Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind (51 page)

As the war progressed, the supply of Red Cross parcels grew to have another importance. With the German war effort faltering, shortages began to appear across the Reich, leaving the guards desperate for commodities such as soap, coffee and cigarettes. Luckily for the prisoners these were three commodities they did have some access to. Those prisoners who received Red Cross parcels were able to trade these items for whatever they desired. Graham King described how the system operated:Schiller was a staunch member of the Nazi Party and was a Brownshirt. For all that, he was very friendly and I soon had him operating a black-market enterprise with me. He was addicted to English cigarettes (
verboten
). English Red Cross parcels were coming through regularly and certain types of parcels addressed to individuals could be sent. All food was a bulk issue but clothing, books, records, tobacco and cigarette parcels could be sent to individuals. I even had a portable, wind-up gramophone sent out. Cigarettes, tea, chocolate (used to make up weight of 5 Kgms of clothing parcels) were the Euros of the POW camps. German Reichgeld and Lagergeld had very little purchasing power. However, chocolate, coffee, tea and soap were useful items of barter but cigarettes were at the top because they could be used singly or in multiples. The good Doktor could obtain a flash type of cigarette lighter, which became a ‘must have’ among the POW community. The Herr Doktor swapped one lighter, which cost 7.50Rms, for a tin of fifty cigarettes and I sold them on at fifty per cent profit.

Of course, trade was not the only method the prisoners used for improving their lifestyle. Theft from the enemy became an everyday part of stalag life, as Graham King later recalled:Many of the POWs worked on local smallholdings, many poultry farms. During the egg-laying season the Germans were surprised to experience an immense shortage of fresh eggs. Of course, they were being smuggled into the camps where we experienced a glut. Eggs were so plentiful they became an embarrassment and were used in all kinds of ways. Fresh raw egg stirred up in tea with sugar and KLIM milk were a guarantee of erotic dreams and, like Ambrosia cream rice, was much in demand . . . Eggs were smuggled into the camp by using the excellent design of the British battledress, which was a baggy blouse and trousers. The trousers were secured at the ankles by either gaiters or puttees. The eggs were gently packed into the air gaps and the smuggler marched into camp. The record number of eggs smuggled into the camp in this manner by one man, on one trip, was two hundred.

At Stalag 8B Ernie Grainger saw the effects of the diet on prisoners: ‘The main problem was stomach disorders. People were so starving, when they got Red Cross parcels they just ate the lot. Then they got perforated stomachs and duodenal ulcers. It caused us to get lots of haemorrhage cases.’

The lack of medical care led to all manner of unexpected infections and strange deaths. At one stalag hospital a post-mortem was carried out on a soldier who had died of a mysterious condition. A pus-filled tumour was found on his brain. There were signs of inflammation leading down from the tumour to the source of the infection – a decayed tooth. He had been killed by tooth decay.

While such extremes were fortunately rare, disease still became a constant companion for the POWs. During the first year of captivity the medical staff at the stalags had done their utmost to prevent the spread of disease and infection. Despite their efforts there was little they could do with the sickest of the prisoners. During 1940 the Germans put nothing in place for the treatment of men who contracted tuberculosis. Instead the men just lay in their beds at the stalag hospitals, hoping to recover. At Stalags 20A and 20B there were deaths among the TB patients, resulting in some being transferred to Stalag 3A. However, although some treatment was available, the food was inadequate and men continued to die for lack of care.

Fortunately for the ailing prisoners, someone did care about their fate. In early 1941 the Swiss intervened and insisted that 150 TB patients be transferred to the hospital at Stalag 4A. There they were housed four to a room, had access to hot and cold running water and could stroll in a park. To cope with the numbers of TB patients a second facility was opened for them at Winterberg. Then, when the hospital at Stalag 4A was closed to patients, 130 men from the BEF were transferred to a sanatorium at Königswartha that had previously been a hospital for infectious diseases. Despite its history, the facilities were of a poor standard. Some men were in stone buildings, others in wooden huts, and once again they were sleeping in two-tier bunks with no flushing toilets, just latrines over cesspits. The conditions resulted in the death rate rising again. Treatment of TB only improved in 1942 when mass radiography for suspected cases became available. Even then it could take up to nine months to find a hospital bed for a TB patient.

Quite often, prisoners with TB were offered no treatment at all. Some just continued working, day after day, until they became too sick to continue. On a working detail from Stalag 8B, Bill Holmes witnessed the demise of a fellow prisoner:We were working at this sawmill and food was tight. There was one chap who had TB. He was only twenty but he was dying. We couldn’t do anything with him. We only got a portion of bread – two slices – for the day, but we tried to fill him up to keep him going. But one night he died. The Germans said he’d just have to be buried in the churchyard without a coffin. We argued that we were working in a sawmill so with all the wood, couldn’t they spare some. So we had these rough boards and made a coffin. And we got a scrap of tin, hammered it into a cross and put that on the lid. We made a paper wreath. It may seem crazy, but we were just happy he was in a box. What his poor parents would have thought, God only knows.

Stalag hospitals were often depressing places for the patients. Men who had dreamed of getting a break from work were usually desperate to get back to their working parties rather than remain in hospital. One of those who experienced this turmoil was Dick Taylor. A Territorial soldier who had been captured at St Valery, Taylor found himself in hospital after he suffered the swelling of a gland behind his left ear. He needed an operation urgently since the swelling prevented him from eating. As a result he had lost a lot of weight from his already malnourished body. He was sent to a depressing military hospital in Danzig where he witnessed a madman rampaging round the wards waving a cut-throat razor and discovered patients who had lost limbs as a result of scratching insect bites. The bites had got infected and the infection had spread until blood poisoning had set in. For Taylor it was the lowest point of the entire war: ‘There were people dying all around me. The bed I got was because a coloured lad had just died of yellow jaundice. There was also a locked ward full of mentally ill Russians. It was a depressing place. The thing was, when someone died, their belongings were put into a small cardboard box. That was all they possessed in the whole world – nothing else. It was pretty depressing to see a man’s whole life in one tiny box. It was a sign of a wasted life.’

Physical sickness was not the only burden faced by the POWs. Every prisoner felt the effects of the mental turmoil of captivity. Ken Willats, the chef turned infantryman captured at Abbeville, recalled the impact of knowing how far from home he was:When you are sitting on a farm in East Prussia and your home is in Elmfield Way, Balham, you cannot possibly see what events could take place to remove you from this little hamlet back to the hustle and bustle of London, SW12. You couldn’t imagine how that could come about. It seemed impossible that you would one day be back in normal life. So that was daunting. One realized that if Germany did win the war you’d be there for many, many years – that was a very real thought. But once you’d determined the war was going to be over by Christmas – every Christmas – you were all right. We had no choice, there was no point thinking anything else. It could drive you mad, you’d torture yourself.

Jim Pearce, a Londoner who found himself working on lonely farms in the Polish countryside, took solace in the company of a Bible that had been sent to him by the Red Cross. It also accompanied him on the seemingly endless railway journeys between working parties. Whenever he had the chance he read from it and he prayed every night ‘for the Lord to look after me. It really helped me to keep going.’ Although he was not alone in turning to religion, others found a more basic use for their Bibles as toilet paper.

For other prisoners the process of retaining morale was nothing more sophisticated than undermining German morale, as Eric Reeves remembered: ‘Once we got together we always believed we would win. The guards would say, “
England kaput
.” They’d say that the Germans had always won another big battle. But we would say, “Yeah, but we’re gonna win the last one mate!” We used to needle the guard all the time. That kept morale up.’ These were emotions that were shared by another young soldier, Jim Reed: ‘I was just a kid, but you soon grow up. Quite a few men went nuts. But I never felt I was wasting my life. I was just waiting for the end of the war to get a bit of justice from them – I wanted to have a go at the Germans. I wasn’t afraid of them. We told them we were better soldiers, we were better men and we came from a better country.’

At first the prisoners did anything they could to entertain themselves. They played innumerable games of cards and chess on boards provided via the Red Cross and read whatever books they could find. Some had bizarre competitions, such as seeing who had the most lice on their bodies. At Stalag 20B there was even a contest to see who had the largest penis in the camp. As the camps got increasingly organized more sophisticated methods were found for keeping up morale. They put on plays and concert parties, formed dance bands and orchestras, established educational classes and played sports in whatever space they had available. One of the regular performers at his working party’s concerts was Cyril Holness, who had been captured in an aid post in 1940. He could sing and play the accordion but had one other talent that made him in demand. As a small, fresh-faced youngster with good teeth, he was the perfect choice to play female roles. For performances he wore a bra made from a cigarette tin and eventually had a pair of breasts fashioned from rubber by a commercial artist. While in costume he found he received unexpected attention: ‘One time I was dolled up in my costume and heading back to my hut. The guard was following me – he was very interested in me! I said to him in German, “You’re gonna get a shock when I take my trousers off!” He laughed his head off and said, “You look so good I wasn’t sure.” You wouldn’t think of those things in a POW camp!’

Certain songs evoked sentimental memories for the prisoners, reminding them of everything they had left behind at home. Cyril Holness remembered the effect of the songs he would sing: ‘Every Christmas I’d have the big fellows in tears. All the older men who were married with children would cry when I sang this old song “The Little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot”. It’s a very sad song about a boy who wants toy soldiers for Christmas but doesn’t get them because he hasn’t got a father.’ As Eric Reeves remembered: ‘You’d see all the tears coming when they sang sad songs – that’s how you picked out the married men – they cried unashamedly, tears rolling down. Some were blokes who’d got married on their embarkation leaves then been stuck out in Germany for five years. Us single blokes didn’t bother, we didn’t give a monkey’s! But that was when the morale starts to go.’

By March 1945 there were more than 41,000 British POWs who had endured more than four years of captivity, all of whom were thought to be likely to require some form of mental rehabilitation once they were finally released. For some the symptoms were no more than a deep sense of longing for home and family as they lay down to sleep each night. They thought of the parents who were growing older and the children who were growing up. They dreamed of the warm embrace of their wives, were tormented by sexual desire or the thoughts of what their girlfriends might be doing in their absence. They dreamed of walking the streets in freedom or simply watching the sunset from somewhere that wasn’t surrounded in barbed wire. However, for the thousands of working prisoners these were brief thoughts that filled their minds before their exhausted bodies slipped into deep sleep.

For other POWs the mental burden was far greater. Those officers and NCOs who remained in the stalags were free from the physical burden of work but carried a far greater mental burden since they had little to do except to ponder their situation – hour upon hour, day after day, year upon year. This mental burden – which probably inspired more escapes than the desire to return to continue the fight against Germany – took its toll on many of the prisoners. One of the most visible signs of mental stagnation was displayed by the men known as ‘sack hounds’. These men spent long hours in their beds, hardly bothering to stir for days on end. In November 1944 a Major Higgins wrote from Oflag 7B about the mental state of the 800 officers in the camp who had endured four and a half years of POW life. He was prompted to act after eight officers were removed to mental hospitals: ‘I must emphasize that in my opinion it is most important that prompt action is taken if these young officers are to be in a fit condition to render useful service in the future.’
⁵

By 1943 the British Army estimated that around 30 per cent of long-term prisoners would be mentally unfit for further service upon their release from captivity. An official report described the individual morale of long-term POWs as ‘brittle’. It was accepted that after eighteen months of captivity emotional problems became disproportionately severe. This period was remembered by Graham King:In films the prisoners are always depicted as cheerful but we used to suffer from depression. You’d get annoyed with the person you were living with. Even the way they’d hold a bloody cigarette would get on your nerves – until you could scream. You wouldn’t speak to them for about three months – just because they weren’t smoking properly! You can’t get away from people, you are with them every day. At least civilian prisoners can count the days off as they go through their sentence. We couldn’t do that, we didn’t know what was happening. Even up to the day of liberation it could all have changed. The International Red Cross referred to these symptoms as ‘barbed-wire fever’ and they recommended that in future wars prisoners should not be held for longer than five years and then sent to a neutral country.