by Sean Longden
It was a situation that was painfully obvious to Fred Gilbert. Having been shot three times in his final battle, Gilbert received little in the way of meaningful treatment for his wounds: ‘You were just supposed to get better. It slowly started to heal up. But whilst I was in Lamsdorf, I think it was bandaged up a couple of times in three months.’
Remaining at Thorn, Graham King was initially sent to work as an orderly for the dentist looking after the prisoners. He was only able to work two days a week since it was an eight-kilometre round trip to the surgery each day. He was just too weak to contemplate making the trip more than twice a week. Later in the year he began working at the Medical Inspection Room in Fort 15. With medical supplies so limited, their greatest fear was of major outbreaks of disease. Of particular concern was typhoid, since none of the water that arrived in the fort’s crumbling underground brick-built water tanks had been treated. Furthermore, water from the cesspits was found to be leaking into the main water tanks. As a result they were forced to carry out mass inoculations, injecting 1,500 men three times over a period of three weeks. In the weeks that followed they had to give a further 3,000 injections to inoculate against diphtheria. The problem was that the hospital had just two syringes and twenty-five needles. As a result, the medics had to regularly sharpen the needles between injections just to keep working.
We worked hard in the MI Room. Following on from the dysentery and malnutrition we now had multiple boils, suppurating wounds from lice and fleabites, respiratory complaints and the threat of diphtheria. All the men had to have throat swabs taken and then inoculations were carried out, compulsorily. The lice and fleabite wounds were most time-consuming because there were so many on each patient which took a considerable amount of time to clean and dress. As there was a shortage of dressings, we had to reuse the bandages by giving the slack to the patient to hold and the orderly rewound the bandage. I was dressing the multiple septic lice bite sores of an ancient warrior – claimed to have dropped twenty years off his age to join up, but was a pensioner – when I noticed an army of lice walking up the bandage towards me. A quick shake and they fell to the floor where, with much stamping of booted feet we hoped the majority perished. It took about an hour to dress this guy’s wounds so he came every other day.
One of those whose health suffered while at Thorn was Seaforth Highlander David Mowatt. Such was his rapidly worsening condition, it seemed he had survived battle and the march into captivity for nothing:
I was in Fort 17. But I got gastroenteritis – twice. My stomach was in a terrible state. The first time I was roped to the bloody bed, for five days. There was no medical attention. I recovered. Then suddenly a week later I had another attack. As I came around the second time I looked into a face of an officer. He had this little tin mug of water and was dabbing my lips. I said to him, ‘I thought I was in heaven!’ He said to me, ‘No, thank God. You’re still in the land of the living.’ He told me he was going to get me out of the hospital or else they’d end up carrying me out. He suggested I go on a working party. I said, ‘Sir. I can’t even stand up let alone work!’ But he knew he needed to get me out of the camp because the walls were running with water and were green with fungus. So he got me out on a small working party.
Once out at work he began to slowly recover, courtesy of the extra food that he received each day. It was clear to Mowatt that joining a working party had been a small price to pay to escape from the conditions that had reduced him to such an appalling physical state.
Sent initially on a working party to build a road – that was soon washed away during a storm – Dick Taylor was also glad to be working: ‘On a working party you were fully employed. You were pretty tired when you came back at night, there was no time for thinking.’ His fellow Northumberland Fusilier, Jim Charters, said the same thing: ‘It was a relief to go to work. If I hadn’t have been working I’d have gone round the bend.’
With time, some workcamps would become well established, offering a basic standard of living to the prisoners. However, in 1940 this was not the case. Early working parties endured living and working conditions far below the internationally agreed standards for POWs. The food was invariably awful, offering little in the way of sustenance for the working prisoners. One man, who had already lost two front teeth after being beaten by the guards, recorded his daily rations as black bread and coffee for breakfast, a pint of weak broth for lunch and a cup of coffee for his evening meal. He was only saved by the kindness of Polish prisoners who managed to get extra food for him. On an early working party, Bob Davies recalled the daily rations: ‘We were weak. We mainly had watery soup with black bread. We shared a ten-inch loaf between five people or, when food was short, it was one between six. It was once a day and that was your lot – no butter, marmalade or jam. We got hungry but the old stomach settles down, shrinks, and eventually you realize you don’t need so much food.’
Eric Reeves, who took part in the building work to expand the stalag at Schubin, was soon aware that the food shortages had undermined their ability to carry out even the most menial duties:
They got loads of bricks and we formed a human chain to move them. One bloke said, ‘Here, that ain’t how you do it. You take two at a time . . .’ So someone else shouted, ‘Oi! We’re working for the Germans now. We’re not on piecework!’ So we passed them slowly from hand to hand. But even at that rate, after an hour or so, we’d had enough – we were shattered. Another time I was a lumberjack. We were out in the wood cutting trees to make pit props. They gave me a double-headed axe but I couldn’t even pick it up. It was too heavy. We were suffering from hunger.
As early as July 1940 some men arrived at Stalag 9C to discover that other prisoners had already been sent to workcamps. The first seventy-six British prisoners sent to work were employed on local building projects. Forty-two of the men slept in a single attic room while the remainder slept in a large room above a garage. The kitchen and laundry facilities were insufficient for the numbers living there and all seventy-six of them shared just five toilets. The men worked for nearly twelve hours each day but did not receive any work clothes. As a result their uniforms were soon ruined. It was little wonder the prisoners considered they were being made into slaves.
The story was repeated throughout the system of arbeitskommandos. Sleeping accommodation was always basic, with men sleeping in spartan huts often without even bunks, straw mattresses or blankets. Some of the luckier prisoners found themselves employed as builders and were pleased to discover they were actually constructing huts for themselves to live in. The huts may have been basic but at least they knew they would soon be sleeping in purpose-built accommodation rather than living 200 to a room in three-tier bunks contained within a former Polish Army stables.
Toilets at workcamps were seldom more than holes in the ground, which were regularly emptied to spread upon the fields, and washing facilities consisted of a single cold tap – if they were lucky. For Jim Pearce, whose duties that winter included shovelling snow from Luftwaffe runways, there was a tin in the corner of the hut that was used as a toilet during the night: ‘I can still remember my mate Bubbles calling out, “Mind the toilet tin! Mind the rats!” ’Cause the rats were always in the huts. It was horrible – the rats lived with us. They’d crawl over you in the bunk. No one wanted to sleep in the bottom bunk at night.’
Though the conditions at most of the workcamps left much to be desired, one thing was certain – work meant food, food meant life and thus work meant survival. It was a simple equation.
Despite that, there were some employments that were reviled by the prisoners. Worst of all were the mines of Silesia, into which many of the prisoners from Stalag 8B were sent. There were coal, salt, copper and lignite mines. Conditions within, in particular the unfamiliar sense of claustrophobia, made the mines a place of fear. One of those who soon found himself at a coal mine was Cyril Holness. It was a far cry from his pre-war days at a suburban railway station:
It wa
s frightening. I had no idea what mines would be like. Before that I’d only read about it – up in Geordie land! We just had these tiny lamps that went out all the time. We didn’t have any protective clothing, just rough old clothes. Just an old vest with rags tied around your boots. Going down in the cage was terrible – it was dripping wet, water was running down the walls. I reached a low point in that pit. One time my lamp went out. I was stuck in the pitch black. I was calling out but no one could hear me, because of the noise of the machinery. So I had to crawl along the rock to find my way out. That was the worst time.
For some prisoners the horrors of war seemed to have followed them from the battlefields of France all the way to Poland. Jim Reed recalled his experiences on a working party from Stalag 21B: ‘My first workcamp was when they sent us to dig up the Jews from the local cemetery. They made ten different men go on this every day. It was an awful job. But we had no choice. You might not want to go but if you get a few strokes off the guard’s rifle-butt you soon change your mind. It was a terrible job.’
It was little wonder men began to attempt to escape. Some were successful but others were caught and returned to the camp. Reed and his mates heard the punishment handed out to the returning men: ‘The guards lived at the end of our hut. We knew someone was getting some stick from the shouting that was going on. We could hear them thumping and banging. They turned us out and the guards were waiting. They lined up and made the escapers run the gauntlet. You wouldn’t believe men could be so savage. They beat them all the way – hit them everywhere and kicked them down into the potato store.’
The following day the prisoners were lined up ready for work, but few were in the mood to work for the people they had watched beating their comrades. The sergeant in charge of the prisoners then put on a display of courage that made a lasting impression on Reed:
He said to the Germans, ‘We want those men out of the cellar to have a look at them. Or we’re not going to work today.’ The guards came amongst us hitting us with rifle-butts. But no one was going to work. The Germans backed Sgt Williams against a wall but he said, ‘I’ve told my men they are not working.’ The German went mad, he shouted, ‘They are not your men they are my men!’ I’ve seen one or two brave men – but that was something special. The German pointed his rifle at him and said, ‘I am going to shoot you.’ So Sgt Williams shouted to us, ‘No one is going out of these gates without my permission!’ In the end the Germans backed down. They let the men out of the cellar. I thought we were all going to be shot! So we went to work, but we didn’t do a lot that day.
The violence of their guards was not the only issue the prisoners had to deal with. There was also the question of exhausted men attempting to work as they survived on just the most basic rations. The general weakness of the working prisoners resulted in large numbers having accidents or falling sick as a beleaguered medical staff attempted to look after them. By late 1940, Fred Gilbert, barely recovered from the bullet wounds he had sustained during the retreat through Belgium, found himself working at a granite quarry in Poland. It was a far cry from his pre-war days of training to be a commercial artist:
I was on this wagon moving stones and some bright bloke picked up a stone and went to throw it on. I said, ‘Hold it! Don’t let it go!’ I was trying to pull it out of the way and the stone dropped and landed on the top of my finger. I was taken to a German doctor who lopped off the top of my finger and stitched it up. So I was sent back to Lamsdorf for the winter. I had to get it dressed most days. This doctor looked at it – it was all wet and soggy – he said, ‘That wants drying up.’ So he cleaned it up and signed me off to go back to work. I could have strangled him!
The working prisoners were lucky if they found any qualified medical staff to treat their wounds. During the early period of captivity large numbers of medics were still preoccupied with caring for those who had been seriously wounded in the battles of May and June. Furthermore, many captured in the fall of France were not initially allowed to work in a medical capacity. Some spent more than a year before being detailed to assist with medical care. Others, like Les Allan, were never recognized as medics and spent the entire war as labourers on working parties. The majority of available medics found themselves remaining behind in the main camps, where they operated hospitals for those suffering from disease or serious injury. As a result, the medics sent to working parties found they had little with which to treat those who suffered day-to-day injuries.
Captured near the Mont des Cats and initially imprisoned in Lamsdorf, Norman Barnett was sent out on an early working party where he attempted to look after the welfare of his fellow prisoners:
There were 125 POWs there. I didn’t have any bandages or any medicines. The Germans asked me if everything was in order but I said, ‘No, I need ointment.’ We needed it for frostbite. The POWs were cleaning the coal silt from a canal. I did get a few aspirin and quinine tablets and some black tar that came in a tube. When the men got blistered with frostbite we had to use this cream. You had to cut away all the dead skin – when you cut it though, God the stink! Bloody hell! Then rub the cream on it. But you couldn’t do much for the blokes. Just help their morale – if you gave them a bit of string to hold their bloody trousers up, it was something good!
As the year progressed, most of the prisoners began slowly to recover their health. It was not that they had suddenly begun to live in luxury but quite simply they were no longer starving. Once they had gone to work, found opportunities to trade, and also to beg, steal or borrow food, they began the slow process of recovery.
More than anything, during 1940 there was just one thing that saved the prisoners from wasting away – Red Cross parcels. As some later commented, it always seemed so strange that a simple cardboard box – no bigger than a shoebox – could bring so much joy to their lives. In the words of Ernie Grainger, struggling to survive at Lamsdorf: ‘To be honest, if it wasn’t for the Red Cross and the Gold Flake cigarettes they sent us, I wouldn’t be alive now. Because those cigarettes were currency. I could buy a loaf for five cigarettes.’ Dick Taylor, on working parties from Stalag 20A, agreed: ‘If we hadn’t have got the parcels we wouldn’t have survived. That’s fairly sure. On the forestry kommando we got what was called “heavy workers’ rations”, but it was only another half ounce of margarine and a bit of sausage – that was all. Not enough to keep us going. In the end the Germans were no better off than we were.’
At first the parcels were shared between large groups of men. In some cases they held lotteries to decide who should get what. Ken Willats celebrated his good fortune when he received a small bar of soap from a Red Cross parcel. Initially he was disappointed not to get any food, but he soon realized he had actually been fortunate. The following day all those who had received food – having consumed it immediately – were just as hungry as ever, while he was still able to keep clean. Corporal Allan, who later escaped home via the Soviet Union, reported his share of the first Red Cross parcels: ‘We received one parcel on 28th August, which was divided between forty-one men; my portion being twelve cigarettes and half a tin of kippers.’14
Graham King later recalled the excitement that accompanied the sharing out of cigarettes and tins of condensed milk: ‘We grabbed the tin, raced to our room, punched two opposing holes in the top, lay on our bunks and sucked at one of the holes, a complete reversion to babyhood. Quite soon the tins were emptied and we lay back with full bellies, belching like contented Arabs. Suddenly, there was a mass exodus to the latrines where the sounds of violent vomiting could be heard and sighs of “Never again.” Much too rich for our starving guts.’ Although the prisoners celebrated the arrival of these parcels, they were not all so lucky. For Eric Reeves, weighing just six stones, the joy of receiving a Red Cross parcel – shared between seven men – did not come until March 1941. As he recalled: ‘By that time we were virtually skeletons.’
If their health began to recover, the same could not be said of their emotions. The improvemen
ts in health coincided with the arrival of winter. As the days got shorter and the first snows of winter began to bite, it was difficult to maintain morale. Nothing had prepared them for this. The experience of shovelling snow in minus 20° – often without gloves or overcoats – drained the men. Jim Pearce recalled getting ‘down in the dumps’ since he was living on foul horsemeat stew and working outside in freezing conditions that meant he was unable to do his flies up after urinating.
Though they tried to put a brave face on, beneath the veneer of self-confidence that was displayed for their guards, the reality was that most of the prisoners were sick, tired and frustrated. They were scared for themselves and for their families. They may have been able to switch their minds off as their senses were dulled by long hours of hard labour but, at the end of each day, as they lay down to sleep, their thoughts were awash with emotions. As Bill Holmes remembered:
When I thought about things was just before I went to sleep. You were exhausted but you’d think about what had happened that day or about what people had said. It might be a tale about home and you’d wonder if it was true. Then I’d wonder if I was ever going home. On one occasion I had a dream about my parents. And in it my mother was standing beside a grave in our local churchyard. When I woke up I thought about whether it was my grave and the dream was trying to tell me something. It was an emotional time. I kept thinking about that for a long time.
As the year drew to a close, all the prisoners had to cling to was the notion that one day – sometime in the future – they might finally go home. And so, the end of that first year was a landmark. After months of the ceaseless routine of forced labour or the stupefying tedium of stalag life, Christmas and the New Year were a sign that time had not stood still.