post, he was drafted into the peacetime army in 1941. He was commissioned a second Lieutenant in 1942 . He participated in four amphibious landings and three campaigns in the Europe-Africa Theater. He was awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart. He also became a prisoner of the Germans after a less than successful landing behind enemy lines in Sicily. He spent 18 months as a POW until eventually escaping and making his way out through Russia.
After the war, the author left the army and spent nearly 40 years as a writer, reporter, and editor with U.S. News and World Report. He covered military affairs for a number of years, starting with the Bikini Bomb Tests in the Pacific in 1946. As a reporter, he cruised aboard nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers, attended Marine Corps war games, flew missions with the Air Force, and witnessed close-up the Soviet Missile Crisis in Cuba. He was also a regular participant in the Army War College s Annual National Strategy Seminars. His specialty, however, remained economics, and in 1982 he retired from U.S. News and World Report as a Senior Editor. J. Frank, as he is usually called, loves travel, and has visited over 108 countries on all five continents. After retiring, he continued to write for the Maturity News Service, syndicated by the New York Times to several hundred newspapers across the country.