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My war began in 1949 when I was 19 years old, the story of which is entitled ‘LEN’S WAR IN THE 292 FIELD COMPANY ROYAL ENGINEERS.

After being captured in Crete, we had orders to destroy our equipment. We hung about until the Germans came and we were picked up. Greece had already been captured by this time. They walked us back to Greece to repair the bridges that we had blown up; we were here for quite a while. We were not properly fed and we slept in fields. The Germans gave us a handful of mint tea and dried fish that we ‘cooked’ on the steam from the engine on the train. We weren’t fed for three days.

We were then put on a cattle truck, the compartments, for want of a better word, normally would hold 40 men or 8 horses. They put 80 of us in here, with a small grill in each corner for air. We had no water, no toilet facilities and barbed wire over the openings. Some of the men had diarrhoea and pulled their sleeves off their uniform, tied it in a knot
and used it as a toilet. We travelled day and night, stopping once in Yugoslavia, where
we were allowed to get off the train. Two women brought us cake and maize bread. There was a trough we could use for a toilet. We queued up to use this and then we were ordered back onto the train. I don’t know how long we travelled for. When we got off the train we had to shuffle/walk until we got to Austria.

There were French, Yugoslavian, Greek and Russian troops in the camp with us — 5,000 in all.

The Russian prisoners of war and civilians had been in the cattle trucks for weeks under terrible conditions. They were looked upon as vermin. A lot of the Russians had died, but as the ground was very hard and frozen, they were all stacked up ready to be buried by us when the ground thawed. Due to this, Typhus broke out, but the British were given vaccines supplied by the Red Cross. We had our hair shaved and our bedding burnt. Fortunately none of the British died due to this epidemic.

I had been issued with a pair of Italian shoes, but the wooden nails had come out so I found some wire and tied them around the shoes to keep the soles on. For some reason, I’m not sure why, when we arrived at the prison camp exhausted, an officer gave me a decent pair of shoes. I’ve often wondered if it was due to the uniform I was wearing, as it was a service jacket with brass buttons from the 1914 war, that I had been issued with whilst in hospital and I was dressed different from anyone else, so maybe they thought I
was an officer. They asked if I was German as I had blond hair and blue eyes. I was one of the lucky ones as some of the lads were given wooden Dutch clogs which rubbed and gave them ulcers and being malnourished, one poor lad called Nobby Clark died of blood poisoning. The shoes I had taken off changed hands numerous times during the war!

The camp consisted of three Cavilliary Barracks of which they had taken the stables out and installed 100’s of three tire bunks. We were like rabbits in their hutches. At the end
of the building was a big stone trough; two water taps and toilets of a fashion. We were searched, given a number and photographed.

All we got to eat was a ladle of broth. You never questioned what was in it as you were that hungry. We were also given a loaf, which had to be cut into five pieces to share amongst you. This caused a lot of animosity between us as the pieces were different sizes and people were starving. Civilisation quickly disappears when faced with starvation.

One morning, one of our lads went down to the pump to clean his teeth and was shot for disobeying orders.

The camp was very primitive.

The first job I was given was at a drainage camp, where we continued with the work the French had started in the 1914 war. We used to have to walk 2 ½ miles and start work
with nothing to eat. We dug by hand. One of you digging and one of you working the wheelbarrow. We took with us a sack of potatoes that we boiled and ate during the day.

When we got back to camp at night we were given watery soup, pieces of black bread and maize. We were slowly dying of starvation. We were always lethargic, as we had no energy.

During this time, my mother received a telegram telling her I was MISSING IN ACTION.

Eventually food and clothe parcels began to arrive from England via the Red Cross. The parcels proved to be good propaganda for us, as the Germans had been lead to believe our country was struggling, yet here we were, prisoners who were no longer of any use to the Country, being sent decent clothes and food. We ended up better clothed than our captors as the best of their clothing was donned by the S.S. We used soap to bargain with, as our captors had never seen decent soap before. They had to use block panshine to wash with, consequently they had skin complaints. I got a tooth filled in exchange for a bar of soap.

I can’t emphasise enough how the Food Parcels from the Red Cross saved our lives.
One day they asked for five volunteers to work for the S.S. (the S.S. that were discharged or wounded). I volunteered as I’d heard it was a ‘good number’. We were required to unload trucks and administer food. During this time with the S.S. we used to help ourselves to bottles of Snapps, sugar and chocolate and secrete them in our uniform. One
Christmas we held a ‘party’ and I had ¾ of a mug of Snapps and other alcohol. Needless to say I was the worse for wear and a few of us woke up very thirsty during the night. We asked the guard on duty, who was freezing cold, patrolling the camp, for some water. You can imagine what he told us to do!

We also received footballs and tennis racquets from the Red Cross. One of the Australian lads, a fisherman, made a tennis net out of string and we secured it to the two huts by bricks. We watered the ground every night to stop it becoming dusty. In the winter we made an ice skating rink with the use of a fire hydrant and the very cold weather.

The Red Cross fed us, clothed us and gave us recreation facilities for the Germans to work us! One of us even received a tin of Cavier in our food parcel. It took us a while to figure out what it was. With this food and the rations the Germans gave us, we managed to stay alive. When there was a lull in the parcels, we got lethargic; it felt like flu, nobody used the recreation facilities then. We became ‘food parcel addicts’.

I was having a shave one Sunday morning (you didn’t work Sundays) when we heard an air raid warning. The next thing, bombs dropped onto the nearby town. We were
ordered to go down to the town and repair the bomb damage. Up until this time, we had been treated fairly by the townsfolk, but on this Sunday morning, we were spat at and called names.

The bombings started from hereon in and got worse. It would start in the morning at 9.30 until 10.00 p.m. There was a continuous screaming sound from the bombs as they dropped. One day the camp was bombed, a bomb exploding near our hut. Five Jewish lads got killed. Ironic really, as they had escaped being sent to the Concentration Camps! Due to this we couldn’t sleep here, so we were moved to a big hall near the town.

One day whilst we were clearing the bomb damage, we were sent to root through a bombed house to look for valuable ornaments for the lady of the house. Myself and an Australian came upon the pantry, the Australian concealing two jars of jam under his uniform. Whilst on our way back to camp, he asked me to hide one of them, which I did. (Something I still feel guilty about) Unfortunately for us the ‘lady’ had seen this and informed the guards. When we returned back to camp we were searched (something we never were). We were sent to the guardhouse for a lecture on stealing, the Australian blaming me for the theft and he was given a reprimand and let off. I knew I was in trouble now as POW’s come under military jurisdiction, but as soon as you did anything seriously wrong, you came under Gestapo rule and pinching jam was a serious offence.

Things could have been a lot worse for me because of this, but by now the country was in a mess and Germany could no longer control the situation properly, instead I was sent to a holding camp, waiting to be sent to a concentration camp, helping to maintain the railways. I was there for approximately five to six weeks.

We began to see the Poles from the slave labour camps that had been released from Europe being sent home and we were told the War was over.

Chaos then set in, it was like a pantomime, overnight the troops had disappeared, we were given no instruction and for two days we wandered about in the town, but nobody would serve us. We were in more danger now than we had ever been before! One day we held a ceremony and a Union Jack, made out of a sheet, was hoisted up a wooden pole. Whilst we were away looking for food, the S.S. who were coming down from Italy, made one of the lads climb up and take it down. We returned to find him crying, taking splinters out of his legs.

We then stole a lorry and drove to the nearest Allied Forces Camp where we were eventually flown to Naples in a Dakota. The American pilot in charge of the plane greeted us with a bottle of Bourbon in his hand. We were terrified. We thought that after all this; we would be killed on our way home! We were at Naples quite a while, then travelled to Cardigan Bay where I telegrammed my family to tell them I was still alive.

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