Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind

by Sean Longden

  Arriving at the station outside Stalag 20A, Fred Coster recalled the doors finally opening to allow them out: ‘They shouted “Raus! Raus!” As we jumped out we all just flopped to the ground. Then we dragged ourselves up to walk into the camp. For me, as I was walking along, it didn’t feel like it was me walking – it was as if my spirit was pulling me along.’

  One group dismounted from their train only to be greeted by the sound of a loudspeaker broadcasting to the local population. It announced that these were the men who had laid down their arms and refused to fight for Churchill. It was crude propaganda, meaning little to the starving men it was supposed to humiliate. Quite simply, such ludicrous boasts meant nothing to the prisoners. Nothing filled their heads more than the distant hope of filling their bellies. Not the war – not Churchill – not the fall of France. Food and water – even just a mouthful – became the hope and dream of every man who journeyed to the stalags that summer. As Jim Pearce remembered: ‘We were all in a terrible state, and it was in this state that we were put into the POW camp.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  The First Year

  Totally exhausted. Starving. Filthy. Covered in lice.

  Jim Reed, Seaforth Highlanders, on life in a POW camp in 1940

  All across the Reich the men of the BEF shuffled into captivity. At some stalags the trains carrying the wretched prisoners pulled up directly outside the gates. Other prisoners stumbled out of the trains into fields, then marched towards the barbed wire fences and watchtowers. Elsewhere, the already weakened men were forced to march for miles. At Danzig some of the survivors of the surrender at St Valery dismounted from their cattle wagons, then were marched through the city ready for the next stage of the journey to a POW camp. Gordon Barber remembered the scene: ‘There were young Jerry soldiers in the streets flicking their fag ends to our blokes and some of our blokes were grabbing them. The Jerries were laughing. Some of them flicked the fags then trod on them when our blokes went to grab them. I said to my mate, “The bastards, I won’t pick ’em up. I’ll never let them see they’ve got the upper hand.” And we were both smokers!’

  Just to see a real live city with its crowded streets seemed bizarre. The bedraggled prisoners shuffled along the cobbled streets like a dirty brown stain. The neat streets and shops – horses and carts, trams and buses, people going about their daily business – all were a symbol of a respectable world, one to which the prisoners no longer belonged.

  The men on display in the streets of Danzig were representative of the thousands making their way into captivity. Their bodies stank of dried sweat, urine and shit. The wounded also gave off the foetid stench of dried blood and pus. Their filthy clothes hung from their bodies. Soldiers hitched up their trousers, pulling their belts ever tighter around their shrunken waists. Those without belts searched for lengths of string. On the prisoners’ buttocks there was no sign of the firm muscles that had been honed on parade grounds and route marches back in Britain. Instead the flesh hung loose and limp where fat and muscle had vanished as their desperate bodies had used up all their reserves of fat to generate the energy to keep them shuffling along.

  The Germans were ill-prepared to cope with the size of the influx. The lack of provisions for their journey had seemed like a vicious introduction to life as a prisoner of war. Yet the conditions they faced once within the camps revealed to them that this was to be the limit of their existence for the foreseeable future.

  At Schubin, Stalag 21B was little more than a farmhouse, farmyard and some fields surrounded by a hastily erected barbed-wire fence. Yet as the haggard band of prisoners approached the gates an order rang out loud across the field. Eric Reeves remembered the moment:

  We staggered out of these flamin’ wagons. The Germans were pushing us with their rifle-butts. We were all staggering about. Then a voice shouted, ‘Pay attention! You are soldiers of the British Army’ – he must have been a regular soldier, probably a Warrant Officer – ‘You will act like soldiers of the British Army. You will fall in, in three ranks, and we will march into this camp with heads high. Now fall in!’ And we did. We marched in. The Germans must have been amazed. Then we got into the camp and straight away we all collapsed again!

  During his first days within the camp, Reeves found himself physically unable to react to his new environment. Like so many he was too exhausted to do anything: ‘We were out in the open all day. Me and these blokes just found this place and sat there, leaning against a wall. If you wanted to get up it was difficult. You could get up so far then you blacked out and fell down again. So you’d have to get other blokes to help you up. Once you were on your feet it was OK. Malnutrition had hit us.’ Elsewhere in the camp Seaforth Highlander Jim Reed was trying to adapt to life as a POW: ‘It was shocking. Everyone was a bit low. I wanted to get a shower to get deloused, but we got nothing. It was a stinking hole. We slept on shelves – 100 on the bottom, 100 on the top. It filled the room. The sergeant in charge was as smart as if he was on parade, but he could do nothing for us. It was the worst place. The food was just rotten potatoes, there was no drinking water and we all had dysentery. It was a rough camp – no grass, just one big yard.’

  At Thorn the train arrived directly outside the gates of a vast complex of forts that had been constructed in the nineteenth century, following the Franco-Prussian War. One of the arriving prisoners described his first impressions:

  My view was dominated by two massive gates made of wood, laced with barbed wire. These gates, I then noticed, were the entrance to a vast flat piece of ground which was surrounded by a double fence of barbed wire. I noticed that each corner of this compound held a raised machine-gun post manned by German guards. The two gates were also manned by two guards, one of whom opened the gates on our arrival. We were told to enter whilst the other guard counted us in. It was all so bewildering, especially as I was aware of a commotion inside the compound where there were already many, many POWs settled in.1

  The forts were mainly underground with prisoners living in two storeys, in fifty dark rooms, each holding around thirty men, that ran along the rear. At the front of the fort were open courtyards below ground level. Graham King later discovered that the moat contained a surprise: ‘It was a dry moat, rather overgrown but, surprisingly, teeming with rabbits. In our early days in this fort we had tried to trap some using snares but were told by the Germans that snares were banned in Germany and the punishment was quite severe.’

  The prisoners arriving at Thorn were first sent into tented camps where they went through the process of registration as prisoners of war. This included having their heads shaved, being sent for delousing in steaming shower rooms and being photographed holding their POW identification number. Finally they were issued a small rectangular tag – always known as a disc – stamped with their identification number, that they would wear every day for the next five years. Though most prisoners felt dejected as they were processed ready for life in a POW camp, there was one bonus. The shaving of their heads removed the breeding ground for the lice that were already making their lives a misery.

  Many of the prisoners were searched and all spare clothing was taken away. The imposed clothing shortages would have a severe effect in the months and years that followed. As well as having their names taken, they were asked to fill in Red Cross forms that were to be used to notify the British authorities of their status as prisoners of war. It was a process every prisoner would eventually go through. Eric Reeves remembered the experience:

  The first morning we were all grouped together. The Germans had a chair and a board. They wrote your number on the board – I was 3479, one of the earliest prisoners – and they took our photographs holding the board. One of our NCOs said, ‘Show them you’re not beat – give them a smile.’ So I did. Then they took your thumbprint and wrote down the colour of your eyes and hair. Years later, I got my registration card back from the Ministry of Defence. There’s little me sitting there with a sickly grin above this board with my numbe
r on it.

  During the period of registration some prisoners found themselves washed down with high-pressure hoses, so strong they had to be controlled by two men, and the strength of the spray knocked the weakened prisoners to the floor. Graham King found himself in a group of prisoners who were ushered down into the cellars of the fort to be prepared for POW life. First they had to strip and were then given a small, rough towel and some soap:

  Our clothing was taken away and we lined up, starkers, outside the barbers shop. We entered three by three, carefully explaining how we would like our nearly shoulder-length hair cut. Hopes dashed, hand clippers were manoeuvred over the whole body resulting in complete depilation. Then we went into the shower room and stood, three men under each showerhead and the water was turned on, then off! We rubbed the soap over our bodies, leaving a covering of fine pumice and an indescribable body odour. A shouted warning and the water came back on, rinsing the skeletal bodies of the prisoners. Skulls like a phrenologist’s dream and the fleshless bodies of the starving – no mother would have recognized her darling. We sat outside the room on a hard wooden bench, wriggling in discomfort, the cushioning fat and muscle of our gluteals having disappeared in the fight for survival.

  When his clothing came back from the delouser, King noticed how his freshly washed clothing smelt like a damp dog drying in front of a fire. Others noticed the delousing had done nothing to actually kill the lice, which had survived in the seams. Graham King also noticed that the uniforms they received were not their own, rather they were of far inferior cloth. As he recalled: ‘they would not have been accepted by any poverty-stricken rag and bone merchant of the thirties, but we were offered no choice’. Dressed in these threadbare clothes, and with his feet soon bleeding from the rough wood of his newly issued clogs, King prepared himself for his first night within the fort – sleeping on the straw-covered floor of a subterranean storeroom. The only light came from a bare bulb at the end of the corridor outside the room.

  Once cleaned up, the prisoners were sent to Fort 17, which was not actually one of the main subterranean forts but a series of wooden huts in which prisoners were housed while the Germans decided what their fate would be. Living in one of these sheds, which housed 1,000 prisoners, one man recorded: ‘So I’m now just gristle and bone, but as hard as iron and in good health, except for diarrhoea which we all suffer from the pumped water . . . we all get the skitters . . . I’m like Gandhi with no hope of getting back any fat on my bones on that diet – I’m always hungry.’2

  When Jim Pearce entered Fort 17 it seemed life couldn’t get much worse. He spent his time shuffling around in straw-filled clogs, thinking of nothing but food and hardly caring whether he lived or died: ‘We couldn’t care less. We were just wandering around, starving. Nothing mattered. Then a Scottish sergeant major came along and made us get up and walk around. He made us soldiers again. We became men again. Otherwise we’d have gone under.’

  For Bob Davies, who had arrived from Calais, Thorn was a difficult place to describe. Quite simply, he spent his time there in a dream. There was little to see or experience within a camp that was built mostly underground. For men who spent their days sprawled on the cold floor of a dark, damp cellar, memory was a luxury – there was nothing in their day-to-day lives they wanted to remember. All that mattered was raising enough energy to pull themselves up from the straw-covered floor, then to drag themselves along the corridors to collect their next bowl of soup. Ken Willats recalled the first awful days at Thorn: ‘You’d see men sitting on the ground with their shirts off cracking lice between their fingernails. A door led out to a path up the hill where the so-called toilet was. It was two trestles and a long plank over a hole. You perched on that and just hoped for the best.’

  The dreadful conditions within Thorn only served to further reduce the prisoners to a state of appalling apathy. One of those who became well acquainted with the stinking latrines was Fred Coster, whose first days in the stalag were spent inside a marquee:

  They said they were going to serve us soup. I thought good – that’s the first food we had been given. But, oh my god, I couldn’t get up. Luckily there was a tent post by me so I pulled myself up. I was as dizzy as hell. I staggered over and stood in line for hours to get my bit of soup. In mine was a bit of pork fat, floating. I thought ‘Lovely!’ I polished that off quickly. Then I started being sick. I pulled myself up on the tent post again and tried to stagger off to the latrine. I could feel this saliva flooding into my mouth and I was spitting it out. Then I went back and collapsed again.

  Although the very notion of living in subterranean forts appalled even the most exhausted of the incoming prisoners, the alternatives at the other stalags were hardly more appealing. At Stalag 8B in Lamsdorf the prisoners were greeted by a sight that would become common for hundreds of thousands of prisoners in the five years that followed: ‘All I can remember is these bloody great five-bar wooden gates,’ recalled Norman Barnett. ‘They were more than six feet high and covered in barbed wire. Then we could see the barbed-wire fence and the machine-gun posts. There were two guards on the outer gates and then a six-foot gap and two more armed guards at the second gate. The Stalag was a massive place, it had previously been a barracks.’

  When Stephen Houthakker entered Stalag 8B he was immediately struck by the foul smell that hung over the camp and he could see the condition of men who had arrived before him: ‘spiritless men were sprawling about, Poles and British, both so starved, it was difficult for them to get up without reeling’.3 It was little wonder they were dispirited. Even in the summer, the stone buildings were cold. Bill Holmes could remember how the guards seemed to be certain of a German victory and wanted to make sure the prisoners knew it. On his first day in the camp he had to queue for a whole day to get his first meal. It was just another annoyance for the prisoners who had, for the most part, already grown to accept that if they could be made to wait, they would be made to wait.

  Cyril Holness remembered the guards at Lamsdorf:

  They could be nasty – especially some of the younger Nazi types. They were full of it – they wanted us to learn German because they thought they were going to take over the whole world. But the guard in charge of us was OK, he spoke with an American accent. One day he came along with the commandant, he asked us, ‘Any complaints, guys?’ So we said we wanted more potatoes. He just looked at the commandant, turned to us and said, ‘The Kommandant does not believe in fat bellies in Germany.’ We had to laugh.

  Despite the good nature displayed by that guard it did not ease Holness’ mind: ‘We had no idea what was going to happen. Stalag 8B was tremendously big. When I first saw the place I thought “What is this? What’s happened to my life?” That first year was a bad year. When was it all going to end?’

  The new huts that were put up to house the prisoners were also unappealing places. Norman Barnett was moved into one of these barrack rooms: ‘I was in hut 35A. It was full of wobbly three-tier bunks.We just had a straw palliasse on bed boards and one blanket. Bang in the middle of each hut was a washhouse, with cold water and concrete sinks.’ Most of these wooden and brick-built barrack blocks had bunk space for nearly 200 men, with little space between the bunks. It was in these overcrowded rooms that Barnett and his fellow prisoners had to adapt to POW life: ‘In the first weeks we just sat around. The only time you got up was when a German officer came in. You were supposed to get up quick, but you couldn’t. If you were too slow they had these Polish civilians – they were bastards; they had these rubber hoses filled with sand – who’d clout you. But when you got up the room used to spin round.’

  Arriving at Schubin, Jim Reed was struck by how basic the conditions were. Many prisoners slept on straw mattresses in the attic of what had been a reform school. As the camp began slowly to expand, the prisoners moved into new accommodation, filling each hut as it was constructed. While the construction work continued, the prisoners remained in their attics, tents and barns, all the time hoping t
heir new accommodation would be ready before the start of winter. Reed’s first POW camp was also the worst conditions he experienced during five years as a prisoner of war: ‘When we first saw the camp there was no barbed wire. We thought it had previously been a nunnery. There was one pump in the yard but the water was unfit to drink. But we were only there for about a month. Then we were marched out and put into bell tents. We stayed there until the winter – when it started snowing. Then we were moved to a foundry where we slept in the sand for about a week.’

  The conditions experienced by the prisoners within the stalags varied in everything but awfulness. If one man found himself in an overcrowded, airless room, another found himself sleeping outdoors in tents that barely kept out the wind and rain. For every man living in a draughty wooden hut, there was another living in gloomy subterranean cellars of Polish forts like those at Thorn and Posen. The first year in captivity saw prisoners sleeping in all manner of locations – barns, schoolhouses, stables and cellars. In the fort at Posen, one prisoner decided to record his living accommodation. He lived in the underground rooms of a moated fort. Their beds were within long, dark, tunnel-shaped chambers, with straw-covered floors, that were lit by a single light bulb. From this chamber, he had to walk twenty-four paces to catch a sight of daylight. It was a total of 107 paces for him to get outside into the fresh air. Fred Coster recalled the effect of living and working underground in rooms untouched by daylight or fresh air:

  It was claustrophobic. I used to do tailoring when I was at school, so I knew how to make a pair of trousers out of two worn-out pairs. So I worked in the machining-room. They used to leave half a dozen of us in there. Then they locked the door. I could feel the claustrophobia rising in me. I thought ‘What’s happening to me?’ I felt that I was going to go to pieces. But I had to fight the feeling back. In the end I got used to it – I beat it. But you can imagine what it would’ve done to a weaker person – it would have sent him off his head.