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Joined 1938 TA Folkestone.

Then called up in 1939, 27th August. Buffs — Royal East Kent Regiment. Stayed in Dover for several months doing general duties.

March 1940 sent to France. On the Somme, Arras. The Germans made first breakthrough and I was taken prisoner. Bombed by Stuker bombers. Regiment got separated by the bombing. Impossible to reform and we were separated by a German pincer movement. We were marched as prisoners into Belgium then Luxembourg. Took about two weeks to get to Luxembourg, arrived in Trier.

We were given a bowl of oily water and dog biscuits. Went in cattle trucks — 60 to a truck. We were in there for five days. After that we stopped for long enough for them to pass in two loaves for five men and two cups of water each.

Most of the time we were in sidings and had to wait there while all the German troops were moving on the railway.

There were no toilet facilities and you can imagine the rest.

I saw good lads go under — they couldn’t face up to it. Some died of malnutrition.

We arrived in Poslen in Poland. I know what the Jews felt like to be crowded into cattle trucks.

We got out of the cattle trucks. They had all the Polish people out on the streets and they paraded us all through the streets and humiliated us.

We went to a big old fort and they told us that we would go to a nice special built camp but we stayed where we were which was an old cavalry camp.

We went on to a specially built camp which previous British prisoners of war had done. We were working on stone breaking and road building. We got on-fifth a German loaf and one bowl of potatoes boiled to a pulp for a whole day. We got that at the end of the day. We got very weak, but we got used to being weak.

I was in Poslen area for a year. We then moved to the Polish border near the Czech border. Camp on the side of a canal. They were building a factory to make petrol out of coal. There were Russian, French, American and Polish camps there. It was a vast factory complex with all these camps around. I was there for three years and nine months. We got a few Red Cross parcels after a year which helped our rations.

The last three months when all the pressure was on the Germans, we were taken from the camp and marched in all the snow to a camp near Munich. They were moving the POW’s all over Germany. We were lucky to get any food on that march and we were skin and bone at the end.

The Germans obeyed the Geneva Convention within reason. They had to pay us or we would have been slaves. The bit about the Geneva Convention only went so far though. The Convention said we had to have a canteen. What it didn’t say was that there had to be anything in it. We had a canteen but nothing in it!

They had specially printed money Lagegelt, which was useless. When I got back I was owed back pay by the Army but they deducted what the Germans had paid me.

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