ORANGE : 3 Ex-POWs Reunite for First Time
With a smile, a handshake and a hug, Lou Palermo greeted two long-lost buddies who had helped him survive internment in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp and a 500-mile forced march.
Palermo, 68, and fellow wartime fliers Arthur Dean Batchelor, 68, and Robert Tharratt, 69, reunited for the first time in 47 years at Palermo’s home Monday to reminisce about their World War II experiences.
The three men were imprisoned at Stalag Luft IV, which housed 10,000 other captured Air Force servicemen, Palermo said. “The only thing that kept us going was true grit and a desire to get home,” he said.
Two years ago, Tharratt found Palermo’s address after seeing his name in a newsletter for former Stalag Luft IV POWs. Since then, the two have talked on the phone but had been unable to arrange a meeting until now.
“It feels great,” Palermo said. “We just live too far apart, or we’d do it more often.”
Recalling their internment, he said that humor played a crucial role in their survival. American prisoners reveled in such “dumb jokes” as teaching gullible Nazi camp guards how to speak English incorrectly--for example, using four-letter words as greetings.
Together, the three men endured a 500-mile march over snow-covered ground during which the Germans fed them little. Along the way, all of them lost a considerable amount of weight. Palermo said he dropped from 150 pounds to 90 pounds.
When one of them would become too tired or despondent to trudge along, the others would carry his pack. “Basically, we owe our lives to each other,” said Tharratt, of Walnut Creek, Calif.
Batchelor, who lives in Woodland Hills, said his plane was crippled by enemy fire during a bombing raid on Hamburg just after his 22nd birthday. After he emerged mostly unharmed from the crash landing, “a guy came riding out on a bike and said, ‘Sprechen sie Deutsch?’ and I knew I was in trouble.”
Tharratt said his plane crash-landed a quarter of a mile from a Nazi youth camp. “That’s who captured me, and I was scared to death,” he said. “I thought that they were going to hang me there.”
For more than 40 years, it seemed that there would never be a reunion.
“When we were discharged, one of the last things an officer said to us was, ‘When you go out there, forget about it because no one will believe you anyway,’ ” Tharratt said. “So consequently, we walked away from it and put it all behind us and went on with our lives. I think the reason the three of us have not gotten together before in the past is we went through such bad times together that each of us saw each other at their worst. And you don’t like people to remember you at your worst.”