The Battle of the Bulge ended 70 years ago but for Clinton McKinney, his memories of the event are so vivid and clear, it could have been yesterday.
German forces launched a major offensive campaign and caught Allied forces off-guard, ultimately resulted in the highest amount of casualties of any operation during WWII.
“There was only three of us that made it out of that battle in my platoon,” McKinney explained.
Although he survived the battle, his arduous journey of dealing with German troops had only begun.
“They started marching us back to their lines,” McKinney said. “I was processed at Staleg 4B where the one they called, 'Doctor Death' was. Mengele. He was an SS doctor.”
Joseph Mengele was notorious for performing deadly human experiments on prisoners of war and concentration camp victims.
McKinney found himself in the lab of Mengele and received two injections into his chest but was never told what the chemical was inside of his body.
For the next 35 years, McKinney experienced swelling and boils during December that would eventually rupture due to the pressure. To this day, despite multiple doctors and opinions, McKinney has not been told what was forcibly injected into his chest.
He never gave up, attempting escape whenever possible.
McKinney did escape a boxcar filled with other prisoners headed to Poland at one point, but was quickly recaptured after several days in the forest.
The war was in full effect by that point and bombing runs were common in Nazi controlled zones.
“By that time our airplanes were bombing everything. We got bombed by some of our own planes,” McKinney recalls.
Despite being captured after the first escape attempt, McKinney escaped Nazi troops a second time.
He went through the countryside and almost made it to the Russian border before Nazi troops found him again.
“A kind of burr in their saddle…I didn’t have any regard for them at all,” McKinney gleefully laughed when telling the story.
He was eventually shipped off to a POW camp in Czechoslovakia where he befriended some English prisoners and was able to escape for a third time with a seventy-seven-man British commando unit.
“That night, we decided we had enough of that,” McKinney said, thinking back to the brazen escape.
After days, the group of men made it to Germany where Allied forces had secured a safe zone and McKinney was sent home to America.
When asked if he had ever been back to Europe, McKinney simply replied:
“I don’t think I want to.”