Hitler's British Slaves (43 page)

Whilst they rebuilt their relationships with their families the ex-POWs had to realise there was much about life to which they needed to adapt. Long forgotten details of home life seemed unreal – the soothing ticking of clocks, tables laid for meals with tablecloths and cutlery, open fires rather than the stoves of central Europe, the taste of common British vegetables rather than the pickled cabbage and boiled turnips they had grown so familiar with. Where there had once been no choice now they had choice – whether to stay in or go out, what to eat, which radio station to listen to. They overheard conversations on subjects they knew nothing of. Accepted details of everyday life such as the Mulberry Harbours were a complete mystery to them. All were small, seemingly insignificant details of normal life, but were complicated dilemmas to men who had endured captivity.

These problems were no less trying for single men, since at least the married men had someone to return to. Many came home to their bedrooms in the family home they had left years before. They looked back at their previous lives and realised how much they had changed. The passing years had seen them outgrow their childhood homes. The 18- and 19-year-old boys who had gone to war six years before had returned as men – men whose experience of the horrors of war had matured them beyond belief. Yet despite their new found maturity and the desperate yearning for female company some men found they could no longer approach women. Years of captivity had eroded their confidence and they felt uncomfortable in mixed company. Some attended dances but were unable to ask women to take the floor. It would take
time for them to learn to live fully, and soon many families realised the brave face shown in the letters from the POW camps had been little more than a mask concealing a reality few outsiders could have imagined.

The attention given to the return of the prisoners caused discomfort for some among them. No one could begrudge families wanting to visit them, nor blame them for wanting to hear tales of war. However, many among the prisoners simply wanted to be left alone. After so long in enforced captivity, crammed into huts alongside other men, they yearned for solitude. Instead many became curiosities, constantly receiving visitors who wished to view them. Few wanted the attention, preferring to rebuild their lives quietly without the constant questioning of well-intentioned friends and relatives. Above all they wanted to fit back into society with as little fuss as possible.

Feeling they had wasted so much of their lives in Stalags and work camps the ex-prisoners realised they needed to change and put behind them the memories of what had gone before. They couldn’t continue with the lives they had known. Everything needed to be moderated. Table manners needed to be learnt all over again. They had to remember to use cutlery rather than their fingers and not to lick plates clean in desperation. They also needed to remember that few among the civilian population expected to hear every sentence punctuated by swearing. Some had even attended lectures to prepare them for civilian life, however the advice sometimes left a lot to be desired. At one lecture former POWs were advised to modify their table manners, being told: ‘When you go home, don’t say pass the fucking butter! Say pass the fucking butter – please!’
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Though such comments may have provoked laughter, there was a serious side to the experience of returning home from
war. Although all of society was attempting to readapt to peacetime conditions the ex-prisoners perhaps had it harder than most. All the demobbed soldiers needed to reconstruct and restart their lives but for the prisoners the circumstances seemed more extreme. The curtailment of their freedom had stripped away many of the certainties of life and replaced them with doubt. Freed from Stalag VIIa at Moosburg, ex-paratrooper Bryan Willoughby came back ready to rebuild his life:

I wasn’t ashamed of having been a POW. I was 25 when the war ended. I’d got no job. I didn’t know anything. As ignorant as a pig, I was. I got a job in insurance through the recommendation of a friend. There was no time to dwell on my experiences. Other things were more important, like scratching a living. I had time to make up. I don’t think it’s generally realised just how little we knew of life, when we came out of the army. The ordinary things of life people would be expected to know we didn’t. All that had to be learnt. Like the business of trying to buy a house – what to do, what not to do. We’d spent our youth thinking of something else – trying to stay alive.
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As the POWs struggled to adapt to fit into the civilian world, much of the burden was carried by those family members closest to them. Some of the unconscious behaviour of former POWs went unexplained, they made decisions that confused their wives and children but which, with the passing of time, became clear. Some children of former POWs were denied normal childhood treats by their fathers. Ex-POWs didn’t want to visit zoos and see animals held in small cages, nor allow caged pets to be kept in their homes. Upon arrival home one former POW immediately opened a birdcage and
allowed its inhabitant to fly away. The very thought of any living thing being confined in so small a space brought back intense memories of their own incarceration. At mealtimes they could not tolerate seeing food being left on plates, or rejected by ungrateful children. To men who knew such scraps could mean the difference between life and death such behaviour was unacceptable. One former POW disrupted a civic event in Swansea when the pensioners for whom the event was organised were refused food until the local dignitaries arrived, in his fury he upended one of the tables, which in turn collapsed the rest of the tables in the hall. Whilst most people attending the event were furious other former POWs stood by him and offered support, fully understanding his emotions at seeing people being forced to wait to eat.

In light of such tensions it was to the credit of most families that they allowed their husbands or sons to adapt to civilian life in their own time. George Marsden was one of those who endured a lifelong struggle with his memories of the degrading squalor in which he was held at Fallingbostel. With the support of his wife he was able to attempt to rebuild his life: ‘My life was affected, in that I became subdued. I think every night about certain things and have been unable to go away on holidays or be away from home. I have been back to Normandy, but was agitating to return home again, we have never been abroad on holiday, but I have a good wife who has looked after me.’
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The men who had received years of support from their wives whilst they were POWs became conscious of the mental anguish their wives had suffered – not knowing how long his captivity might last, nor if they would ever meet again – and were concerned at how it had affected their relationships. One later wrote: ‘My biggest regret was not that it marred my life, but also caused hardship and trouble to my
wife and children. Much to her credit she never reproached me for it. Looking back I wonder if it was worth it or just an unmitigated folly.’
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These men were not alone in suffering. Though most hid their feelings, few could not help but feel they had contributed little to the eventual victory and owed much to others. Many among them remained reluctant to talk of their experiences and despite all they suffered they considered themselves fortunate compared to so many.
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They saw the conditions of labour endured by prisoners in the Far East and blessed their good fortune to have been captured in Europe or North Africa.
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They could also remember the appalling deprivations forced upon Russian POWs and the brutality shown towards the forced labourers from concentration camps. Some among them had witnessed at first hand the ultimate horror of the Nazi regime, something which helped put their own sufferings into context. ‘Bill’ Sykes was among them:

Eventually after many days and nights of aimless wandering, I was picked up by forward echelon troops of the American forces and dispatched to a hospital near Nuremburg, suffering from a bad case of dysentery and malnutrition. During my time at this location I met an American Army Sergeant who indicated that he had a Jeep and was going to travel to a concentration camp at Buchenwald, and seeing no one else had volunteered to travel with him, would I be interested. I said certainly, why not. I had travelled this far and survived, so why shouldn’t I see for myself the crimes of man’s inhumanity to man. Anyway, I figured that in my current physical condition I would be right at home amongst the skin and bone fraternity. Once again how wrong could I be. The scene that I witnessed was one of infinite horror where piles of dead bodies, in various stages of decomposition, were scattered about the camp. The living could not be distinguished from the dead. A place of horror, disbelief and anger against the perpetrators. To those unbelievers out there, I can attest to the fact that Hitler’s ‘Final solution’ the ‘Holocaust’, or whatever one wishes to call the terrible acts of inhumanity, did occur and was as violent and horrific as portrayed in later documents.
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Looking back, men like Sykes realised their own suffering seemed minimal – indeed they had been fortunate to survive when so many had perished. Instead of wallowing in self-pity, they held their heads up high and continued with life.

Whilst the plight of the Far East prisoners has been highlighted over the years, the realities of imprisonment by the Germans has received scant public attention. Former POWs were unaware of how little the people of Britain knew of their sufferings, nor would they learn of them for many years to come. Although they did not face the same levels of brutality and systematic cruelty that others endured at the hands of their Japanese captors, they suffered enough to ensure their lives were changed forever. Yet somehow much of what they experienced was forgotten or simply never made public. For every man whose memoirs of suffering were published it seemed a hundred others told their stories of escape and evasion. And the public wanted heroes not victims. Those who spent long hours tunnelling to freedom seemed to embody the defiant spirit of the wartime years, not the men who spent five years slaving for the common enemy. These ex-POWs had suffered more than many others – most had endured defeat in battle, faced the humiliation of captivity and been powerless to prevent the enemy from enlisting them to work on the farms or in the factories of the Reich.

Maybe some felt ashamed of having worked for the enemy, maybe they were frustrated that so many years had been wasted in the mind numbing drudgery of slave labour. Maybe they were just too exhausted to tell their story. Some quite simply thought that no one would ever believe their tales of the disease and deprivation endured in the Stalags and work camps. Ex-POW copper miner Alec Reynolds explained why he seldom talked of his experiences as a POW:

It’s rarely that I ever talk about it. I never thought I’d suffered. My boys never knew where I’d been or what I’d done. For years no one could get anything out of me, but I talk about it more now. Being a POW was just part of life. The real shocks were when you first went away into the army. You had no idea what was going to happen to you. Then when you first go into battle, it was just confusion. Anyway, the 1930s had been grim so the POW camp wasn’t too much of a shock. At home as a kid there were ten children in a two bedroom house. There wasn’t much food, you just ate what you could find. The ones who worked always ate first. We had soup nearly every day. It was a big pot with everything in it. You’d put water in each day and heat it up. The thing is, it wasn’t that different when I was a prisoner, so it was no shock. I’d been brought up with that sort of life.
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Arnhem veteran Bryan Willoughby also had a quite simple explanation for why he spoke so little of his experiences in the post-war years: ‘For 15 or 20 years after the war you didn’t tell your stories. The quickest way to clear a room was for somebody to tell their war experiences. People were fed up with it – they’d had their fill of war.’
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Others realised they would have to put the whole thing behind them if they wished to progress in the new post-war world. Ken Willats,
who had barely survived the first day’s march from Stalag XXb, recalled his life after liberation:

I didn’t throw myself into life upon my return. Things in Britain at that time were very bad. You came home, you met a woman, you fell in love. You needed to look round for a job and somewhere to live. You had another goal to achieve in life. You were coming back to a country that had been devastated, there were no houses, rationing was still in place. If you were going to get married you had to look at the moment and carve out a new life for yourself. We settled down into a routine that would have been impossible before the war. We were trying to make our way in the world after a five year break – as were many other people. We felt we had lost a few years of life – five years is a big slice of your life – but so had a lot of others. But it was the same for a whole generation.
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In common with many ex-POWs, Willats recognised that in a lot of ways their war years had actually been spent in greater safety than many others. Despite the deprivation and disease, the monotony and the mental torment, life could have been a whole lot worse:

The fighting troops must have suffered tremendously. Without being too smug – having done what one could, which wasn’t a lot quite frankly, and then having been taken prisoner – providing you kept your head down, lived a quiet life and weren’t too antagonistic towards the Germans, you didn’t have too much to worry about. It was boring and one was on tenterhooks about the future but by going out to work you settled into a daily routine. So it was a boring but strange existence.
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