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A GUNNER, AND PRISONER OF WAR (Stalags and the Long March) by Doug Hawkins

Part 1 Experiences as a gunner and Prisoner of War in Italy

This is an edited version of an interview by Derek Spruce on 22nd March 2004.The original recording and full transcript are held in the Wessex Film and Sound Archive, ref. BAHS 105 and BAHS 106. © Basingstoke Talking History

Part 2 describes his captivity in Stalag 7A and Stalag 344 and The Long March. Part 3 describes what happened after The Long March, going home, and 60 years on.

BACKGROUND
I was born in Brixton, south west London, in 1924, 27 March. We lived there until I was about eight, and then we moved to Clapham till I was about 14, and from there we moved to Mitcham in Surrey. I volunteered in 1942 and went in the Army from there, and then when I came out after being a Prisoner of War, I went up to Harrogate. I came back down south and then when I'd finished my time I went north and married a Yorkshire lass and played league cricket.

ARMY TRAINING
I did basic training in Chester and then was transferred to a place in the Isle of Anglesey called Rhosneigr and was trained to be a machine gunner, a Vicker's machine gunner with the Middlesex Regiment. I then went up to Lancaster to Barron Barracks and from there went to Liverpool and went abroad to North Africa about 1943. The action was already partially over when we got there. We saw a little bit but not a lot.

WAR IN ITALY
I went into Italy and the Cheshire Regiment had taken a bit of a bashing, so we got transferred from the Middlesex Regiment to the Cheshire Regiment of which I'm still a member. From there we went up to the Central Sector and transferred to the west side of Italy and went up on that side and I was captured South of Rome.

GUN TEAM
Our number one was usually Lance Corporal. You went down the line, it all depends how you got made up. If they wanted people made up, you got made up but he was usually a Corporal. An officer would have been in control of a platoon and he would govern possibly so many guns and he'd have rear echelons, he'd be just behind, perhaps 200 yards behind where your guns were and he'd be back there with the rest of the platoons. He used to have different people in there, all sorts. A lot of them used to stay back in that echelon and only come up to the guns when they wanted ammunition or feeding or something brought up.

There were eight of us on a team and the number one used to carry the gun, the number two used to carry the tripod. There were various things that the others carried, like water cans, and ammunition, and dial sights and things like that, so there was eight employed in the team to carry this stuff forward. They were very heavy things, the tripods. I used to carry the tripod and it was a beast of a thing to carry. You used to carry it over your shoulders, and you used to move it about on your body to see if you could make it more comfortable, because they were solid steel and they were quite heavy. We managed it but the mud in Italy was terrible. In 1943, 1944 we were running up through Italy and the glue of the mud in Italy was atrocious stuff, it really was. It was the worst mud I'd ever encountered anywhere. We used transport as far as we could go and then carrying on from there. When you advanced you picked up your gun and moved forward with your gun and you carried that, you didn't have any help in carrying that at all.

You'd have a team of possibly four guns consolidating a line, in one part we had four guns, and eight guns, and we looked after four American Brownings at the same time, machine guns. And they weren't manned, we used to go and look at them every morning but they could be manned in an emergency, and they was just left in the dug-out so we looked after them and made sure there was the ammunition there and it was in proper working order. Brownings would have been used, the same as the Vickers, but they weren’t as powerful as the Vickers. It was a pretty good gun, the Vickers. On the Vickers you lifted the safety catch and you pressed the button and that set it going, and it had two handles at the back and you used to knock it forward different degrees east or west. But the Browning just had a pistol grip and I think it was just used as a weapon like you would do a rifle, but of course it would fire more than a rifle. But we used to be able to use our Vickers as single shots, you could get quite good at it, lift the safety catch and fire single shots as if it was rifle fire.

We thought the range was pretty great. They used to pinpoint these at crossroads, how far in front they were, we thought they were four or five miles, but they could have been quite less than that, but we used to use them just as a harassing thing. If any German vehicles were passing at that time, of course, they got hit with a veil of bullets. Sometimes you were at close range but more often than not you used it on a fixed line and you picked out the points that you wanted to fire, but they were in the front lines and they could be what we used to call ‘free traverse’, you could move them along, hopefully a belt opened the locking system, and you could fire it if you saw the enemy coming. You could open up and use it as a defensive weapon. It wasn't used an awful lot. It was on occasions when they made an assault, a few guns would open up with a free traverse, but most of all we used to go out on different things and fire in advance of these.

We used to do all manner of things with this machine gun. We used to go out on reconnaissance with the Pioneer Corps and we'd run up to a few, almost to the front line. We used to fire eight guns off, or eight bursts of ammunition into set points that they gave us on map references and then scoot out. The infantry didn't like us because they got the bashing when they found out where we were, but we'd gone by then. We used to use these guns in all manner of different ways. We used to take them up the side of Italy, we used to run in close and fire them from these boats. We used to fire about eight belts of ammunition and scoot off again. That was from landing craft - well, I don't know what they were but we used to call them landing craft. They were smaller than the proper big boats. They had a ramp at the front and we used to fit them on T-boards, like a T and fit the tripod in the T. The tripod fitted in holes in the T to give it stability, and we used to fire them from there.

There were planes attacking but we never had air support in that way, that would have been more the front line infantry that would have got that, I suspect. They had a very bad accident down at, I think it was Slapton Sands where they were advancing, and the RAF came in and instead of firing in advance they hit them. A lot of them were killed there and I met a chap long after the war and we were talking about that and he said things were still being washed up from that beach at that accident.

We did the softening up, then the British infantry would come forward, but the British infantry didn't like us very much, really. We used to fire these things and they'd get the artillery once the Germans found out where we were and they'd bonk it, and more often then not the infantry would be unfortunate to be in those positions. But we were all infantry, really.

The Bren gun was a lighter and a very good weapon. That was fed by a magazine you used to plonk on top and you used to have to fill those magazines with so many rounds of ammunition and then you used to carry spare ones as well. But they were used more by the infantry than anyone else and you could fire those from the hip. A very useful weapon, the Bren gun, marvellous.

SUPPLY LINES
In Italy supplies were brought up by a mule train, which they got the Italians to do. There was about eight mules that used to carry different things up through the country because the terrain of Italy was terrible in places, it was all up and down, and wet and horrible. A lot of the Italians were back behind our troops and they used to use these mule trains because the army used them to bring up the ammunition and things like that. But we never saw that because the ammunition was left at the base and then would come up to us from there. Some of the places in Italy, you were stuck in a trench all day, you couldn't get out of it, you only came out to feed at night time because you were in such an advanced position. If they saw you knocking about they'd have a go at you, so we used to feed of a night time, and used to slip back in your trenches during the day. You'd probably sit in a foot of water during all the day.

We used to see naval shelling, they used to fire in further out than we were, and we used to see them. Many a time we used to get their cigarette ration, which was far better than the Army cigarette ration, Passing Clouds, and all the top brands of cigarettes, they had. Big Woodbines as well, not the little Woodbines, the bigger ones.

DIFFERENT REGIMENTS
We didn’t operate with the Cheshire Regiment, we were in the 5th Div which was a Yorkshire Division. We had a ‘Y’ on our shoulder. They were made up of all different regiments, the Seaforth Highlanders, the Cameronians, we had a Guards Brigade, we had the Yorks & Lancs, we had the Green Howards, Enniskillen Fusiliers, we had all sorts of regiments within that division and we used to support a brigade and things like that. But that was all.

EARLY CAPTURE
We went to the 8th Army front, which was on the east side of Italy, we went up that side and then we got transferred to the Central Section to Minturno. Then we got transferred from there to the west side and went up on that coast under the 5th Army. We were going towards Rome when I got taken Prisoner of War. We'd taken a hill, because they'd broken out from Anzio and we'd taken a hill the night before and it was reported that the infantry were coming through us that night, but unfortunately as far as we knew they never came. The Germans put in an attack at dawn the following morning with tanks and infantry and we were captured from there because we were simply up against tanks with the machine guns, you couldn't do much about it. The next gun, (we had eight guns and they had two guns) got away, I think, and the other gun on the right or left of us, they were killed outright, a tank just ran into the trench and that was the finish. We got captured by the Hermann Goering Panzer Division. About eight of us altogether. That was the gun team, people that carried ammunition and different things, and supplied the gun team with things.

When we were captured, the German patrols used to come through our lines and go to perhaps one of the roads behind and stop any traffic on there that was going through, to inspect it, and if they wanted anything, of course, they'd take it and take it back to the their own line. One famous one, we always knew this chap, he was a sergeant major in the German army and he used to bring a patrol through on a regular basis, but he never got caught as far as we knew. But of course I expect we were doing the same thing to them. We were taking patrols through and bringing back prisoners or something like that, but because of being in a machine gun corps, we were infantry but not infantry, you know, sort of fighting on the front line.

They took us to Rome to a film studio. We knew it was a film studio because it was all draped in gold and things and they had balconies where they ran the cameras round. They put us in there, there was quite a few in there, and then they interrogated us. They wanted to know where we came from but they knew more about us than we knew ourselves, really. They knew everything about us, the regiments and everything. We didn't give much away because they already knew it anyway, and then they marched us on foot from there, past the Colosseum in Rome, which I'd never seen that before, all the way to Florence.

FROM FLORENCE TO STALAG 7A AND 344
It was a frightening time. You didn't know where you were, really, your mind was in turmoil and I remember Florence because some chaps tried to escape from there and they were shot. We then went to sit in cattle trucks that took us through the passes into Austria and they took us to a camp just outside Munich called Stalag 7A. We were there, I suppose, for about six months and they put us in more cattle trucks and took us to Stalag 344, which was in Poland. And there I spent the rest of the time up until January 1945, when they decided to move us away from the Russian front.

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