Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Galione told his platoon leader about his suspicion and asked if he could have a couple of guys for reconnaissance. There may be some American prisoners there, he argued. Maybe pilots shot down and captured.

Although the platoon sergeant didn’t disagree, he said no. A reconnaissance mission would be too risky. If there is a concentration camp up ahead, he said, it’ll have to wait another week.

Galione couldn’t sleep that night. A week was a long time; men would die. The more he thought about the camp—now a reality in his mind—a plan began to take shape. If there was a Nazi camp farther east, it would have to be next to a railroad. How else could they move thousands of prisoners in and out? All he had to do was follow the train tracks east, deeper into Germany, and they would lead him to the camp.

Galione woke up a buddy and told him he was going to have a look up ahead and why. He expected to be back by morning, he said, but if he wasn’t, would his buddy tell the sarge that he hadn’t deserted? Galione didn’t want to be branded a coward if he got captured or killed.

At nine thirty on the night of April 5, 1945, Private Galione began to follow the rail tracks southeast. He felt at home traveling under the stars. For a Timberwolf, specially trained in nighttime fighting in America’s rugged Northwest, darkness was a friend.

Galione never made it back by morning. When the sun rose, he continued following the tracks and the smell. For five days, over one hundred miles, along the tracks at night and in the woods during the day, no sleep, just a few hours of rest against a tree. He was surrounded by German soldiers and retreating convoys of trucks and jeeps. To sleep was dangerous.

Exhausted and weak from hunger, Galione was also in pain. Walking had chaffed raw the unhealed leg wound he suffered at Remagen. But he kept on going, pushed by an invisible hand (was it God?) and pulled by the fear that there might be Americans in the camp. God or no God, he was worried. Would he face court-martial when he got back to camp? If he got back?

With each step, it seemed, the smell of death got stronger. On the fifth day of trekking, he spotted another Timberwolf camp a mile or so from the tracks with a road leading to it. He thought about going for help, then dismissed the idea. Lives were at stake; every minute was a life.

A few hours after he passed the Timberwolf bivouac, he found a spur trailing off north from the main tracks. The stench was now overpowering. He followed the spur and soon found an abandoned boxcar. It was empty, the straw-strewn floor fetid from blood, urine, and feces.

The spur curved and the tracks stretched toward the mouths of two openings in the mountainside, camouflaged with netting. In the valley, on a flat plain, stood a huge, silent camp with empty guard towers and a gate with a large lock. A lone soldier was loading a truck. Galione knew he had stumbled onto something big.

On the tracks near the first opening sat another boxcar. The smell coming from it was even riper. He didn’t have to guess what he would find inside—dead bodies dressed in prison rags. He began poking around the five-day-old corpses with his rifle, hoping to find out who the dead men were, how they died, and whether any were Americans. The only identifications he found were colored armbands sewn onto the prison pajamas—red, green, yellow, blue. He knew that “yellow” meant Jew. What did the others signify? While turning corpses, his gun made a steel-on-steel clang. He silently cursed. If he weren’t so tired, he would never had made such a rookie mistake.

The first shot pinged off the boxcar. Galione ducked. The soldier he had seen earlier was running toward him with a rifle. Galione jumped from the boxcar and scampered up the mountainside as fast as loose rocks would allow. Bullets whizzed by his ear and ricocheted off the granite rocks as he dove into the camouflage above the first opening.

Unable to see the American with the green and silver Timberwolf patch on his shoulder, the soldier lost interest, jumped in his truck, and drove off. As soon as he disappeared around the curve, Galione relaxed and scanned the camp below. The barbed-wired prison was as quiet as a ghost town.

Attracted by the gunfire, curious prisoners began to gather at the gate. They knew the Allies were advancing. For days they had heard the sounds of battle, closer every daybreak. Was this liberation day? There was no cheering. Just an eerie silence.

The openings in the mountain were calling to Galione like sirens. What were the Nazis hiding inside? Fuel? Bombs? Tanks? How deep into the mountain did the openings go? As curious as he was, he was too smart to explore. There might be Germans hiding inside or the place might be booby-trapped. One step into the darkness and the mountain could explode into piles of rock. Instead Galione picked his way down to the prison gate. The least he could do was free the prisoners.

It was four thirty in the afternoon on April 10, 1945. The men he found waiting inside the gate were “skeletons wrapped in skin,” with an average man weighing less than sixty pounds. Private John Galione had just discovered Camp Dora.

Galione tried to break the lock while the men watched mutely. Without tools, he couldn’t force it open. He could shoot it, of course, but that would be nearly as dumb as exploring the mountain. What if there were guards still inside the camp? As a lone soldier standing in the open, he’d be an easy target.

Galione decided to go for help. But first, he needed sleep. He climbed back up the mountainside to a clump of trees above the mine openings. From there he had a clear view of the camp and road and would hear anyone climbing over loose rocks. He quickly fell asleep and awoke in the dark. Perfect for a prowling Timberwolf.

Galione began to hike back up the tracks to the American camp he had spotted on the way to Dora. He was not up to walking five more days to his own camp, if it was still where he left it. Besides, judging from what he had seen, the prisoners in the camp could die waiting for rescue.

A miracle was waiting for him when he got to the road leading to the Timberwolf bivouac, at two o’clock that morning. Sitting on the road was a stalled jeep and a tired driver. Galione tried to use his basic knowledge of auto mechanics as a bargaining chip. He told the driver about the secret openings in the mountain and the camp. He’d fix the jeep, he said, if the driver would take him back there, help him break the lock, and free the prisoners. The driver said he couldn’t. He was on a personal assignment for his commanding officer and needed his permission. He offered to take the private to his superior. Galione found a disconnected wire under the Jeep’s hood and fixed it.

The Timberwolf battalion leader not only agreed to give Galione a ride back to Dora; he insisted on going to the ghost camp himself along with one of his men. Just as the spring sun was about to rise, the three Timberwolves rounded the curve to the camp. Within minutes they broke the lock and opened the gate. A wave of prisoners swallowed them up, grabbing their hands and kissing them over and over. Like DeVito at Dachau and hundreds of other liberators in camps across Europe, the three Timberwolves could not process what they saw.

The rising sun slowly lit a scene from a horror movie. Men so thin “you could see their back bones through their stomachs.” Rotting bodies in open trenches and piled outside buildings. A prisoner led Galione to the “infirmary,” where a hundred men lay on straw in their own excrement, the dying next to the already dead. The French Resistance fighters among the living began singing “La Marseillaise” when they saw the American soldiers.

Worried that there were still guards in Dora, the Timberwolves raced back down the road to their camp to radio for backup and medical help. Then the commander drove Galione back to his platoon to face charges.