Carl Bonner grew up in rural south Alabama hunting, fishing and working in a sawmill when he left school around the age of 12. He went on to serve his country in World War II. He never talked about it much, only in bits and pieces to his children when he needed to release some of the pressure inside his mind. The memories were painful and if he had his way, he’d have left it all in North Africa and Italy forever.
A writer for the hometown newspaper wanted to tell his story and tried to coax it out for years. After my grandfather’s funeral, he told my mother the most he ever got out of him was “It wouldn’t be fair to the men that I served with that didn’t make it back, so ain’t nothing I can tell you.” He had lived through hell and revisiting it with a reporter for some article on personal glory was something he didn’t intend on doing. We hear it on those holidays where we honor the fallen and celebrate liberty: freedom isn’t free. It comes from the grace of God above and sacrifices of men like Carl Bonner who left blood, sweat, and tears thousands of miles away on distant battlefields.
Mortar shells exploded all around him, blowing men into pieces. After the conflict died and before another rose again, Sgt. Bonner walked around the battleground picking up body parts of his fallen brothers. “Somebody had to do it. Somebody needed to do it,” he said. Reluctantly, he placed fingers, teeth, and small pieces of men that still remained around him in a boot he found nearby on the ground. Anything larger than that, he placed in a stray box.
He was commander of a tank. U.S. Army Company A, 15th Tank Battalion. He had spent time fighting in North Africa and now found himself in Italy, a far cry from the hills and hollers of Choctaw County, Alabama. He was sitting on top of an ammunition box when a mortar shell struck his tank, overturning it and breaking his left arm while leaving him pinned beneath the wreckage for a day and a half. The rest of his crew inside the tank were killed in the explosion.
Sgt. Bonner now found himself captured by German forces. He was taken to a POW camp nearby. The POWs were fed thin potato soup made from a harvest in a nearby field. That was their only provision. After 3 days, the Allied soldiers’ strength was wearing thin and a plan of escape was hatched as a last-ditch effort at freedom. To their advantage, only three German soldiers guarded the nearly 300 POWs. Sgt. Bonner bent down and picked up a cigarette butt lying on the ground. He motioned his hands as if he were striking a match drawing the attention of one of the guards. The guard took pity on the scrawny, half-starved American probably thinking the man was no longer a threat. The guard leaned his rifle against a tree and stuck his hands in his pocket for a match. No sooner than he looked down to find the match, Sgt. Bonner grabbed the man’s rifle and in a coordinated effort the other POWs overpowered the other two guards, killing them. Sgt. Bonner mercifully held the guard hostage pointing the man’s own rifle at him.
The POWs all scrambled hurriedly back toward the direction of their own camp. Sgt. Bonner walked back as well, escorting his prisoner. At this point, exhaustion was setting in. The initial adrenaline of the jailbreak had worn off and he was hungry, sleepy, and tired fighting a new enemy- fatigue. He was at a breaking point. He told the German, “I reckon I’m gonna have to kill you so I can get some sleep.” The guard had only spoken German up until that point, but after hearing Sgt. Bonner’s words he replied in English saying, “I won’t try to kill you. I won’t run if you let me live.” He was done fighting. After the exchange, they both lightly slept.
After a short nap, they resumed making progress back to the Allied camp. The two men reached an open clearing, a field, and hid themselves from nearby German patrols by lying flat on the ground. Sgt. Bonner held his finger on the trigger ready to squeeze, pointing the end of the rifle barrel under the German’s chin in case the soldier shouted to any of the nearby patrolmen. For what felt like an eternity, he could hear the Germans talking all around him and slowly crawled back away from the clearing with his hostage. As they continued their journey back to camp, an Italian woman emerged from the mouth of a cave and gave them a small loaf of bread, a much-needed blessing of nourishment.
During the ordeal, Sgt. Bonner’s family had been sent a telegram saying he was M.I.A. but within ten days they would receive another: Sgt. Bonner had made it back to his unit. When they arrived at the camp, he turned the German soldier over to the guards. Sgt. Bonner was ghastly thin, half-starved, and severely dehydrated. A doctor at the camp gave him a bottle of Paregoric. He immediately swallowed half the bottle and slept for two days. When he woke up, he swallowed what remained and slept some more, finally finding rest.
He recuperated as best he could and was then sent orders to prepare to go to Normandy for the D-Day invasion. His commander told him to forget about it—that he wouldn’t be making the trip. The Germans recorded names, ranks, and serial numbers of all prisoners and as an escaped POW if he were to be captured again the Germans would kill him without hesitation. Instead, Sgt. Bonner was sent back stateside to train soldiers in artillery.
Honorably discharged in 1945, Carl Bonner returned home to Choctaw County with a Purple Heart in his pocket where he farmed the land he was raised on and started a family of his own. He later found work with the Public Works program, drove a bulldozer, and worked as an ironworker for the remainder of his working days. He retired at the age of 62 to hunt and walk the woods he did as a boy, where he found peace and solace. He was a quiet man with a story that haunted him and defined the experience of countless others who would never be able to tell it.
