Stalag Luft IV was a German World War II prisoner-of-war camp in Gross Tychow, Pomerania (now Tychowo, Poland).

It housed mostly American POWs, but also Britons, Canadians, Poles, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Czechs, Frenchmen and a Norwegian.

In July of that year a military report was released which described such problems as inadequate shower facilities, unfit distribution of Red Cross parcels, and that prisoners complained about the food situation often.

These letters were harshly censored, with prisoners forced to tell families that they were being treated well and that there were no problems whatsoever.

[1] A report by the International Red Cross in October 1944 described camp conditions as generally bad.

The camp was divided into five compounds (A-E) separated by barbed wire fences, with the POWs housed in 40 wooden barrack huts, each containing 200 men.

Pneumonia, diphtheria, pellagra, typhus, trench foot, tuberculosis and other diseases ran rampant among the POWs.

When a wagon was not available and a POW fell out along the road, a German guard would drop back and a shot would be heard.

When the sound of Allied artillery grew closer, the German guards were less harsh in their treatment of POWs, because the prisoner roles might soon be reversed.

With the Russian and Western Allied forces closing in rapidly, the POWs of Stalag Luft IV crossed the River Elbe on 21 April 1945, near Dahlenburg.

On the morning of 2 May 1945 the POWs were all sitting in a ditch next to the River Elbe near Lauenburg, Germany, when the British arrived and liberated the camp.

James B. Lindsay 15081658, he and two fellow POWs, Dewitt and Lockenny, armed with a hatchet taken from a woodpile of a nearby barn, captured a guard and fled on 24 April 1945; they found the body of a second decapitated German officer while making their escape.