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POWerful Recollections Of World War II

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By LELAND HAWES, Tribune correspondent

Published: September 25, 2007

Augustine 'Gus' Fernandez stays away from caves. That's just one legacy of his World War II experience.

The 84-year-old Tampa native spent more than a year in a German prisoner-of-war camp, where he got trapped in a cave-in while trying to tunnel out. Later, he underwent an appendectomy without anesthesia.

He recounts his experiences in 'POWerful Memories,' a book he self-published two years ago. A member of the U.S. Army Air Corps, he was captured in Germany after parachuting from his disabled B-17 bomber. The Nazis sent him to Stalag Luft 1 near the Baltic Sea.

'Escape was considered a patriotic duty,' he says.

His fellow prisoners constantly hatched plans but most were impractical. One seemed worth trying:

Fernandez joined a 'tunnel team' to burrow beneath the guarded barbed-wire fences. The objective was to steal an observation plane from a nearby airfield and aim for Sweden, 50 to 60 miles away. The team devised an elaborate digging system, using boxes and scoops to pull out the dirt. Each night, prisoners rotated the perilous chore.

On his fourth turn, Fernandez was about 40 feet into the tunnel when the roof fell in on him. Buried alive beneath the dirt, he knew he would soon die. Finally, he felt hands clasp his ankles, and he was dragged out. He was so dazed and horror-stricken, he curled up in his bunk and didn't arise for a day and a half.

'I never again went underground,' he writes in the book published by Xlibris Corp.

No More Caves

That resolve has continued to this day. Even when he took his grandchildren to Florida Caverns State Park near Marianna, he stayed above ground while they went inside.

Fernandez grew up in Ybor City and attended Hillsborough High School. As Europe went to war, he played football for the Terriers with classmates whose names would one day be well-known in Tampa: Marcelino Huerta Jr., Joe Benito, Richard Fidalgo, Norman Castellano, Max Castro, Lawrence Robles, Benny Fernandez, Vincent Nuccio.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Fernandez graduated from high school and joined the U.S. Army Air Corps Cadet program.

By the spring of 1944, he was serving as a bombardier aboard a U.S. Army Air Corps B-17. When the bomber became disabled, he and the rest of the crew bailed, parachuting down near Brunswick, Germany.

Fernandez landed in a plowed field, where a German soldier on a motorbike spotted and captured him. He was questioned repeatedly by Gestapo officers and was astonished to learn how much the Germans already knew about him, including that his parents had emigrated from Spain. One of the interrogators even spoke Spanish in an unsuccessful effort to wheedle military information from him.

Next came a torturous train ride in a boxcar so jammed with prisoners that they could neither sit nor lie down. The train brought them to Barth, where they were paraded through town and pelted with rocks.

Only when he reached the fences and towers of the prison camp did Fernandez feel he was 'no longer in imminent danger of being killed.'

But he would be imprisoned there for more than 14 months. Food, such as it was - bread made with sawdust - was scarce. Midnight cookhouse raids netted potato peels for extra sustenance.

The long months were monotonous, broken only by occasional soccer games and reading. He went through Thomas Hardy's 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles' three times.

Tighter Rules After D-Day

In June 1944, the prisoner network brought word of the Allied landing in Normandy, but the invasion resulted in tighter camp rules. The prisoners had to remain in their barracks for frustratingly long hours. Fernandez remembers listening repeatedly to the only musical recording somehow smuggled in, 'Don't Fence Me In.'

In the winter of 1945, Fernandez suffered a ruptured appendix. The Germans operated on him in the crude POW hospital. A painkiller was injected into his neck for the surgery, and it wore off as staples were inserted into the wound in his abdomen.

On May 2, 1945, the prison guards disappeared and the Red Army took over. Fernandez made his way to France and then England and finally, on July 4, 1945, arrived in Tampa.

He was home. The gaunt young man was 'smothered in embraces' by his parents.

Fernandez would go on to attend college in Tallahassee, where he would meet his wife-to-be, Esther, who everyone calls Dot. They built a lifetime of memories, but Dot learned more about her husband through 'POWerful Memories.' She worked with him for three years to produce the book.

The couple live in Miami. They have four children and four grandchildren.

Fernandez retired from the Air Force in 1966. In his military career, he served in the Korean War. As part of the Strategic Air Command, he also took part in B-29 missions to guard against Soviet air attacks.

'POWerful Memories' is available for $18.69, plus $8.10 for shipping and handling. To order, call Xlibris Corp. at 1-888-795-4274.

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