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

Part 2 of 3 Stalag 7a, Stalag 344 and The Long March

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 Histor.

Part 1 describes Doug’s training and experiences as a no 2 gunner in Italy, and his capture. Part 3 describes what happened after The Long March, going home and 60 years on.

STALAG 7A AND 344
We were in Stalag 7A, 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.

LIFE IN CAPTIVITY
In the camp there was a lot of Welsh chaps who I got friendly with and I was supposed to go out on a coal mine but unfortunately caught malaria, or fortunately as it happened, so the Germans wouldn't let me go as I had this malaria and I stayed in the camp. I got a job in the 344 camp keeping the RAF compound clean, because they were mostly officers and sergeants.

There was a British officer in charge of the camp and each compound, as there were so many different compounds all the way round the camp, like RAF compound, Working Party compound was down at the front, and each of them had an officer in charge and the RAF people had a pretty high ranking RAF officer and he was in charge of the RAF compound. In each hut I suppose there were about 100 people, must be 300 people in each compound, I would think. There were about three huts in the RAF compound, as far as I can remember, and I was in the end one. The three huts of about 100 people apiece, possibly more, I mean, we were crammed in. They were filthy places, fleas and lice and bugs, and all sorts of things.

CAMP FOOD
There wasn't much to eat and they sometimes bought us up what we used to call a skilly, which was a very thin soup and perhaps a tenth of a loaf of bread. A loaf of bread was, I suppose, a foot long and that was cut into ten pieces to share, and we survived on that. But, of course, in the camps we had Red Cross parcels and they kept us going very well as they were very good parcels. Because I was under-age, under 20, I got an extra half parcel a week, this was our own people who organized this in the camp. In the camp we used to muck in, about four us used to share our parcels, so we kept it going like we'd have something from each parcel each day. The Canadians were very good, they had a beautiful coffee in there that we used to make. The Germans used to supply us with Ersatz coffee of a morning and perhaps one of these thin skillies. It could have been a barley soup or a pea soup, there were little bits of meat but not much, and then you'd get probably five potatoes a day at supper time. And piece of a loaf of bread and sometimes a little bit of butter, of course it wasn't butter, but it was what we had to consider as butter.

CAMP CONDITIONS
It was terribly cold, there was no heating in there, as far as I can remember. We had an oven in there that we could cook, it was just a central plate where you could bung wood on there and heat up food or cook, and we also had in there what we called blowers, which we'd made out of tins, and we made a fan of them and they had a kiln on the end which you fanned it through to and you burnt wood or bits of coal or whatever you found in there, and you could heat the food up. And most people had these blowers and you could borrow them They were very ingenious, these chaps, they made all sorts of things.

POW ESCAPES
There were escapes from that camp. We didn't know about it because it was all kept secret and these people dug tunnels and went out as working parties from there and escaped. If they were caught they came back and there was what we called a 'cooler', which was a form of prison where they kept them in for so many days. But the ordinary rank and file was not on those things, it was an escape, a properly organized sort of thing. You got a party together, maybe organized to escape. There were civilian clothes that they made or got from somewhere, there was coats and all sorts of things. I remember, I was in a working party in the compound and there was a working party going out and they loaded a container, four men, one on each corner, you carry it out to the compound to put in the truck. There was bread and there was rations in there, but of course underneath the bread there was coats and trilby hats and all sorts of things, and as soon as it got outside the blokes there would grab hold of it, and it was done up so quickly, they never discovered these things.

The German guards were more elderly, they had been perhaps on the Russian front and they'd give them these jobs. They weren't bad but they weren't friendly, except when we wanted anything, like when we used to make a hooch in that camp. It was made out of raisins and prunes and potato peelings and put into a barrel, but we had to get yeast, so we used to buy yeast from the German guards for perhaps two or three cigarettes and make this hooch and it was pretty potent stuff, it really was. And of course the Germans used to make a search of our huts periodically and this hooch was put up in the loft, but it used to rumble like mad and when the guards came round there was a lot of singing going on to hide the rumbling sound.

CAMP ENTERTAINMENT
The chaps there, they entertained themselves, we had our concert party there that used to put on theatre shows and everything like that and the Germans’ Commander or Commandant was invited to the shows and they did 'South Pacific'. They did all sorts of things, marvellous shows, some of them. And when they came back a lot of them went into the theatre. We made a lot of entertainment ourselves.

We had a professional football team in there that were captured all together. One team joined the Territorials before the war and they were all in together and of course they all went abroad together and they were caught together, so that's how the whole football team got taken. I think they were Port Vale, as far as I can remember and I forget what teams they were but there were some Newcastle chaps in there that played. The Stevens twins who played for Fulham, when they came back home. I’ve never been able to contact them at all, I don't know whether they're still alive even but they were twins, they were good footballers and they played professional football when they came home.

D-DAY DECLARED
The second front started then and of course the Germans were being pushed back. Their propaganda said, 'Oh we've got secret weapons, we won't stand it, you won't be long, you'll still be Prisoners of War in years to come'.

We heard about D-Day. The RAF chaps in that camp were very clever. I If a working party went out, the chaps used to say, ‘Bring anything back in the way of wire’, or anything that they found that would be useful. So the chaps used to come back from the working parties and bring stuff in that would help people make these different things. They got a radio in there and they gave us all the news that was going on. There were aircraft flying over bombing over Dresden and they even got in touch with them. We had one chap, I think he was American, I don't know much about him, they knocked one out of the sky and he came down into the camp and they hid him for two or three weeks because their chaps got together and dressed him up as a Prisoner of War. But he was eventually found and, of course, the information that he had was useless to them then because it was three weeks old. But that was one of the things that happened.

THE LONG MARCH
The Russians were coming through from the eastern side and we were pretty close so they decided to move us, or march us out of there, and march us across Germany. There must have been about a thousand of us, or more possibly. And of course there were other camps dotted around, they were going different directions and we gradually met up with different columns and of course you marched on, and you lost friends on the way. I got split up from my mates, they went different places and we went different places. You were lined up and they’d say ‘Five from here and five from there,’ and so I didn't know anybody from there onwards at all.

Of course, we set off on the march then and we were on the march from January until April 1945. We thought we'd covered about a thousand miles, marching right across Germany. We went into different places, and we spent overnight in barns, and we passed north of Dresden. We saw Dresden being bombed, the flames leaping up. The Germans were frightened as well because they took us into a church crypt while the bombing went on for hours. When that was over they started marching us again right across Germany, stopping in different places. One place we stayed at was an indoor riding school, where they plonked us down on this sawdust sort of stuff and there we had a little sleep.

FOOD ON THE LONG MARCH
We didn't have any Red Cross parcels at all on that march, they'd gone, non-existent really. Well we didn't know where they were, anyway, they were probably in a siding something like that, but we never got any on the march. When we saw a potato clamp open in a field they made a rush for it to get the potatoes out and all we could find there, and that's where I got hit with a rifle butt. Because the German guards didn't think much of this. I got hit in the back and the chaps I was with on that march carried me for about three days because I couldn't hardly walk. Of course, there were no medical facilities, they couldn't do anything for you, anyway. On that march we went into a nunnery overnight and they provided us with some food there, the nuns were very, very good and I suffered my first experience of haemorrhoids in there, marching on that march. They said, ‘Does anybody need any medical help?’ so it was rather embarrassing, really. Anyway I went and said I'd got this and she said, ‘Ooh dear!’ She couldn't speak English and I couldn't speak German but she gave me a little pot of cream in a wax container and she told me what to do, and it was marvellous stuff. There's nothing in this country that ever is made like that. It did the trick and I didn't have any more trouble ever on that march from haemorrhoids.

GERMAN CIVILIANS’ FEELINGS
The German civilians were very angry at places. One place we went through they had to put double guards on the march because the German civilians were really angry. We thought they were going to tear into us because their place had been bombed the night before, and it was only a little place. I mean, there was places in England that they dropped their bombs in the little villages - well, this was like that and of course this place had been devastated and you can understand it, they were pretty angry. The Germans got us through that little place. But that was the only occasion I think that I can remember that we did meet it. We went into a brickfield and I spent my 21st birthday in this brickfield - we were still under German guard then and it was the first morning that they left us and the German civilians did try and help. We were in a bit of a state, and they didn't actually help. They didn't come forward with anything, but if you went to them they would help you. Because some of them didn't know really what was going on, let's face it, what was happening.

I finished off just outside Hanover, just outside a place called Gottingen, I've forgotten lots of names. When I came home I weighted 6 stone 7 lbs. I had been about 11 stone 7, so I'd lost all that amount of weight in that time.

END OF THE LONG MARCH
We stopped on the side of the road overnight because the weather was getting quite warm then. It was April and it had warmed up considerably since coming from Poland and then overnight, the night before when we lay on the side of the road, we heard all this screaming and rifle banging going on. We didn't know what that was and then when we woke up in the morning the guards had gone, and there was nobody there. We were left on the side of the road and then the chaps dispersed, trying to get food and such as what they could, and I suppose, of course, we were eating the wrong things, and that caused trouble. But then all of a sudden we saw these trucks coming down the road and we thought they were Germans, because the helmet in the distance is very similar to the Germans’, so we all dashed into these fields and hid. But then when these trucks came further down we saw there was a white star, it was the Americans. Well, they took us back to a little village a little way up the road and within no time there must have been twenty calor gas cookers on the side of the road and they cooked us eggs, and these pancakes, and all sorts of things. Of course, all of it was bad for us, because we couldn't hold it, but they treated us pretty well.

I shouldn't have thought there were many more than about 100 of us there because we'd all split up then and we'd gone our different ways. At that time the Germans were in a heck of a mess, they didn't know where they were going, there was people deserting and all sorts of things, from their army, they had no medical supplies, they had nothing. And of course they just disappeared and we didn’t know where they went but then they took us back to another little village. Well, it wasn't a village, it was where the Germans had a big warehouse and we didn't know what was inside it, but there were some airborne chaps that hadn't been Prisoners of War long. They had been captured at Arnhem so they were pretty fit and they sorted out these German guards and we got into this warehouse and there were tins of this meat, and dried potatoes and all sorts in there, they used to dry this stuff and had it for their rations and things like that. We had a feed on that but again we were in trouble because we’d been used to so little. In our little party there was a butcher and he'd gone round somewhere and he'd found someone that had a pig, so he pinched this pig and did the proper thing, did it properly, and of course we had pork and that didn't do us much good either.

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