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Story elicited during interview with ‘Peoples War Volunteer’.

Grenville was an apprentice at Austin in Longbridge in 1939. After two unsuccessful attempts to join other units with his apprentice friends he was third time lucky joining the RAOC in June 1939. Called up on the 1st September war broke out on the 3rd.
He was posted to France in late December 1939 eventually at a workshop near CARVIN in early 1940. They were readied to move out of there in early Spring as the Germans advanced but it wasn’t until planes bombed the brothel opposite the Officers mess that they decided it was time to move back. In about May 1940 whilst generally retreating to the coast, he had no idea where they were as a unit, the Colonel ordered ‘every man for himself’ to make to the coast. He thinks they were somewhere near AUDRIQX when the unit got ‘smashed up’ and he and some others got into a truck and headed towards where they thought the coast was. It was chaos everywhere. They stopped for a rest after which they discovered the truck had been stolen so set off walking straight into some Germans and were captured.

Eventually he found himself in Poland at THORN, Fort 17 an old cavalry barracks in the Staleg 20A Group. Work was mainly manual labour eventually becoming a blacksmith’s striker.

On January 21st 1945 at 2000 hours the whole camp was brought onto parade and told to back a knapsack with what food they had and one blanket and prepare to move out. It was bitterly cold being mid winter. There was no explanation but he eventually learned that the Germans were trying to evade the advancing allied troops, particularly the Russians. They marched for 87 days and he estimates they covered 670 miles before being abandoned by the Germans. Survival was more down to guile than care from their captors.

He had many adventures during that time but recalls just a few as time allowed.
After 3 days on the march he and a mate escaped from the column by hiding in a ditch. After the column had moved off they emerged from the ditch only to find the area had been taken over by a Latvian Division. Deciding it was too difficult to keep evading them they ‘commandeered’ a sledge and rejoined the column. With the poor weather and severe lack of food (sometimes only about a third of a loaf for a week) many people fell by the wayside but the sledge proved to be a life saver for Grenville.

One night they were billeted in a church with the Russian prisoners downstairs and the British upstairs. Grenville remembers there was such noise and chaos downstairs as the Russians broke up the wooden furniture for fires. Then an eerie silence until one Russian started playing a violin and the others joined in with a chant. Grenville hummed the tune to the interviewer and said he was told it was ‘Volga Ruska’ but it was clear to the interviewer that it was a tune we now know well as ‘The Carnival is over’. It was a lasting memory.

After 87 days on the march the Germans abandoned them near UMMENDORF when the Americans were near. Two days prior to that they had seen a cart loaded with what they thought was boxes of cakes. They liberated several only to find they were cigars. Grenville was a non-smoker but put some on the sledge anyway, They proved very useful to trade with the American’s for K rations.

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