Island Redoubt

by David Roy

  He had survived.

  But that was all. There were days when his life was so devoid of hope and of stimulation and when he was so hungry and cold that he wished he hadn’t survived.

  And there were days when the sun shone and he could almost forget his hunger and look at the sky rolling past freely. And on these days his hope returned in some indefinable way. Someone had said to him that freedom was a state of mind. It was said when he was newly arrived and he hadn’t really understood what they meant at the time…. but it was true. There were only physical barriers imprisoning him. His spirit wasn’t crushed…. not when the sun shone.

  Their numbers had thinned out during the long winter and not because of escapes either. There was no point in escaping simply to tracked down and executed. For one thing there was nowhere to escape to and without the correct documents proving that you had been legitimately released from the camp, there was no future in Hitler’s Britain. The Germans were big on paperwork; identity cards, work permits - things by which people’s movements and activities could be tracked or traced.

  ‘Fastidious’ was the word he had heard used to describe the German’s record keeping. The British officer who had interviewed Sam upon his arrival in the camp had told them that they were ‘fastidious’ in tracking down those whom they considered to be racially impure and that meant Celts as well as Jews. The officer - from the Navy, so Sam couldn’t make out what rank he was - had gone on to say that they would be asked details of their families and places of origin upon being processed and admitted to the camp. It was important to, either, not know too much about one’s background, or to assign one’s relatives clearly Saxon-derived names. Many of the captured servicemen really had little idea about their forebears. Some of them were Anglo-Saxons who fitted the desired Nazi mould. All in all, it was a good time to be tall, blond and blue-eyed and sadly, those who weren’t, or who couldn’t make themselves appear to be racially pure, seemed to 'disappear'. Hence the steady decline in the prison camp numbers after the initial influx at the end of the war.

  Sam supposed that he was lucky not to have been taken away. The rumour mill ground out horrific tales about the concentration camps - some of which seemed too terrible to be even close to the truth. And yet there was no denying that people had vanished. He wondered what had happened to the others - the men of his section who had been like brothers to him. Some would be dead but some must have survived, surely. He couldn’t be the last one of them left alive, could he? In particular he could not imagine Tony O’Keefe being dead - the phrase ‘larger than life’ could have been coined for him. Before they had segregated senior NCOs and warrant officers from the junior NCOs and men, Sam had become friends with a sergeant pilot from the RAF. ‘Spud’ Murphy from Larne had told him about the Germans’ plans for Northern Ireland and how they intended to hand it over to the Republic in return for being able to operate submarines out of Irish ports.

  ‘Of course’, said Murphy, ‘de Valera was ready to invade anyway but this way he gets Ireland’s neutrality kept safe.’ Sam wondered how he could possibly know all this. There had always been murmurings to this effect but was this anything more than a rumour? Murphy would just give a sly smile when pressed on this point.

  ‘But one good thing is that he is offering Irishmen serving in the British forces the chance of repatriation. Now, if Northern Ireland just becomes part of the Republic, that means that we are then Irish citizens and can go home.’

  ‘To live under the Irish….’, said Sam, sadly.

  ‘Who would you rather be ruled by; the Irish or the Germans?’ It was an unpalatable thought but also an argument that made complete sense. That was all some time ago. Spud was gone. To another camp? To a concentration camp? Back to ‘Ireland’? Sam didn’t know. He did know that he'd feel like a traitor to return home under these conditions if and when the chance came.

  But what was the alternative? If Spud's claim was correct then what would he being holding out for if he didn't just accept the offer of Irish citizenship? Who, exactly, would he be defying by refusing to become Irish, especially when his whole family lived across the water? What would be the point of making a stand on this point of principal? What would everyone else do?

  What would his family think about it, knowing that he had had choice to claim his new Irish citizenship, as he assumed he would? The alternative would probably be to never see Belfast or his family again. It was only conjecture at this point. There was no decision to be made yet and maybe there never would be. He imagined that the Germans would let them all go free one day. They no longer posed a threat to the Reich and presumably cost money (though not a lot, judging by the quality of their rations) to keep locked up. The new government needed workers for the factories and the fields, and at this early stage at least, they seemed keen on the return of normality. Normality? Hardly! But there was little to be gained by keeping the men behind barbed wire

  Very little happened which broke the monotonous routine of the camp; roll calls, parades, occasional searches. The parades in particular were tiresome, consisting of a little bit of fumbled, half-hearted drill. Sometimes they were read a speech made by the Fuhrer about how his new acquisition was shaping up as part of the Reich. All this was delivered in accurate but stilted English, raising a few wry smiles from the assembled prisoners. They dared not laugh out loud.

  A few men tried gardening or writing or even painting but lack of materials and the overpowering lethargy that came with camp life soon stifled these creative pursuits.

  In February Sam received a letter, thus becoming the first soldier in camp to do so. His letter was a matter of immense curiosity for his fellow prisoners, so much so that he almost felt compelled to read it aloud or pass it around those who had yet to receive a letter of their own i.e. everyone else. It came in a clean, crisp brown envelope with an improbably vague address. As he looked at it, wishing to savour the moment of opening his first letter, Sam could not fathom how it had ever got to him. Beattie, Samuel, John. Camp 4. He ran his fingers along its sides, smelt it - it smelt of nothing - and shook it next to his ear. Silent. Did he expect bells? He felt it again. It was fairly flat, of course, but inside the envelope seemed a little bit uneven. Rough, lumpy. He sighed and noticed that a corporal from the Black Watch was looking on intently.

  ‘Are ye goin’ tae open it?’, he asked, with a partial smile on his lips.

  ‘Aye. Just checkin’ it first.’ Which didn’t really make sense. He smiled and tore at one corner until he could get a finger inside to rip the envelope open fully. He noticed idly that the calluses from his hand were gone. Soft, like a man who worked in an office. Then he tipped it on its side and out fell a tattered white envelope that had clearly been opened. This had a more descriptive address, giving not only his name but his army number and unit, right down to his platoon. It also had the location at which the sender had last seen the recipient, although Sam doubted that this had helped the Jerries to track him down. But now he knew the identity of the person who had written the letter, even before unfolded it.

  Now he just gave up with any pretence of drawing the moment out. Starved of mental stimulation and unbiased, accurate news from the world outside the confines of the camp, he devoured the words on the page and, like one of the expensive Belgian chocolates that that bastard Greenhalgh had eaten in the dunes of Dunkirk all those years ago, the taste was gone all too quickly. He was both happy and sad as he read the words for a second time and as he read them for a third time he was surprised at their erudite nature and the literacy with which they were written. Nobody’s fool that boy, he thought.

  Dear Sam,

  I have no idea if this letter is ever going to reach you or if you’re even still alive but I’ll have a go. Bill Hewson and I were captured by the Germans in 1942, not long after we lost track of you. We had no idea where you had gone but someone said they had seen you chasing a German soldier into the woods. Lots of people said you were dead but for some reason I never
thought so.

  After being captured, Bill and I were sent to a camp with thousands of others. I have no idea where the camp was. Bill and I got split up and after a few months I was given the chance of being repatriated back to Ireland and took it. I felt like a traitor in a way but the war was lost already and who wouldn’t have taken the same opportunity in the circumstances? Anyway, no-one batted an eyelid when I left. If anything, they were jealous - it wasn’t a great place to be and we were all starving all the time. So here I am back in Ireland.

  The North is over-run with Germans but they are leaving the South alone for the meantime. Rumour has it that they will give us Northern Ireland before too long. It’s nice to be back home but they’ve got me in the army. I’m a sergeant already. Can you believe that? It’s not a patch on being in the Fusiliers but those days are gone. I did my bit for King George and Winston Churchill.

  Well that’s it. I don’t think there is much for the censor to take out. Keep your head up and try to get back to Belfast if you can. You have my address so maybe we’ll meet up someday. Keep your head up. Faugh-a-Ballagh!

  Tony O’Keefe.

  Sam smiled every time he read the last bit. Faugh-a-Ballagh! Well that was the end of that. He recalled the time they had charged down the hill shouting those words at the tops of their voices, trying not to laugh with the exhilaration of escaping from the Germans. Where had that been? He couldn’t quite remember…. He took comfort from the fact that Tony had survived and was safe. Something was right in the world - just one thing. The irrepressible Irishman was still up and ligging about. It cheered him up and for a time stopped his thoughts returning to the problems that beset him and the difficult memories with which he was plagued.

  In particular he thought about Yewell Owen’s death and the death of the young German he had first pursued and then shot near Weymouth. He thought about the former much more than at any other time since, perhaps because he had little else to concentrate his thoughts on. He thought about the latter when he pondered his own fate. Would he be spared after failing to spare someone else? He gradually lost sight of the fact that he had had no real option but to act as he had done at the time - that soldier had had to lose his life - and there was no-one to tell him that such introspection was just part of life as a prisoner of war. Equally there was no-one to stop him from withdrawing into his own invisible shell. The other servicemen just left the quiet ‘Irishman’ alone. They called him ‘Paddy’ and no-one bore him any malice.

  But his fellow prisoners gathered from his demeanour that he just wanted to be left alone. The section and the platoon, the company and the battalion and regiment had become the layers of his extended family without him really knowing it…. and now that was all gone.

  A letter from his dad cheered him up. It was about three months old when he received it and had been left uncensored. His parents had been informed of his survival and his prison camp address. The letter was filled with tittle-tattle scratched out in his father’s unpractised hand and with a strong vein of stoicism running through it. He was surprised that it hadn’t come from his Mum instead, although he had never known either of them to actually write a letter before. He was touched by the contents of the letter and saddened that he wasn’t at home. He worried that his life was being wasted - was slipping through his grasp - in a way that should not have been happening until he was much older.

  On one particular day - a cold winter’s day with a bright sun and blue skies, Sam became a member of a working party. The Germans were indifferent to their treatment and did not inform them of their destination or of what their work would consist. They were given a slightly less awful than usual breakfast of bread and tea, piled into trucks under armed guard and taken to a railway siding where they were loaded like glum cattle onto a train. The railway was back in the nominal control of the many regional companies which had always been responsible for the huge and pioneering network which criss-crossed the country. The train guards and drivers wore their distinctive pre-war uniforms and the only obvious change was the presence of armed guards in every carriage.

  Sam marvelled at the countryside sweeping past, forgetting the uncertainty of the immediate future. Some had said that they might be going to another camp - a much worse camp, but Sam for reasons which he could not explain, doubted this. The sun picked out the shades of green that had made this a ‘green and pleasant land’. The greens were still there but the rest of the formula seemed to have gone awry somehow; there was little which could really be described as pleasant. He saw men at work in the fields once more and smoke coming from chimneys and he realised with shock that this was how it would be from now on. The fight was over and all that was left was for people to get back to normal - even though ‘normal’ didn’t mean what it used to mean. ‘Normal’ now meant some variation on a theme of slavery.

  There was talk of a new government being elected but this could only ever be a puppet regime. Sam wondered what sort of man would put himself forward as a candidate for the new parliament…. but that was how it would be from now on; MPs who were simply Nazi stooges. He’d forgotten. ‘If you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em’ - and they clearly couldn’t beat them. This was a new world he was living in - or hoped to be living in soon.

  The train took them to Plymouth and once there they were unloaded and forced into trucks which took them to Devonport. The gates of the former Royal Navy base swung open to admit them after a cursory check by the Kriegsmarine ratings on duty and the trucks rumbled down to the dockside. They spilled out once more and were hastily pushed and cajoled into three ranks so that a civilian in a neat pin-stripe suit and highly polished shoes could address them. Guards hovered nearby, their long Mauser rifles held firmly, ready to administer a beating should one prove necessary. The civilian smiled and then spoke in good, but heavily accented English. He introduced himself as Mister Ankoplar.

  ‘You are here to work as labourers in a project to rebuild and enlarge the naval dockyard. The place is heavily guarded and I would say that there is no chance to escape and nowhere to escape to. I….’, he pointed to himself, ‘am actually a Dutchman. I work for the Germans. It is not necessarily what I always dreamed of doing but I have had no option. This way I am alive and get well fed and know that my family back in Holland is safe.’ He looked at the men hoping that they would understand his message - his family was only safe as long as he produced the goods for his new masters. ‘The same sort of thing applies to you. I have managed to ensure that you are well fed and that your time working here counts in your favour with regards to your release from the prison camp. The Germans want you to work well and not try to sabotage things and so far, they have let people out of camps and even given them paid work when they have followed the rules. In other words, they are sticking with their side of the bargain. We have had no sabotage and I must emphasise that it is futile to even consider it. If you do think about committing some act of sabotage just ask yourself this question first, ‘What difference will it make?’ The answer is none - to the Germans.’

  Ankoplar turned slightly to his right but still talked to the men. ‘I have been asked to give you a quick tour of the dockyard so if you would follow me, please.’ The thirty or so prisoners shuffled off in their threes escorted by the guards whilst the Dutchman pointed out the features of the dockyard and the damage that had been done during the war. It was this that they would be repairing. They came to the end of one massive wharf lined with huge prefabricated warehouses and turned a corner. The real reason for their guided tour now became clear; ahead and to their right sat an enormous battleship. Its presence was quite striking. Two massive turrets sported twin fifteen-inch guns and the superstructure loomed up into the air like a monument to war.

  ‘This is the Tirpitz’, said Ankoplar. ‘Sister ship to the Bismarck. Just about the biggest thing afloat in these waters.’ If any of the men had needed convincing that their country’s defeat was total, then the presence of Germany’s most powerful ship in De
vonport, one of the traditional homes of the Royal Navy, provided it. Of course, they’d lost the war but here was the proof - just in case. Sam could only stare. He and the other prisoners were shocked. If Hitler himself had stepped down from the gangplank he didn’t think he could be more dismayed.

  They walked along its flank, watched by more armed Kriegsmarine ratings who stood on Tirpitz’ lofty deck. Turning a corner at the end of that wharf and proceeding down the next, was a sight which only added to the misery that each man was experiencing. The new battleship Duke of York lay broken-backed and discarded in the water. Day after day her hulk rusted until the Germans could find a way to refloat her and take her out to sea, there to simply sink that great ship once more.

  ‘Well I think that’s enough for one day’, said Ankoplar, sadly. It helped them to see that he shared their sadness. It was nothing more than a ploy, but he knew very well that it was in their best interests to work closely and well under his supervision. For that there must be trust - even if, ironically, he had to dupe them a little to gain it.

  Their work was back-breaking on some days and rather easy on others. There was no way of telling what each new day would bring. Sometimes it seemed as if their overseers could find little for them to do, perhaps as some other task was being completed by heavy machinery before they could become involved using only hand tools or indeed their hands. However, their food was always good, hot and plentiful. Their beds were comfortable and their accommodation was warm and dry. They got frequent breaks and their treatment was fair. They were deliberately treated well whereas in the camp they had been neglected if not maltreated. But there was no argument from any of them; things were better here, especially with the vague promise of freedom waiting for them at some unspecified time in the future.