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Friend’s Of Bill Pledger

My name is Margaret Rose and I am putting onto the People’s war site the story of Bill Pledger’s war. Bill is a very kind softly spoke gentle gentleman who went through the most appalling brutality and sever privations as a prisoner of war.

He was a member of the British Expeditionary Force and was captured in the Somme area of Belgium in 1940 he was one of those who experienced the brutality shown to ‘our lads’ as a slave labourer in the German labour camps the most notorious being Stalag V111 at Lansdorf which was part of the Auchwitz complex in the Upper Silesia region of Poland.

Hearing of Bill’s experiences fills me personally with horror at the conditions he experienced, admiration for him and his comrades survival and disgust at man’s inhumanity to man. Bill is a witness to some of the most awful happenings of the 20th century, it’s a wonder he survived and the only question one can ask is ‘How could the Germans have done it’? And to marvel at the way the human spirit can survive under such appalling conditions.

He arrived home to the sunlight and blossoming countryside of the Easter of 1945 after 5 long years of privation and cruelty to the sheer blessed joy of freedom and reunion with family and friends.

This article deals with after his escape from German hands in early 1945 and some of his thoughts and memories of friends both at home and those made through those terrible times. Although Bill was able to receive letters from home they were heavly censored and it was not until he arrived home in 1945 that he was able to catch up with the stories of how family and friends in Kent had fared in those cruel years that he had been apart from them.

So over to Bill for his story.

After my escape from the main body of prisoner who were being marched either to the Baltic coast, west across the Oder or south over the Carpathians a group of us arrived at the outskirts of Gliewitz. The town was at that time held by the Germans and was being smashed into submission by the bombs and shell of the Russian forces. However we were very glad at reaching Gliewitz which after the Russians took it was, for us, the beginnings of freedom although we still had a way to go before we could say we were actually on our way home.

After marching many miles through Poland, where I must say the Polish people were very kind to us. Although they had little themselves they shared their meagre food with us and I will always be grateful for their kindness especially in this time of great hardship for all.

After enduring strafing from the Lufwaffer along the way due mostly to them trying unsussfully to knock out the Russian advance, we made our way into Czechoslovakia. It was during this time that I ‘mucked in’ with a tough little scouser lad from Salford Lancashire. Now here is a case where truth can be stranger than fiction. He had two other brothers who were in the same Lancashire Regiment they were all taken prisoner at Dunkirk in 1940! Can you imagine how their poor old mum must have felt with three boys prisoners of war? Tommy Gibbons was the oldest he was always bemoaning and cursing the Germans for separating him from his brothers.

I read a book by Len Williamson an ex P O W who told a story about a work party he was on. The brothers by that time had been reunited and it seems that were all out working together. It seems that Tommy got into some kind of altercation with a guard who hit him on the head with a rifle butt. He told me later that it only hurt when he combed his hair. However he was, in later years, to die from that injury. I suppose it might have been a cracked skull and because it had gone unattended he had died from his injury. This is what I mean when I speak of the loss of our old comrades through the privations and cruelty of those years.

It's strange the links that are created by circumstances, in a way it gives us who were in a sense out of it a feeling of being part of the same overall picture.

As I say I suppose that some of us felt that their imprisonment had put them in some kind of a way out of things, although through our ingenuity and inventiveness we did manage to have a highly prized life line in the form of a wireless set. Which we went to great lengths to hind from our German opressers.

With our wirless set we were able to tune into the ´óÏó´«Ã½ and in that way we knew albeit briefly the way the war was going. We heard of the victories in North Africa and Europe and I were able to know that captivity would soon, but not soon enough for us waiting in eager anticipation, be at an end. We were able to pass on to others through meeting them in work camps, even though at times the language barrier was a difficulty, that things were going well for the allies and this of course gave hope to all of the longed and fervently prayed for final freedom.

On reaching Port Said we sailed home on the old Cunard White Star ship S S The Samaria, I noted that on the TV series Band of Brothers that it was the Samaria that brought over the 101st U S Airborne prior to D. Day. They had trained in Wiltshire near Aldbourne, my sister married a Wiltshire lad while he was stationed in Kent and now lives in a Wiltshire village a few miles from where their training camp was. You might remember that it was the 101st who was dropped in Normandy the evening before D Day the depiction of the tragedy of some being caught up on the spire of the church by their harness and shot (which to my mind was nothing but plain murder!) is a picture that will stay in my mind for ever.

Though out our P O W days we all tried our best to care for each other and to encourage and take care of each other as best we could. This care and comradeship went on after the war, we would met up for holidays and outing together, this was a great support and comfort to all concerned. It is not that other could not understand what we had been through but that the comradeship that had been forged in such circumstances of privation and cruelty was such that we did not want to let it fade away. Although through natural causes and as a result of the circumstances of our captivity many old comrades are no longer with us.

After my release and arrival home I went on to meet and marry my dear wife Iris and now have a family and granchildren. I hope and pray that none of my loved ones will go through the dreadful experience and the terrible privations that I and my comrades suffered.

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