Eight months into combat in Europe and Stanley Akita had barely a scratch.

But on Oct. 23, 1944, after the 100th Infantry helped liberate the town of Bruyeres in France and captured 27 German prisoners in Biffontaine, Akita had a bad feeling.

He was ordered to take the prisoners back to the unit's headquarters with six other armed soldiers and several wounded fellow GIs.

That feeling — called "kimochi ga shirasu" in Japanese — overcame him. He thought that something was going to happen. Something bad.

As they walked the German prisoners through the dense Vosges Mountains, they lost their way and came upon a camp of Germans.

The 17 nisei soldiers were outnumbered.

"The only thought in my mind after the first battle was that I'll either get a million-dollar (wound) and go home and end up crippled, or I would get killed," said Akita, now 84 and living in Kahala. "The thought of being a prisoner never occurred to me."

Akita and his fellow GIs were taken to Stalag VII A, a huge German prison camp about 45 miles east of Munich. It was surrounded by double barbed wire and machine gun towers.

The first night there, they slept on bundles of straw infested with bedbugs and fleas.

The low-ranking prisoners — Akita included — were put on trains to Munich every day to clear debris from the town and its railroads. It took up to three hours to get to the work site.

There, the nisei soldiers would trade the cigarettes they got from American Red Cross parcels for loaves of caraway-seed bread.

Better-tasting than the "sawdust" bread served in the prison camp, these loaves could be traded for a pack of cigarettes from the higher-ranking soldiers left behind.

From rags he found, Akita sewed four large pockets inside his overcoat that could hold up to four loaves of bread. He would take the loaves back to the prison and trade them for cigarettes, which he would use to get more bread.

"We had it made," he said, laughing.

The Germans never mistreated the nisei prisoners, he added, though they were curious to learn more about these Japanese-American soldiers who had the faces of their allies.

"They were so curious of us being Japanese and fighting for America," Akita said. "Anytime a high-ranking German official came who would speak English we were interrogated. They wanted to know if we went to Japanese school, what we learned, why we were fighting for the United States. 'You should be fighting for us, not against us,' they would say. I heard that so many times."

Life in the prison was pretty routine, Akita said. They got up at 4:30 a.m., drank coffee and were in the boxcars to Munich by 5:30 a.m. They cleared paths for cars and covered up bomb craters. Once in a while, they got to harvest potatoes — one of Akita's favorite details.

Every so often the prisoners got Sunday off. If it was sunny, they would air out their blankets, take baths and get haircuts. Akita was one of the camp's barbers.

In early March 1945, about 500 of the prisoners, including Akita, were sent to a small farming village about three miles from a railroad yard. They stayed in a large barn and slept on straw.

They walked three miles to and from work every day to clear the railroad.

Then one night in April, Akita heard a familiar sound — American machine guns.

The following day an American tank rolled into the prison and liberated the POWs.

"The first thing (the tankers) gave us was American bread," Akita said. "It looked and tasted like cake to us."

Reach Catherine E. Toth at ctoth@honoluluadvertiser.com.