One Of A Kind
This guest post is courtesy of Jennifer, author of In Jennifer’s Head. If you’ve got any information about her grandfather’s ashtray, please head on over to her site and let her know. I’m sure she would be very appreciative of any information you could provide.
My grandfather was a WWII vet. He didn’t really talk much about the war itself, but he did tell several stories of his time guarding a POW camp in Paris. As was his way, he made it a point to get to know the German prisoners. He viewed them as young men no different from himself. The only difference being that they had been drafted to the other side in the war. As luck would have it, one of those men just happened to have been a bootlegger that traveled through the tiny Kansas town that my Granddad called home. He’d gotten a letter telling him that his German mother was very ill. It was a ruse to get him back to Germany so they could draft him. Granddad never expected to find a connection to Grenola, KS all the way in Paris, but that’s just how things worked out.
He was always kind to them, and as a result, the German prisoners loved him. And they made it a point to show their gratitude. During the dead of winter, they dug his tent into the ground and lined it with wool blankets while he was away. Granddad used to say he had the only warm tent in all of Paris that winter. They made him a clock which he sent home with someone that claimed to be a friend. The clock was never seen again. Thankfully, he let the prisoners handle the delivery of another gift, which my mother has in her living room today.
I have a similar item from my great grandfather’s service with the U.S. Army in the trenches of France during WWI. It’s base is similarly made from the cut off base of an artillery shell, roughly a 105mm in size, with three French coins evenly spaced and tacked to the lip to rest cigars or cigarettes. The center is a deactivated .30-06 shell with bullet intact.
According to he, when I was a small child and he would sit on a chair cushion on the stone wall bordering the hedges in front of their house smoking Luckies and ashing into this thing, the men tried very hard to outfit the trenches with as many comforts of home as possible. The ashtrays were among the many pieces of furniture they’d make and the round in the center made it easy to dump the ashes in the pot to make a delousing soap!
Leave it to POW’s…the things they came up with to pass the time (and “thank” kind guards….and escape….) were nothing less than genius! Check out some of the things the guys who ended up in Colditz came up with. I’ll post a link here on a WW2 forum I chat on, see if any of the smarter heads (heh…that’s pretty much all of em) can come up with some ideas for ya.