SURVIVING STALAG 8

After the United States entered WWII, George Williams lost his father, who worked in a cotton mill. Because his father was a worker at the mill, they lived in a mill house. In order to keep the house, George worked in the cotton mill after school, but he felt the need to join the Army. Trained as a crew member on a bomber, he flew missions from England over German-occupied Europe. On one mission, when his plane was shot down, George and fellow crew member Chester Rogers survived only to be taken captive and sent to Stalag 8. In early 1945, with the Russians and Allied Armies approaching, the Germans did not want them to discover the POW compounds and the concentration camps. The solution was a Bataan Death March-style movement of almost four thousand men over two hundred kilometers in the harshest of survival conditions. The men endured forced marches, starvation, beatings by guards and civilians, freezing temperatures, and death in order to finally be rescued and make it home as part of America's Greatest Generation.