Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind (52 page)

A paper submitted to the War Office by Major Newman of the RAMC set out the psychological impact of captivity:intense initial depression after capture, the period of recovery of morale with frustrated revenge feelings liable to be misdirected towards the home authorities; the gradual adaptation of the more fortunate PW to his conditions and the storing up of frustration in less fortunate men. Then follows a long boring period which worries the man because unlike a civil criminal there is no period put to his captivity and during this period frets for fear of being forgotten, especially by those from whom he seeks affection.
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Major Newman’s predictions were echoed by an officer who wrote from a stalag to the Swiss Legation in Berlin in February 1944: ‘More recently, among the older prisoners, the number of mental and nervous cases has been steadily increasing and I see signs now, amongst a number, that they are reaching a breaking point.’
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The psychological effects of long-term captivity were considered so severe that some in the British military suggested that there should be a straight swap between the British and Germans of healthy POWs. The suggestion was never put to the Germans since it soon became clear that the Germans would get 3,000 fighting men while the British would receive 3,000 men who would most likely be immediately discharged from service.

Desperate not to be forgotten by the outside world, the most important thing in the POW’s life became his mail. Over the years of captivity this became a lifeline, the only thing that connected them with the civilian world of their families. Such was the impact of mail that prisoners recalled greeting each other with ‘How’s your mail?’ rather than ‘How are you?’ It seemed that every prisoner received bad news at some point. While in Thorn, Fred Coster received the devastating news that his brother had been killed in action. He later also heard that his girlfriend had gone off with a Canadian soldier. Yet not all the news was bad, even if it had to be waited for. At working camps from Stalag 8B, Fred Gilbert attempted to keep alive a long-distance relationship with his girlfriend:I hadn’t known her very long when I was captured. I’d only met her in 1940. Lads were getting letters off their wives – ‘Don’t bother to come home – I’m not living there any more – I’m marrying someone else’ – and so on. We heard this time and time again. It destroyed them. It was their only link to the outside world. I thought that was a bit grim. You’d see a bloke with a letter and people would say, ‘Is it a good one? Is everything all right?’ So it wasn’t a happy time. However, I wrote home to ask my girlfriend to marry me – I had to wait some months to get the answer. It was the right answer fortunately – I just hoped she’d keep her word.

Others were not so fortunate to receive news they wanted to hear. Peter Wagstaff recalled the impact bad news had upon one of his fellow prisoners: ‘He received a letter from his fiancee within a couple of months. She wrote, “I don’t know how long you are going to be away. I don’t think I can wait that long.” He climbed the wire and got shot by the guards. That happened to a lot of people.’

While ‘Dear John’ letters from girlfriends and wives brought devastating news, other letters brought information that just could not be believed. Graham King recalled reading a letter on behalf of an illiterate soldier: ‘If men heard their wives were being friendly with Yanks, there was bugger all they could do about it. This one illiterate bloke’s wife wrote that she had heard a noise one evening and gone to the back door. When she got there she found a little baby had been left there. She said it looked so much like her husband she had decided to keep it. And this bloke accepted it! I wonder if it had been different if he had been able to read it himself.’

While all the prisoners experienced some form of mental anguish, there were increasing numbers who suffered severe psychological disturbances as a consequence of five years’ captivity. For some the trauma was a manifestation of issues that had already plagued them pre-war – in the words of their fellow prisoners they were the type who ‘couldn’t handle it’. For others the trauma of war had simply devoured their ability to resist the strain of captivity. The most severe cases were later found to be men who were ruminating over the death of friends and comrades or who had experienced a particularly distressing experience in battle.

There was a fine line between misery and madness, and the prisoners all witnessed enough suffering to realize that they were actually among the more fortunate groups detained within the Third Reich. At least they had the nominal protection of the Geneva Convention, something that was not shared by the Russians within the stalags. The British might have been appalled by the treatment handed out to the Russians, but at least they were just witnesses rather than victims. ‘Ginger’ Barnett, a medic at Stalag 8B, remembered: ‘The Russians were treated like animals. I saw starving Russian POWs being used like horses to pull carts piled high with their own dead. The poor devils were so cold they fought each other to get the clothes off the dead.’

When prisoners did crack up it was disturbing for the men who witnessed it. Jim Reed recalled watching a man attempting to dig his way through the floor with a spoon: ‘I knew him and tried to talk to him but next time I saw him he was barefoot and halfway up the barbed wire. The guard started prodding him with a bayonet and made him climb back.’ Others were not so fortunate, as Jim Pearce recalled: ‘A lot of people got really down in the dumps – they didn’t care if they lived or died. They’d pinch anything – they’d commit suicide by climbing the wires. They knew they were going to get shot.’ At a working party on a farm at Adlesbruck Ken Willats and Gordon Barber were woken by a fellow prisoner calling out the name of a local girl with whom he had fallen in love. It was clear that the man was losing his mind. Gordon Barber remembered that night:It was uncanny, it frightened us. What the fucking hell was going on? All night he stood by the window holding the bars, as he gazed out into the darkness and sang about his lover. My mate Ken went up to him and said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘I love her. I don’t care what the guards say; I’m going to see her tonight.’ He’d gone. He’d flipped. All you could see were fag ends burning. None of us could handle it. Next morning he wouldn’t go to work. We saw him with his hands through the barbed wire. The guards said they’d shoot him. We said, ‘You can’t shoot him, he’s gone crazy.’ So ‘Dixie’ Dean walks over, says, ‘Fipper, you’ve got to go.’ Then hits him and knocks him straight out. We carried him to the fields, but he was useless. When the sergeant in charge of us came round that month they took him away. He got sent home.

At least this prisoner was protected by his comrades; others had no one there to help them when they needed it most, as Fred Coster recalled: ‘I was lined up outside Fort 13 to go on a working party. We heard a clatter in the courtyard. We looked round and one of the chaps had jumped off the roof. He’d gone mad and killed himself. His body was down there on top of this big steel drain cover. We didn’t know who it was, we just marched off to work.’

In the summer of 1944 the prisoners were struck by news of a landmark event that helped lift their spirits to new levels. The announcement of the D-Day landings marked a turning point for the men who had been in captivity for four years. After so long waiting, the British Army and its allies were back in France, working hard to advance through the landscape that had seen its defeat back in 1940. Now, it seemed, the soldiers who had escaped at Dunkirk were returning to liberate their comrades who had been left behind.

There was another sign that helped spark the realization that Germany must finally be defeated. From 1944 onwards, those men employed in the factories of the Third Reich saw an increasing weight of bombs dropped on Germany by the Allied air forces. The very thought that high in the skies above them were their own countrymen, bringing the war to the heart of the Reich, lifted their spirits. However, each pound of high-explosive may have helped hasten the end of the war but, for those on the receiving end, it also ushered in a period of mounting danger. Eric Reeves, who had last found himself under bombardment in the fields around Abbeville in 1940, found the industrial complex he was working within was one of the major targets for the bombing campaign. He was unfortunate to be employed at Blechammer, where synthetic fuel was manufactured for the German war machine:It really got hit! The first time was in June 1944. They hit the place while we were working – but we weren’t allowed in air-raid shelters. Then they bombed us each month until Christmas. At that time the Germans were so desperate for manpower that we were working every day for four weeks then having a weekend off. We’d just finished our shift and got back to the camp on Saturday afternoon and over the bombers came and hit our camp with five bombs. That’s when we lost blokes.

With the commencement of the bombing raids on Blechammer the whole atmosphere changed for the prisoners:The civilians you used to talk to stopped saying ‘good morning’. The offices were all at one end of the camp. They had a line of buses waiting for the air raids. So as soon as the sirens went all the boftins could get in the buses and get away. We were working near there one day and as the sirens went we waited for the buses. When they turned the corner we ran out and climbed up the ladder that took you on to the roof rack. We went about ten miles out while the camp was being bombed – we had a grandstand view of the bombing from this hill. But one time we did it and the bombers actually bombed all round the hill we were on. They were bombing the antiaircraft sites around us! This German said to us, ‘You will have to walk back!’ I was cheeky, I said to him, ‘Yeah, and from here we can run away.’ So he let us back on the bus to go back to the camp.

Although the air raids helped to reassure the prisoners the Allies were winning the war, they also put them under the psychological pressure of worrying that bombing might turn the guards against them:You were always in a certain amount of danger that one of the guards was going to run amok. One of the guards went home on leave and previously he’d treated all the blokes well. He’d been fair to them, they’d even given him fags and coffee to take home. But when he came back from leave he was a broken man because his family had been destroyed in a bombing raid. He was a different man after that. He was spiteful to the prisoners. You could see the difference in him. It wouldn’t have taken much for them to turn on us.

By 1945 there still remained thousands of POWs – in varying degrees of health – who had been in captivity since the dark days of 1940. Almost to a man, they had developed a ‘stalag mentality’ in which their prime concern was for their personal survival. They had grown cynical and increasingly accepted anything the world threw at them as long as their own lives were not affected. Les Allan recalled how, in the latter days of the war, long-term prisoners would feel less bitter about violence by the guards, pointing out that the victim had probably brought the violence on himself by his behaviour. Effectively, they had developed a protective shield that helped keep them sane in a world that had grown increasingly mad. As Jim Pearce remembered, as their fifth year of captivity drew to a close: ‘Life was getting tough and the Jerries were getting tough as well!’

The discovery of just how mad the world had become would include a final trial that was to be faced by the victims of Dunkirk – it was a trial that allowed them the right finally to return home.

I met him just after the war and he was a very cynical, very embittered young chap.
Patricia Wagstaff on the effect of five years’ captivity upon her husband

Everything you do in life leaves a scar and those five years left many scars . . . There were about twelve people captured with me and only about six of them came back home.
Peter Wagstaff on the psychological impact of five years’ captivity

As 1944 drew to a close the men left behind at Dunkirk were deep in the midst of their fifth winter in captivity. For six months, since the joyous relief of the D-Day landings, the prisoners had waited for the army that had escaped in 1940 to repay the favour and rescue them. If the summer and autumn of 1944 had been filled with good news, as the Allies advanced on the German frontier, the winter was very different. Every winter had been a miserable experience for the prisoners. Working prisoners spent days out in the bitter cold shovelling snow, cutting ice, digging sugar beet from frozen ground. With no protective clothes they wrapped themselves up as best they could and prayed to avoid frostbite. Yet this final winter was something else.

With Germany facing defeat, its economy was slowly collapsing. Rations deteriorated, often falling back to the starvation levels they had known in the sickening summer of 1940. Back in their first year of captivity they had been saved by Red Cross parcels, but by late 1944 the supply of parcels had begun to dry up. As the Allied advance cut through the supply routes previously used for parcels, the prisoners’ future began to look increasingly bleak. With the icy hand of the war’s worst winter gripping the prisoners, they once more began to face the awful realization that if something did not happen soon they might not live to see liberation.

What did happen was not something any of them would have hoped for. In early 1945 the stalags and workcamps across the eastern regions of the Reich – East Prussia and the former Polish and Czech lands – began to close. For all the prisoners had long dreamt of camps closing so that they could head home, this was not the end they had hoped for. While five years previously they had been crammed into stinking cattle trucks for the journey east, the journey west would be different. This time they were heading west on foot. There was an irony in these circumstances. In 1940 they had endured the blistering heat of summer as they marched into captivity. In 1945 they were again sent out on to the roads, this time on roads deep in ice and snow. Yet, though the weather conditions were so different, the prisoners soon realized their real enemies were the same – starvation, exhaustion and the murderous behaviour of some among their guards. It was a journey that drove the prisoners to the very brink of survival.