Stories from the past

40 years ago

IMPERIAL — An Imperial police officer suffered minor injuries Sunday when a sniper shot out the window of his police car at California Midwinter Fairground.

Officer Darrell Osborne suffered a cut forearm from flying glass in an exchange of gunfire with an unknown assailant.

Osborne said at least five, possibly six, shots were fired at him when he responded shortly after 9 p.m. to a call that a car without lights had entered the fairgrounds.

Some law enforcement officers today believe Osborne was the victim of an intended ambush.

30 years ago

Forty-three years ago, as allied troops crawled across France toward Berlin, Cpl. Daniel Mendoza and his U.S. Army comrades rested in a bunker near the German border.

The machine gun nest that protected them was knocked out, and a German commander ordered the Americans to surrender before the entire bunker was blown up.

Surrounded by German troops, the men were overmatched and had to give in. “We were hoping and praying for some support of any kind,” Mendoza said. “It never came.”

The 66-year-old veteran added, “It was a shocking experience because it was only a matter of time before we would all have been wiped out.”

But despite the horrors of battle, Mendoza’s capture began an even more terrible period of his life, six months as a prisoner of war that he would prefer not to remember.

“I would have rather been on the front lines, whether we were advancing or withdrawing, than a POW,” Mendoza said.

The Brawley native and all 30 men in the 4th Platoon began their captivity with a forced march away from the battlefield to a railroad siding. Their captors took away their helmets and with little protection from the winter cold, the men marched at night facing artillery fire from Allied troops, who could not distinguish the prisoners from the enemy because of a driving snow-storm.

When they reached the train tracks, the men were herded into old French railroad boxcars for the journey to their “stalag” near the German city of Dresden, which was later devastated by some of the most intensive Allied bombing of the war.