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Diary offers a glimpse into soldier’s time as POW in World War II

By Ashley Rader

No. 094839.

That was the number given James Howard Sheffield to identify him among thousands of other soldiers when he was captured as a prisoner of war in Luxembourg during World War II.

The sole remaining account of Sheffield’s time as a prisoner of war is recorded in the diary he faithfully kept for the first two months of his four-month captivity. Sheffield’s daughter, Anna Deal, said her father did not talk to his family about his time in the Army, so she did not know many of the details of what happened to him until she read the diary. Deal said she was not aware of her father’s journal until her mother showed it to her a few years ago.

To tell her father’s story, Deal shared that journal with the STAR.

“There was so much that we did not know,” Deal said. “He just didn’t talk about it. To read what he had to go through, what he endured, it was unreal.”