1945

January–March

 * February 19, 1945

NONCHALANCE AS AN ART FORM

After dinner, Mr. and Mrs. J.E. Griggs board a city bus downtown. They pay their fare and walk down the aisle, passing a young man who sits alone at the front of the bus. Something doesn't look quite right to J.E. Griggs.

"His boots weren't American-made," Griggs later told the Tennessean, explaining what had set him to wondering about the rider. It does not appear to have registered on Griggs, the bus driver or any other passengers that the young man was dressed in full German uniform, adorned with the inverted chevron of a private first class in the Wehrmacht.

The bus lurches on, making its way out Franklin Road. After a while, Griggs gets curious enough to strike up a conversation with the mysterious rider. In broken English, he gets the point across: He is a prisoner of war, escaped from Fort Knox, Ky., and abandoned by his fellow escapees; he's hungry, tired and lost, and he just wants to go back to the POW camp.

Griggs apprehends the prisoner, taking him off the bus and turning him over to the police. The Nazi invasion of Nashville, as carried out by 19-year-old Werner Schwanbeck, is over.

--by Tom Wood

Sources: Arnold Krammer, Nazi Prisoners of War in America (Stein and Day, 1979); Nashville Tennessean, 2/20/45.

(Originally published in Nashville Scene, 2/18/93)