POW Change

From the Stars and Stripes:

"WWII vets detained in Switzerland finally get POW status"

Alva Moss was 20 when his World War II B-24 bomber took fire over Allach, Germany. He and the crew were forced to bail out over Switzerland, an officially neutral country during the war. With his legs filled with shrapnel, Sgt. Moss parachuted into a tree, where Swiss police would later find him. He was put up in a resort hotel in the Swiss Alps, fed military rations and offered the best of Swiss medical care. He would have to wait out the war there in internment, Swiss and U.S. officials said.

But Moss wanted to return to the front lines. As soon as he was healthy, he jumped out a window with a group of British airmen and headed for the border, hopping trains and dodging police on his way back to his unit, which was stationed at an airport just across the Italian border. But border guards caught up to him, and Moss was shipped to Wauwilermoos Prison Camp. There he lived the life of a POW, becoming part of a little known piece of WWII history. He and 160 other Americans held at the camp were never officially recognized as prisoners of war because Switzerland was not at war with the United States. On Wednesday, however, the Department of Defense made a correction. It awarded the United States Prisoner of War Medal to the eight surviving prisoners of Wauwilermoos camp. They were among 143 honored. Gen. Mark Welsh III, Air Force chief of staff, teared up as he pinned the medals on the airmen, now in their late 80s and 90s. Some were in wheelchairs, or hunched over metal walkers as they made their way to Welsh. Along with Moss, the living veterans honored were James Misuraca, James Moran, Paul Gambaiana, James Mahon, John Fox, William Blackburn and George Thursby. Staff Sgt. Joseph Sinitsky was honored posthumously, along with 134 others. (The remaining airmen have yet to have their status fully verified.) "This is a great time for us," Moss said Wednesday, his medal gleaming from the lapel of his suit jacket. "Everyone was together again and there were no slackers." Their recognition was the result of an extended campaign by Maj. Dwight Mears, who started the project as a West Point doctoral student. Now he teaches history there. Mears culled records from U.S. and Swiss archives to show that conditions at Wauwilermoos were analogous to camps elsewhere. Mears' effort was also personal: His grandfather had been imprisoned at Wauwilermoos. They were men trapped in a diplomatic gray zone. How could they be prisoners of war in a neutral country? And they were among men under suspicion. At one point during the war, U.S. officials suspected that those airmen who ended up in neutral countries were deserting the military in favor of internment. A total of 1,570 American airmen were interned in Switzerland. But there and in Sweden, the numbers grew so large that U.S. officials feared they were facing a morale crisis. In May 1944, William Corcoran, the U.S. Consul in Sweden, submitted a report suggesting that airmen were "openly expressing opposition to further service." The military launched an investigation that showed the doubts were unfounded. Mears found evidence of more than 1,000 escape attempts. In Wauwilermoos, airmen fled though being caught meant being sent to solitary confinement. After the ceremony, Mears read from a letter written by Sinitsky. It turns out that Wauwilermoos also housed the country's worst convicts. The camp was run by a renegade Swiss military officer and Nazi sympathizer. According to Mears, the prison was an aberration. While the Swiss Army and the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross were busy monitoring POW conditions in other countries, few efforts were taken to ensure humane conditions in Switzerland, Mears said. "Nobody was inspecting them, and they were not inspecting themselves," said Mears, whose grandfather was one of the men honored Wednesday.

^ It is good that the Military is finally fixing this after nearly 70 years. Even though countries like Switzerland, Sweden, Ireland, Spain and Portugal claim to be neutral during the war they really weren't. Switzerland allowed the Germans to use Swiss territory to send troops to fight the Allies as well as Jews and other prisoners to the death and concentration camps. The Swiss also took cold and other valuables from the Nazis that they knew came from being looted (some from the mouths of the dead.) The Swiss were more anti-Semitic too as they made the Germans distinguish between who was a Jew and who wasn't. That's why the Germans put the "J" in Jewish passports. The Swiss would allow the Germans to enter and would refuse the Jews. The Swiss have slowly been made to account for some of their actions during the war (it took decades for the international community to force Switzerland to open their bank accounts from that era - - most belonged to either Nazis or stolen from Jews.) It seems that with what the Swiss did during the war the Allied soldiers who were imprisoned there should be officially seen as POWs. War may not have been officially declared, but the Swiss clearly sided with the Germans. It should also be noted that the US hasn't officially declared war on anyone since 1941 and yet the soldiers captured in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are considered POWs. ^

http://www.stripes.com/news/air-force/wwii-vets-detained-in-switzerland-finally-get-pow-status-1.280925