Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind (47 page)

What with all the delays in passing the details of the captured soldiers to the authorities in London, it took some time for a regular flow of mail to reach the stalags. It was not until autumn 1940 that the prisoners were allowed to receive clothing parcels.

While the vast majority of the 40,000 prisoners were transported via the canals and railways of northern Europe to the stalags of Germany, others remained behind in France. Such was the devastation caused by the blitzkrieg that someone was needed to clear up the mess. German manpower was fully stretched, clearing up the remaining French opposition, occupying the conquered lands, preparing for a possible invasion of Britain and the planned invasion of the Soviet Union. So there were no men available to return France to a semblance of normality. As a result some prisoners were immediately absorbed into a system of ‘frontstalags’, in which they were put to work.

Initially the organization was haphazard, with local commanders ordering groups of captured soldiers to work for them. In the aftermath of the siege of Calais, while some were sent on the march towards Germany, others were forced to help clear up damage in the docks. Elsewhere British prisoners were made to begin the systematic rape of the defeated French nation. They were sent into factories where the produce was immediately packed up and sent back to Germany for sale on to the consumer market. Others found themselves made to clear the roads of the rotting corpses of horses killed during the German advance. Even more humiliating was the experience of three soldiers who were made to clear sewage from blocked drains. As both their guards and a group of French prisoners looked on, the men were forced to remove excrement from the drain and throw it out through a window, with just their hands to use as shovels.

From June to November 1940 British prisoners were employed at Frontstalag 142 in the railway yards of the French town of Besançon. Their work included loading and unloading munitions on to trains to be sent forward to the front. They were also made to load damaged tanks on to wagons ready to be sent back to Germany for repair. Others were taken to Malmedy in Belgium where they were forced to fell trees to make temporary runways for the Luftwaffe. Though their employment in military work of this nature was illegal, there was nobody to whom the prisoners could complain. No Red Cross representatives were able to make contact with them and no news was sent home of their fate.

In the year that followed they became forgotten men. Not until early 1941, nine months after the defeat of the BEF, were the Red Cross able to visit some of the 294 men employed at the frontstalags. Many had remained in the areas where they had been captured. In some areas the prisoners were in small groups, such as the eight officers and ten other ranks working at Peronne. Elsewhere some unfortunate POWs were held alone, working for the enemy without the comfort and support of their fellow prisoners. Slowly, reports trickled back to London, painting a bleak picture. At Le Mans fifteen British soldiers were held in conditions that shocked Red Cross inspectors: ‘The disorder here is complete. The huts are falling to pieces. Food is poor and insufficient. The men sleep on the ground without any blankets. Conditions of hygiene are deplorable.’
¹²

The story was the same across northern France. The fifteen prisoners at Saveny received just two loaves of bread between them each day and on just four days a week they shared a small portion of horsemeat. Prussian guards at Laval were accused of brutalizing their prisoners who, without even a blanket, slept on a bare concrete floor. Red Cross inspectors went on to report how the British in the frontstalags were undernourished, treated most severely and often shot on the slightest provocation. The threat of lethal violence was most vividly shown when the 500 British prisoners at Mulhouse revolted following the outbreak of an epidemic. As a result of the revolt, twenty prisoners were picked out at random and executed.

The unfortunate prisoners at the frontstalags were not the only men put to work that year. Almost immediately after their arrival at their designated stalags, the thousands of POWs began to filter out into workcamps – known as AKs or arbeitskommandos – that spread rapidly across the Reich. Under the Geneva Convention all prisoners beneath the rank of sergeant could be put to work. There were definite rules about their employment that were designed to protect them from exploitation. They should not be employed in dangerous jobs, nor in any form of war work. They should be given rations equal with those allowed for civilian workers and be housed in clean and heated surroundings. During the following five years, few of the prisoners were treated according to the rules. Initially those in London had little idea of the working conditions endured by the men on working parties. In August 1940 the General Secretary of the British Red Cross wrote to the Foreign Office: ‘Several relatives of prisoners of war have been in here during the last few days to enquire about a rumour that is apparently going about, that their husbands, sons etc. have been put to work in the salt mines of Poland. I presume we can contradict this.’
¹³
His presumption was misplaced. As he wrote, hundreds of men were beginning life as enforced salt miners in Upper Silesia.

Initially, and understandably, most prisoners were wary about working for the enemy – after all they had gone to war to stop the Nazi war machine, not become part of it. However, most soon realized there was little choice in the matter – if the Germans told them to work, they would have to work. Furthermore, there was one attractive thing about working parties: they allowed the men out of the stalags and gave them contact with civilians. The first groups of prisoners, who were sent out to work from the stalags each morning, returned in the evening carrying the spoils of illicit deals they were able to conduct. Furtively, the prisoners made contact with civilians and traded whatever they had available. Watches and wedding rings were exchanged for bread and sausage. Desperation led the prisoners to develop an entrepreneurial spirit. If a prisoner knew he could get two loaves for one watch, he would make deals with fellow prisoners, agreeing to take their watches out to sell. He could then offer the seller a portion of what he had received, effectively acting as a broker for those unable to leave the stalag to make their own deals.

With conditions within the camp failing to improve, large numbers of prisoners began to fall sick. There were increasing numbers of TB cases, epidemics of boils, outbreaks of typhoid and a constant array of men suffering from festering sores caused by the constant scratching of insect bites. Despite the dedication of those members of the Royal Army Medical Corps who had been taken prisoner, there was a limit to how much they could do. For Ernie Grainger the desire to help his fellow inmates at Lamsdorf was undermined by one basic problem: ‘We had no equipment. There was an awful lot of dry pleurisy. It is not a fatal condition but it’s very painful. But we had nothing to treat it with. Bronchitis and asthma were a problem in the winter. Lots of people went down with frostbite and lung diseases. The Germans didn’t give us any medicines.’

It was a situation that was painfully obvious to Fred Gilbert. Having been shot three times in his final battle, Gilbert received little in the way of meaningful treatment for his wounds: ‘You were just supposed to get better. It slowly started to heal up. But whilst I was in Lamsdorf, I think it was bandaged up a couple of times in three months.’

Remaining at Thorn, Graham King was initially sent to work as an orderly for the dentist looking after the prisoners. He was only able to work two days a week since it was an eight-kilometre round trip to the surgery each day. He was just too weak to contemplate making the trip more than twice a week. Later in the year he began working at the Medical Inspection Room in Fort 15. With medical supplies so limited, their greatest fear was of major outbreaks of disease. Of particular concern was typhoid, since none of the water that arrived in the fort’s crumbling underground brick-built water tanks had been treated. Furthermore, water from the cesspits was found to be leaking into the main water tanks. As a result they were forced to carry out mass inoculations, injecting 1,500 men three times over a period of three weeks. In the weeks that followed they had to give a further 3,000 injections to inoculate against diphtheria. The problem was that the hospital had just two syringes and twenty-five needles. As a result, the medics had to regularly sharpen the needles between injections just to keep working.We worked hard in the MI Room. Following on from the dysentery and malnutrition we now had multiple boils, suppurating wounds from lice and fleabites, respiratory complaints and the threat of diphtheria. All the men had to have throat swabs taken and then inoculations were carried out, compulsorily. The lice and fleabite wounds were most time-consuming because there were so many on each patient which took a considerable amount of time to clean and dress. As there was a shortage of dressings, we had to reuse the bandages by giving the slack to the patient to hold and the orderly rewound the bandage. I was dressing the multiple septic lice bite sores of an ancient warrior – claimed to have dropped twenty years off his age to join up, but was a pensioner – when I noticed an army of lice walking up the bandage towards me. A quick shake and they fell to the floor where, with much stamping of booted feet we hoped the majority perished. It took about an hour to dress this guy’s wounds so he came every other day.

One of those whose health suffered while at Thorn was Seaforth Highlander David Mowatt. Such was his rapidly worsening condition, it seemed he had survived battle and the march into captivity for nothing:I was in Fort 17. But I got gastroenteritis – twice. My stomach was in a terrible state. The first time I was roped to the bloody bed, for five days. There was no medical attention. I recovered. Then suddenly a week later I had another attack. As I came around the second time I looked into a face of an officer. He had this little tin mug of water and was dabbing my lips. I said to him, ‘I thought I was in heaven!’ He said to me, ‘No, thank God. You’re still in the land of the living.’ He told me he was going to get me out of the hospital or else they’d end up carrying me out. He suggested I go on a working party. I said, ‘Sir. I can’t even stand up let alone work!’ But he knew he needed to get me out of the camp because the walls were running with water and were green with fungus. So he got me out on a small working party.

Once out at work he began to slowly recover, courtesy of the extra food that he received each day. It was clear to Mowatt that joining a working party had been a small price to pay to escape from the conditions that had reduced him to such an appalling physical state.

Sent initially on a working party to build a road – that was soon washed away during a storm – Dick Taylor was also glad to be working: ‘On a working party you were fully employed. You were pretty tired when you came back at night, there was no time for thinking.’ His fellow Northumberland Fusilier, Jim Charters, said the same thing: ‘It was a relief to go to work. If I hadn’t have been working I’d have gone round the bend.’

With time, some workcamps would become well established, offering a basic standard of living to the prisoners. However, in 1940 this was not the case. Early working parties endured living and working conditions far below the internationally agreed standards for POWs. The food was invariably awful, offering little in the way of sustenance for the working prisoners. One man, who had already lost two front teeth after being beaten by the guards, recorded his daily rations as black bread and coffee for breakfast, a pint of weak broth for lunch and a cup of coffee for his evening meal. He was only saved by the kindness of Polish prisoners who managed to get extra food for him. On an early working party, Bob Davies recalled the daily rations: ‘We were weak. We mainly had watery soup with black bread. We shared a ten-inch loaf between five people or, when food was short, it was one between six. It was once a day and that was your lot – no butter, marmalade or jam. We got hungry but the old stomach settles down, shrinks, and eventually you realize you don’t need so much food.’

Eric Reeves, who took part in the building work to expand the stalag at Schubin, was soon aware that the food shortages had undermined their ability to carry out even the most menial duties:They got loads of bricks and we formed a human chain to move them. One bloke said, ‘Here, that ain’t how you do it. You take two at a time . . .’ So someone else shouted, ‘Oi! We’re working for the Germans now. We’re not on piecework!’ So we passed them slowly from hand to hand. But even at that rate, after an hour or so, we’d had enough – we were shattered. Another time I was a lumberjack. We were out in the wood cutting trees to make pit props. They gave me a double-headed axe but I couldn’t even pick it up. It was too heavy. We were suffering from hunger.

As early as July 1940 some men arrived at Stalag 9C to discover that other prisoners had already been sent to workcamps. The first seventy-six British prisoners sent to work were employed on local building projects. Forty-two of the men slept in a single attic room while the remainder slept in a large room above a garage. The kitchen and laundry facilities were insufficient for the numbers living there and all seventy-six of them shared just five toilets. The men worked for nearly twelve hours each day but did not receive any work clothes. As a result their uniforms were soon ruined. It was little wonder the prisoners considered they were being made into slaves.

The story was repeated throughout the system of arbeitskommandos. Sleeping accommodation was always basic, with men sleeping in spartan huts often without even bunks, straw mattresses or blankets. Some of the luckier prisoners found themselves employed as builders and were pleased to discover they were actually constructing huts for themselves to live in. The huts may have been basic but at least they knew they would soon be sleeping in purpose-built accommodation rather than living 200 to a room in three-tier bunks contained within a former Polish Army stables.