Survivor of the Long March

by Charles Waite

  That was soon to change. If I had known what lay ahead next, I would have said, ‘Let me stay here, safe behind this barbed wire fence.’

  12

  The Worst Winter

  Beautiful but deadly, that’s what winter was like. A white landscape with the ghostly shapes of pine trees and rooftops layered with snow like a wedding cake, picture postcard. But stay out in the Arctic winds unprotected and you would die.

  Winters were long and hard, lasting from October to March. Dark mornings merged into dark evenings with nothing in between. It felt as though spring and warm weather would never arrive at Langenau and we would be stuck there for ever, forgotten and freezing to death. We spent half our time clearing snow and ice away in order to get out to work and the other half freezing our balls off doing whatever work we were ordered to do outside. The cold and damp got permanently into our bones. No amount of hot soup, burning firewood or layers of clothes would warm us up. I was hardly ever out of my uniform and overcoat during the winter months. I worked and slept in all the clothes I possessed when it was really, really cold.

  The army greatcoat was both a curse and a blessing. It was made of dense thick wool and as I got thinner so the coat got bigger and heavier. It flapped about my legs when I was working and it felt like wading in treacle when I made my way along the muddy rows of beets. The coat dragged me down as I bent over further and further with my nose nearly touching the beet tops and my boots stuck in the ground. The bastard Germans had a trick of moving the marker point in the fields from where they had paced out the number of rows we had to do. So when I looked up to see if I had nearly finished there was always another row.

  Map of Charles’s route on The Long March Jan-April 1945, drawn by Peter Collyer.

  On the other hand, we wouldn’t have survived without our coats. They were our blanket at night, our defence against the bitter cold by day and an eternal comfort; so they really saved our lives. By God, didn’t they keep the wind out! There was room to wear layers of clothes underneath and still be able to move in it. The wide lapels overlapped at the front for extra protection for the chest. With the collar turned up I could keep out the worst of the icy winds. Sleeves were long enough to cover my hands, and pockets big enough to carry my forage cap, eating utensils, identity documents, letters and photos. I still kept Lily close to my heart, her photo in the top breast pocket of my uniform blouse.

  19 January 1945. Evening. That’s when we heard that we were leaving the camp. When our work parties returned from work, one of the officers called us together and said, ‘Pack everything, we’re moving’. We had to be ready for six the following morning. Why the hurry? Why did we have to leave at the crack of dawn?

  We were going, leaving the only home we had known for nearly five years. You get used to a place, don’t you? You get comfortable and get used to your little routines. Never mind that it’s a cramped dormitory in a damp house behind barbed wire fences, in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country. Never mind that you eat little and work long hours at gun point; that your hands are blistered and cracked from work and your skin red raw from scratching fleas. You have your mates, your own tiny corner where you can pin up a photo, keep a few bits and bobs, read your letters and be alone with your thoughts.

  All that was coming to an end.

  The place was abuzz – inside and out. We were excited at the prospect of something happening at last. Prisoners and guards were busy, men everywhere trying to get their things together, sort themselves out. There were chaps looking for stuff they had saved or hidden for a rainy day. Now was that rainy day – or rather snowed-in day. We five set to work straightaway as we talked and sorted what belongings we had.

  ‘Another camp,’ said Laurie. ‘Wonder what they’ve got in store for us.’

  ‘Nothing good,’ said Heb.

  ‘A change is as a good as a rest,’ said Sid.

  ‘It’s freezing out there!’ I said. Little did we know that the winter of 1945 turned out to be one of the worst of the twentieth century with temperatures falling as low as -25°c. ‘Abso–bloody-lutely freezing!’ I added.

  Jimmy echoed my sentiments with something incomprehensible.

  ‘Hope it’s not far,’ said Heb. ‘I’m exhausted just thinking of going.’

  We all thought we were moving to another work place. We had no idea that the Russians were advancing and the war was coming to an end. It would have been so much better for us if we had known what was going on so we could have made plans. Bloody silly time to move. Why couldn’t they wait until the weather got better? We had no idea what was in store.

  I had never really stopped to think about what would happen at the end of the war. I always wondered how we would know it was over and how we would get back to England. I didn’t imagine that it would end like this – our journey back to freedom and civilisation.

  As soon as we left the camp and passed through the gates and wire fences, we realised we weren’t off to another work place. Everybody was there – officers, guards, the lot – and we knew something big was happening. No idea where we were going but I just knew this looked like big trouble. Memories of that first march from Abbeville to Trier and journey by the cattle truck came back to me. That’s where it had all started.

  I did the silliest thing when I knew we were leaving. Like everybody else we wanted to take everything we had. Over time fellows had collected or made quite a few knick knacks and souvenirs: matchstick models, animals and figures whittled from wood, stones picked and polished. Some had Red Cross boxes and bags that they had begged, borrowed or stolen. I got into one of the barns where I remembered seeing some storage boxes. That’d be good for carrying my stuff, I thought. I didn’t expect we were going far. If I could find a really strong cardboard box, not too heavy, I would put all my belongings in it.

  My letters were the most precious things I possessed and I had a real stack of them. Nearly five years’ worth. I wasn’t going to leave them behind. I had odds and ends left from my last Red Cross parcel (bit of chocolate, some biscuits and a few cigarettes). I had my spoon and bowl, shaving kit, towel, bit of soap, spare pair of socks, trousers and my old boots.

  I decided to wear my new boots which my mother had sent me, and keep the old ones as spare. Because of the extreme cold, I was already wearing pretty much all the clothes I owned including my spare underwear and my fireman’s jumper over my uniform. I packed my old boots and everything else neatly inside the box and tied it up with some string – the stuff made from twisted brown paper which came with the Red Cross parcels. I was ready to go.

  What on earth did I look like? There I was holding this huge box out in front as though I was Father Christmas looking for some kiddies to give them their presents. I soon realised how stupid I was. There I was battling through the snow drifts against the icy winds, my arms aching and my feet skidding on the slippery ice-impacted roads as I tried to keep up with the other men marching out into the white wilderness.

  I wasn’t alone though in trying to carrying everything. Nobody had said, ‘Look men, take only what you can eat or wear. Dump everything else.’ It could have saved a lot of trouble later on. Me and the other chaps soon started throwing things away as we went along, to lighten our load and make it easier to walk and not fall behind the column. We kept the absolute essentials and ditched everything by the roadside. God, how I wish we could have kept it all. We had little enough to show for our five years of slave labour but it was all precious to us.

  So that was how I came to lose all my letters and cards from home and most of my photos. I kept two envelopes, from mother and Lily’s last letters, and placed a couple of family photos inside along with my Army Service Pay Book. I’m looking at the Pay Book now. It’s not actually in that bad a condition considering what it went through; amazing it has survived. The cover is creased and water stained and it still smells of tobacco smoke. On the inside pages I can read about the vital statistics of my younger self, that I weighed 130lbs and
was medical classification ‘A’ on enlistment. I can also pride myself that I fulfilled the Instructions to Soldiers ‘You will always carry this book on your person.’ I had my dog tag round my neck, the belt my friend made from the tops of old army boots round my waist and everything else stuffed into my many pockets.

  Jimmy, of course, was better equipped. He was born to be out of doors and always on the go. Like a good Boy Scout, or gamekeeper, I should say, he knew to ‘be prepared’. He always carried an assortment of useful things about his person: stub of pencil, needle, matches, knife, bits of old wire and string. And on The March, true to form, he was always on the lookout for things to make our lives better, opportunities to search the area and any empty houses along the way.

  When we left camp Jimmy had a rucksack made from a hessian animal feed bag on his back. I’m not sure if he had found the bag and stitched it together himself or our tailor friend had made it. He kept all his stuff in there including his tartan trews, which he changed into when the weather got better months later and the sun was shining, I enjoyed watching him up in front, head held high, tartan legs striding along, and the ribbons on his Highland cap fluttering behind.

  39 men.

  Left the farm at Langenau [20 January] 2 men stay in hiding.

  Everybody in good spirits.

  It was Saturday (one of our rest days) when the camp was evacuated. No rest for us though. We had started with forty-five men in the camp back in 1940, lost a few, gained a few and were down to forty-one. When the officer took the roll call there were two men missing and a couple of guards were sent to look for them. Our two chaps didn’t appear and we never heard any shots fired so maybe they got away. God knows where they went. To the coast to find a boat? Madness. In the end the guards were called back and we set off on foot down the road.

  The Germans had loaded two small horse-drawn carts – one full of supplies, including some Red Cross parcels, and their equipment; the other nearly empty. This was later used to fetch bread from villages where a bakery was still in business, and also to carry those too ill or injured to walk. I remember looking at the horses thinking they looked in better condition than us. There were bags of feed on the cart for them but it wasn’t enough for a long journey in the middle of winter.

  Of course, the guards were more worried about keeping the horses fed than us prisoners. We felt sorry for the creatures. They were doing a good job so we kept an eye open for hay when we stopped off somewhere. If we kipped in a barn or stable we grabbed a handful of straw and fed them when we could. I remember Laurie saying, after we’d been a month on the road when everybody, including the horses, looked on their last legs: ‘If one of the nags goes down, at least we’re in with the chance of a decent meal.’ Those horses turned out to be lot tougher than us.

  [21 January] March 42km. Nearly all of us throw away a lot of kit.

  Much too heavy to carry

  It was on the second day that the dreadful weather conditions got the better of us and I and most of the other men realised the folly of struggling to carry bundles, boxes, bags, whatever, of belongings. Nearly everybody started throwing things away as they went along. You could look back and see a trail of discarded items. During an early stop, I said, ‘I can’t be doing with this!’ and tipped out the box leaving everything in the snow except my bit of food, cigarettes, piece of soap, socks, and my spoon and bowl. What I couldn’t fit into in my already filled coat pockets got left behind.

  Survival. That was what we focussed on. You concentrated on the walking, watching your feet and the boots of the men in front and getting into the rhythm. Nobody wanted to fall behind. God help you if you got detached. And when other groups of men gradually joined us along the way, it was even more important to stick together and not get separated. Even though we hadn’t a clue where we were going, we thought, ‘Better the devil you know. Stick with your mates.’

  We were fortunate, my pals and I, to be at the back of the line so the first men in front were clearing a path which made it easier for us. We still had to battle through deep snow sometimes up to our chests, sometimes digging it away by hand, other times stopping to get shovels off the back of cart while the guards looked on. It was exhausting. Every icy breath drawn in hurt your lungs and made your teeth and head ache. Every movement was painful. Every step dangerous. It was so slippery that you had to watch every step so you didn’t fall. I thought about our horses at home, how I used to take them to the blacksmith’s in winter to have studs put in their shoes for the bad weather. We could have done with some of those on our boots to give us a bit of grip. It was never this like in Essex even during the worst winters. Such a struggle just to be able to walk a few hundred metres. Would there ever be an end to this torture?

  Always the snow and the ice. It was the continuous gnawing cold which made your eyes water except the tears froze and glued your lids together. Even with a scarf wrapped round, your cap on, and coat collar up, your head ached as though somebody was banging an ice cold hammer through your brain. Even with two pairs of socks on, your feet were so cold you had to look down and check that they were still there at the end of your legs. Even if you had gloves or your homemade mittens on and stuffed your hands deep into your pockets you could still feel them burning with cold as though they were being held over a hot flame. Utterly, utterly miserable.

  There was a plan of sorts – to go in a westerly direction from camp to camp – but it didn’t always work out like that. We didn’t know the route and I don’t think the guards did either half the time. Sometimes we walked for days in huge circles coming back to where we started. Cries went up: ‘Christ in heaven, we’ve been here before!’ or ‘Where in f------ hell are we going?’ but it made no difference. We just carried on. We followed orders. With guards carrying machine-guns you just did. No questions asked. In spite of having walked all day, it was so cold that gangs of men got into circles at night to keep warm and continued walking round and round; others were so frightened to lie down and go to sleep that they used to prop each other up as they snatched a few minutes sleep here and there.

  Not long after we started on The March, we began picking up other POWs – twenty, thirty or forty men at a time, until we had a steady column of about 100–150 men. It was a shifting and changing group. Some stayed a few days to rest or work and moved off again and some others would join us. Some of our original guards stayed for quite a while but as time went on, older men replaced the younger ones who left, called back to fight the Allied advance from the west and the Russian Army from the east.

  One of the first groups to join us was a bunch of American airmen who were pulling homemade sledges. They seemed very well-prepared with woolly hats and scarves wrapped round their heads and some had fur mittens, even goggles. We were very envious of them with their belongings packed neatly on the sledges even though it was probably quite difficult pulling them along on the ice and through the thick snow.

  They looked pretty fit and well fed to me and we learned that they had only been prisoners for three months. When we told them how long we had been POWs they were shocked. ‘Jeez, no wonder you guys look like death warmed up!’ They could see in our haggard faces that we had suffered a lot. Of course, most Yanks love the Brits and everything British and as they had been stationed over in England they waxed lyrical about our countryside and village pubs but mainly our food. ‘Oh, we love your fish and chips’ and ‘How about those steak and kidney pies?’ How much they missed them. If they missed them, what about us? I did think it was insensitive of them going on about our wonderful food when we were starving but at least they shared a cigarette or two with us and a bit of chocolate. One good thing about smoking was that it curbed your appetite. Our stomachs had shrunk over the years so we were used to eating very little but it was still hard, very hard to cope in these conditions.

  Our bits and pieces from the Red Cross parcels were soon eaten up and we relied on the handouts of stale bread distributed by the guards. Keeping warm by
moving was more important than eating. You didn’t want to sit down or your trousers would freeze to the ground. You didn’t want to take your hands out of your pockets even if you had strips of old blanket wound round them because the tips of your fingers would get frostbite. At times groups managed to clear a small area and light a fire or two and make a brew with melted snow and a few tea leaves from someone’s pocket. We would pass the bowl around the lucky men in the group. It reminded me of happier times felling trees in the Rosenberg forest.

  Hebby managed to make notes during the journey in a diary which he had taken from the blacksmith’s where he had worked. He kept track of places and distances we covered. I don’t know how he worked out how far we walked each day because we didn’t always see sign posts or know which places we’d been through but he was the sort of person who kept his eyes peeled, listened to other people and picked up information that way. What he wrote down helped me when I jotted down my own notes using the blank pages of my New Testament. I brought this home with me but it was not the original one with which every soldier was issued on enlistment. I was given this book about a week into the March by a padre I met in a church. It is stamped inside Stalag 2B Geprüft – meaning ‘examined’, so it came from another camp.

  I received this [New Testament] on 28th Jan 1945

  During a halt on The March

  About 1,000 of us in a church.

  One of our boys is now playing the organ

  As we walked on and on through villages and towns we began to see the effects of the war and the damage caused by the Allied bombing raids. It was dusk, after another long day walking, when we came to a large town or the outskirts of a city. It looked much the same as all the other places in the evening gloom with smashed vehicles – carts and cars, boarded up buildings, empty houses and deserted streets. There was a church standing in a square littered with stones and rubble. Some of the guards went ahead and must have checked it out because we started moving slowly in that direction. It was large with fancy stonework and buttresses and steps up to the main doors.