Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind

by Sean Longden

  Quite often, prisoners with TB were offered no treatment at all. Some just continued working, day after day, until they became too sick to continue. On a working detail from Stalag 8B, Bill Holmes witnessed the demise of a fellow prisoner:

  We were working at this sawmill and food was tight. There was one chap who had TB. He was only twenty but he was dying. We couldn’t do anything with him. We only got a portion of bread – two slices – for the day, but we tried to fill him up to keep him going. But one night he died. The Germans said he’d just have to be buried in the churchyard without a coffin. We argued that we were working in a sawmill so with all the wood, couldn’t they spare some. So we had these rough boards and made a coffin. And we got a scrap of tin, hammered it into a cross and put that on the lid. We made a paper wreath. It may seem crazy, but we were just happy he was in a box. What his poor parents would have thought, God only knows.

  Stalag hospitals were often depressing places for the patients. Men who had dreamed of getting a break from work were usually desperate to get back to their working parties rather than remain in hospital. One of those who experienced this turmoil was Dick Taylor. A Territorial soldier who had been captured at St Valery, Taylor found himself in hospital after he suffered the swelling of a gland behind his left ear. He needed an operation urgently since the swelling prevented him from eating. As a result he had lost a lot of weight from his already malnourished body. He was sent to a depressing military hospital in Danzig where he witnessed a madman rampaging round the wards waving a cut-throat razor and discovered patients who had lost limbs as a result of scratching insect bites. The bites had got infected and the infection had spread until blood poisoning had set in. For Taylor it was the lowest point of the entire war: ‘There were people dying all around me. The bed I got was because a coloured lad had just died of yellow jaundice. There was also a locked ward full of mentally ill Russians. It was a depressing place. The thing was, when someone died, their belongings were put into a small cardboard box. That was all they possessed in the whole world – nothing else. It was pretty depressing to see a man’s whole life in one tiny box. It was a sign of a wasted life.’

  Physical sickness was not the only burden faced by the POWs. Every prisoner felt the effects of the mental turmoil of captivity. Ken Willats, the chef turned infantryman captured at Abbeville, recalled the impact of knowing how far from home he was:

  When you are sitting on a farm in East Prussia and your home is in Elmfield Way, Balham, you cannot possibly see what events could take place to remove you from this little hamlet back to the hustle and bustle of London, SW12. You couldn’t imagine how that could come about. It seemed impossible that you would one day be back in normal life. So that was daunting. One realized that if Germany did win the war you’d be there for many, many years – that was a very real thought. But once you’d determined the war was going to be over by Christmas – every Christmas – you were all right. We had no choice, there was no point thinking anything else. It could drive you mad, you’d torture yourself.

  Jim Pearce, a Londoner who found himself working on lonely farms in the Polish countryside, took solace in the company of a Bible that had been sent to him by the Red Cross. It also accompanied him on the seemingly endless railway journeys between working parties. Whenever he had the chance he read from it and he prayed every night ‘for the Lord to look after me. It really helped me to keep going.’ Although he was not alone in turning to religion, others found a more basic use for their Bibles as toilet paper.

  For other prisoners the process of retaining morale was nothing more sophisticated than undermining German morale, as Eric Reeves remembered: ‘Once we got together we always believed we would win. The guards would say, “England kaput.” They’d say that the Germans had always won another big battle. But we would say, “Yeah, but we’re gonna win the last one mate!” We used to needle the guard all the time. That kept morale up.’ These were emotions that were shared by another young soldier, Jim Reed: ‘I was just a kid, but you soon grow up. Quite a few men went nuts. But I never felt I was wasting my life. I was just waiting for the end of the war to get a bit of justice from them – I wanted to have a go at the Germans. I wasn’t afraid of them. We told them we were better soldiers, we were better men and we came from a better country.’

  At first the prisoners did anything they could to entertain themselves. They played innumerable games of cards and chess on boards provided via the Red Cross and read whatever books they could find. Some had bizarre competitions, such as seeing who had the most lice on their bodies. At Stalag 20B there was even a contest to see who had the largest penis in the camp. As the camps got increasingly organized more sophisticated methods were found for keeping up morale. They put on plays and concert parties, formed dance bands and orchestras, established educational classes and played sports in whatever space they had available. One of the regular performers at his working party’s concerts was Cyril Holness, who had been captured in an aid post in 1940. He could sing and play the accordion but had one other talent that made him in demand. As a small, fresh-faced youngster with good teeth, he was the perfect choice to play female roles. For performances he wore a bra made from a cigarette tin and eventually had a pair of breasts fashioned from rubber by a commercial artist. While in costume he found he received unexpected attention: ‘One time I was dolled up in my costume and heading back to my hut. The guard was following me – he was very interested in me! I said to him in German, “You’re gonna get a shock when I take my trousers off!” He laughed his head off and said, “You look so good I wasn’t sure.” You wouldn’t think of those things in a POW camp!’

  Certain songs evoked sentimental memories for the prisoners, reminding them of everything they had left behind at home. Cyril Holness remembered the effect of the songs he would sing: ‘Every Christmas I’d have the big fellows in tears. All the older men who were married with children would cry when I sang this old song “The Little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot”. It’s a very sad song about a boy who wants toy soldiers for Christmas but doesn’t get them because he hasn’t got a father.’ As Eric Reeves remembered: ‘You’d see all the tears coming when they sang sad songs – that’s how you picked out the married men – they cried unashamedly, tears rolling down. Some were blokes who’d got married on their embarkation leaves then been stuck out in Germany for five years. Us single blokes didn’t bother, we didn’t give a monkey’s! But that was when the morale starts to go.’

  By March 1945 there were more than 41,000 British POWs who had endured more than four years of captivity, all of whom were thought to be likely to require some form of mental rehabilitation once they were finally released. For some the symptoms were no more than a deep sense of longing for home and family as they lay down to sleep each night. They thought of the parents who were growing older and the children who were growing up. They dreamed of the warm embrace of their wives, were tormented by sexual desire or the thoughts of what their girlfriends might be doing in their absence. They dreamed of walking the streets in freedom or simply watching the sunset from somewhere that wasn’t surrounded in barbed wire. However, for the thousands of working prisoners these were brief thoughts that filled their minds before their exhausted bodies slipped into deep sleep.

  For other POWs the mental burden was far greater. Those officers and NCOs who remained in the stalags were free from the physical burden of work but carried a far greater mental burden since they had little to do except to ponder their situation – hour upon hour, day after day, year upon year. This mental burden – which probably inspired more escapes than the desire to return to continue the fight against Germany – took its toll on many of the prisoners. One of the most visible signs of mental stagnation was displayed by the men known as ‘sack hounds’. These men spent long hours in their beds, hardly bothering to stir for days on end. In November 1944 a Major Higgins wrote from Oflag 7B about the mental state of the 800 officers in the camp who had endured four and a half ye
ars of POW life. He was prompted to act after eight officers were removed to mental hospitals: ‘I must emphasize that in my opinion it is most important that prompt action is taken if these young officers are to be in a fit condition to render useful service in the future.’5

  By 1943 the British Army estimated that around 30 per cent of long-term prisoners would be mentally unfit for further service upon their release from captivity. An official report described the individual morale of long-term POWs as ‘brittle’. It was accepted that after eighteen months of captivity emotional problems became disproportionately severe. This period was remembered by Graham King:

  In films the prisoners are always depicted as cheerful but we used to suffer from depression. You’d get annoyed with the person you were living with. Even the way they’d hold a bloody cigarette would get on your nerves – until you could scream. You wouldn’t speak to them for about three months – just because they weren’t smoking properly! You can’t get away from people, you are with them every day. At least civilian prisoners can count the days off as they go through their sentence. We couldn’t do that, we didn’t know what was happening. Even up to the day of liberation it could all have changed. The International Red Cross referred to these symptoms as ‘barbed-wire fever’ and they recommended that in future wars prisoners should not be held for longer than five years and then sent to a neutral country.

  A paper submitted to the War Office by Major Newman of the RAMC set out the psychological impact of captivity:

  intense initial depression after capture, the period of recovery of morale with frustrated revenge feelings liable to be misdirected towards the home authorities; the gradual adaptation of the more fortunate PW to his conditions and the storing up of frustration in less fortunate men. Then follows a long boring period which worries the man because unlike a civil criminal there is no period put to his captivity and during this period frets for fear of being forgotten, especially by those from whom he seeks affection.6

  Major Newman’s predictions were echoed by an officer who wrote from a stalag to the Swiss Legation in Berlin in February 1944: ‘More recently, among the older prisoners, the number of mental and nervous cases has been steadily increasing and I see signs now, amongst a number, that they are reaching a breaking point.’7 The psychological effects of long-term captivity were considered so severe that some in the British military suggested that there should be a straight swap between the British and Germans of healthy POWs. The suggestion was never put to the Germans since it soon became clear that the Germans would get 3,000 fighting men while the British would receive 3,000 men who would most likely be immediately discharged from service.

  Desperate not to be forgotten by the outside world, the most important thing in the POW’s life became his mail. Over the years of captivity this became a lifeline, the only thing that connected them with the civilian world of their families. Such was the impact of mail that prisoners recalled greeting each other with ‘How’s your mail?’ rather than ‘How are you?’ It seemed that every prisoner received bad news at some point. While in Thorn, Fred Coster received the devastating news that his brother had been killed in action. He later also heard that his girlfriend had gone off with a Canadian soldier. Yet not all the news was bad, even if it had to be waited for. At working camps from Stalag 8B, Fred Gilbert attempted to keep alive a long-distance relationship with his girlfriend:

  I hadn’t known her very long when I was captured. I’d only met her in 1940. Lads were getting letters off their wives – ‘Don’t bother to come home – I’m not living there any more – I’m marrying someone else’ – and so on. We heard this time and time again. It destroyed them. It was their only link to the outside world. I thought that was a bit grim. You’d see a bloke with a letter and people would say, ‘Is it a good one? Is everything all right?’ So it wasn’t a happy time. However, I wrote home to ask my girlfriend to marry me – I had to wait some months to get the answer. It was the right answer fortunately – I just hoped she’d keep her word.

  Others were not so fortunate to receive news they wanted to hear. Peter Wagstaff recalled the impact bad news had upon one of his fellow prisoners: ‘He received a letter from his fiancee within a couple of months. She wrote, “I don’t know how long you are going to be away. I don’t think I can wait that long.” He climbed the wire and got shot by the guards. That happened to a lot of people.’

  While ‘Dear John’ letters from girlfriends and wives brought devastating news, other letters brought information that just could not be believed. Graham King recalled reading a letter on behalf of an illiterate soldier: ‘If men heard their wives were being friendly with Yanks, there was bugger all they could do about it. This one illiterate bloke’s wife wrote that she had heard a noise one evening and gone to the back door. When she got there she found a little baby had been left there. She said it looked so much like her husband she had decided to keep it. And this bloke accepted it! I wonder if it had been different if he had been able to read it himself.’

  While all the prisoners experienced some form of mental anguish, there were increasing numbers who suffered severe psychological disturbances as a consequence of five years’ captivity. For some the trauma was a manifestation of issues that had already plagued them pre-war – in the words of their fellow prisoners they were the type who ‘couldn’t handle it’. For others the trauma of war had simply devoured their ability to resist the strain of captivity. The most severe cases were later found to be men who were ruminating over the death of friends and comrades or who had experienced a particularly distressing experience in battle.

  There was a fine line between misery and madness, and the prisoners all witnessed enough suffering to realize that they were actually among the more fortunate groups detained within the Third Reich. At least they had the nominal protection of the Geneva Convention, something that was not shared by the Russians within the stalags. The British might have been appalled by the treatment handed out to the Russians, but at least they were just witnesses rather than victims. ‘Ginger’ Barnett, a medic at Stalag 8B, remembered: ‘The Russians were treated like animals. I saw starving Russian POWs being used like horses to pull carts piled high with their own dead. The poor devils were so cold they fought each other to get the clothes off the dead.’

  When prisoners did crack up it was disturbing for the men who witnessed it. Jim Reed recalled watching a man attempting to dig his way through the floor with a spoon: ‘I knew him and tried to talk to him but next time I saw him he was barefoot and halfway up the barbed wire. The guard started prodding him with a bayonet and made him climb back.’ Others were not so fortunate, as Jim Pearce recalled: ‘A lot of people got really down in the dumps – they didn’t care if they lived or died. They’d pinch anything – they’d commit suicide by climbing the wires. They knew they were going to get shot.’ At a working party on a farm at Adlesbruck Ken Willats and Gordon Barber were woken by a fellow prisoner calling out the name of a local girl with whom he had fallen in love. It was clear that the man was losing his mind. Gordon Barber remembered that night:

  It was uncanny, it frightened us. What the fucking hell was going on? All night he stood by the window holding the bars, as he gazed out into the darkness and sang about his lover. My mate Ken went up to him and said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘I love her. I don’t care what the guards say; I’m going to see her tonight.’ He’d gone. He’d flipped. All you could see were fag ends burning. None of us could handle it. Next morning he wouldn’t go to work. We saw him with his hands through the barbed wire. The guards said they’d shoot him. We said, ‘You can’t shoot him, he’s gone crazy.’ So ‘Dixie’ Dean walks over, says, ‘Fipper, you’ve got to go.’ Then hits him and knocks him straight out. We carried him to the fields, but he was useless. When the sergeant in charge of us came round that month they took him away. He got sent home.

  At least this prisoner was protected by his comrades; others had no one there to help them when they ne
eded it most, as Fred Coster recalled: ‘I was lined up outside Fort 13 to go on a working party. We heard a clatter in the courtyard. We looked round and one of the chaps had jumped off the roof. He’d gone mad and killed himself. His body was down there on top of this big steel drain cover. We didn’t know who it was, we just marched off to work.’

  In the summer of 1944 the prisoners were struck by news of a landmark event that helped lift their spirits to new levels. The announcement of the D-Day landings marked a turning point for the men who had been in captivity for four years. After so long waiting, the British Army and its allies were back in France, working hard to advance through the landscape that had seen its defeat back in 1940. Now, it seemed, the soldiers who had escaped at Dunkirk were returning to liberate their comrades who had been left behind.

  There was another sign that helped spark the realization that Germany must finally be defeated. From 1944 onwards, those men employed in the factories of the Third Reich saw an increasing weight of bombs dropped on Germany by the Allied air forces. The very thought that high in the skies above them were their own countrymen, bringing the war to the heart of the Reich, lifted their spirits. However, each pound of high-explosive may have helped hasten the end of the war but, for those on the receiving end, it also ushered in a period of mounting danger. Eric Reeves, who had last found himself under bombardment in the fields around Abbeville in 1940, found the industrial complex he was working within was one of the major targets for the bombing campaign. He was unfortunate to be employed at Blechammer, where synthetic fuel was manufactured for the German war machine: