Farming, Fighting and Family

by Miranda McCormick

  ‘With your education,’ they kept saying, fixing me with a stern officer stare, ‘you should take a commission. You are not pulling your weight.’

  Conscience makes cowards of us all. I gave in. The accusation about not pulling my weight was hurtful. So off I went to the War Office Selection Board – WOSBIE – in North London, was tested and deemed suitable to go on to OCTU.* But although I may have satisfied the examiners as to a few academic capabilities, knew how to organise a stretcher party so that it got a prostrate dummy body over a wall – I dare say my nursing experience came in useful here – and passed various other fairly ordinary tests of competence, they didn’t reckon on my ball and chain. Even the lady psychiatrist didn’t pick that up. I suppose they were looking for conscientiousness, but only up to a point. They didn’t spot that they were dealing with someone who had it to such a degree that it was more a hindrance than a help.

  Once David got wind of Pamela’s intentions he was suitably encouraging. In a letter dated 13 May he wrote:

  I hear you stayed with the parents on your way to the city to be fleeced. They loved having you, but I hope you weren’t over-shorn. But I hear it is in a good cause – to help towards getting a commission. Good luck with that, Darling. I don’t know why they didn’t give you one straight away.

  By now news of the Allies’ progress in North Africa during the spring of 1943 had reached David and his fellow captives. On 27 May David wrote Pamela a particularly upbeat letter:

  At present I am having a sort of 2nd childhood & am playing lots of games like football & basketball & on the whole am feeling pretty fit … Well, now that Tunisia is finished I suppose one can be optimistic about being home soon. It is a great step forward. I wonder where the cat will jump next?

  * * *

  Where the cat would jump next had, in fact, already been decided as a result of the Casablanca conference of January 1943 at which Churchill, Roosevelt and their respective military advisers planned Allied strategy once Axis forces had, as anticipated, been driven out of northern Africa. It had not been an easy meeting. The Americans were initially in favour of an immediate all-out assault in northern France pushing through to Germany. Churchill opposed such a plan, arguing that more time was needed; British forces were not yet ready for a second front; the Luftwaffe and German U-boats had to be effectively annihilated, and more landing craft needed to be manufactured. Churchill argued that in the meantime Axis forces, who were currently concentrated on the Eastern Front in the long drawn out, bitter battle for Stalingrad which they were on the point of losing, should be further stretched by being engaged on as many other fronts as possible, particularly in the Mediterranean. The obvious next move was the invasion of Sicily, followed by that of Italy, whose hopes of creating an African Empire had been dashed by the defeat of its North African colonies. Churchill managed, in large part, to get his way, though his idea that Italy would prove to be Germany’s soft underbelly would prove wide of the mark.

  Following the formal surrender of the Axis forces in North Africa on 13 May, the Allies needed a period of consolidation and planning before launching their invasion of Sicily (code-named ‘Operation Husky’). The battle for North Africa had proved something of a learning curve for the novice American troops. British veterans of the Second World War invariably describe their new allies both in this and other fields of the conflict as very ‘green’. Whilst better equipped than their British counterparts and commendably enthusiastic, they were inexperienced and liable to panic under pressure, resulting in poor discipline and consequent unnecessary casualties.

  General Dwight Eisenhower was appointed Supreme Commander of the invasion of Sicily, with the British and American forces under the command, respectively, of Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery and Lieutenant-General George Patton. The operation was planned for the second week of July, when the position of the moon would be at its most favourable to guide the invaders. In the event the invasion, on the night of 10 July, was hampered by an unusually vicious summer storm, which led to many casualties during the landing process, particularly amongst the airborne troops. The upside of the storm was that the defending Axis forces were taken by surprise, little suspecting that the Allies would attempt to invade on such a night, and the landings themselves received scant opposition.

  The plan was for Montgomery’s forces to land in the south-east and Patton’s in the south-west, both aiming northwards to reach Messina as quickly as possible to cut off any Axis retreat over the Straits to the Italian mainland. Although the American forces had farther to travel, Montgomery’s men, progressing up the coast via Syracuse and Catania, were met with stiff opposition from the Germans, particularly in the foothills of Mount Etna; therefore when they finally entered Messina on 17 August they found themselves narrowly beaten to it by Patton’s American troops. Meanwhile the Axis forces had managed to execute a surprisingly orderly retreat back to the mainland.

  The Italians, having lost their North African colonies, were by now thoroughly demoralised and war weary. On 25 July Mussolini was stripped of his powers and succeeded as Commander-in-Chief by King Victor Emmanuel, who promptly imprisoned the former leader. Marshal Badoglio was appointed prime minister with the aim of getting Italy out of the war altogether; a difficult diplomatic game ensued with Badoglio on the one hand conducting secret negotiations with the Allies, whilst on the other hand assuring Hitler that the Italians would remain loyal. Badoglio feared the collateral damage to his country if Allied and German troops were to fight over it, fears which would prove well-founded later that autumn.

  * * *

  David’s letters home during this period give little clue as to how much of these developments had filtered through to him and his fellow prisoners, but certainly their hopes must have been raised at the prospect of imminent release. Recent events had evidently interrupted mail deliveries, for on 24 June David wrote to Pamela saying that he had received no letters from England for a good two months, and he was eager for news from the Home Front. He went on to reminisce:

  Well, it is just exactly 2 years since I arrived in Egypt – what a waste of time! It must be jolly nearly 3 since Mrs Thing’s dance at the White Hart … When did we meet, Darling? Can you remember? I feel that this can’t go on much longer now, don’t you? How is your work going? Are they going to give you a pip? Is your Dad writing a book about the Home Guard?* There is no news, but I am always thinking of you and longing for our reunion.

  A week or so later David finally received several letters all at once. On 8 July he wrote to Pamela: ‘I have been very lucky & had 3 letters from you this week … What a wonderful typist you are now! … I am so glad you passed the O.C.T.U. board, though there could never have been any doubt about the result.’

  A letter David wrote to his parents that same week paints possibly the clearest picture of the conditions in which he had been living since his capture:

  Well, I have been in gaol for some 20 months now. Apart from half a dozen mass walks I have been enclosed in 5 acres or less all the time … I expect you think I am having a wonderful opportunity for studying, but I am afraid this is not really so. Application and concentration are both impractical as our bed-living-room is a rectangular cloister with some 300 beds arranged end to end in two rows, so that what with a few gramophones, people always hammering stoves out of old tins, doing a bit of one’s cooking, and general conversation and flies, things aren’t easy. We get the Italian newspapers, and occasionally home news from new arrivals. Perhaps the most important thing in our lives after the general news are our Red Cross food parcels. At present they have ceased.

  This life was about to change, however. With southern Italy under threat of Allied invasion, David and his companions suddenly found themselves evacuated en masse from Padula and sent to other prison camps further north. On 6 August David wrote a brief postcard to Pamela with his new address, trying in typical fashion to make the best of his changed circumstances: ‘Have not been able to write for
a few weeks, but am now in a new camp. We have all been moved. In many ways it is an improvement, but I shall miss the view.’ In a subsequent letter dated 14 August David was able to expand a little on his new surroundings:

  This camp will not be too bad if we only have a short stay, but would become very monotonous after a bit. It is a modern affair of brick bungalows & barbed wire & vaguely reminds you of petrol filling stations. There is no view & very poor space for games & nowhere for plays & things but the washing and messing facilities are an improvement on 35.

  Prisoners were not permitted by the censors to reveal the localities of their prison camps, which were simply referred to by a number for address purposes, Padula being PG (Prigione di Guerra) 35; later records show that David’s new camp, PG 19, was situated near Bologna, deep in northern Italy.

  Censorship appeared to be tightening up at this critical stage of the war, for David ended his letter with the somewhat cryptic words: ‘I am not allowed to make any comments on general news and feelings.’ It is not hard to guess what such feelings might have been. Word would have reached the prisoners of the successful outcome of the Sicilian campaign; surely it would only be a matter of weeks before the Allies came on over to the Italian mainland and David and his companions would finally be freed.

  * * *

  The Allied landings did indeed go ahead as anticipated. On 3 September the Eighth Army crossed the Straits of Messina from Sicily, and on the same day an armistice with Italy was signed. Further Allied landings took place at Taranto and Salerno on 9 September. Although there was fierce fighting for a while at Salerno, the other landings met little resistance. However the German forces, retreating northward, fought with dogged determination, using the Italian terrain to thwart the Allies’ progress wherever possible. Later in the autumn, after Naples had fallen into Allied hands, stalemate was reached at what became known as the Gustav Line, stretching from west to east across the country and incorporating the now notorious hilltop village of Monte Cassino, the scene of much heavy fighting to come. Despite the armistice, as the Italians feared, their country had effectively become two separate warring states, with the Axis forces in northern Italy – nominally headed by a rescued and reinstated Mussolini – keeping the Allies in the south at bay at every opportunity. This situation would continue well into 1944. Italy was not the Germans’ soft under-belly that Churchill envisaged; rather it would prove to be its backbone.

  Churchill was not the only one to be frustrated by the slow progress of the Italian campaign. David and his fellow prisoners, whose hopes of imminent release had run so high earlier in the summer, suddenly found themselves about to be taken in cattle trucks to a new prison camp deep inside Germany itself, a place later identified as Weinsberg.* To avoid being thus transported, David hid in the rafters of the Italian POW camp, but was discovered at the eleventh hour and forced to rejoin his fellow captives. Once again, the McCormick name may have saved him from being summarily executed, the fate of most prisoners attempting to escape.

  In David’s first letter to Pamela following this latest move, dated 22 October, he made his feelings clear, though in typical stoic fashion tried to remain philosophical about his new situation:

  Darling, This is the first letter I have been able to send you since I left Italy; as you will understand, I knew Mummy would be anxious and have written to her on every opportunity. To hear that an armistice had been signed & think one was free & then to wake up in Germany a week later was a shattering blow, but we have been marking time so long now that I suppose a bit longer won’t hurt us. We were able to take all the kit we could carry – so we are not too badly off, though I had to jettison quite a lot of things, especially as I thought it wise to carry about 20lbs of Red X food. I am afraid all your letters are somewhere in Italy!

  It was as well David did not know at the time that far from being just ‘a bit longer’, it would be a full year and a half until the war in Europe ended and he and his companions would at long last be liberated.

  Notes

  * This sounds somewhat irregular at that time, for black American soldiers were strictly segregated from their white colleagues, both in accommodation and leisure activities, during their period of service in the Second World War. Possibly the ‘darkies’ to whom Pamela referred were drivers.

  * Officer Cadet Training Unit.

  * This was a reference to Arthur Street’s From Dusk till Dawn, which was first published in 1943. A revised edition appeared in 1945.

  * Its official war address for correspondence was ‘Oflag VA’. ‘Oflag’ was short for Offizierslage – officer camp, as opposed to Stalag, short for Stammlager, permanent camp for other ranks.

  Fourteen

  ATS Promotion and Worrying Events (October–December 1943)

  Despite having passed her ATS officer suitability test in the spring of 1943, Pamela did not immediately leave for training. It appears that she had once again been laid low by one of her recurring maladies, but no doubt after the difficulties of the previous harvest, Pamela wanted to be on hand to help with that of 1943 if needed. Another factor may well have been her burgeoning relationship with Holden Bowler; for this reason alone she must have been reluctant to leave Wilton.

  So it was not until the autumn that Pamela finally found herself at the ATS OCTU training headquarters at Guildford. It was an exhausting experience, as she later described:

  So, off I went again, this time to Guildford, to be knocked into shape – officer shape. Besides lectures and a certain amount of desk work, we seemed to spend an inordinate number of hours square-bashing. There was a fierce male ginger-haired sergeant-major who used to shout, ‘Left right, left right. Pick up yer feet, ladies. Pick ’em up. Halt! Abaaat Turn.’ We were all so tired at night, it was all we could do not to get into our camp beds without undressing.

  In her letters home, Pamela not only complained about the physical hardships of the life she now found herself leading, but in particular bemoaned the fact that she constantly felt foolish and inadequate. Arthur Street’s robust reply, in a letter dated 6 October 1943, was a typical blend of compassion and down-to-earth common sense:

  I don’t think you need worry too much about being slow on the uptake. I was always so, and I can assure you that these frightfully bright people don’t really cut much ice. The English tradition is to remain silent and unmoved no matter what injustice or misfortune occurs, and thus to disarm the alien into thinking one is a fool. Then, at the right moment, one traps him hopelessly.

  Even so, I don’t think you should devote all your energies into making yourself appear an even bigger fool than you are. You see, after a while that becomes boring to other people. The great thing is to hang on to one or two principles that one is certain are right, hang on like grim death in the face of superiors if need be, and for the rest deal with life as it comes, feeling firmly convinced that the others are bigger fools than yourself …

  Only too aware of his daughter’s sheltered upbringing, Arthur Street goes on in the same letter to explain to Pamela, in farming metaphors, why she was finding her current life so tough:

  Also I shouldn’t worry too much about disliking the job you’re at, or rather the one life and other people have rather pitchforked you into. The whole art of living is to learn how to do something that one loathes. This happens again and again until one dies. Begins at boarding school, next at work, then in love, next in marriage, next with children, next with business worries, then with illness and so on. Life is always uphill, with very occasional glorious downhill short bursts.

  For instance, you don’t like the job of the moment. Well, I cannot remember ever liking being a retail milkman. Your handicap is that you’re a colt that wasn’t broken to work young enough, and now you’re collar shy. You know, as I’ve told you, bone lazy. Well, so am I, but one comes of it [sic] in due course …

  By now Pamela had moved from Guildford to the Imperial Services College at Windsor for the second phase of her training
course, which she was evidently finding even more gruelling than the first, for Arthur’s letter continues: ‘I’m sorry Windsor seems to be getting you down more than did Guildford, which most people consider to be the hardest part … Apparently the policy is to treat cadets as being the lowest form of life. Then they blossom like the rose.’

  Arthur’s letter gives no inkling of a far more serious matter that would have been very much on his mind at the time of writing. From a family point of view, Pamela’s OCTU course could not have taken place at a more inopportune moment. Shortly after she left Wilton her father, who had secretly been suffering from shortness of breath and chest pains all that summer, was diagnosed with a serious heart condition. Despite wartime rationing, he was now tipping the scales at over 17 stone, and a drastic diet was prescribed to ease the pressure on his system, otherwise he might only have six months to live. His doctors recommended that he should spend three months at Ruthin Castle in North Wales, a private hospital-cum-nursing-home which specialised in weight-loss treatments, and in mid October he duly went there, leaving Vera Street nominally in charge of Ditchampton Farm. Vera might well have appreciated her daughter’s presence and help during this deeply stressful period, but she and Arthur decided to keep the severity of the latter’s condition from their daughter whilst she was engaged in her new patriotic duties, and it was only much later that Pamela was made aware of the danger in which her father had been.