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This story was submitted by Allen Buckroyd, who compiled ‘Great Baddow Oral History’, published in December 2003. The book contained this contribution from Les Sparrow and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the terms and conditions.

Les Sparrow — My POW Experience

I was in the first 5th Essex Territorial Army before the war and we went all over the British Isles before going abroad in 1942, to Cairo for six or seven months and Iraq through to Lebanon, and I was part of the spearhead into Italy, landing at Taranto. We travelled via Foggia and pushed forward to the River Trigno. Unfortunately only a few got across and we were taken prisoner and eventually shipped back by train through the Brenner Pass via Innsbruck, through Germany to Moosburg which was a big transit camp near Munich. There I spent the rest of the war. We were very near the concentration camps in Germany. There was a huge transit camp where there were about 25,000 prisoners of all nationalities and this particular day a train came in from the Russian side. When they opened up the cattle trucks in which the prisoners had travelled, some of the prisoners were frozen solid.

A short time before the war in Europe ended about 6,000 of us in our column were sent on a march by the German powers that be. They were trying to get us back to Salzburg to hold us as hostages against the final reparations when it came to the Armistice. They never got us to Salzburg, as we used to keep overlapping, the back would overlap the front, so we did not do more than five miles a day. The Americans eventually liberated us. Our guards were old Austrian guards, who had little time for the old ‘Nazi’ Germans. Normally the SS would take the prisoners from one area to another but one day the Austrian guards took all 6,000 of us to various farms and hid us. Somehow the Americans knew we were there and rescued us. Eventually we all came home in Lancaster bombers to Oxfordshire. I weighed 7st 5lb. In Oxfordshire they kitted us out in civvies, then I had seven weeks leave, during which I got married. That was the end of my Army career. I wouldn’t have missed my Army experience; we used to moan about it, but there was a wonderful spirit; we all looked out for one another. You don’t get that today!

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