The Barbed-Wire University

The Real Lives of Prisoners of War in the Second World War

Midge Gillies

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781845137779
• eBook ISBN: 9781845137274
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

Feature films have created the stereotype of the Second World War prisoner of war. He is the spruce, stiff-upper-lipped Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai, or Steve McQueen's cunning and opportunist 'Cooler King' in The Great Escape, the all-American motorbike hero. If he is imprisoned in Europe it will have to be in the forbidding North German Schloss of Colditz or the tunnel-riddled Stalag Luft III. But, as Midge Gillies shows in this groundbreaking work of social history, the true experiences of nearly half a million Allied servicemen held captive during the Second World War were nothing like the Hollywood myth – and infinitely more extraordinary. The real lives of POWs saw them respond to the tedium of a German stalag or the brutality of a Japanese camp with the most amazing ingenuity and creativity. They staged glittering shows, concerts and elaborate sporting fixtures, made exquisite ornaments – even, amid the terrible privations of the Thailand-Burma railway, improvised daring surgical techniques to save their fellow men's lives. Whatever skills or hobbies they took with them to captivity they managed to continue and adapt – to the extent of laying out a 9-hole golf course between the huts of one German camp. They took up crafts and pastimes using materials they found around them: even the string from a Red Cross food parcel was used to make cricket balls, football nets and wigs for theatrical performances. Men studied, attended lectures, learned languages, sat for qualifications and exams, on such a scale that one camp was nicknamed 'The Barbed-Wire University'. A number of books written by POWs in captivity are still in print today. And often the years in captivity proved a turning-point in their lives, as the new interests and skills they took out of the camp enabled them to embark on a post-war career in which they would succeed at the highest level – whether actors like Clive Dunn and Denholm Elliott, artists like Sir Terry Frost and Ronald Searle, or the birdwatchers who studied rooks and jackdaws beyond the perimeter wire in distant parts of the German Reich and went on to run the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Drawing on letters home, diaries and interviews with redoubtable survivors now into their nineties, Midge Gillies recreates the daily lives of a truly remarkable group of men. It is a story by turns thrilling, funny, desperate and moving, but never less than inspirational.

PART I

Europe

1

Becoming a POW

Every soldier, airman or sailor who becomes a prisoner of war loses his liberty in a slightly different way. Capture might be a quiet surrender that comes almost as a relief: he is not required to fight on, the game is up, the struggle over. Or perhaps it is the conclusion to a bloody battle that has left him injured and traumatised: his over-riding concern is how – or whether – his wounds will be treated. Or perhaps he is smarting from feelings that capture was avoidable, that his officers were at fault, or, conversely, that he let his men down.

Sergeant George Booth, a twenty-nine-year-old observer with the RAF’s No. 107 Squadron, is usually credited as the first Briton to be taken prisoner in the Second World War. Booth’s war ended the day after it had officially begun when his Bristol Blenheim was shot down over the German coast on 4 September 1939. The pilot was killed but the Wireless Operator, Air Gunner Larry Slattery, survived and, together with Booth, spent the next six years in captivity. They were among an estimated 170,000 to 200,000 British, Commonwealth and Empire men who were taken prisoner in Europe during the Second World War. This compares to the 90,000 Allied prisoners who were held in around a thousand camps around the Far East after Japan entered the war in late 1941.

Booth and Slattery left behind a country that was just embarking on what became known as the ‘Phoney War’ – when the population held its breath, waiting for a bombing onslaught that failed to appear. The first major influx of British POWs into German camps began nine months later in June 1940 when that phoniness gave way to a Blitzkrieg – or lightning war – as the Nazis swept down through the Low Countries into northern France. As the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), which had been sent to defend France, was evacuated from Dunkirk and other ports it was forced to abandon over 50,000 men who would spend the rest of the war as POWs. They entered captivity knowing that Britain faced the threat of invasion and that, if Hitler was successful, they were unlikely ever to see their homes again.

Each major Allied defeat made more men POWs. Germany’s invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia in April 1941 was followed by the battle for Crete after which 11,370 Allied troops were captured in May 1941. The next big wave of POWs arrived from North Africa where Rommel was notching up significant victories. When he finally managed to break the siege of the Libyan port of Tobruk in June 1942, the garrison’s 35,000 men, many of whom were South Africans, lost their freedom.

Since America did not enter the war until after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941 only 62,000 of her soldiers became POWs in Europe. Most American POWs before D-Day were airmen. Soldiers began to be taken in large numbers when the Allies landed in Italy in 1943 and Normandy in 1944 and began to claw back parts of occupied Europe. The Germans captured over 6,000 men in September 1944 as a result of Operation Market-Garden when the Allies tried to establish a bridgehead across the Rhine at Arnhem; Hitler’s surprise attack on the Ardennes (also known as the Battle of the Bulge) in a bitterly cold December 1944 led to around 23,000 Americans becoming POWs.

Most prisoners were soldiers. The nature of sea battles meant that few men serving in the Royal or Merchant Navy survived to become prisoners or internees – about 5,500 from each category. Around 13,000 British and Commonwealth airmen and 33,000 US airmen became POWs but their experience was very different from the other services. Of the 10,000 members of Bomber Command (about eight per cent of its total) who became POWs, many started their day with a British breakfast on British soil, and ended it in a cell where the enemy was keen to extract as much information from them as possible. The RAF did not suffer anything like the military setbacks of Dunkirk or North Africa and the peak year for Bomber Command was 1943–44 when 3,596 of their members became prisoners.

Becoming a prisoner in 1944 or 1945 felt quite different from becoming a POW in the early days of the war. Although the later prisoners had a sense that the war was drawing to a conclusion and that the Allies were winning, they still faced an uncertain future. Would they become hostages or even suffer execution at the hands of an enemy who felt he had nothing to lose?

Battery Sergeant Major Andrew Hawarden of the 53rd Field Regiment Royal Artillery (RA) was one of the longer serving POWs. He was forty-five in 1940 and the French landscape he was speeding through on his motorbike on the afternoon of 29 May 1940 was horribly familiar. He had first visited France during the Great War – which had also taken him to Egypt. This time round he was married and had a daughter, Sandra, who was less than a year old when he had last seen her in January. For his Second World War he was a mature soldier whom men looked up to – not just because of his status as a veteran but because he was also a sporting hero. As a teenager he had worked in a Bolton cotton mill but between the wars he had played professional football for Southend United and Tranmere Rovers, where he played alongside the future footballing legend – Dixie Dean.

The 53rd Field Regiment was a perfect home for him because it included the entire first team of Bolton Wanderers Football Club. In the 1930s, the club was a Boy’s Own team, a young side of individual sporting heroes in their baggy shorts, thick, woolly socks and sleek Brylcreemed haircuts. At Easter 1939 their captain, Harry Goslin, had stepped in front of the microphone at Bolton’s home ground of Burnden Park before their match against Sunderland. He urged everyone in the ground to do what he or she could to protect their country: whether that meant joining the Territorial Army or becoming an auxiliary nurse. A week later he marched into the TA’s recruitment office with the entire first team. Hawarden became their coach and arranged matches against other regiments. By the time they landed at Cherbourg on 19 April 1940 he had formed a strong bond with them and he felt their absence keenly during his years in captivity.

He spent his first night as a POW sleeping in a field near Dunkirk. Although he had no way of knowing it, his comrades were inching their way towards the beaches in an exhausting loop of attack followed by retreat until they reached the sand dunes where men queued amid the smoke and burning oil hoping for their turn to be hauled onto one of the assorted boats that would make the perilous journey home.

He arrived in his permanent home at Thorn in Poland on 12 June 1940. Torun, as it is now known, is a medieval, walled city that sits on the wide, sweeping River Vistula. Its geographical position, wedged uneasily between Russia and Germany, explains why for centuries it has been batted backwards and forwards between different powers. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1814 Prussia took control of it for a second time and in 1870, French prisoners of war built a chain of forts around the city to protect it from attack. By the time Hawarden arrived the central fortress and its string of crumbling and dank forts built by an earlier generation of POWs had become Stalag XXA.

The main fortress carried out the central administration of the camp, while the various satellite forts each had their own special functions: Fort XII was dominated by Polish POWs; Fort XIII was made up mainly of Scots; the hospital was at Fort XIV and Fort XV included mainly NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers), New Zealanders and Australians; Fort XVI was the punishment camp and Fort XVII held mainly British POWs. Over the next two years Hawarden was to get to know each building well.

David Wild, the chaplain to the 4th Battalion Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, who was also captured at Dunkirk, describes crossing the bridge over the dry moat that surrounded Fort XV and being marched through a huge steel door. Inside the camp, which occupied several acres, men lived in two-storey barrack rooms leading off endless corridors that formed a figure of eight enclosing two deep grassy bowls where prisoners could exercise.

Above it all was a thick layer of earth and vegetation, including many shrubby trees. From outside and from above, no building was visible except the barrack section facing the moat … A walk around the top of the fort amounted to about a third of a mile. All the barrack-rooms and corridors were brick-vaulted, like sections of underground railway, and the rooms, like Nissen huts.

Hawarden’s first home at the nineteenth-century fortress of Stalag XXA, with its sprawling chain of satellite buildings, is a long way from the common image of a POW camp. But Germany’s military successes left it with the huge logistical problem of what to do with the men scooped up as it surged through Europe. Prisoners were not just British, Commonwealth and American but French, Polish and Dutch and – as countries changed sides – Italian and Russian. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Germans took nearly three million soldiers prisoner in the first four months of fighting; by the end of the war she had nearly six million Russian prisoners. After the Italian Armistice in September 1943, Germany sent 600,000 of her former ally’s troops to POW camps. Russian POWs were treated particularly badly and many British POWs are still haunted by memories of the starved and broken bodies they glimpsed through the barbed wire that separated the compounds. Like the Japanese, the Soviet Union had no sympathy for soldiers who had allowed themselves to be taken prisoner and these men (and some women) became non-persons. The Soviet Union had not signed the Geneva Convention and Russian prisoners could expect no assistance from home. While German captors felt a cultural connection with the British men they captured, they had only distrust for the Russians. It was left to other POWs to lob their own precious supplies over the wire to help the starving Russians.

At the start of the war Germany had thirty-one POW camps; by 1945 this figure had risen to 248 – of which 134 housed British and American men. After Mussolini joined forces with Hitler in June 1940, men who were captured in North Africa were usually held in Italy and by the time Mussolini was overthrown and an armistice declared in September 1943 there were nearly 79,000 Allied prisoners in the country. By the end of the year, 50,000 had been taken to Germany and more, like the future travel writer, Eric Newby, who had spent some time on the loose, were later rounded up.

There was a huge diversity of architecture among camps that varied dramatically depending on the prisoner’s rank, his escape record and whether or not he was made to work. Andrew Hawarden’s first camp of Stalag XXA does not conform to either of the two most common stereotypes of a POW camp – the barbed wire, barrack huts and sentry posts of somewhere like Stalag Stalag Luft III, near Sagan, (now

aga

) one hundred miles southeast of Berlin, which Paul Brickhill made famous through his book, The Great Escape, and Colditz, the glowering castle which many people still cannot think of without recalling the ominous music which accompanied the TV series of the same name.

Most POW camps were nearer in design to Stalag Stalag Luft III, which was run by the Luftwaffe. In 1940 the German air force decided to build and control separate camps but they were quickly overwhelmed by the intensity of Allied bombing raids and many POW airmen ended up in military camps, albeit in separate compounds. My father’s first camp, Stalag IVB, at Mühlberg, near Dresden, was built to hold 15,000 men but at its peak housed double this and included a large RAF contingent.

At first, naval and merchant-sailor prisoners were held at Stalag XB near the North Sea coast at Sandbostel until the German navy took control in 1942, when they were concentrated at a purpose-built site nearby at Westertimke. Naval POWs were held at two compounds (one for officers and the other for petty officers and senior ratings) at Marlag (an abbreviation of Marine Lager). Merchant seamen were held nearby at the larger camp of Milag (Marine-Interniertenlager).

Paul Brickhill, an Australian who worked as a journalist before he became a fighter pilot, describes being taken to the North compound of Stalag Luft III where fifteen bare wooden huts were arranged in three rows next to ‘a patch of stump-studded, loose grey dirt for recreation and appell’. The compound was about 300 yards square and surrounded by two 9 feet high barbed wire fences, with further thick coils of barbed wire sandwiched in between and a low warning wire which, if transgressed, was liable to attract a scattering of gunshots. Every 150 yards or so sentries looked down from their wooden towers, or ‘goon-boxes’. The hospital, coal store and ‘cooler’ – the punishment block where in the film of The Great Escape Steve McQueen plans a new bid for freedom as he rhythmically bounces a baseball against the wall and floor – were situated between the two main fences at one end of the camp. Outside ‘gaunt pines with skinny, naked trunks, packed close together in the dry, grey earth. They were everywhere you looked, monotonous barriers that shut out the world and increased the sense of Godforsaken isolation’. The only bare patch was immediately outside the camp where the trees had been felled so that escapers could not use them for cover.

As well as these purpose built stalags (an abbreviation of Stammlager meaning permanent camps) the Germans adapted existing buildings such as the fortresses of Stalag XXA, but also schools, barracks and more grandiose castles or even palaces. Oflag IVC (Colditz) is the most famous example of a castle prison – a sinister presence that dominates the surrounding countryside from its rocky outcrop. But there were other grand Oflags (short for Offizierslager – officer camps). Oflag VIID at Tittmoning was a medieval castle on the Salzach river in southeastern Bavaria and prisoners taken to Oflag IXA/H crossed a drawbridge to arrive in the cobbled courtyard of the thirteenth-century castle that overlooked the medieval town of Spangenberg, near Kassel.

Colditz was in a class of its own, a fortified prison which held persistent escapers – the bad boys of the POW world. In The Colditz Story, Pat Reid’s bestselling account of his time as ‘Escape Officer’ which was published in 1952, he describes his first impression of the castle:

We arrived at the small town of Colditz early one afternoon. Almost upon leaving the station we saw looming above us our future prison: beautiful, serene, majestic, and yet forbidding enough to make our hearts sink into our boots. It towered above us, dominating the whole village: a magnificent castle built on the edge of a cliff. It was the real fairy castle of childhood’s story-books. What ogres there might live within! I thought of the dungeons and of all the stories I had ever heard of prisoners in chains, pining away their lives, of rats and tortures, and of unspeakable cruelties and abominations.

Colditz was a Sonderlager, a special camp for men who were particularly troublesome – which usually manifested itself through their eagerness to escape – and Prominente – important or well-connected prisoners who could be used as hostages. The castle also contained an unusual mixture of nationalities – Poles, French, Dutch and British. It was this heady cocktail of international and determined officers set in a deliberately hostile setting that gave Colditz its unique atmosphere and set it apart from all other POW camps. The castle had once been a lunatic asylum and it often felt as if some of that mania had been released into the atmosphere. Prisoners who arrived for the first time – or returned after a failed escape bid – were introduced to Colditz’s distinctive personality in the raucous greeting they received. When John Chrisp turned up with a group of naval officers in September 1942, amid the customary bugles, drums, shouting and singing, a miniature parachute floated down from a top window. It landed at their feet to reveal a white mouse with the message, ‘Welcome to Colditz’ on a label round its neck.

As the network of POW camps spread through the German Reich a nomenclature developed to help identify each one. A Roman numeral denoted the military district whose jurisdiction it fell under, followed by a letter attached to a particular camp – so Colditz was Oflag IVC. ‘H’ stood for Hauptlager (the main or administrative camp). As the war progressed and the number of camps increased, additions were given Arabic numbers. So, for example, my father was taken first to Stalag IVB and then to Stalag 357, which was originally in Poland, but later moved to south of Hamburg.

It was nearly a year before Robert Dunn settled in to a traditional POW camp at Stalag XVIIIA in Wolfsberg, south Austria. He was one of thousands of British soldiers captured in Greece where he was serving in the 4th Hussars. Clive Dunn, as he is now better known, will for many people always be Corporal Jones, Dad’s Army’s excitable veteran of imperial wars, but in 1941 he was just twenty-one and a stretcher-bearer and orderly for Captain Eden (cousin of Anthony). He had been on the run for weeks and was frail and suffering from dysentery when he was captured. Although the Germans who caught him were friendly, even sharing their last packet of cigarettes with him, he and thousands of other British, Indian, Yugoslavian and Palestinian prisoners were then taken to barracks in Corinth, 50 miles south of Athens, where SS guards punished anyone who failed to salute them properly. During the day he sought out slit trenches to escape from the searing heat and at night he shivered in the icy dormitories. Daily rations consisted of two or three bits of water biscuit and a quarter of an inch of olive oil; his friend who had managed to hang on to his gold engagement ring exchanged it for part of a loaf of bread.

Their clothes were baked for one or more hours in huge ovens delivered to the camp. Then they were ordered to march naked several miles to the sea, past women who...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Author’s Note
• Preface
• PART I EUROPE
• 1. Becoming a POW
• 2. Settling In and Getting By
• 3. Uses for a Red Cross Parcel Number 1 – String
• 4. Friendships and Feuds
• 5. Sport
• 6. Uses for a Red Cross Parcel Number 2 – Cigarettes
• 7. ‘Stalag Happy’ – Imaginary Worlds and Other Ways of Escape
• 8. Uses for a Red Cross Parcel Number 3 – Tins
• 9. POW Artists
• PART II THE WAR IN THE EAST
• 10. Surrender
• 11. Changi
• 12. Turned Out Rice Again: Food and Cooking
• 13. Make Do and Mend
• 14. Entertainment: ‘You’ll Never Get Off this Island!’
• 15. Sport
• 16. Recording Captivity Through Art and Photography
• 17. POW Doctor
• 18. Taking Flight: Escape Through Birdwatching
• 19. Survival Teams
• 20. Escape Through Study
• 21. University of Kuching
• 22. Languages and Communicating with the Outside World
• 23. Hidden Wireless Sets
• 24. Religion
• 25. The Magic of Letters from Home
• 26. The Changi Murals
• PART III EUROPE
• 27. Reading for Profit
• 28. Gardening and Birdwatching
• 29. Study
• 30. Music and Theatre
• PART IV THE FAR EAST
• 31. ‘Upcountry’: The Thailand–Burma Railway
• 32. Art and Medicine on the Railway
• 33. Archaeologist on the ‘Death Railway’
• 34. Entertainment and Ingenuity in Thailand
• 35. ‘Home’ Again: Changi Gaol
• 36. The POW Diaspora
• PART V FREEDOM
• 37. Somewhere Near the End
• 38. Victory in the Far East
• 39. Homecoming
• PART VI EX-POWS
• 40. Aftermath
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright