by Sean Longden
At Thorn, Graham King described the accommodation shared by thousands of the British prisoners: ‘the rooms contained beds, the same design as those seen in pictures of concentration camps. Three shelves were against the wall, about six and a half feet wide with a gap of one metre between the bottom shelf and the middle, and between the middle and the top. The best position was the top because there was more light and there was no one tossing and turning above you, vomiting or suffering loss of bladder control. In each room there were about thirty men living.’ The rooms themselves: ‘they were like semi-tunnels; all the ceilings were arched to give strength. The perpendicular walls were about three metres high and the height to the arch’s top was about five metres. The width of the room was five metres and the length about fifteen. Three-tiered wooden bunks provided sleeping spaces and thirty-two men would sleep, eat, argue, smoke, fart, cough, snore, groan, moan, play cards, have nightmares and read in each of those rooms.’ Each room had two small windows over which blackout blinds had to be fitted every night. These allowed no ventilation: ‘By the end of the night the air was solid and everyone would have a headache due to oxygen starvation.’
There were already considerable numbers of British prisoners of war within the camps. Some were those who had been captured during the Norwegian campaign. Others had been taken in the very early days following the German assault. Among these were a number of senior NCOs, some of whom made a less than favourable impression upon the incoming men. With the army having been so heavily defeated, and with a defeatist mentality having crept into their way of thinking, plenty of the soldiers were not impressed by any idea of military discipline.
The efforts of some to instil discipline met with immediate and vocal resistance. At Thorn, Jim Charters arrived at the camp to find his group confronted by a British Army major dressed in a perfectly pressed uniform, complete with a polished Sam Browne belt. The officer did not care that they had marched hundreds of miles, then travelled in the holds of coal barges and within stinking cattle wagons. He told them: ‘You people are filthy, you get nothing to eat till you get cleaned up.’ The reaction of the prisoners was immediate. Some of the senior NCOs told the officer what they would do to him if his threats were carried out.
At Thorn one particular NCO paid the ultimate price for his behaviour, as David Mowatt remembered:
I can’t remember entering the camp. All I can remember was a Welsh Sergeant Major. He was trying to get us to march up and down – after all the way we’d walked! I couldn’t do it. I collapsed and ended up in hospital. That sergeant eventually wangled his way on to a repatriation ship. On the boat on the way home he vanished. Someone got him and dumped him over the side. It was someone who’d remembered him from Thorn and thought ‘I’ll have him one day!’ The senior NCOs of the King’s Royal Rifles were in charge when we arrived at Thorn. They were as fit as fit could be. They’d taken over the POW camp, whilst we’d still been fighting in the rearguard!
During the period following registration and entry into the camps, the prisoners continued to lose weight rapidly. Although they were no longer marching, the deprivations they had suffered, combined with the extreme food shortages, ensured they were fit for little more than collapsing to the ground in exhaustion. Once again they faced the problem of only being able to collect food if they had a receptacle for it. Those with mess tins or the glass jars and discarded tin cans they had found during the march blessed their good fortune. Those without again cursed their luck and once more offered up their filthy, cupped hands to collect whatever was available. So continued the desperate search for anything that could hold food. E. Vernon Mathias, captured at Calais, later described the physical effects of all he had endured: ‘It was a near starvation form of diet which dominated our physical health as well as our character. Physically I had lost weight in a rapid and alarming manner and the side effects were weakness, an outbreak of skin sores, loss of some teeth and, worst of all, one’s weakness encouraged the infestation of body lice which practically made one’s life unbearable.’4
What little food the prisoners received made an awful impression upon them – indeed food was their only thought at the time. It was difficult to forget the rancid sauerkraut, thin pea soup, stinking cheese and ersatz coffee that was keeping them alive. Jim Charters remembered mouldy bread and potatoes so black that ‘pigs would turn their noses up at them’. For others the rations seemed to be nothing more than a handful of potatoes covered in eyes. If potatoes weren’t available they got black bread that seemed to have been bulked up with sawdust. Some prisoners remembered potato bread, in which the bottom of the loaf was thick with what seemed to be rotten potato. As Norman Barnett recalled: ‘When you cut it, it stank. But it was edible.’ Elsewhere prisoners were fed barley soup mixed with cattle blood. One man recalled receiving a bowl of dirty spinach. Before he could consume it he had to drain off the water and pour away the sand that had settled on the bottom of the bowl. Some of the prisoners made efforts to clean whatever they could before consuming it. Some burnt potatoes in a fire, charring the outsides, before boiling them, in the hope of killing off bacteria. Others toasted all their bread, for fear of infected flour.
The appalling rations meant that those who retained the energy to move still spent all their waking hours dreaming of food. They mustered up what little remained of their strength to drag themselves up to cookhouses just to take in the smell of whatever weak stews were being prepared for them. Graham King recorded his daily rations in the early weeks at Thorn. The day began at 6 a.m. with coffee made from roasted acorns. For lunch they received a litre of vegetable soup, with no meat or fat. At 4 p.m. they received a 1,500-gram loaf of black bread, one between five men. With this they received a little margarine, honey, jam or, very occasionally, liver sausage. He recalled that, after the deprivations of the journey from France, so much food seemed like a feast. That said, it was still not enough to help them recover: ‘Each individual collected his own soup from the kitchen, which was downstairs for our group. I found that I did not have the strength to carry my soup upstairs, so sat on the bottom stair and ate it there, every delicious drop, eventually getting enough strength to climb up to the room.’
In the initial months of captivity there were few differences between the treatment of officers and other ranks. The officers lived in segregated camps or in enclosures away from the men. However, like the men, they survived on appalling rations. At Oflag 4D the officers reported they were too weak to take advantage of the exercise facilities in their camp and instead they had to lie down for most of the day. Just like the other ranks, the officers also had had their heads shaved when they entered the camps. Some later commented that their individual personalities disappeared along with their hair, noting that for the first few weeks each officer became a nonentity. Only later did their individual characters re-emerge as their hair began to grow back.
Despite the differences between the POW experience as endured by officers and other ranks, the officers did not live in better conditions. Peter Wagstaff later wrote of an unexpected encounter within a fort at Posen: ‘I will never forget one day turning a corner in a passage and being confronted by something sitting up on its hind legs. It was the size of a large rabbit but I knew it could not be. In the next instant I suddenly realized it must be a rat! We managed to kill one later – from head to tail it must have been 24 inches.’5
Considering the squalid conditions the prisoners were forced to live in, most were amazed that they seldom saw rats within the main stalags. Looking back, they realize why this was. It was quite simple – there was no food for rats and thus no reason for them to be there. Or as some commented, any rats that did appear would probably have been caught, killed and cooked. As Norman Barnett recalled: ‘What were they going to eat? There were no scraps for them to eat. Men were fighting over scraps. I’ve seen them fighting over potato skins. When they dished out potatoes from these boxes, men would fight over what you could scrape from the inside of
the box.’ The starving men had learned that to turn down any food was tantamount to suicide. There was no vegetable too rotten, no meat too high, that they did not think it was worth consuming.
As they had begun to realize, it did not take proud men long to adapt to life-threatening conditions. E. Vernon Mathias later wrote: ‘This period of physical and mental stagnation was causing great harm to the morale within the camp. Our movements were lethargic and our mental reactions had slowed down. Our self-respect suffered and groups of POWs would congregate near the waste bins sifting through the rubbish for potato peelings or anything edible. These were the dark days when we had to adapt our body and mind to a much lower standard of living than we had experienced before.’6
Sickness became rife within all the POW camps. While some of the weakest men just gave up and died, hundreds found themselves so weak they could barely move. To do anything was an effort. To stand up, to walk, to talk – all seemed beyond them. One soldier later reported that he had been forced to jump up to salute a German officer. As soon as he did so he immediately collapsed to the ground since the movement had been too sudden. Others reported seeing spots before their eyes whenever they bent over, with one man reporting that he had fainted as he attempted to reach down to tie his bootlaces.
It seemed that life continued to revolve around dreaming of food and then rushing to the stinking latrines as the men were gripped by stomach cramps and diarrhoea. One prisoner later recalled how he had seen a man reading a book. He asked if he might be allowed to borrow it but the man refused. He explained that he was using it page by page as toilet paper and that it was a race between his intellect and his bowels as to to which finished the book first. As Norman Barnett, trying to adapt to life at Stalag 8B, later recalled: ‘I don’t think anyone did a solid crap the whole time they were prisoners.’ At Thorn, Graham King recalled queues of men waiting for the foul latrines, which consisted of just six places for over 1,500 prisoners, large numbers of whom had been struck by dysentery: ‘After reaching the head of the queue and performing, it was necessary to go and queue again for the next gut-gripping attack.’
Everything seemed to be designed to humiliate the prisoners, and attempts to elevate morale were hard work. Eric Reeves remembered the efforts of one of his fellow POWs: ‘His name was Arthur Briton. He was a lay preacher and he got a church service going. That was on about the third day at Schubin. We sat there in the dirt and said our prayers and sang the hymns. He was brave to do that amongst all us hairy, hard old soldiers. He used to complain about our bad language. He was a nice man.’
Despite such efforts, Reeves couldn’t help but notice the psychological turmoil within the stalags: ‘There were so many of us that we never knew if people were starving to death – blokes were falling sick and disappearing, we never knew what happened to them. But others were dying. One man tried to hang himself, another cut his throat. They got to the point where they couldn’t cope.’ The depths to which the prisoners sank during that first year at Lamsdorf were recalled by Ernie Grainger: ‘The first nine months was my lowest point. I’d dropped from twelve stone to just sixty pounds in weight. We had these big tummies and matchstick legs. The last thing I’d ever expected to be was a prisoner of war. I’d never expected to be in a strange country, surrounded by these evil-looking blokes. I thought “What the hell’s going on here?” It was awful. Some people went mental. The rest of us thought we’ll just do the best we can.’
The mental and physical stagnation within the stalags saw morale collapsing as the prisoners struggled to survive. Prisoners were pitted against one another as the slightest incidents became blown up out of all proportion. Jim Pearce recalled those bitter days:
The atmosphere was terrible. There were arguments all the time. What little bit of food you got you had to watch it closely otherwise someone would pinch it. Gosh yeah, there were fights over food! I remember one time I got some food and cigarettes from the Red Cross. So I slept on it. I woke up the next morning and the food and cigarettes had gone. They tickled you in your sleep so you’d move, so they could pinch them. They’d pinch everything. We got piles of swedes for food during the week. Once they’d gone we’d get nothing else for the week. So we had to take turns guarding them, so no one pinched them. Chaps lost all respect, they didn’t care. It was dog-eat-dog. There was a lot of bitterness, it’s not like they show in films and on TV.
While every prisoner was happy to steal from the enemy, only a few were prepared to steal from their comrades. Every former prisoner can recall stories of food being stolen – the most repeated being the tale of men going to sleep with a loaf as their pillow only to awake to find the ends of the loaf cut off. Though such scenes sound comical there was nothing humorous about the loss of rations. Nor was the punishment of thieves anything to laugh about. The punishments for those caught stealing were extreme. Thieves were beaten violently by men who had been their friends. One man was even strapped to a table then whipped for stealing food. The beatings were followed by banishment, leaving the offenders without friends as they struggled to survive. There were even dark rumours, about which few former POWs ever openly talk, of men who were killed for daring to steal food from their comrades. In the overcrowded camps it was easy for men to disappear, as Ernie Grainger remembered: ‘There was an unwritten law about stealing. We had this static water tank in the camp and they found a dead prisoner in there one night. No one owned up to it, but everyone knew he’d been stealing.’
The prisoners willing to demean themselves in front of the Germans in exchange for food or cigarettes also got short shrift. At Stalag 20B two men who gave the Nazi salute to German officers in exchange for bread were thrown into a cesspit by their disgusted comrades. Elsewhere a soldier who posed for photographs giving the Nazi salute, receiving cigarettes as a payment, was beaten up by the rest of the prisoners.
Although the prisoners attempted to police themselves, there were some occasions when gangs formed and took over life within the compounds. Descriptions of the gangs vary but most describe them as racketeers, wideboys or ‘fly charlies’ who had ‘nothing to learn from Chicago’.7 Accounts tend to identify the worst offenders as being from the slums of large industrial cities like Glasgow, London and Liverpool. Many were described as ‘cosh boys’ or veterans of the razor gangs that had terrorized some inner-city areas in the pre-war years. In some camps, Stalag 8B being a particular case, the gangs could dominate by stealing food. By ensuring their own food supply, and thus depriving others, the gangsters provided themselves with enough food to ensure they remained physically stronger than their victims.
Stephen Houthakker at Stalag 8B later wrote of this period:
Fights amongst the starving men were frequent, and thieving rife during those first weeks. However, there sprang up a comradeship between the downtrodden or poor of the camp, who were in the majority by far . . . The racketeers somehow or other continued to thrive. The soup queues and the potato queues presented freefights daily. Men reduced to starvation, though weak physically, fought with tremendous zest to prevent the next from obtaining a larger share. Gangs were formed and there was often war between combatant and non-combatant forces.
The prisoners discovered the supply of food was controlled not by the Germans but by elements from within the British Army who had been able to get into positions of authority. The Germans, who accepted military discipline and the privileges of rank, were prepared to pass power into the hands of senior British NCOs. While many were dedicated to looking after their men, there were plenty of others who inspired fury for their efforts to make their own lives more comfortable. These cliques of senior sergeants and warrant officers took over the control of food supplies and clothing, enriching themselves at the expense of the mass of prisoners who held such behaviour tantamount to treason. In the post-war period many made official complaints about the behaviour of NCOs. At Fort 8 in Posen, three ‘rotten’ Guards NCOs appointed themselves cooks and kept stocks of food for themselves. At
Thorn, Ken Willats recalled lying on the ground in a state of virtual starvation while being able to smell meat being cooked by the men in charge of the rations. As Norman Barnett explained: ‘The cooks always used to look healthy. But wouldn’t you? If you were in the cookhouse and you were starving, the first thing you’d do is get a bit extra. It’s human nature.’
In later years many former prisoners noted how the offenders tended to be long-serving senior NCOs who had a tendency to band together, just as they had done when the army had begun its rapid expansion during the late 1930s. Then they had stuck together to preserve their position and once behind the barbed wire of the stalags they reverted to type and continued the process.
Considering the threadbare uniforms in which the prisoners had entered the stalags, there came a desperate need to reclothe the men. However, the Germans did not have any stocks of British uniforms available for 40,000 ragged men. They even made the prisoners share out the clothing they had. But they did have vast stocks of captured uniforms from the defeated nations of Europe. Consequently the new prisoners found their battledress replaced with all manner of kit. There were trousers, overcoats and tunics from France, Belgium and Poland, cavalry breeches that were worn without riding boots, leaving the wearer with ridiculous bare calves, tall peaked Polish Army ceremonial caps and Great War overcoats designed to be worn while riding a horse. Arriving at Lamsdorf, Bill Holmes remembered how the new kit was issued: ‘They’d throw you stuff – you had to be quick. You’d either get something that was too big or too small – nothing ever fitted. I got a Polish overcoat – by the time that was on you could only just see my eyes. If you were lucky you got a good coat, if not, that was your bad luck.’
