Meeting the Enemy

by Richard van Emden

  It was tempting for captured officers to turn the tables and feed the enemy utterly useless information. Grinnell-Milne got into conversation with one German officer who astonished him with the name of a new secret British aircraft known as the Crosse and Blackwell, fitted with two new-style engines of great power and made by Huntley – ‘I forget the exact name,’ remarked the German.

  ‘“Huntley and Palmer,” I suggested timidly, suddenly tumbling to the hoax of which this poor man was the victim.’

  The yarn may have worked that time although Captain Francis Don was doubtful about the wisdom of playing such games. ‘I know that some officers take a very natural delight in stuffing these interpreters with false information. However, they are so clever and plausible in their methods that I venture to suggest that this should be discouraged.’ Whether Don was aware or not, those methods included the newly embraced art of bugging.

  The idea that one gentleman officer might be party to eavesdropping on another’s conversation was anathema to most British officers, but the Germans saw no contradiction in this pursuance of war by other means. The Germans consequently stole a march on the Allies in developing operations that became common practice in the years ahead. Don arrived in Karlsruhe after a stay in hospital recovering from the wound to his arm. Karlsruhe, as Don came to understand, was another place of ‘clearing’ for prisoners coming directly from the front or hospital. In the city there was a ‘hotel’ to which officers were sent prior to leaving for a POW camp. Don believed his experience at the hotel was typical of that of all officers sent there.

  I was first of all locked into a small room alone. Soon a very plausible German interpreter (officer) came and made himself pleasant. He explained that he had to interrogate us simply for form’s sake and because ‘the camp commandant is rather a fussy old man’. I adopted the attitude which I have always found completely successful, namely, to tell him that I have promised my government only to give my name, rank and regiment (R.F.C). That I am honour bound to give nothing more – ‘Do you expect me to break my honour?’ This invariably shuts them up. Not finding me communicative, he produced a pocket-book and rather astonished me by informing me of the number of my squadron and of the name of my squadron commander and asked me if it was correct. I, of course, gave a non-committal answer. He then informed me that he thought I had been in the 7th or 9th wing, which was wrong.

  The interpreter expressed his sympathy for Don: it must have been difficult to stay in hospital without another Englishman to talk to. To make life easier he was going to place Don in a room with another English officer.

  After a few days’ stay in the ‘hotel’, Don was moved to an established prisoner-of-war camp where he was able to compare notes with fellow officers.

  Many of us are strongly of the opinion that it is used as a ‘listening post’ for Intelligence purposes. Some of the walls of the room have undoubtedly recently been replastered. I may mention that I met four officers at Karlsruhe who had just been captured and who came, I think, from Courtrai. They had spent four days together in a small room, at the end of which time they discovered four microphones fixed in the walls. They tore these out and put them down the drains. Nothing was said to them on the matter . . . It is the general belief among prisoners of war that the system of microphones is enormously used as a perfectly legitimate means of getting information.

  The pampering did not last, and when the Germans felt there was nothing further to be gained from listening in, the prisoners were moved on to camps where the regimes were often harsh and unforgiving. No more oysters and liqueurs. Food in the POW camps was in the main uniformly poor and officers, like other ranks, survived on Red Cross parcels.

  Neither Max Immelmann nor Werner Voss survived the war. Immelmann was afforded the utmost respect by British pilots on news of his death when, as an official token of admiration for a great pilot, Lieutenant Long, an RFC observer, dropped a wreath with black bow and message of condolence on to Immelmann’s airfield. Werner Voss was shot down in combat in September 1917 but only after an astonishing lone battle against seven British planes. Captain James McCudden, who took part in the engagement, recorded Voss’s extraordinary flying skills. ‘The German triplane was in the middle of our formation, and its handling was wonderful to behold. The pilot seemed to be firing at all of us simultaneously, and although I got behind him a second time, I could hardly stay there for a second . . .’

  Mortally wounded, Voss and his plane smashed into the ground. ‘As long as I live,’ wrote McCudden, ‘I shall never forget my admiration for that German pilot . . . His flying was wonderful, his courage magnificent, and in my opinion he is the bravest German airman who it had been my privilege to see fight.’ Lieutenant Rhys-Davids was congratulated in the mess that evening on bringing Voss down but his victory was tinged with regret. ‘Oh,’ he said to McCudden, ‘if I could only have brought him down alive.’ His remark, wrote McCudden, was entirely ‘in agreement with my own thoughts’.

  Such were the short lives of these pilots. Like their German counterparts, neither Arthur Rhys-Davids nor James McCudden lived to see final victory. Rhys-Davids was shot down in October 1917. McCudden, who was awarded the Victoria Cross and became the seventh highest scoring ace of the war, was killed in a mundane flying accident in July 1918.

  After the exhilaration of living life so close to the edge, it could be tough for Royal Flying Corps pilots, when made prisoner, to survive, grounded, suffocating behind barbed wire, irrespective of the quality of food, facilities or the attitude of the camp commandant. It was hardly surprising that many officers chose the option of escape, as much as a way of killing time and keeping occupied as in any realistic hope of reaching home. In the meantime, as plans were hatched and tunnels dug, camp life would be stoically borne. Yet no matter how brutal the camp regime became, no officer came close to experiencing the barbaric treatment of one select group of prisoners removed from their camps for a collective punishment for which none was culpable.

  The routine policy of reprisals reached its terrible climax in February 1917 when 500 British prisoners of war were sent to the Eastern Front to work in German trenches opposite Russian forces. These prisoners were regular soldiers or Royal Naval Volunteer Reservists (RNVR) from the Royal Naval Division (RND). The vast majority were captured either during or shortly after the Retreat from Mons or at Antwerp, where the RND landed in late September 1914. These men were the ‘paid murderers’ despised by the Germans in 1914, the men who had frustrated von Kluck’s thrust towards Paris and ultimately cost Germany the quick victory promised to the nation. In an act of vengeance, these men were sent to the front in temperatures as low as -35°C and forced to work with little or no food, returning to a camp and a seventy-yard-long tent pitched on a ‘frozen swamp’. Not surprisingly many died, with survivors losing toes, fingers, even hands and feet, through severe frostbite and amputation.

  ‘It would be beyond the powers of any man, no matter how able or fluent, to describe, in writing, the impression it left as you gazed upon these human wrecks, starved, frozen and unwashed,’ recalled a witness and exchanged prisoner of war, Sergeant James Morrison of the Royal Marine Light Infantry. ‘They were simply a frame of bones covered with skin, breathing and looking at you with eyes sunk deep in their sockets, and worst of all, when you spoke to them some of their answers were quite unintelligible.’

  The process that led these men to injury or death on the Eastern Front had begun ten months earlier, in March 1916. A seemingly uncontroversial memorandum sent by Sir Edward Grey to Walter Page, the American ambassador in London, declared that the British proposed to lend the French 2,000 German prisoners of war for work in the city of Rouen and at the docks at Le Havre. These men were held in Britain but would be shipped overseas. Page was assured that none would be involved in moving munitions.

  Shortly afterwards, Page was informed that 750 prisoners had gone to Le Havre on 5 April 1916, followed by 700 more on 26 April. Another group of
500 would be sent the following month. As part of America’s role as neutral intermediary, the information was relayed to the Germans through the American Embassy in Berlin.

  It was a decision that should not have caused great consternation, at least not according to the British. Britain’s Commander in Chief, Sir Douglas Haig, continually used German prisoners of war within five miles of the fighting line, and saw no problem with that policy so long as prisoners were not exposed to shellfire, although it is unclear how he could guarantee their absolute safety. Prisoners’ labour, other than in the direct movement of munitions, was of great importance, he believed, and he resisted suggestions that this distance between them and the fighting line should be increased to twelve miles. Rouen was a good sixty miles, and the docks of Le Havre a hundred miles, from the Somme region.

  For this reason alone, the British were not expecting an adverse reaction from Berlin. It was no secret that the Germans continued to use Russian prisoners of war as labour on the Western Front, and very close to the front line. Haig was equally certain that British prisoners were employed on the Western Front, despite the enemy’s vigorous denials.

  Britain and Germany regarded each other’s protestations of fair play with automatic suspicion and, almost as a matter of policy, chose retaliation as the default setting for any move of which they disapproved. In response to the British decision to deploy prisoners, the Germans announced that 2,000 British prisoners of war would be moved from Germany to the Russian Front to be employed under the same conditions as British-held prisoners in France; of these, 500 would be sent to the front line. These men were taken primarily from Döberitz, Friedrichsfeld and Senne POW camps, as Company Sergeant Major Alexander Gibbs of 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders testified:

  I was the senior 2nd Class Warrant Officer of a party of 1,000 NCOs and men (25% NCOs) who left Döberitz Camp on 8th May 1916 for Russia. We knew nothing at that time of our destination or the reason for the move, and as it was very warm weather we left our warm clothing and half our food to follow. We arrived at Frankfurt an der Oder the same day and by 11th May 1916 another 1,000 NCOs and men from a number of camps in Germany had also come to Frankfurt.

  On 11 May 1916, four parties sequentially numbered EK1 (Englische Kommando 1), EK2, EK3 and EK4, consisting of 500 men each, left for the Russian Front; forty men were packed into each cattle truck for an initial three-day journey to Russian Latvia.

  One of those sent east was a twenty-year-old Royal Naval Reservist, Cedric Ireland. The sixth son of a Derbyshire vicar, Cedric was sent to a school in Leatherhead, Surrey, founded for the education of the children of impecunious clergy. On the outbreak of war he joined the Royal Navy’s Hawke Battalion and the following month was sent with the newly formed Royal Naval Division to assist in the defence of Antwerp. The division was ill-equipped for such a role and was forced to retire; on 9 October, many, including Able Seaman Ireland, were captured. Within weeks he was at Döberitz POW camp, a few miles west of Berlin. In late August 1915 he sent two postcards home to his sister depicting the funeral of a fellow RND seaman, William Malcolm, of the Collingwood Battalion. Malcolm, captured on the same day as Ireland at Antwerp, was killed in a carting accident while at work near the camp. Cedric Ireland almost certainly appears in both photographs and the priest taking the service of committal is the Reverend Henry Williams. The following year Williams would be made aware of the men’s departure for Russia. He recalled their loss with sadness. ‘These men, most of whom I knew personally at Döberitz and other camps, were splendid fellows, the pick of our “Old Contemptibles” and RNVR in Germany, and included many or most of the heroic survivors of Mons. I was not allowed to visit these men in Russia, though I made every possible effort to do so.’

  The men worked very hard but as they were supplied with parcels from home, life remained bearable. For eight months EK4 worked in Libau docks before being sent to Mitau. At that time ‘most of the men, on our departure from Libau [to Mitau] were the picture of health and strength,’ recalled Corporal Robert Steele, probably an exaggeration but an understandable one, given what was to follow.

  Throughout 1916, the Germans remained convinced that the British were contravening the rules of war by using prisoners too close to the front line. By January 1917, they had had enough. In a telegram sent through the American ambassador to Berlin, the Germans claimed information had reached them that His Majesty’s Government were ‘employing near the immediate front large numbers of German prisoners who are reported to be badly fed and lodged’. Several had been killed and wounded. In short, if the British did not rectify the situation immediately and withdraw these men to a distance greater than thirty kilometres from the front line, British prisoners would be ‘given the same treatment as that meted out to German prisoners by the British Military Authorities’. The Germans also demanded assurances as to the conditions under which prisoners were kept. The British were given four days to reply.

  The British government was furious. Not only did it consider the conditions under which enemy prisoners worked and lived ‘extraordinarily favourable’, but believed the ‘absurdly short notice’ given was being used by the Germans as a pretext to send British prisoners closer to the front line in order to dig trenches. The British refused to meet the ultimatum, although a note sent on 6 February offered a compromise that would remove prisoners on all sides to a point at least twenty kilometres from the trenches. This distance was not acceptable and retribution was now at hand. British prisoners would be informed of their altered circumstances in a note entitled ‘Declaration to the English Prisoners of Respite’. This note was distributed or read out to prisoners.

  Upon the German request to withdraw the German prisoners of war to a distance of not less than 30 kilometres from the front line, the British Government has not replied. Therefore, it has been decided that all [my italics] prisoners of war who are captured in future will be kept as prisoners of respite ie very short of food, bad lodgings, no beds, hard work (also beside the German guns under shell fire) no pay, no soap . . .

  The English prisoners of respite are allowed to write to their relatives or persons of influence in England how badly they are treated, and that no alteration will occur until the English Government has consented to the German request . . . You will be supplied with postcards, paper and envelopes, all this correspondence in which you will explain your hardships, will be sent as Express Mail to England.

  It seems that the Germans originally intended to send prisoners from Germany back to the Western Front but instead decided to send the men from EK4 to the trenches on the Eastern Front. The wording of the German note seemed to ignore the fact that none of the 2,000 prisoners sent east were anything other than long-term prisoners of war. It is possible that the message read out to the men at Libau was altered to reflect that fact, although the ramifications were identical. At Libau, 500 prisoners were notified that they would be sent to the trenches between Riga and Mitau, where they would remain within range of Russian artillery fire.

  According to the Reverend Williams, and as described by one survivor, the men were told their fate in direct and graphic terms.

  On arrival at Mitau, they were paraded by a German officer who told them: ‘I suppose you know that you have come here to die, and we expect you to die like English gentlemen.’

  I know . . . that the German authorities refused to forward any food parcels from home to any of these men on the grounds of ‘Reprisals’, and indeed I saw thousands of these parcels stacked up and rotting in the camp at Friedrichsfeld. This meant that the men were being practically starved, for men in Germany, the prisoners, could not exist on their rations for very long.

  In addition to effective starvation, German guards were instructed to mistreat the prisoners. CSM Gibb claimed to have obtained printed orders stating ‘that no mercy was to be shown to us; we were the men who had, every one of us, assisted in stopping the Kaiser’s army from going to Paris and they were to think of their c
omrades who were being brutally treated in France, and be strong.’ Gibb claimed the German interpreter encouraged prisoners to write home describing conditions.

  At Mitau, the men were forced to clear or dig trenches in the German second and third lines, as well as constructing communication trenches linking them to the front. They were also employed collecting ice from a nearby river. According to Gibb, the men paraded at 5.30 a.m., moving off around 6 a.m. and returning to the camp about 5.30 p.m. They were given no food between these hours and there were only two breaks of twenty minutes during the day. Survivors recalled that Russian shelling injured a number of men and at least one prisoner was shot in the stomach by a sniper.

  The lack of food coupled with atrocious weather quickly took its toll. Private Arthur Soder of the 1st Dorsetshire Regiment, for example, was left helpless as his weight dropped from 69kg to 40kg in a little over five weeks and one leg swelled to twice its normal size through the effects of frost.

  If Corporal Robert Steele’s description of the men’s physical condition on leaving Libau was even moderately accurate, there can be no doubt as to the terrible conditions at Mitau where victims died within three weeks of arrival. On 17 March, Private Reuben Wilmott of the Border Regiment died from the effects of cold. According to Soder, ‘He was quite stiff through the frost when we found him in the morning. He was lying just by the flap of the tent.’ Six days later, Able Seaman Philip Rootham also died. Witnesses stated that he was carried back after a day’s work unconscious through exhaustion. He died on the way to hospital. Private Albert Roberts of the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment died later the same day and was buried next to Rootham. Private James Brown of the Highland Light Infantry followed soon after, succumbing to the cold on 22 March, and on 23 March Private Mulholland died.