Hitler's British Slaves (2 page)

These were the real experiences of the men who faced up to life behind the wire between 1940 and 1945. Men whose characters were built by imprisonment and whose behaviour was shaped by all they had experienced at the hands of their captors between the fall of France and the collapse of the
Nazi regime. As one man later wrote of his feelings towards most of the POW books he read in the post-war years: ‘I, an ex-prisoner, am increasingly left with a feeling of having heard only half a tale.’
¹
Here, for him and the rest of his fellow prisoners, is the rest of that tale – the story of ‘Hitler’s British Slaves’.

1

Into the Bag

‘One of the first rules of war is personal survival.’

Eric ‘Bill’ Sykes, 7th Parachute Battalion, captured in Normandy.

‘Treatment bad – stragglers being shot at… I saw a German officer shoot three wounded prisoners.’
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For a soldier there can be few more bewildering experiences than the moment of his capture. This is not what they have been prepared for – they are trained to fight and defeat the enemy, not for capitulation. Between 1940 and 1945 almost 200,000 British and Commonwealth servicemen fell into the hands of the enemy. In the early war years, with defeats in Norway, France, Greece, Crete and North Africa, streams of once proud soldiers made their way into captivity. Even once the Allies were advancing through Sicily, Italy and north-west Europe there would be a steady stream of new prisoners taking their places in the cold, damp huts of the Stalags and their work camps. Usually exhausted, dishevelled, hungry and thirsty, they had reached the end of their physical and mental endurance. Whether through the fields of France, across the sands of the desert, the parched hillsides of Crete or the shattered villas of Arnhem, they raised their hands and shuffled off to an uncertain future.

The first major influx of prisoners came with the shock defeat of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France in May and June 1940. The men who had promised to ‘Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’ were marched off into
captivity that, for most, was to last almost five years. As the Blitzkrieg smashed through the British, French and Belgian lines the Allied armies were left in disarray. Whilst some British units made organised withdrawals others were left behind, lost and alone, surrounded by the enemy. They were beaten by both tactics and technology as British tanks failed to make an impression, their guns all but useless against the enemy panzers. The mobility of the Germans shocked the British troops, many of whom were recent recruits, conscripts, or poorly trained pre-war territorials whose training was limited to the occasional exercise or evening lecture.

Unlike the Germans, who, in many cases, had years of modern military training, the British were unprepared for contemporary warfare. The British prisoners looked around at the Germans with their new vehicles and realised why they had been defeated. Much of their own transport had been civilian vehicles – butcher’s lorries, delivery vans, coal trucks – which had been requisitioned and repainted in khaki. In the chaos that followed the German offensive many units found their training and supplies woefully inadequate. Medics found themselves without supplies and were forced to bandage wounded men with strips torn from blankets. Some of the more recent recruits were even without uniforms, including one man who was captured at Calais still in civilian clothing having only joined the army 24 hours previously and been shipped immediately to France to join his regiment. It was clear to such men that Britain had clearly been unprepared for war. Among them was Private Ken Willats, captured in France in early May 1940:

I didn’t volunteer, I wasn’t the military type. Like thousands of others I went because I was told to go. I was conscripted into the Queens Royal Regiment on 21 January 1940. I was in France by the end of April, I’d had about eight weeks training. You could say my military career wasn’t very intensive, nor was it very successful. We were scattered through the area around Abbeville. We were subject to Stuka dive bombing. We were in a farmhouse, looking for the enemy. Out of the back of the house we could see about thirty or forty German tanks. They were the advance guard of a crack German Panzer division. The situation was ludicrous because we just had rifles and clips of five bullets each. We blazed away at these things, but I don’t think we ever hit anybody. Unbelievably when we’d used our five bullets we’d report to Sgt Major Davey and say ‘Excuse me Sgt Major, but I’ve used my five bullets can I have five more.’ Then you’d put the clip in and fire until you needed another one. The tanks replied by firing tracer at us. Then we saw a small detachment of German soldiers in the farmyard. There was no struggle or fight, we were overpowered. We just put our hands up, there was nothing else we could do. It was a bit of an unequal struggle.
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Whilst the likes of Willats were going ‘into the bag’ much of the rest of the BEF was making its way back to Dunkirk. Yet in the aftermath of the largely successful evacuation many thousands of their comrades were left behind, many of those who fought as the rearguard to protect the retreat, suffered greatly in the days between the German breakthrough and their eventual capture. Stretcher-bearer Les Allan found himself confused since his unit had managed to stop the enemy only to be told to retreat from their positions. Only later would he realise this was because flanking units had not been so successful. They kept fighting and falling back until eventually they were overcome. Allan spent his days looking after the wounded only to see most of them killed when the Germans
destroyed their hospital. By the time of his capture he was already starving. He had not eaten for days, nor washed, shaved or slept. It was a grim precursor to the months, then years, of degradation that would soon follow.

Also included in the round up of the remnants of the BEF were a majority of the 51st Highland Division, surrounded at St Valery. Gunner Gordon ‘Nobby’ Barber was among them. He explained the chaos experienced by the defeated army:

None of us knew where we were. All we could see were broken guns, dumped at the side of the road. They wanted volunteers to go into St Valery to find small arms, to fight our way to the beaches. We found a box of hand grenades. The sergeant said ‘It would’ve been a good idea if you’d brought the detonators’. So that was another balls up. The outskirts of the town was a mess. We found French officers dead in their cars, like they were asleep. I went in a smashed up shop and found a big box of nylon stockings. I thought I’d be all right if I got home. Our officer, Captain Wright, he said ‘Barber, you were a signaller. See if you can get a frequency on that set.’ I still remember it. ‘This is the BBC’ – You know, the old toffee-nosed way of talking – ‘The BEF have been successfully evacuated from Dunkirk.’ I thought what a load of bollocks that was. There was the whole 51st Division stuck in St Valery. It was more propaganda we didn’t believe. So the captain said ‘I can’t give you any info. Now we are going to be taken as prisoners of war.’ So my mate Paddy said, ‘Let’s take my bike’. We put a can of petrol on the back and off we went. It was all pie in the sky. We didn’t have a clue where we were or what we were doing. We were all just kids. It was a cock up from start to finish.
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After 20 or so miles the would-be evader ‘Nobby’ Barber and
his mate pulled their Royal Enfield motorcycle into a farmyard only to find it full of Germans. There was no choice but to surrender. They were soon returned to St Valery and packed into a field outside the town. Initially for many among the prisoners there was little time for emotion, as Ken Willats explained: ‘The enemy, apart from the Germans, was the lack of sleep. When we were captured we hadn’t slept for about 60 hours. I was extremely tired. The Germans put us in this sort of barbed wire corral and one of the first things I did was to go to sleep. Fatigue does funny things to you.’
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This lack of emotional response was a common feature among captured soldiers, all that mattered was to have survived the battle. Seldom was it a time for tears, instead for most their emotions were submerged beneath instinct as ‘Nobby’ Barber recalled: ‘To be honest I can’t remember how I felt. We looked round and saw trucks with machine guns on them. We thought they were going to shoot us. When you’re young you don’t have time to cry. We didn’t realise what was going to happen. From that day on it was survival of the fittest.’
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Both Barber and Willats were experiencing almost identical feelings. Though both very different men – one a quiet former chef and an admittedly reluctant soldier, the other a tough and streetwise young pre-war regular – what they learned in these early days of captivity was to sustain them through the long years of imprisonment that followed. As Ken Willats explained: ‘Survival is a very emotive feeling. The progression of need in extreme circumstances is water, food, cigarettes, ladies – in that order. Without being offensive to the ladies, they come a lot further down the list than water.’
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Little did they realise it, but their paths would later cross and they would share in a desperate battle for life.

Defeated and dejected, the remnants of the BEF were marched eastwards towards Germany. However not all began
the journey immediately, some were taken to Calais where they began the task of clearing the rubble-strewn streets of the town. Another group of 700 prisoners were crammed into a single hall. For a period of three weeks they were kept inside with no exercise, no washing facilities and precious little food. Others found themselves detailed to help the victorious Germans begin to strip France of her wealth. POWs were sent to sugar refineries where they were made to load the produce into sacks to be taken back to Germany. Though they could find little pleasure in helping the enemy plunder a defeated nation, they did at least gain solace in the knowledge that the handful of sugar they ate as they worked would help keep them strong.

Those prisoners going into captivity in the summer of 1940 could hardly have known that almost five years ‘behind the wire’ awaited them. If they expected fair treatment from the enemy the experiences of those first few days soon changed their minds. They were marched in vast columns from France, into Belgium then on to Germany. Day after day they trudged onward, their feet blistered from their miles of marching, their crotches rubbed raw by their thick woollen trousers. The heat of summer beat down upon them, leaving their skin red and dry and their mouths parched. They spent days and weeks on the road, usually sleeping in the open, sometimes in flooded fields. There was little food – British army biscuits and soup made from boiled bones provided much of their sustenance, unless they were lucky enough to scrounge or steal food from civilians. As they marched, men broke off from the columns and took whatever they could find, running back to find their mates and hand over their haul. Without stopping, they punctured eggs and sucked out the yolk. Others dived into roadside clamps of manglewurzels and stuffed their faces with the raw vegetables that were grown as cattle
feed. Despite the foul taste the men chewed them as they marched, desperate to quell the pangs of hunger. One group of men were forced to queue for three hours at an abandoned French barracks just to receive a small ration of bread. When some men were detailed to wash up after their guards had eaten their meals the prisoners received no more than bread crusts as thanks.

This treatment was sudden proof that the Germans viewed them with disfavour. The guards seemed either brutal or uninterested in the fate of the defeated men of the BEF. The only sign of any humour was when one column of prisoners was marched into a cemetery for the night. They had no choice but to laugh to themselves at what seemed to be a sick joke. Amid the beatings and the starvation there was little sign of the fabled gentlemanly respect between combatants. Instead the Germans subjected their prisoners to treatment that forced them to re-evaluate their moral code. Many among the prisoners were quick to learn tricks that would help preserve their lives. Though confused by their situation, wracked by exhaustion and with senses dulled by hunger and thirst, the survival instinct rose to the fore. The more canny prisoners realised it was always best to be at the front of the marching columns since they would be the first to rest whenever the column was called to a halt. If they were marched into a field for a break then the men at the back of the column might still not have arrived by the time the break was over. In such trying times even short breaks of 10 or 15 minutes could give precious respite from the rigours of marching.

Even brief rests could mean the difference between life and death. As the prisoners grew weaker those who fell out from the columns were punched, kicked, beaten with whips or shot. Those at the rear of the columns regularly faced more severe treatment than those at the front. To compound their
humiliation they were taken on circular routes through towns to show them off to the subdued populace. Then to ensure the message of their defeat of the British army was spread far and wide, the Germans filmed the pitiful prisoners to highlight how complete had been their humiliation. In some locations they were made to run ‘at the double’ at bayonet point to stop them from talking to civilians. For mile upon mile they trudged: ‘On that march you looked in front of you. The roads were wide, long and straight. You could see for miles. It was bloody hot and I can remember how thirsty we used to get. I’ve seen blokes go to a water butt and skim a dead pigeon off the top then drink the water.’
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In those first unnerving days of captivity the prisoners soon learned a German word they would hear almost every day for the next five years – ‘
Raus
!’. Meaning ‘out’ the Germans used it whenever it was time for them to move. That summer it was their signal to rise each morning from their sleep in the fields of France, it would also soon be their cue to exit the stinking cattle wagons transporting them eastwards, and would eventually be the call they heard each morning as their guards woke them ready for a long, hard day’s work in the fields or factories.