Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind

by Sean Longden

  Yet as the prisoners made light of their situation and attempted to celebrate the season, there was plenty to remind them that, for those imprisoned by the Nazis, this was not the season of goodwill. On a working party from Stalag 8B, Bill Holmes and his mates did their utmost to wrest some enjoyment from their first Christmas in captivity:

  Everybody said, ‘We’ll be home for next Christmas, that’s for sure.’ There we were, sleeping on hay in an old barn, and we could hear the Germans singing carols – it was ‘Silent Night’. Even now, when I hear that it brings a tear to my eye. There we were with nothing – we were full office. On Christmas morning we got up and thought we might as well have a laugh. There was this Scots lad with us, he was having a laugh but the guard thought he was laughing at them. So the guard shot him dead. His corpse lay there in the snow for three days. The guard said, ‘If any of you laugh at us the same will happen to you.’ That was my first Christmas in captivity.

  Looking out into the snow, all thoughts of the Christmas season were swept away. All they could do was look at the frozen corpse and dream that some day they might survive to go home. However, there would be four more Christmases before the men who had escaped via Dunkirk would return as their liberators. It would be a long and arduous wait.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Five Years

  There was no opportunity for individuals to be alone. Everywhere they went, everything they did, was among a group who observed and commented . . . Baths, eating, washing, reading, writing and latrine visits were all carried out in the company of others.

  Graham King, RAMC, on his five years in Stalag 20A

  All who have been in captivity for a considerable period are more or less abnormal.

  War Office report on the psychological impact of life in a POW camp1

  If the trials and tribulations of 1940 had not been enough, the remnants of the BEF faced five long years of misery in the stalags of Germany. The rosy picture of POW life that emerged in the post-war years was a fantasy, born of the public’s reluctance to read stories that did not focus on prisoners spending their days attempting to escape. Though a brilliant piece of film-making, the 1963 film The Great Escape helped to create a public image of POWs that was essentially a myth and yet it is one that has survived to the present day. Quite simply, it bore little or no resemblance to the day-to-day lives of the vast masses of prisoners of war, whose lives revolved around forced labour, inadequate food, disease, violence and death.

  There were three categories of prisoners. The first were the officers, who lived in separate quarters to the men they had led in battle. The second group were the NCOs, above the rank of corporal, who were excused from work by the conditions of the Geneva Convention. The third group – making up the vast majority of POWs – were the men employed at the workcamps. The lives of men in these different groups were entirely different. The existence of a typical POW lifestyle was the creation of the post-war media, presenting images that revolved around escape committees, wooden horses and tunnel-digging.

  At Laufen, home to large numbers of officers captured in 1940, the prisoners were housed in a country palace, formerly the residence of the Archbishops of Salzburg. Others were imprisoned in a former girls’ school at Rotenburg, or the hill-top castle at Spangenburg. Most famously, a number of the officers captured in 1940 eventually found themselves housed in the notorious Colditz Castle.

  Unlike the men in the main stalags, who had soon discovered the advantages of going out to work and being able to trade with the local workforce, the officer prisoners had no such benefits. In the early years of the war some were allowed to give their parole, taking walks in the countryside on the agreement they would not escape. One Red Cross inspector even arrived at an oflag to be told he would not be able to meet the prisoners since they were out skiing. In most camps where officers were allowed out, there existed an unwritten agreement among the prisoners that they would not breach the conditions of parole. They agreed it was not fair for those who wished to escape to endanger the few freedoms enjoyed by the majority. After all, deep down, most escapers knew they themselves would soon be recaptured and be returning to the stalag.

  As well as being able to give their parole and go for walks, the officers benefited from a number of other ranks allotted to each camp to act as batmen – effectively servants – for officer prisoners. Such measures did not meet with everyone’s approval. Despite the desperate need for trained medical staff to look after the sick, some were diverted from their duties. In 1941 Fort 15 at Thorn became a camp for officers. Although a medic, Graham King was detailed to act as batman to a group of four senior officers:

  My job was to look after these four, as a general skivvy, tidying up after them and fetching and cleaning. As a medic I took a dim view of this, as there were many sick among the other officers and there were no more medics to spare. Two days later a senior British Medical Officer arrived, Lt-Col. Morris, MC, RAMC, actually the CO of the unlucky 13th CCS. He was an outspoken man and shortly explained to the Brigadier the rights of protected personnel and I was returned to the sick bay forthwith.

  While many working-class men had little more than their work clothes and one suit ‘for best’, officers tended to have more clothing that could be sent to them from home. Many regular officers requested their best service uniforms be sent from home, allowing them to dress presentably after having lost so much when they were captured. Other privileges were the result of the class differences between officers and their men. Officers usually had bank accounts, something few of the other ranks had access to, and were able to use their savings to continue to spend money at home. They could request purchases from shops and for items to be posted out to them. Or they could arrange to buy presents for their loved ones, with some women recalling how their husbands managed to arrange a weekly delivery of flowers and ensure birthday presents reached their children. Such continuing connections with the outside world allowed officers to remember there was a world outside the barbed wire of a POW camp. However, those officers enjoying these privileges found that, although it made their lives more comfortable, there were certain disadvantages. Having a servant meant they had less to do each day to fill the long, boring hours of captivity. Rather than filling their hours with menial labour they had to find something else to do as they waited between roll-calls and mealtimes.

  Despite the supposed glamour shown in the post-war POW films, most officers spent their five years of captivity in stupefying boredom. Their accommodation may have been better than that of the other ranks – having fewer men per room – but it was not a life of luxury. The benefits might have seemed obvious to some, but for others the notion of spending years cooped up in rooms with the same men day after day did not appeal.

  Peter Wagstaff explained the effect of prolonged captivity:

  I think there is a psychological point – for the prisoner of war – when you come across some extraordinary basis of living – you can’t understand it, it’s a new form of life. Gradually, as you continue to live that life, the extraordinary becomes ordinary. You think, ‘Oh God, how will I pick myself up?’ Normally you live a normal life and you compare yourself to that mode of living. But if you lose that way of living, because you are existing in this extraordinary state, you think ‘Am I mentally that stable?’ A lot of us felt that. We suffered in trying to readjust ourselves.

  Stressing how difficult it is fully to explain the changes undergone by a twenty-year-old as a result of the violence of POW surroundings, he went on to discuss his reaction to witnessing deaths:

  There was no particular impact. You are used to it. It was part and parcel of your life. Life comes and goes. The Kommandant, a German we called ‘The Purple Emperor’, told us, ‘If you look out of the window you are going to be shot.’ One officer said he was still going to do it – and he was shot. But you took it, because it was part of life. You accept it. This was happening all the time. But I was not depressed because you were fighting for you
r physical and mental existence the whole time. You didn’t have time to analyse yourself. You are fighting to keep alive. You’ve got to keep mentally strong. So you develop a peculiar sense of humour.

  The prisoners eventually had the satisfaction of seeing the Purple Emperor tried for war crimes.

  The officers shared much of the same mental turmoil and yearning for freedom as was seen within the main stalags. The NCOs and other ranks who passed the years within the barbed-wire enclosures were also cut off from the rest of the world, interacting with outsiders solely by letter. As a result, the two groups of men found a commonality of experience that was reflected in much of the behaviour displayed by POWs.

  Incarcerated within the main camps were the permanent staffs of senior NCOs who did not have to go out to work. Although out of boredom some chose to go out on working parties, those who remained in camp took on a myriad of duties in support of the working prisoners. They managed the stocks of clothing and Red Cross parcels. There was both incoming and outgoing mail to be sorted and parcels from home to be sent out to men on working parties. The prisoners also ran cobblers’ shops where teams of men could use whatever was available to repair boots and clogs. At Thorn, Fred Coster worked in the tailor’s shop, using skills he had learned between leaving school and starting in the city. He used worn-out clothing to make patches to sew on to threadbare uniforms. Whenever possible they took damaged uniforms to pieces, removing torn sleeves and replacing them with good ones. They even took apart pairs of trousers, using two worn-out ones to create one good pair.

  With the passing of the years, some of the prisoners who remained within the stalags settled into the life. Men captured later in the war were shocked when they arrived in the camps and witnessed men who had created their own little worlds. Within the forts at Thorn some prisoners curtained off their own areas, as if to construct their own small living rooms. This amazed outsiders, as did the strangely civilized conversations about the latest novels they had read, plays they had seen back home or records they had heard. Books and gramophone records were jealously guarded to protect them within the world they had created. To the outsiders there was a sense of one-upmanship more expected in the middle-class drawing rooms of England than the damp bowels of a Polish fort.

  Large numbers of those who formed the permanent staff at the stalags were pre-war regular soldiers – NCOs with many years of service under their belts. It was easier for them to settle into this life than it was for many of their fellow prisoners. In many ways the stalags were not that far removed from army barracks – only they had even less freedom. As a result, many NCOs found it easier to settle into stalag life than those men who, until just months before, had known the freedoms of civilian life.

  The senior NCOs had a degree of power and cooperated with the Germans in maintaining a sense of discipline among the mass of prisoners. However, maintaining discipline was a fine balancing act. There were plenty of men who had no desire to be ordered around by NCOs now that they were prisoners. Instead they felt they had ‘done their bit’, then been let down by the army. Now they wanted to be left in peace until they could walk out of the stalag as free men. For these men, the sight of senior sergeants strutting around, as if on a parade ground back home, was too much to bear. So they preferred to be on working parties where at least everyone seemed to exist at the same level. Such emotions had to be balanced by an awareness of the benefits brought by a measure of order. Many realized they had been saved in the early months of captivity by NCOs forcing them to get active, making them wash and shave rather than just lazing around the camp doing nothing. The problem was that the balance was not easy to find, as one NCO discovered when he was confronted by Gordon Barber: ‘They sent me to a lumber camp. I didn’t last three weeks there. I saw too many blokes with broken arms and legs. I smacked the bloke in charge – one of our blokes – in the mouth. He was too far up the Germans’ arses. He had a nice billet and we had the shit. One day he started giving me a lot of mouth so I hit him.’

  Although most senior NCOs were scrupulously fair in how they looked after the other prisoners, there were some who abused their positions and whose maintenance of discipline overstepped their responsibility. At Thorn RSM Davidson and Private Puttinger – who wore the rank insignia of a sergeant major – were both accused of currying favour with the Germans. Prisoners were annoyed to see NCOs handing out punishments to fellow POWs, even getting the German guards to administer the punishment duties for them. Some were accused of collaboration since they were responsible for keeping the best food for themselves and did not provide enough good-quality clothing to the men on working parties, keeping it instead for their cronies. Working prisoners felt any man who deprived them of the clothes they desperately needed was as bad as any German guards who made their lives a misery.

  Despite the majority of prisoners being employed on arbeitskommandos, most still spent some periods within the main camps. Bill Holmes recalled why he did not like these return trips to Stalag 8B: ‘I didn’t like it there. Once you’ve emptied latrines with a bucket you want to be back at work. There was also a lot of violence between the prisoners. One morning when the frost melted we saw a severed human hand stuck to this metal fire hydrant. It must have been in the ice all winter. It was a prisoner who’d been murdered. They’d cut his hands off. He’d been an informer so our lads hung him. You couldn’t blame them for doing it.’

  He also witnessed how the experience of captivity had a deadly effect on some prisoners: ‘One chap I’ll never forget. One night we heard shots go off. He was weary of life in the Stalag and he tried to escape. He hadn’t got a hope in hell. They’d riddled him with bullets. We found what was left of him hanging on the barbed wire. He was practically shattered – all his bones were sticking out. It was horrible to see. Then they left him there for three days as a warning to us. Humans can be worse than animals.’ In such circumstances, it was unsurprising that many prisoners preferred employment to inactivity. Quite simply, they preferred the arduous toil that seemed to help make captivity pass more swiftly, despite the knowledge that their sweat was aiding the survival of the regime that had enslaved them. Their poor food and living conditions, their lack of freedom, the harsh regime of punishments, the violent behaviour of their guards all served to convince the prisoners that they were slaves. As Jim Pearce remembered: ‘We’d go to the villages to be chosen to work on the small farms. The Jerry farmers would come along, look at us, point to men and say, “I’ll have that one and that one” – it was like a slave market. When you look back that’s exactly what it was!’

  This state of enforced misery and servitude, under the threat of death, followed the prisoners through their working lives in the Third Reich. Some jobs were better than others, but all working prisoners knew what it was like to toil from dawn until dusk, in all weathers, with little or no concern taken for their welfare. In the summer of 1941 Sapper Thomas Pearson wrote home: ‘I am now working at a swine of a place. It is always a hurry and working on nothing but a small bread ration and potatoes. It is nothing to see a man being sick while working because the food is rotten. The guard thinks we are horses although he calls us swine. Working in rain, no parcels, no smokes, threats of shooting now make our lot.’2

  Les Allan, who should have spent the war years helping the sick and wounded, found himself forced to work in a brewery. One day he found himself face to face with a guard while holding a hammer he needed for his work. Seemingly fearing that Allan might attack him, the guard reacted quickly. He swung his rifle at the prisoner, smashing the butt into Allan’s jaw. The young British soldier crashed to the ground, his jaw broken. For the second time in his military career he found himself wounded, helpless and reliant on the enemy’s mercy for survival.

  Such attacks showed how some Germans simply ignored many of the clauses of the Geneva Convention. At Stalag 20B the commandant, Oberst Bollman, forced senior NCOs to go out on working parties, but he sent the Red Cross inspectors and repre
sentatives of the protecting powers to specially selected workcamps to ensure any cases of illegal working would not be discovered. During the period in which Oberst Bollman was in command at Marienburg, eighteen prisoners were shot and killed, with a further twelve wounded, at workcamps supplied from his stalag. It seemed the guards had little concern for the men in their charge. At one farm a drunken guard shot a prisoner in the leg, then when the prisoner shouted for assistance the guard fired again, blowing half his head away. Other guards were reported to have lain in wait for soldiers attempting to escape and then opened fire without giving the men a chance to surrender. A Private Mackenzie was even shot and killed for daring to argue about whether a saw was sharp enough to work with. In the case of one of those killed during Bollman’s command, it seemed that the guards revelled in the suffering they had inflicted. An announcement was made to the assembled prisoners that Sergeant Fraser had been killed for being the ringleader of a mutiny. The announcer also revealed that the guard who had shot Sergeant Fraser had been promoted for his actions.

  Men who had seen the hideous violence and suffering of the battlefield found it difficult to understand why their guards could treat them with such disregard. Bill Holmes was angered to see that some guards seemed to delight in the pain they could cause: ‘The brutality was awful. One chap had piles – I’d never seen piles before and I’ve never seen them since – they were bleeding. It was like a huge bunch of bleeding grapes hanging down. One day he pleaded to be excused from work because of the pain. And the guard came along and kicked him up the backside. There was blood everywhere – the agony must have been terrible.’