Keith Richardson, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, April 2, 2001: Saving the Legacy tape no. 202

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K ITH RI HARD ON PRI 2 2001 turned around in the yard there and took us back to Tashkent, where we'd been in amp. They finally told us ... well, it came out later. We didn't know then why they took u back. So we went back to camp. By the middle of January, there were 131 of us there. A bunch of B-29 crews from China had crashed in Russia and were flown to our camp. It was January 28. We again were put on a train. All131 of us were put on a train and went to Ashkhabad and we stopped there again at the same place. But this time they had a whole convoy of trucks available to us, with Russian drivers, stripped of all insignia. They were officers in the Russian army, stripped of their insignia. They were just in army clothes, more or less incognito. They were the drivers and there were about ten trucks. So we had about ten or twelve men in each truck. I think there were ten trucks altogether. So in convoy we left Ashkhabad and headed south through the mountains between there and Iran. Those are big high mountains and it was winter. Oh, it was cold. We were in the back of the trucks under canvas covers, which were drawn over. We had no blankets, but we had four or five bales of hay. They started out to be kind of bales, but they got trampled down so it was just loose hay in a short time. We drove for three, twenty-four hour days, in the back of those trucks. We went clear to Tehran, the capital of Iran. In Tehran we were taken to a US Army medical hospital there. It was on an Army base and we went to the hospital where we were fumigated and deloused and what have you, and taken to the hospital, the whole bunch of us. They made apologies because the only food they had was bacon and eggs and toast and jam! That was the only food they had, they said. And here we'd been half­starving all the way. We only had hard brown bread and hard-tack crackers on the trucks 24