by Sean Longden
The discrimination was noted by many among the columns. Eric Reeves was part of a group of around 5,000 British prisoners outnumbered three to one by French soldiers. Each night, as the column came to a halt, the Germans set up their horse-drawn field kitchen, allowing the famished marchers the comforting sight of its chimney smoking.
It was always soup, of a sort. Then they’d shout, ‘All of the English over here – Do not sit down. All of the French here. French first.’ So the Froggies went off and filled their tins. Then the Germans would call us. The first blokes would get there and the lids would come down and the cooks would say, ‘All finished!’ They did that every day. It was psychological warfare because eventually the boys started muscling in on the French and pinching their soup. So the Froggies hated us. The first bit of French I learned was ‘Poussez pas’, Don’t push – you’d hear them all shouting out when our blokes were going for their food.
Gordon Barber decided to take matters into his own hands: ‘I saw the French getting issued dripping from these big vats. I had a French overcoat I’d pinched so I could go and get my share. As I came away with mine the French spotted my British jacket and I had to run for it. This Froggie went to grab it, he kicked my arm, so I nutted him hard. So I ran like bleedin’ anything and got back to my mates.’
It was not only the humiliation of being fed from the French leftovers that made life increasingly unbearable for the British troops. Reginald Collins of the Gloucestershire Regiment recorded the misery of being forced to march in a mixed column. The Frenchmen in the column were marched ahead of the British until a substantial gap had opened up. Then the Frenchmen were allowed to rest and the trailing British were made to run after them: ‘To encourage us in this the German guards stood on both sides of the column swinging the butt ends of their rifles and sticks and clubs. This treatment lasted all day, the heat was intense and many prisoners fell at the side of the road from exhaustion. Those who fell were kicked until they regained their feet. For the whole of this day we had no water.’19 This continued throughout the day with the British seldom allowed to rest; instead they were constantly marching or running.
In similar cases, British troops were made to run, then given a brief rest while marching French prisoners were allowed to catch up with them. Once the French had caught up, the British were forced to run again. One group recalled having to run to overtake French prisoners five times, all in the heat of the midday sun. Walter Kite, captured near Abbeville, later wrote of his experience of the march: ‘On the march again at 0800 hours at the double. God what an experience – running uphill in the sweltering sun with the young German NCOs helping us along with their bayonets. A Tommy in front of me was bayoneted in the thigh and a Poilu killed just because he didn t hurry enough.’20
The antagonistic attitude of the guards heaped agony upon the misery of the marchers. As a government report later described it, the crimes inflicted upon British prisoners ‘seem to indicate systematic inhumanity directed against British prisoners of war’.21 With no choice but to steal to stay alive, it was little wonder the prisoners came into conflict with their guards. Jim Reed, the Sheffield teenager who had been captured with the Seaforth Highlanders at St Valery, was prepared to take risks to ensure he was fed:
The Germans liked to show you who was the master. We had no food at all – we weren’t given any food for about a week. So we scrounged food out of the shops. We just went in and grabbed stuff and ran out again. I saw one or two get shot. I got whipped by a German guard – he was riding by on a horse, keeping us in order. I had come out of a shop and he spotted me. He rode up and cracked me once or twice with his whip until I got into the crowd and got out of his way. But I kept hold of the food, I wasn’t going to let go of that! It was us against them. I’d changed from a soldier into a thief.
Some paid a higher price than a whipping. On 16 June a private of the Cameron Highlanders was shot while attempting to reach a pile of sugar beet. Others in the same column watched as a soldier bent down to pull potatoes from the earth of a roadside field: ‘Suddenly there was the sound of a shot and this man rolled over and did not move again.’22
In another incident a Scots soldier with wounded feet fell out of the column to rest, only to be shot and killed by a German NCO. One soldier captured at Calais recorded that he had witnessed the murder of six men who had fallen out of the column after collapsing. As one of those who had sufficient strength to keep a diary wrote of the march between Lille and the Belgian frontier: ‘Treatment bad, stragglers being shot at.’23 Another soldier later wrote of the German efforts to hurry the men at the back of his column: ‘They consistently exhorted more speed and threatened us, finally shooting a few of the real stragglers. Thereafter, the speed of the column increased noticeably.’24 Fred Coster remembered: ‘Some would drop out and the Germans came along shouting “Raus”. They told us the sick were being picked up by lorries. But we never saw any lorries. So we got the opinion they were being popped off.’
Having trudged wearily for mile upon mile, hardly able to distinguish one day from the next, David Mowatt had seen much in the week leading up to the capture of the 51st Division, but one act of savagery was to imprint itself in his memory:
We were going through this village and there was a Scots Guardsman in front of me. He was very tall, head and shoulders above me, still with his cap proudly on his head. He put his hand out to take some food from the villagers. Suddenly a guard struck out with his rifle-butt and hit the man’s hand. The Scots Guardsman turned round and landed the finest right hook I’ve ever seen. It sent the guard flying, landing on the ground a couple of yards away. I said, ‘For God’s sake get away! Take your hat off and change position! Get in another group.’ He said, ‘No way’ and carried on marching. About half an hour after the guard came up – he was right in front of me – he raised his rifle and shot the Scotsman through the chest. There was no hesitation. All because the man was too proud to take his hat off. It was terrible. You expect it of the SS, but this was just an ordinary Wehrmacht soldier. He just killed this man, it was a dreadful thing to do. The body was just left at the roadside . . . He was just left there and we all had to step over him. I don’t know why he hadn’t tried to hide. Maybe it showed his state of mind. Perhaps he’d reached the stage where he couldn’t care less about living.
Not all the marching men were witness to such acts of violence but all knew what was happening. Every day they would hear the gunfire as guards shot those attempting to escape. And every day men fell out from the columns never to be seen again. Eric Reeves recalled how the threat of violence was never far away:
I didn’t see any executions, but I heard about it. We came to one place where the Germans shooed us all away. We heard that one of the guards had kicked a bucket of water over and a young Welsh Guardsman had given him a right-hander. So the guard shot him in the head. Another time, it was a beautiful day, and I was sitting on the side of a dry ditch. I was absolutely shattered. Then a guard came along. He shouted, ‘Get up!’ and shouldered his rifle. Then a staff car drew up and this immaculate German officer got out and roared at him. The guard came to attention and then walked off. Then the officer threw three cigarettes at me and went off in his car.
Reeves was fortunate that the car had arrived just in time, allowing the officer to intervene and save him from one of the many acts of random violence that followed the marching columns.
The casual violence convinced most to keep their heads down and see the pointlessness of risking death for the sake of a raw potato. One soldier recorded how the violence and deprivations had brought the British to a state of submission: ‘A single shot fired over our heads brought instant attention from hundreds.’25 It was an emotion reflected by Gordon Barber when he explained: ‘You’d be surprised how resilient you are at that age. When you know that if you don’t keep going you’re going to die – they’re going to fucking shoot you.’
In this situation it was little wonder few among th
e marching prisoners believed there was any point in attempting escape. In the early days of the march plenty had dived into the long grass at the roadside or dived into woodland. Most were soon recaptured and sent back to join the marchers. Others were shot and killed as they attempted to evade their guards. As the men grew weaker any thought of running away became unthinkable, it was strenuous enough to keep putting one foot in front of the other – hour upon hour – without contemplating the idea of dashing off to find cover. Growing increasingly weary, few were concerned about anything but their own survival. They also became increasingly cynical about the fate of those who took the chance, as Dick Taylor explained: ‘I had no thoughts of escape, it was too dangerous. But if anybody else broke away you’d hear the shots. You’d just think to yourself “It isn’t me.” That was the attitude. One more dead man meant nothing, as long as it wasn’t me. It was self-preservation – you’re not bothered about anybody else. Heroes are dead people – it’s better to live for your country than to die for it.’
There was a further concern. Most prisoners recognized how lucky they had been to survive the battle for France. They had seen their friends shot down or blown to pieces by high-explosive. Why then take the risk of becoming another forgotten victim of war? Bill Bampton described the emotional pull against escaping: ‘If it went wrong and we were killed, our parents would never know what had happened to us.’26
For so many of the marchers, it was a lonely existence. They were surrounded by thousands of men. All were sharing the same hideous experiences, all had known the horrors of battle and seen their friends slaughtered, yet they had no emotions to share. Instead each man became wrapped up in his own small world – a world that revolved around the desperate desire for food and rest.
Having witnessed the horror of a fellow prisoner being murdered just a couple of feet in front of him, and suffering the aching pains of hunger shared by every man on the march, David Mowatt began to feel the effects of all they were being forced to endure: ‘I didn’t have the strength to talk. We were all dragged right down. We were filthy – lousy. I can’t describe the despair. It was terrible. The days just blurred into each other. We didn’t know how far we were going to march – we were just going in circles.’
However, as he would soon discover, their ordeal was far from over.
CHAPTER NINE
The Journey Continues
Women came right up close to me and spat in my face.
Bill Holmes, captured on the Dunkirk beaches, on his arrival in Germany
I thought the war was over. We’ve had it. What’s going to happen to us?
Jim Pearce, Middlesex Regiment, captured at St Valery
As they approached the German border, the effects of the weeks of marching took their toll on the physically and mentally exhausted prisoners. They had been kicked, starved, beaten, humiliated and, quite often, shot at by guards who seemed to have no regard for their welfare. Quite simply, they had been treated worse than animals – at least animals would have been allowed to graze each evening. About to enter Germany, they would finally be engulfed within a system that seemed hell bent upon their destruction.
The toil of the long marches – the aching muscles from days of walking, the pain caused by sleeping on cold damp ground, the empty bellies and shrinking waistlines, the blistered feet, the calluses and carbuncles caused by equipment that rubbed – all created a deep sense of despair for the prisoners. Unwashed, clad in stinking, sweat-stained blouses that rubbed at their necks and heavy woollen trousers that scraped their crotches, leaving the skin redraw, they marched onwards. Each step, that in their minds seemed to burst another blister and took their socks closer to disintegration, was an attack on their very humanity. When they found food they stuffed it into stubble-ringed mouths, through lips parched by thirst and burned by the sun. They looked at the hands that lifted the food to their mouths and could hardly recognize the filth-encrusted digits topped by nails deep in dirt. They cursed the sun that burned their skin, then in turn cursed the rain that soaked both them and the ground that was their bed. Each intake of breath brought the sickly sweet smell of the filth ingrained on their bodies. Then they endured the stench of what remained after they had been assaulted by the oppressive stomach cramps that signalled diarrhoea.
Less than two months before, Lord Gort, the commander of the BEF, had written: ‘The morale of the troops is excellent and on that score I have no anxiety . . . the fears expressed in some quarters have proved groundless.’1 Yet for the hordes of prisoners as they trudged towards Germany, such words were meaningless. The army may have retained its morale before war but, in the chaotic aftermath of defeat, the morale of those who had been sacrificed on the road to Dunkirk plummeted to a previously unknown level. It was no longer a case of whether Britain could survive, it was simply a case of whether they could survive as prisoners of the Germans.
The sense of defeat was compounded by the scenes they witnessed as they trudged towards Germany. Those with enough strength to moan cursed the army, the generals, the government – everyone – for their lack of preparedness. Others hardly dared think of what the defeat really meant. They feared for their wives – their lives – picturing them as the huddled corpses of refugees that had lined the roads of France during the retreat. They thought of the crying babies left orphaned by bombing raids, of the bullet-riddled prams, then of their own families. They imagined storm-troopers kicking in their doors, sneering at their cowering parents, then lying down to rest in their beds. They pictured their streets in flames, their children as corpses – their world in ruins.
Yet if the hunger, thirst, exhaustion and violence were not enough to convince the prisoners of the German victory, there were other more subtle signals. One man, feigning sickness, found himself put on to a truck heading eastwards carrying a group of middle-aged German soldiers, all of whom displayed Great War medal ribbons on their tunics. As they headed home they were drinking looted French brandy while seated on rolls of stolen silks and soft furnishings. It was a sure sign of who were masters of the battlefield. Marchers were greeted by their guards informing them that England would be next and that, while they languished in captivity, their homes would soon be occupied by the victors of the battle for France. As if to add insult to injury, they also stressed that the German soldiers would soon be ‘taking their girls out’.2 As one group of marchers were told by a passing German officer: ‘You go to Berlin – we go to London.’3
Each passing lorry seemed to contain at least one English-speaking humorist who wished to heap scorn upon the dejected British soldiers. Eric Reeves listened to their depressing comments: ‘A cocky bloke would hang out and shout “Ja. You are going to ‘Hang out your washing on the Siegfried Line’ Yes, Tommy.” So we hated that song! But it was depressing. There was silence on that march – you didn’t think about anything.’ The situation was even worse for the Londoners among them who had to endure boasts that the Luftwaffe was already flattening the English capital.
When reports reached London of the deliberate mistreatment, the British government soon recognized the criminality of what they had endured. The War Office was certain that charges would be bought against the German High Command for their deliberate discrimination against the British soldiers. How, they reasoned, could the Germans find food for the vast numbers of French prisoners yet fail to find anything for the relatively small numbers of British? It was not just the senior German officers whose behaviour was condemned, those officers and men who had been in direct charge of the columns were recognized as contributing to the misery of the marching hordes. As one British report acknowledged: ‘The actions of officers and men in immediate charge of prisoners of war was such that no pleas of superior orders, if pleaded, could be admitted to relieve them of responsibility.’4 Effectively, the entire German military machine was responsible for what had occurred: ‘Blame must be apportioned between all ranks, from the officer in supreme direction of arrangements regarding prisoners of
war downwards.’ Furthermore: ‘The mass ill-treatment of prisoners of war would be seen to be a matter of policy or system which would be laid down by the High Command.’5
Yet, for the men about to enter Germany, as prisoners of a regime that had already inflicted so much agony upon them, thoughts of war crimes and any legal framework for punishing their tormenters were far from their minds. Instead, their thoughts were full of more basic needs – food, water and rest. As RAMC medic Graham King – who under the rules of war should have been attending to the sick and wounded rather than trudging country lanes – put it, they were ‘hot, sweaty, exhausted, starving men, struggling to stay alive and hold on to sanity if not hope’.
As the march progressed, every single soldier grew increasingly weak, both physically and mentally. The combined effect of their defeat and the obvious disarray in the Allied armies was a potent brew that delivered a blow to their morale. Though many among the marching columns did their best to maintain morale the simple truth was that most considered it to be the worst period of their lives. Like many, Bill Homes, who had been so close to getting away – beginning the march with the sand of Dunkirk still in his boots – was struck by the enforced state of uncertainty: ‘It took six weeks for me to get to the POW camp. We were exhausted and we never knew what was going to happen to us. I was full of thoughts. I was wondering if I would ever get out of it. But the one thing that helped was that I was still with some of my mates. So at least we had a sense of togetherness. That made a lot of difference.’ The minds of others were engulfed in similar emotions. Bob Davies was among them: