Hitler's British Slaves (4 page)

Once in Italian camps few of the prisoners tasted the fabled local cuisine, instead they made do with starvation rations of weak macaroni stews and biscuits described as looking and tasting like kitchen tiles. Others fought each other to get hold of biscuits that were already green with mould or crawling with maggots. Even in the cold of the Italian winter they survived on a bowl of stew and two bite-sized bread rolls for a whole day. Hunger reached such a level that some men considered frying pieces of cardboard to sate their cravings, and others happily ignored the maggots they found living in biscuits. In desperation prisoners willingly swapped their wedding rings for pots of jam, or exchanged their watches for chunks of bread. Others used boxes to make sparrow traps, their prey being plucked and thrown into the pot. Within months their health tumbled to a state where prisoners had to be careful about standing up too quickly for fear they might pass out. At one camp built on a hillside the starving men
could only make their way uphill by crawling on their hands and knees. As one prisoner later wrote: ‘Is it any wonder that we do not love the Italians?’
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They soon realised the benefits of Red Cross parcels, as one later wrote: ‘The greatest event in the life of a prisoner of war was the distribution of Red Cross parcels. Without them many of us would not be alive to tell the tale.’
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The situation was much the same for the men captured on Crete. For weeks many were kept on the island clearing up in the aftermath of battle. They worked all day under the blistering Cretan sun, filling in bomb craters, clearing rubble, preparing runways for the Luftwaffe, and burying the dead of both sides. Stinking and clad in rags their dry mouths craved for liquid refreshment, their stomachs yearned for hot food. As they toiled they watched their guards smoking British cigarettes, eating British rations and wearing British khaki drill uniforms. Each time local civilians attempted to give them food or water the guards chased them away, hitting them with rifle butts or firing over their heads. Some noted how they were taken prisoner in early June but were not registered as POWs until late August. In the intervening period they faced treatment that had serious repercussions for their health. It was little wonder the British doctors reported that many among the wounded were found to have infections in their wounds. Conditions soon became desperate and an Australian POW, Sergeant Maurice Kelk, later recorded the shocking treatment they were subjected to: ‘When I say no food, I mean no food.’
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He also noted how hundreds of the British and Australian prisoners died from dysentery, malaria or starvation. Describing his own skin as looking like parchment, Kelk noted how he dropped from 13 stone to just 7 stone in two-and-a-half months of captivity.

As hunger bit, the prisoners scrounged whatever they could
find to eat. When one group of men found a sack of flour they mixed it with olive oil and locally grown sultanas to bake a cake. When the cooking was complete, much to their surprise they found the cake was rock solid. On closer inspection they discovered the ‘flour’ had actually been plaster of Paris. Some among the prisoners noted that the ‘lentil’ soup given to them was actually hot water with dirt mixed into it.

Eventually, their work complete, the prisoners began the long haul to the Stalags of Germany. Exhausted from the weeks of hard labour, clad in filthy rags, their humiliation was almost complete. For some among them the final sign of how low they had fallen came when Italian soldiers emptied chamber pots over them from the upstairs window of a house. Marched to a port they were crammed into the deep holds of cargo ships where they were locked into the darkness. Exhausted they lay down, squashed like sardines against the men next to them, only to feel rats scampering over their faces as they attempted to sleep. The floors ran with urine and faeces as they awaited their arrival in port. It was a fitting prelude to life in captivity.

Once ashore they were transferred to rat-infested barracks at Salonika on the Greek mainland where they endured more disease and degradation before they were eventually moved north through the Balkans into Germany. Night by night they heard shots and cries as the guards opened fire on those going outside to use the stinking latrines. No mercy was shown to these men wracked by dysentery and in the morning the bodies of the dead were laid out as a warning to their fellow prisoners. Even during the day the guards had a habit of tossing hand grenades into the latrines to force the prisoners out. As a result the prisoners began to use the parade ground as their toilet. Yet again the prisoners faced a daily routine of boredom and starvation rations. They lived on weak stews and
soups, and noticed how the only meat arriving at the cookhouse seemed to be horses’ heads. When they were called out to parade some dropped dead, others collapsed from exhaustion. Those who stood up too quickly found themselves blacking out. The wretched men were forced to walk sideways up stairs, one step at a time gripping the handrail, for fear of falling. Others were reduced to crawling. One group of ravenous prisoners were able to steal a donkey that was cut up and divided between them. Nothing was wasted, with one desperate Australian cutting off the animal’s genitals, saying he would boil them for three hours and then eat them.

The raids on Dieppe and St Nazaire in 1942 brought many more soldiers trudging wearily into the Stalags of Germany. The campaigns in Italy and north-west Europe also brought more prisoners although with no major defeats their numbers were fewer than in the preceding years. Even in the opening hours of D-Day some men were left to the mercy of the enemy. The parachute drops of the morning of 6 June left many of the airborne soldiers isolated. Eric ‘Bill’ Sykes of the 7th Parachute Battalion was among them. He and his comrades were dropped far to the east of their target, the Orne river. He recalled how his plane’s crew had told them they ‘knew the exact field’, however: ‘They may have known the exact field but they sure as hell didn’t know the right river.’
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Teaming up with other stranded men he attempted to make his way back to his unit. After a number of days wandering, with occasional encounters with the enemy, they were eventually apprehended:

Finally on the thirteenth day, unlucky for some, the group of seven that I was with, eventually got ourselves into a predicament where we were pinned down in a ditch by machine gun fire and suffered the ignominy of capture. To our questionable credit, I must say that we were some of the first of the all-conquering liberation army to enter the city of Paris, albeit under armed guard with a German tour director. The German guards were very proud to show us their recent real estate acquisitions, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc De Triomphe, etc.
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Like so many of those taken prisoner in northern France four years earlier Sykes would suffer much before his final liberation:

At the Gare du Nord railway station in Paris where we were stood outside on display to the French people before being locked in box cars in the railway siding. Two days and two nights we were locked up in a boxcar before we got under steam and started our journey to far away places. The reason for this fright was that the siding was bombed each night by Allied aircraft and as we were locked in the box cars with no means of escape we were sitting targets and a hit would have meant our immediate demise. A large sliding door, which was locked at all times, was the only means of entry into, or exit from, our less than luxury accommodation and this could cause much alarm especially during the periods of strafing by Allied aircraft whilst we were en route to our final destination. The box cars had one small window about nine inches deep by 18 inches long situated near the roof and secured by strands of barbed wire, and during the heat of the day, it was a personal struggle to avoid suffocation by getting air from under the sliding door by rotation of people. I believe that there were about 30 prisoners to each car and we slept whenever possible on the bare floor boards. The only toilet was a bucket in one corner, which was not the most hygienic or the most fragrant aspects of creature comfort but, after all, we were prisoners. There were many times when we were locked in the car for several days on end without food, water, or sanitation, and in our particular luxury coach we had several walking wounded who did not survive the hazardous journey due to lack of medical treatment for the gangrenous infections in festering wounds which they had sustained in battle.
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Three complete months elapsed between capture and the moment Sykes finally entered the working camp that would become his home until liberation.

For soldiers captured after D-Day there was one further burden they had to endure, something that had not been a factor for the men captured in the early years of the war. By 1945 the Allied airforces had almost total command of the skies. Often able to patrol above the battlefields of Europe with impunity, they were entrusted with destroying the transport and supply infrastructure that brought German troops and supplies to the front. This involved daylight attacks on individual trains by fighter-bombers and heavy bombing raids on railway yards. For the newly captured men being transported on the trains that were the targets of their countrymen it became a fraught time. Unlikely to escape from the wagons and unable to see what was happening the prisoners listened in horror to the whooshing of rockets, the rattle of machine gun fire or the scream of bombs as they came under attack. Hearts beat fast and men prayed as they waited for the deadly impact of explosives. Bill Sykes remembered: ‘the fear of the potential horror of imminent death during one of the constant strafing by Allied aircraft, took its toll and many of the “unfortunates” never reached the promised land where “
Arbeit macht frei
”.’ He watched the reactions of the men around him as his train became the unwitting target of aerial attack:

I was with a group of POWs of different nationalities locked in a railroad cattle car which was located for some days and nights in a siding of the Gare De Nord railway station in Paris, mid June 1944, during the nightly bombings and strafings of the sidings by Allied aircraft there was a tendency for a few believers, mostly American, to pray out loud for salvation. The British POWs kept a stiff upper lip and chastised the ‘offenders’ for their doom and gloom attitude. Those couple of nights locked in the railway siding were the most frightening that I have ever experienced.
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The last great influx to the Stalags came in the aftermath of the defeat of the 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem when over 6,000 airborne troops were taken prisoner. This last large-scale defeat came in the aftermath of a bitter and intense battle in which both sides fought with a fervour seldom seen on the western front. Bryan Willoughby was among the paratroopers spearheading the drive to the bridge. Like so many of his comrades it was a journey he would not complete:

We ran right into the Germans in the woods. Straight away we were into one hell of a battle – no messing about. We lost half the company before we started. That was rough. I don’t think I was scared – you didn’t have time to be. I knew everything was going wrong. It was chaos. We didn’t know what to do next because we were cut off and the wireless didn’t work. Then on the Monday we headed into Arnhem. We just rambled along doing our own thing, getting shot at by snipers and so on. It wasn’t too bad. At four o’clock in the morning they said we’d go for the bridge. We were being shot at from all over the place – blokes were going down right, left and centre. Eventually we had about a 1000 yards to go but the company was down to about 20 men. The CO said ‘Right, make for the bridge’. There was none of this ‘Go! Go! Go!’ like you see in the Yankee films. There was hardly a sound. We were pinned down straight away. We realised we would be hit eventually but there really wasn’t any alternative. You couldn’t go backwards or sideways, so there only one place to go – forwards. We just kept shooting and running – and hoping to get away with it. Our chances of getting to the bridge were nil. I saw the company commander outside a house about 150 yards away, shouting ‘C’mon’. We were down to about half a dozen by then. I dived off to make for the house and got fairly near it. The next thing I felt a thump in the back and I’d been hit by a hand grenade. I span around and saw a dark object sailing towards me, I knew it was another grenade, I jumped back but it got me in the legs.
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Realising his role in the battle was over Willoughby knew he had to find help:

I was getting a bit ‘slap happy’. I joined a group of wounded with a Red Cross made from blood on a white shirt and we were taken prisoner. How did I feel? I was highly relieved to still be alive. Nothing else matters when you’re in a situation like that. Then this tank comes up and I was taken to a casualty clearing station in a café. Then they got behind the bar and started serving us drinks. They were quite sociable. There was no real animosity towards the Germans, they treated us like we treated their men.
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In the aftermath of the battle there were many prisoners, like Willoughby, treated with kindness by the enemy – a kindness that saved their lives. For others the experience was very different. Those who resisted as their captors robbed them
of personal possessions were shot without compunction, the actions of the guards ensuring compliance from the rest of the prisoners. When others escaped from a truck the guards opened fire on the remaining men causing many fatalities. A shadow of fear was cast over the prisoners by the conflicting behaviour of their captors. At one moment they were being well treated, at the next they were being executed without warning. To deepen the confusion some even watched as Germans who had executed prisoners were themselves executed by their own officers.