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The Stalingrad of Africa: the story of the battle for Tunis
In 1943, Allied and Axis troops contested one of the most decisive campaigns of the Second World War. Saul David tells the story of the battle for Tunis – as hard-fought as the struggle for the Soviet city
Early on 8 November 1942, Adolf Hitler’s special train was en route from Berlin to Munich when it was stopped at a small station in the Thuringian Forest to receive an urgent message from the Foreign Office. A day earlier, Hitler’s HQ staff had received a “very disturbing signal” from German agents in Gibraltar, informing them that a large Allied troop convoy had passed heading in an easterly direction. Most on the train assumed the convoy was bound for Libya, a colony of Germany’s ally Italy since 1912. But its true destination was revealed by the Foreign Office communiqué: “A US expeditionary corps is disembarking in Algiers and Oran,” ports in French-controlled Algeria. Hitler was aghast. Aware that French North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, controlled by the collaborationist Vichy regime) was an area of the “greatest political and strategic importance”, he asked his advisors what resources were available to meet the threat. The answer was: none. Farther down the line, Joachim von Ribbentrop boarded the train. So concerned was the German foreign minister about the news coming from the Mediterranean that he urged Hitler to put out peace feelers to Stalin, hoping to free up German men and materials to be rushed to north Africa. The Führer refused: “a moment of weakness is not the proper time to negotiate with an enemy.” Instead, Hitler ordered General Alfred Jodl, chief of operations staff of his high command, to “organise the Wehrmacht for the defence of Tunis”, the capital of French Tunisia, which was a short flight or sea journey from Sicily. By securing Tunisia, Hitler hoped to stymie Allied plans to trap Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel’s Italo-German Panzer Army in Libya between General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army, advancing from Egypt in the east, and the forces just landed in Algeria and Morocco to the west. Such was indeed the Allies’ plan – and the subsequent ‘Race for Tunis’ would set the scene for one of the decisive campaigns of the war. The principal objective In December 1941, when the US entered the conflict, the strategy agreed with Britain was ‘Germany First’: win the war in Europe, then deal with Japan. On the question of how to defeat Germany, however, there was less consensus. Prime minister Winston Churchill preferred a ‘peripheral’ strategy, containing Germany by blockade, bombing, small raids and an attack on north Africa until it was sufficiently weakened by its efforts in Russia for a knockout blow on the continent. US president Franklin D Roosevelt (FDR) broadly agreed, but his Joint Chiefs of Staff believed that only the earliest full-frontal assault on Germany via France would keep the Soviet Union in the war. The dispute came to a head in July 1942 when the Joint Chiefs told FDR that, if the British insisted on “scatterization” in north Africa, “America should turn to the Pacific for decisive action against Japan”. FDR was not convinced and in late July, after more inconclusive talks in Britain, he told his Joint Chiefs that north Africa was now the principal objective, and that an attack would occur “at the earliest possible date”. The fighting in North Africa had begun almost two years earlier in September 1940 when the Italian 10th Army, hoping to seize the Suez Canal and create for Mussolini a new ‘Roman empire’, invaded British-occupied Egypt from Libya. Defeated by a much smaller British and Commonwealth force, the Italians were saved by the arrival in Libya of the dashing German commander Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps in February 1941. The contest had then ebbed and flowed as first the Germans and then the British took the initiative. But Rommel’s defeat by Montgomery’s 8th Army at El Alamein in Egypt on 4 November 1942, after a 12-day attritional battle, was a key turning point. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-154424305webready-860b5a8.jpg" width="5201" height="3467" alt="A painting showing several green, white or orange balloons dropping to the ground, onto a desert" title="British paratroops land in Algeria, 1943, as painted by military artist Henry Carr. The Allied attack on French North Africa alarmed Hitler (Image by Getty Images)" /> Four days later, three Allied task forces landed in French North Africa as part of Operation Torch, the largest amphibious operation of the war to date. Commanding the Western Task Force was 56-year-old Major-General George S Patton Jr, a hard-charging tank expert who felt he was destined for greatness. Patton’s objectives were three ports on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Despite a number of setbacks – troops dropped late and in the wrong place, and fierce French opposition – Patton kept his cool and, having landed by small boat, took personal charge of the operation. “God was very good to me today,” he noted in his diary. Vichy French forces put up a stern fight at Oran and Algiers, and Allied attempts to capture the two ports in surprise attacks from the sea were repulsed bloodily. But on 10 November, with defeat inevitable, the French authorities – led by Admiral François Darlan, head of all Vichy armed forces – agreed to a ceasefire. That was too late to prevent German and Italian planes and troops from making the short hop across the Mediterranean from Sicily to forestall an Allied takeover of Tunisia. The subsequent ‘Race for Tunis’ was contested by the vanguard of Lieutenant-General Kenneth Anderson’s First Army and a 15,000-strong Axis force under Generalleutnant Walther Nehring. Anderson, a dogged Scotsman with thin lips and unkempt grey hair, hoped to advance eastwards on two main roads from Algeria to northern Tunisia and capture the ports of Bizerte and Tunis. But Anderson’s British and American armoured columns were harassed by German planes, which had local air superiority, and held up by bad weather and strong German resistance to the west. Attempts were made to outflank the German defences using airborne troops and Commandos, but these were launched too late, and failed. The experience of the 600-strong British Second Parachute Battalion, led by 29-year-old Lieutenant- Colonel John Frost (who later won renown for his exploits at the battle of Arnhem), was typical. Dropped behind enemy lines on a poorly planned mission to destroy German planes before linking up with an Allied armoured thrust towards Tunis, Frost and his men were left without support and suffered heavy casualties as they battled their way to safety. Anderson praised their “epic adventure and great physical endeavour”, but that was little consolation for Frost, whose battalion had been “cut to pieces” on a pointless venture. On 14 December, Anderson informed General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, that his American troops were “green” and “unwilling to listen to advice”, and that prospects of getting to Tunis “before the heavy rains and before the Hun gets stronger than I am” were tiny. He made no mention of his own weaknesses, which included a tangled, inadequate command structure, headquarters too far from the scene of battle and a failure to intervene decisively when disaster beckoned. Setback at Longstop Prodded by his American superior – Lieutenant General Dwight D ‘Ike’ Eisenhower, a brilliant organiser with a “sharp, orderly mind” – Anderson made one last attempt to capture Tunis before Christmas, launched on 22 December. Despite rain and insufficient air cover, it made good progress up the lower ridges of the 275-metre-tall Longstop Hill guarding the river corridor from Medjez to Tebourba and on to Tunis. But poor intelligence failed to identify a second area of high ground and, after three days of bitter hand-to-hand fighting by British and US troops, and with ammunition running low, the Allies withdrew to Medjez. “We took Longstop three times,” noted a bitter American casualty, “but the Germans took it four.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-3293973webready-cd8288f.jpg" width="2881" height="1921" alt="A black and white photograph showing three men, all in military uniforms. The men on the left and in the middle are looking at the man on the right" title="‘Ike’ Eisenhower (centre) with fellow Allied generals Alexander (left) and Patton, March 1943 (Image by Getty Images)" /> By now, the opposing forces had swelled to 134,000 Allies – 54,000 British, 73,800 Americans and 7,000 French – and 195,000 Axis troops (though 70,000 were service rather than combat) renamed the Fifth Panzer Army and commanded by Generaloberst Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, who had replaced Nehring. The Allies used substantial air and sea forces to try to throttle Axis reinforcements. Because Tunis and Bizerte were less than 150 miles from ports and airfields in western Sicily, though, it was difficult to intercept Axis transports, and by late January 1943 a total of 243,000 men and 870,000 tonnes of supplies had reached Tunisia. As the battle raged, Allied leaders met at Casablanca to discuss strategy. Again, Churchill persuaded FDR to delay the cross-Channel invasion – this time because of a slower than expected build-up of forces and a shortage of landing craft. Instead, the next target would be Sicily: to safeguard Mediterranean shipping, tie down German troops, threaten mainland Italy and perhaps drive that Axis partner out of the war. Also at Casablanca, Ike was warned that his “neck was in a noose” if he did not conquer north Africa quickly. To assist him, General Sir Harold Alexander (‘Alex’) was given command of land operations, leaving Ike to solve “political and inter-Allied problems”. Alex’s strategy was to link up Anderson’s First Army with Montgomery’s Eighth Army which, since its victory at El Alamein in Egypt in early November 1942, had pursued the remnants of Rommel’s Panzer Army more than 1,000 miles to Tunisia’s southern border. Before the junction could take place, however, the German theatre commander, Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, ordered Rommel and von Arnim to attack and defeat the two converging Allied armies one after the other, beginning in the mountains of central Tunisia where Anderson’s defensive line was at its thinnest. “After Stalingrad, our nation is badly in need of a triumph,” said Kesselring. At this point, Axis troops were holding Tunisia’s coastal plain, while the Allies were strung out along the Eastern and Western Dorsals – two mountain ranges that join in the north but diverge farther south to form an inverted ‘V’. The only way of breaking into the Allied position was round its southern tip, at Gafsa, or through a double defence line of mountain passes. The first, Faïd in the Eastern Dorsal, was captured from the (non-Vichy) French on 30 January. Two weeks later, in Operation Spring Wind, four battle groups from von Arnim’s 10th and 21st Panzer Divisions surged out of the Faïd and Mazila passes and, in a double pincer attack, defeated elements of the US First Armored and 34th Infantry Divisions near Sidi Bou Zid. Rommel denied Rommel tried to exploit this success further south with Operation Morning Air, an advance through the Kasserine and Sbiba passes in the Western Dorsal via Gafsa, and on towards the rail and road hub of Tebessa in Algeria, HQ of the US II Corps. Rommel captured Gafsa and 200,000 tonnes of abandoned Allied supplies on 15 February. But his request to use all three panzer divisions in Tunisia – the 10th, 15th and 21st – for the second phase of his plan was rejected by Kesselring, who also altered the axis of advance: it would now be north towards Le Kef in northern Tunisia via Thala, not east toward Tebessa in Algeria. It was, wrote Rommel, “an appalling and unbelievable piece of shortsightedness” because it meant that, instead of executing a sickle-stroke deep into the enemy’s rear, the thrust would be “far too close to the front and was bound to bring us up against the strong enemy reserves”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/2HX5DEXwebready-7e349f2.jpg" width="1848" height="1232" alt="A black and white photograph of a line of men standing with their arms up in surrender, with two men with guns accompanying them" title="German and Italian troops surrender after the Allied counterattack in the Kasserine Pass in early 1943 – a turning point that would lead to more Axis defeats (Image by Alamy)" /> On 19 February, Rommel’s armoured spearheads failed to capture Allied positions in the Kasserine and Sbiba passes. The following day, Rommel renewed the assault at Kasserine with panzers, rocket launchers and five battalions of Panzergrenadiers. They were up against 2,000 inexperienced US troops defending a 3-mile front. Surprised by Germans infiltrating along the heights, the flank company of the US 19th Engineer Regiment was the first to crack, and by 5pm the whole line had disintegrated. Hundreds surrendered, the rest fled, and some 20 tanks and 30 armoured troop carriers were captured, with Rommel marvelling at how “fantastically well equipped” the Americans were. On 21 February, Rommel sent battle groups north to Thala and west to Tebessa, but both were stopped short of their objectives by stout Allied resistance. Believing the enemy had grown “too strong for the attack to be maintained”, Rommel ordered a withdrawal through the Kasserine Pass. He was convinced that, but for Kesselring’s caution, they might have been able to “thrust far beyond” Tebessa to the north before meeting any serious opposition. In just eight days, the Axis forces had advanced up to 80 miles, taken more than 4,000 prisoners and destroyed nearly 200 tanks. But they had failed to win a decisive victory – and the tide in Tunisia now turned against them. Promoted to command the newly formed Army Group Afrika, Rommel fought his final battle at Medenine in southern Tunisia on 6 March. He attacked Montgomery’s veteran Eighth Army from three directions with all his remaining armour – 160 panzers – but was stopped in his tracks by well-sited anti-tank guns, artillery and tanks. “Rommel absolutely bought it yesterday,” Monty crowed to Alex on 7 March. “He lost over 30 tanks knocked out, many more hit and damaged.” On 9 March, convinced that the campaign was lost, Rommel flew to Hitler’s southern Werwolf HQ, at Vinnitsa (now Vinnytsia) in Ukraine, to persuade the Führer to withdraw all Axis forces from Tunisia before it was too late. Hitler, basking in the glow of Generalfeldmarschall von Manstein’s successful counter-offensive against the Soviets at Kharkiv (which put a temporary halt to the retreat after Stalingrad), said no. Tunis, he declared, “is a strategic position of the first order. It is of decisive importance for the outcome of the war, and all available resources must be used to hold it.” Rommel was sent to a sanatorium to recover his health, never to return to north Africa. Axis fate sealed There were more tough battles ahead, but the fate of the Axis garrison – now commanded by von Arnim – was sealed. Tunis finally fell on 7 May, following a brilliantly planned two-day Allied offensive known as Operation Strike. This assault deployed armour, infantry, artillery and tactical air support in overwhelming force to punch a hole through the Axis defences in the Medjerda valley and reach the French Tunisian capital in just two days. The end came on 13 May: Maresciallo d’Italia Giovanni Messe surrendered the remnants of his First Italian Army to Bernard Freyberg, commander of the British X Corps, north of Enfidaville (now Enfidha). Von Arnim and his staff had been captured a day earlier. “Sir, we are masters of the north African shores,” Alex reported to Churchill, who was ecstatic: “We have struck a blow equal to Stalingrad,” he told the US Congress on 19 May. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/2ND04KPwebready-102ad72.jpg" width="3000" height="2000" alt="Maresciallo d’Italia Giovanni Messe arrives at a British prisoner-of-war camp after his army’s surrender on 13 May 1943, cementing the final Allied victory in north Africa (Image by Alamy)" title="Maresciallo d’Italia Giovanni Messe arrives at a British prisoner-of-war camp after his army’s surrender on 13 May 1943, cementing the final Allied victory in north Africa (Image by Alamy)" /> For the Western Allies, the scale of the Tunisian victory was unprecedented. At a cost of just over 70,000 casualties – including 10,000 dead – they had captured more than a quarter of a million Axis troops. The victory “signified to friend and foe alike”, wrote Ike, “that the Allies were at last upon the march”. It also welded together a team of Allied commanders – including Ike himself, Patton, Omar N Bradley, Alex, Monty and Arthur Coningham – that would go on to direct all major Allied operations in the Mediterranean and Europe for the rest of the war. With Stalingrad in Russia and Guadalcanal in the Pacific, the battle for Tunisia was one of three Axis defeats in 1943 that changed the course of the war. Historians have recognised the significance of the others, but Tunisia is often either ignored or characterised as a sideshow. Yet it ended Axis seapower in the Mediterranean and destroyed more than 2,400 Axis aircraft, 40 per cent of the Luftwaffe’s strength. More German and Italian troops were captured in Tunisia than at Stalingrad. Such was the scale of the defeat that the German public dubbed it ‘Tunisgrad’. Ultimately, the catastrophe led to the dissolution of the German-Italian Axis in Europe. For Hitler, it was the beginning of the end. 8-10 November 1942 The Allies unleash Operation Torch. Three task forces land in Vichy-controlled French North Africa and, after a fierce but brief struggle, capture the ports of Casablanca in Morocco, and Oran and Algiers in Algeria 15 November - 6 December 1942 Led by Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson, the British First Army narrowly fails in its attempt to reach and capture Tunis, the Tunisian capital, before enough Axis troops are in place to stop it 22-25 December 1942 A brutal see-saw contest for Longstop Hill, a strategically vital area of high ground en route to Tunis, ends with German troops in possession 14-24 January 1943 American and British leaders meet at the Casablanca Conference in French Morocco. Winston Churchill persuades President Franklin D Roosevelt to delay the cross-Channel invasion until 1944. British General Sir Harold Alexander is appointed deputy to US Lieutenant General Dwight D Eisenhower in Tunisia 14-16 February 1943 Operation Spring Wind sees Axis troops score a spectacular victory as four battle groups from Generaloberst Hans-Jürgen von Arnim’s Fifth Panzer Army surge out of mountain passes in the Eastern Dorsal and, in a double pincer attack, destroy elements of two US divisions near Sidi Bou Zid 15-22 February 1943 German Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel (right) sends his panzers through the Kasserine Pass in the Western Dorsal in a bid to disrupt the Allied rear, but the attack runs out of steam in the face of dogged Allied defence, and Rommel is forced to withdraw his troops 6 March 1943 Rommel’s final battle in north Africa – fought at Medenine in Tunisia – ends in disaster as his attacking panzers are stopped in their tracks by the well-placed anti-tank guns, artillery and tanks of General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army 6-7 April 1943 Monty’s frontal attack on the First Italian Army’s strong position at Wadi Akarit, in the Gabès gap, seems doomed to failure until the veteran Fourth Indian Division breaks through on the left, a significant development that enables the First and Eighth Armies to join forces 6-7 May 1943 Operation Strike, a brilliantly planned offensive that uses a combination of armour, infantry and artillery, sees Allied troops punching a hole through Axis defences and reaching Tunis in just two days 13 May 1943 Maresciallo d’Italia Giovanni Messe’s First Italian Army surrenders to the British X Corps. They are the last of 250,000 German and Italian troops to become PoWs – the Allied victory in north Africa is now complete
Ben McIntyre on Colditz: "The reality of Colditz is much more interesting than the black-and-white moral fable"
For his new book, bestselling author Ben Macintyre has set his sights on the most infamous PoW camp of the Second World War. He reveals how the legendary escape attempts are only part of a complex, darker history
Colditz: in context Early in the Second World War, the medieval Colditz Castle was converted into a prisoner of war camp, intended to hold those Allied officers deemed most likely to escape or cause trouble for their German army captors. Colditz remained in use until its liberation by US forces in April 1945 and at its peak held more than 800 PoWs, composed of many different nationalities and including famous names such as SAS founder David Stirling, future politician Airey Neave and RAF hero Douglas Bader. Although the castle was said to be “escape-proof”, more escape attempts took place at Colditz than any other PoW camp. Altogether more than 130 men broke out of the castle, though little more than 30 successfully made it all the way across the German border. These often ingenious escape attempts – popularised in books, TV and a highly successful 1973 board game – are what Colditz is best known for today. But there were many darker aspects of the camp’s history including racism, class divisions and mental breakdowns. In your new book you discuss a myth of Colditz that needs to be challenged. What is this myth and how did it come about? Those of us of a certain age grew up with the great BBC TV series about Colditz and, also, in my case, the board game Escape from Colditz. So Colditz was steeped into our childhoods, but often the story followed a very particular pattern. It was brave British men outwitting the Germans and tunnelling out of this vast Gothic castle in a way that continued the war by other means. It dignified the whole prisoner-of-war experience as an extension of a gallant, rather old-fashioned war. And of course, that is true of Colditz, but only partly so. Like all myths, the reality is much more complicated and much more interesting than the black-and-white moral fable we’ve inherited. There were acts of extraordinary courage and resilience. But there was also a whole other set of behaviours. Colditz was a crucible for the most amazing variety of human responses to circumstances that were beyond their control. What kind of vision did the prisoners encounter when they arrived at Colditz? A pretty terrifying one. It’s a vast, 700-room Gothic schloss on top of a cliff, overlooking the town of Colditz: a very dominating, domineering piece of architecture. The castle was built in the 11th century by the electors of Saxony, effectively as a demonstration of power. And it was also used, from its very earliest times, to incarcerate people who did not fit in with the existing power regime. Over the years, it had been a psychiatric hospital, a prison, a place where the electors would put their unwanted and dangerous siblings. So it’s always had a history of being somewhere people were held against their will. On the podcast | Bestselling author and historian Ben Macintyre joins us to discuss one of the most infamous German PoW camps of the Second World War What kind of prisoners were sent to Colditz? They were the most difficult prisoners: people who had demonstrated, in other camps, that they were going to try to escape, and going to make trouble. The German idea was to herd all these troublemakers together in one place, in a castle that would be impossible to escape from. But there were two problems with that. One was that Colditz, while very impressive to look at, was full of holes and actually not a very good place to have a security camp. And the second problem was that if you put a lot of naughty boys together, they egg each other on and pretty soon, your house is on fire. This is what happened at Colditz: it developed its own culture of defiance. One other thing to say is that this was an officers’ camp, which gave it a particular kind of status because, under the Geneva Convention, officers were treated better than ordinary soldiers. And, again under the Geneva Convention, these imprisoned officers had ordinary soldiers, orderlies, to look after them: to polish their shoes, to make their food, to bring up their bathwater. So right through the middle of Colditz was this unbridgeable social division between the officers who made up the majority, and the orderlies who were under their command and not allowed to escape. As well as different classes at Colditz there were also multiple nationalities. How did they get on with each other? Sometimes very well, sometimes in a sort of rivalry. What you had there were Polish, French, Belgian, Dutch, British and, latterly, American prisoners. They were all allies, technically, but like all allies, they didn’t always get on terribly well. During the initial period in Colditz, the PoWs from different nations were actually tripping up over each other’s attempts to escape, so they established an international escape committee which sort of worked. I loved looking at the ways the different nations interacted. Believe it or not, they had an “Olympic Games” at Colditz in August 1941, which brought out, as one of the observers said, all the sorts of national stereotypes you could wish for: the Poles very focused and wanting to win, the French being very laidback about it all, the Brits just not caring and laughing at everybody. There were also several Jewish prisoners at Colditz. How were they and other racial minorities treated? There’s a racial story within Colditz, which has never been properly told before. Quite early on, the French officers insisted that they would not be billeted with the Jewish-French officers. It was a very shocking moment. You have to bear in mind that at this point the collaborationist Vichy government was operating in southern France, and quite a few of the prisoners were very pro-Vichy, and some were clearly extremely anti-Semitic. The Germans, of course, saw this as a propaganda opportunity and immediately herded the French-Jewish prisoners – of whom there were about 60 or 70 – into a special barrack in the attics. It was much smaller and more uncomfortable, and was immediately called the ghetto. Some of the British were absolutely scandalised that this could happen and that the Germans allowed it to go ahead. One other story that leapt out at me is that of the only non-white British officer in Colditz, an Indian doctor called Birendranath Mazumdar who was in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He had been told that he was not allowed to escape because of the colour of his skin – on the grounds that he would be picked up immediately. He went on hunger strike and insisted he be moved to an all-Indian prison, of which there were very few. The one he ended up in was in occupied France and from there he managed to escape and walk 700 miles across the border into Switzerland. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/11/2-02-Birendranath-Mazumdar-credit-Staatliche-Schlosser-Burgen-und-Garten-Sachsen-gGmbH-Schloss-Colditz-f0efcd3.png" width="620" height="413" alt="The Indian doctor Birendranath Mazumdar (right) was the only non-white British officer in Colditz" title="The Indian doctor Birendranath Mazumdar (right) was the only non-white British officer in Colditz" /> Mazumdar suffered the most terrible racism at Colditz, not really from the Germans but from the British. He was treated as a second-class citizen, and that’s very hard to write, but it’s important to know that there is this race story within the Colditz narrative. In general, how well treated were the PoWs by their German guards? Colditz was run by the German army. It wasn’t a concentration camp and these weren’t SS fanatics – they were professional soldiers, who went out of their way to observe the rules of the Geneva Convention. On the whole, they tended to treat the prisoners as officers and gentlemen and the prisoners expected to be treated that way. That said, if the PoWs were escaping, they could be shot at – it’s not as if it was without danger. And among the German contingent were some pretty grotesque Nazi fanatics, though not very many. But again, this illustrates the point I’m making that there was a huge variety of human nature inside this theatre. And on the other side, how did the prisoners view their captors? It depended on the individual. Some got on with them well, but there were also moments of deep antagonism and direct confrontation. One of the ways that the British contingent, particularly, dealt with the boredom and frustration of this long imprisonment was “goon-baiting”. “Goon” was a slang term for the German guards, and a huge amount of ingenuity went into this activity: teasing them, mocking them, whistling on parade, refusing to stand up straight – anything the prisoners could do to drive them mad. It was very puerile and came from an English public-school tradition of ragging the masters. But it allowed the prisoners to let off steam in a way that was extraordinarily therapeutic. My favourite story is when the prisoners discovered a wasps’ nest in one of the walls and spent weeks catching wasps, putting them in matchboxes and very carefully attaching cigarette papers onto their legs on which was written, “Deutschland kaput”. Then one day in the early-morning parade, on a signal, they all opened these matchboxes and hundreds of very angry wasps carrying anti-German propaganda rose into the sky above Colditz and presumably went on to sting and inform many people around the countryside of what the PoWs felt inside Colditz. The camp is best known for the myriad escape attempts that took place. Was Colditz home to an unusual number of such attempts? Yes it was. There were more attempts to escape from Colditz than any other prison. But escaping from the camp itself was only half the battle. Once you were out, you had to then get out of Germany, which in many ways was much harder. I discovered that there were fewer escape attempts than I had thought, and certainly fewer successful ones. The Germans gradually made it more difficult to get out and security was increased. By the end of 1944, very few prisoners were still trying to escape, it had become far too dangerous. So the story of everybody trying to escape all the time isn’t quite right. Everybody was prepared to contribute to escape attempts, but the hardened escapers were a minority. Did any of the escape attempts particularly stand out to you? The most famous was the escape of Airey Neave, who would become one of Margaret Thatcher’s senior advisors later in his career. There was a space beneath the floor of the theatre in Colditz, and they worked out that they could get into the floor and from there access a tunnel that ran across one of the arches and ended with a locked door into the German guard room. One night, Neave and an accomplice got themselves through the theatre floor, went along this corridor, unpicked the lock into the German guard house and strode out of the front door wearing fake German uniforms – they had managed to produce replicas that were virtually identical to the real thing. They walked across the moat, down a little path, past the barracks, and climbed over the wall and got out. It was an astonishing escape, incredibly brazen. [Neave and his accomplice made it safely to Switzerland and he returned to England via France, Spain and Gibraltar]. Read more | Q&A: How did the Colditz escapees plan to get their glider out? Another one I particularly liked was by a French aristocrat called Pierre Mairesse-Lebrun, who was a cavalry officer. He got an accomplice to help him vault over the wire enclosure that surrounded the exercise yard. He did a sort of cartwheel on the top, and landed beautifully on the other side, like a thoroughbred taking a steeplechase fence. Lebrun then ran up the hill, while being shot at by the guards, climbed over the wall, walked about 70 miles to the nearest station, stole a bicycle, then cycled along the autobahn and miraculously managed to smuggle himself across the border into Switzerland. These stories are extraordinary, but do they obscure the fact that, for many, Colditz was a place of extreme boredom? That’s a good point. Most war stories are about the moments of colour and adventure, yet most of life inside Colditz was unbelievably boring; nothing was happening. Because they were officers, the prisoners were not allowed to work and had nothing to do. They responded to this in a huge variety of ways. Some, as I say, took to goon-baiting, some became obsessed by escaping. But quite a lot of them retreated into literature or took correspondence courses. Drama also played a huge part in Colditz and the theatre became a focal point. There was a new production every few days and they were packed out; the Germans would come too. The PoWs put on dozens of different productions: plays, revues, pantomimes, skits, and a lot of musical stuff as well. There were orchestras in Colditz, there were chamber groups, there was a Hawaiian string band, there was a Polish choir. It was another form of escapism, without actually escaping. The British also began to set up clubs: bridge, chess, sports clubs, but also the social clubs that were so much a part of prewar British culture. Believe it or not, there was a Bullingdon Club in Colditz – exclusively for those who had belonged to the Bullingdon Club at the University of Oxford. Read more | Prisoners of war in Britain during WW2: where were they held? At Colditz there were also some celebrity hostages. How differently were they treated to the regular prisoners? This is another extraordinary story. They were called the Prominente, the prominent ones, and they were individual prisoners whom the Nazi high command had decided were of particular value. The first was Winston Churchill’s nephew, Giles Romilly, who was a journalist and had been captured in Norway. He was later joined by two nephews of the king; a man called Michael Alexander, who pretended to be the nephew of General Alexander [British commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean theatre]; and the son of the American ambassador. Hitler and his entourage had convinced themselves that these characters would be useful bargaining tools, who could either be swapped or threatened. They were treated differently with better food and separate quarters, but if they ceased to be of value to the Nazis, they would have been murdered. Romilly called it a privileged nightmare. Of all the prisoners you wrote about, who made the biggest impression on you? There was one who stood out for the wrong reasons and one for the right ones. Douglas Bader was the most famous soldier, on either side of the entire Second World War really. He had lost both his legs in a flying accident before the war, yet nonetheless, he became an enormously brave Spitfire pilot. He was shot down over France and taken to Colditz. Bader was a man of great courage but he was also not a particularly nice person. He was arrogant, he was rude, he was incredibly unpleasant to people he thought of lower status than him. And he treated his orderly, a man called Alex Ross, really badly. In the middle of the war, some ordinary soldiers were repatriated in prisoner exchanges and Ross was selected for this. He went to Bader and said: “I’ve got very good news, wing commander, I’m going home.” And Bader said: “No, you’re not. You’re my lackey and you’re going to stay here.” And poor Alex Ross spent another two years inside Colditz. On the other side of the ledger, a character that few will have heard of is a Jewish dentist from Glasgow called Julius Green. He looked after the teeth of the people in Colditz, but he was also a spy. He was primarily responsible for writing the coded letters that were being sent back to MI9, the branch of British intelligence that was concerned with prisoner affairs. He was sending back really vital information. Green was rather wonderful: he was constantly modest, and very self-mocking. He described himself as a professional coward, but actually he wasn’t anything of the sort. He was a man of incredible bravery, but we don’t really hear his story because louder, more well-known figures have dominated the landscape. Read more | The real 'Rogue Heroes' of the early SAS I’m also fascinated by the stories of the women who had a role in Colditz. I was expecting this to be a strictly all-male story; it’s not. For example, there was the extraordinary character of Mrs M. She was a Scotswoman in Warsaw, speaking perfect Polish and posing as a Polish housewife, who was actually running the escape networks out of Poland. And many of the Colditz soldiers owed her their liberty. And then there’s another woman who played a very important part. I’ve mentioned Julius Green, the spy dentist. Well, Irmgard Wernicke was the German dental assistant in the town of Colditz, but she was also an anti-Nazi resistance plotter. And even though her father was head of the local Nazi party, she was providing the soldiers in Colditz with crucial bits of information. Following their release at the end of the war, how easy did the men find it to readjust to society? As with many soldiers and many prisoners, it was very hard. The world was never the same again after the war. Some managed to adjust and have very successful careers. Pat Reid, who was probably the most famous escaper, established a mini-industry around Colditz. He wrote books, he patented the board game and he went on tour. But there are other, much sadder stories of people who never recovered. There are stories of suicide, and of people who had mental breakdowns. There is a lot of mental strain that comes from being in any kind of prison, but being in a prisoner of war camp is particularly hard because it is seemingly without end. Quite a lot of people in Colditz suffered grievous mental distress from being in there so long. People are not supermen; people are not made of this granite material that doesn’t respond to stress. So it’s not all about the cheeky-chappy, cheery, moustachioed officer who strides off into the sunset and the world is a better place. Life isn’t like that, and imprisonment certainly isn’t like that. Ben Macintyre is a bestselling author and journalist who has written several books on espionage and the Second World War including Operation Mincemeat, The Spy and the Traitor and SAS: Rogue Heroes, which is the subject of an upcoming BBC One drama This article was first published in the November 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
The untold story of India’s WW2 prisoners of war
Some 75,000 Indian soldiers were captured by Axis powers during the Second World War. Diya Gupta explores how their experiences change their view of the Raj, and why have their stories been overlooked?
Life in New Britain, off the north-east coast of New Guinea, during the Second World War was gruelling – and agonisingly so for Allied prisoners of war (PoWs) interned by the Japanese. “There on the ground I lay, shivering, helpless,” recalled one soldier of his captivity after he had caught malaria in July 1943, describing in visceral detail the torrential rain, wet clothes and mosquitoes. “The thin cotton blanket given to me being inadequate to protect me from the cold, I waited for the sun to warm me. I would shiver like a leaf. Then, seized by fever, my body would turn as hot as fire – I would become unconscious, then awake only to find myself perspiring. There was not a soul who could give [me] a sip of even cold water.” On the other side of the world, a doctor – also a captured Allied soldier, brought to Colditz Castle at the heart of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in 1943 – experienced a similar sense of acute loneliness. After hearing the sound of the key turning as the door was closed behind him, the doctor asked the sentry in German where he was; putting fingers to his ears, the sentry remained silent, leaving the prisoner in complete darkness in his cell. Confined within the forbidding walls of the castle, this was as much a psychological incarceration as a physical imprisonment. Sickness, hunger, cold, solitude: these would have been sensations familiar to many of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers held as PoWs during the Second World War. What makes the stories of these two men – John Baptist Crasta in south-east Asia, and Captain Birendranath Mazumdar in Germany – special is that both were Indian soldiers with the British army, and that both left accounts providing rare insights into the testing experiences of Indian PoWs. Some 2.5 million men from pre-independent India served the British empire during the Second World War. Yet this was the period during which India’s struggle for freedom from British rule was at its most incendiary – so what was it like fighting for the British? When the conflict reached the subcontinent, the British Raj was fissured, threatened abroad by imperialist ambitions of the Axis powers and within India by rising nationalist forces. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/01/The-untold-story-of-India’s-PoWs-2-73a0af3.jpg" width="1600" height="1067" alt="Soldiers of the 4th Indian Infantry Division of the British Eighth Army share a meal of beans , curry and chapattis in 1943 (Eliot Elisofon/Getty Images)" title="Soldiers of the 4th Indian Division, having a meal of curry, bean and chapattis, 1943" /> The external war brought in its wake internal foment. India was declared a belligerent in September 1939 by the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, who failed to consult the burgeoning Indian political leadership, represented by the Indian National Congress, on this decision. The 1942 Quit India movement, beginning as protests against this undemocratic involvement in the war, evolved into mass agitations against nearly two centuries of British colonial rule, suppressed in turn by an occupation-style use of force. The British empire needed men and resources for the war; it would not be quitting India just yet. In fact, 57 infantry battalions of the British Indian Army were diverted from international theatres of war and moved inward, within India, to restrain the August Kranti (revolution) of 1942. Read more: 10 historical turning points for modern India Notions of freedom India’s participation in the Second World War – the so-called ‘good war’ – complicated its moral righteousness. The notion of fighting for freedom could not be limited to the idea of combating fascism alone; it became implicated in the struggle against colonialism. Indeed, Jawaharlal Nehru – who in 1947 became the first prime minister of independent India – highlighted how India’s liberation from colonial rule occupied a central role in the consideration of world freedom, where fascism and imperialism were conjoined. In the Quit India Resolution of August 1942, he stated: “By the freedom of India will Britain and the United Nations be judged, and the peoples of Asia and Africa be filled with hope and enthusiasm… A free India will assure this success by throwing all her great resources in the struggle for freedom and against the aggression of Nazism, Fascism and Imperialism.” These views were seen as seditious by colonial authorities. Gandhi, Nehru and other members of the Indian National Congress leadership were sent to prison, where most remained for the duration of the war. Meanwhile, the British Indian Army rapidly expanded. The Indian home front, becoming a wartime industrial production house and suffering acute shortages in grain, kerosene, cloth and other essential items, changed in drastic and sometimes horrific ways. In 1943, the Bengal famine (which also affected other parts of India), exacerbated by the colonial government’s agricultural, economic and export decisions informed by war priorities, resulted in the deaths of over three million people. From the start of hostilities, Indian soldiers were posted in nearly every theatre of war: in Persia, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, east Africa (including Abyssinia), Syria, Aden, Greece, Italy, Burma and the Malay peninsula. The Middle Eastern and north African battlefronts proved particularly significant: Indian troops played a vital role in the battles of Tobruk in Libya in 1941 and El Alamein in Egypt in 1942, before contributing to the liberation of Italy between 1943 and 1945. They were also crucial to the Burma campaign: of one million men sent to Burma under the British-controlled South East Asia Command to fight Japanese forces, 700,000 were Indians. What happened to these men when captured by Axis forces varied widely, depending on where each was taken captive and who the captor was. By the end of the war, about 200,000 British and imperial troops were imprisoned in PoW camps in Germany, while Japan’s rapid occupation of British-governed territory in south-east Asia between December 1941 and March 1942 resulted in more than 180,000 Allied troops, including colonial forces, being taken captive. Of these, about 15,000 Indian PoWs were in German and Italian custody, and more than 60,000 Indian troops were captured in Singapore by the Japanese. Despite the large numbers involved, hardly any accounts from Indian PoWs are known. So the memoir of John Baptist Crasta, who shivered with malaria in New Britain in 1943, is precious, not least because it includes one of the few first-person Indian accounts of the Allied forces’ surrender to Japan in Singapore. He spent three and a half of his four years in southeast Asia and Oceania as a PoW under the Japanese, finally returning to India on Christmas Eve 1945, aged 35 years. Though he was overjoyed at being home, his physical health had greatly deteriorated. Incredibly weak and ill, he needed six months’ sick leave to recuperate, nursed by his mother. It was during this convalescence that he wrote an account of his imprisonment, scribbling in pencil on the yellowing stationery of his brother’s shoe store in Kinnigoli, near the city of Mangalore in Karnataka, south-west India. His manuscript, which had no title nor chapters, lay forgotten for 51 years until it was recovered and published as a surprise for him by his son in 1997; Crasta died two years later. His son titled the printed memoir Eaten by the Japanese – an allusion to alleged cannibalistic practices by sections of the Japanese army during the war, but used in this case as a metaphor for his father’s intense suffering as a PoW. A large portion of the memoir is a clear and unsentimental account of slow bodily attrition caused by tremendous hard labour and starvation. Describing the heat, suffocation and darkness he endured aboard a troop ship carrying him and fellow prisoners to New Britain, he asked: “Could Inferno be worse?” Read more: The Sumatran Railway: The forgotten death railway The doctor whose account of PoW life in Colditz is cited at the start of this article was Captain Birendranath Mazumdar from Calcutta, who was stationed in France in late 1939. While travelling from Étaples to Boulogne with a convoy of ambulances in 1940, he was stopped and commanded to turn back by a German lieutenant, who informed Mazumdar that he would never reach Boulogne, because France had capitulated to German forces. That was the start of Mazumdar’s long PoW journey. By the end of the war, he had been transferred between no fewer than 17 PoW camps. Deprivation and disillusionment Recounting the hardship of surviving on paltry rations – soup, black coffee and bread – Mazumdar recalled that white European PoWs would not share with him their food from Red Cross parcels. It marked the beginning of his disillusionment with the absence of the progressive values he had expected of the west. Stubborn and strong-willed, Mazumdar often did not comply with orders, and declared openly to German officers that he did not have enough supplies with which to treat patients. Speaking to an interviewer from the Imperial War Museums in 1996, more than 50 years after his war experiences and shortly before his own death, he vividly remembered the PoW camp in the German town of Marienberg, where Russian prisoners with gunshot wounds and amputated legs repeatedly asked him for assistance. He could not help them. In the interview, Mazumdar also analysed his uneasy relationship with British officers in Colditz, where he was the only prisoner of colour. Military and colonial hierarchies were firmly entrenched here, even among those who had been fighting on the same side. Mazumdar was made to salute a senior British officer every time they spoke, and was instructed not to fraternise with the Germans who, as the British officers suspected, kept trying to lure him into defecting. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/01/The-untold-story-of-India’s-PoWs-4-3640d0c.jpg" width="1600" height="1067" alt="A sleeve badge for the Indian Legion, affiliated with the Indian National Army, formed in 1941. Prisoners of war in Germany were recruited to this organisation (INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo)" title="A sleeve badge for the Indian Legion, formed in 1941" /> By then, India was waging its own war against the British Raj. From 1943, the Indian National Army, led by the charismatic political radical Subhas Chandra Bose, fought Allied forces in south-east Asia, and Indian PoWs were targeted for recruitment. About 4,000 PoWs imprisoned in north Africa and Europe joined the Indian Legion (the name of the Indian National Army in Europe), but many others – including Mazumdar – did not. Many Indian PoWs related their experiences to friends and family members through letters, anonymised extracts of which remain archived at the British Library in London. The top priorities for one incarcerated Jemadar (a junior rank of officer) were practical items – toothpaste and shoes. Writing to a friend in August 1942, he described being imprisoned in Libya and Germany, where he had “a comfortable time”. However, “we need some other things of daily use such as toothpaste and stockings. If it is no trouble to you please send me a pair of shoes of No. 9 size.” In July 1943, an Indian sepoy (soldier) imprisoned in Germany wrote rather accusingly to another sepoy in Cairo: “I don’t know whether you are getting my mail, but I’ve sent you a lot of letters and had no reply. As prisoners of war we have nothing to take up our minds and we look forward to getting letters, so you must write to me once a month, or better still, once a week.” This prescriptiveness about writing regularly reveals, once again, an acute sense of boredom and loneliness on the sepoy’s part. How was one to pass the time in prison? Writing between December 1942 and January 1943, another soldier told his mother about the terrible conditions of his imprisonment: “Dear mother… I cannot describe how atrociously we prisoners were treated by the Germans. We were given half a pint of water and one 8oz biscuit. This was all our daily meal. We were employed on odd jobs, fatigues from early morning till it was dark. We were beaten and kicked by the Germans… We have suffered such a lot which, if I write down, will pierce your heart.” If the rigours and complexity of Indian PoW lives would indeed “pierce our hearts”, how is it that they have remained forgotten for some 80 years? “Memory itself is a battlefield, in which there are high stakes involved,” observed historian Joanna Bourke. British remembrance of the Second World War has been framed by the persistent parochialism of Britain ‘standing alone’ in combating fascism. But there are rich seams of forgotten stories beyond this Eurocentric point of reference: this was a world war, and colonial experiences are intricately woven through its fabric. Read more: Beyond Normandy: a global view of WW2 Hijacked by events In modern south Asia, recollections of imperial military service rubbed uncomfortably against post-war decolonisation processes, which highlighted narratives of resistance to the British empire. Rather than shaping national identity, as it did in the UK, in India the Second World War was hijacked by momentous events immediately following the war years – independence in 1947, followed by communal violence and the trauma of partition creating the separate nation of Pakistan. The history of Indian participation in the Second World War has left behind a difficult legacy in both the UK and the Indian subcontinent, as nationalisms of different hues glossed over colonial involvement in this war. Absorbing these forgotten Indian PoW narratives on the 80th anniversary of the start of the Second World War highlights how little we know of the past – even one that might seem familiar to us. Crasta’s memoir, Mazumdar’s interview and letters by unknown Indians reveal that there was no homogenous Indian PoW experience. Instead, we are left with evocative fragments of these men’s immediate and intimate encounters of conflict. More than wreaths and monuments, these narratives teach us to think critically about what we remember about war, and deepen our understanding of a global history of terrible violence. Diya Gupta is a postdoctoral visiting research fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London Read next: Famine and freedom: how the Second World War ignited India Millions of Indian soldiers served during the Second World War, with almost 90,000 losing their lives. Yet as Yasmin Khan explains, the huge efforts of Indians toiling on the home front, and the extreme hardships they suffered, had an even more empire-shaking impact <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2016/12/Famine-and-Freedom-1-4df0db3.jpg" width="1024" height="683" alt="Young women working in a textile mill in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1943" title="Young women work in a busy textile mill in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1943. The war created opportunities as well as challenges for industrialists and women in Indian cities (Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> This article first appeared in issue 19 of BBC World Histories magazine
Prisoners of war in Britain during WW2: where were they held?
Richard Smyth and Professor Bob Moore visit Eden Camp in North Yorkshire, where captured German and Italian soldiers were held prisoner during the Second World War
It’s not much to look at: a cluster of 34 tin-roofed one-storey huts, hunkered down on the agricultural flatlands of Ryedale, halfway between York and the coast. The flags surmounting a redbrick tower in the middle of the complex snap in the wind beneath a blustery blue sky. Eden Camp is an award-winning museum of the Second World War – ‘the people’s war’, as the museum calls it. There are exhibits here covering everything from Bomber Command and the U-boat menace to George Formby and ‘Dig For Victory’. Vintage military hardware and signposts in army stencil crowd the footpaths. But the camp is more than just a museum: as an original, surviving prisoner of war camp it’s a piece of history in its own right. PoWs first arrived at Eden Camp in 1942. They were Italians, captured in action; their first task was to finish the construction of their new home. When they had finished, the camp would have looked much as it does now (minus the gift shop and adventure playground). “Eden was one of 487 PoW camps hastily thrown up across Britain to house more than 400,000 incoming prisoners during the Second World War,” says Bob Moore, professor of 20th-century European history at the University of Sheffield. “At first, these were almost all Italians, seized in northeast Africa as the allies gained ground in Egypt, Eritrea, Abyssinia and Italian Somaliland. Initially, the vast majority of captured Germans were shipped out directly to Canada; many Italians, too, were dispatched to Britain’s former dominions, to India or South Africa. But those who were taken to Eden and the other British camps weren’t here to see out the rest of the war behind barbed wire; they were here to work.” The war had created a crippling labour shortage on the home front. Britain’s farms were crying out for more manpower, and the strong young men of the Italian army more than fitted the bill. The PoW camps, initially designed as internment pens, quickly evolved into central hubs from which prisoners could be dispersed across the countryside to wherever they were needed. Romance and teacakes “Camps had to be sited away from military bases and the coast,” explains Moore. “East Anglia, for instance, was initially considered an unsuitable location, despite its high demand for agricultural labour, because it had too many air bases and too clear a view of the North Sea. The first camps were concentrated in inland north England, the West Midlands and Wales.” Surprisingly, though, prisoners’ rural neighbours didn’t always respond to them as ‘the enemy’. “The stereotype of the Italian soldier was one that came straight from Churchill,” says Moore. “Unlike the Germans, who were viewed as inherently militaristic, Italian soldiers were believed to bear the British little ill-will; there was in fact some sympathy for the way in which the country had fallen under the yoke of Mussolini and his Fascists. What’s more, they were, from a 1940s provincial standpoint, hugely exotic. Instinctive aversion – there was a war on, after all – was leavened by curiosity and even compassion.” Some Britons even tried to actively help PoWs. Mabel Blagborough of Oldham earned the nickname ‘angel of Glen Mill’ for a campaign of support that included throwing cigarettes and teacakes over the camp’s barbed wire fence. But while the view from the home front was mostly accommodating, the presence of Italian PoWs in England prompted a less than tolerant response on the front line. Photographs of Italians at work in the fields alongside British land girls triggered outrage among many serving British soldiers, who were aghast to see their sisters, wives and sweethearts working cheek-by-jowl with the enemy. Romantic liaisons between PoWs and British women did happen. Some of these had happy endings: a number of former PoWs returned to Britain after the war to renew romances and even propose marriage. Others had more unexpected outcomes. Moore recalls one woman who, after her mother’s death, examined her own birth certificate and found to her surprise that her father had been an Italian PoW. What was it like to be a Prisoner of War during the Hundred Years’ War? Nazi daffodils Hut 10 houses Eden Camp’s impressive collections of PoW memorabilia, including a map of Britain littered with black dots, each marking a PoW camp. Moore points out a few locations of note: Grizedale Hall in Cumbria, which from 1939 housed senior German PoWs and was dubbed the ‘U-boat Hotel’ because of its large proportion of submarine officers; Lamb Holm on Orkney, where prisoners working on the sea defences constructed the wonderfully ornate Italian Chapel, which stands there to this day; and the aforementioned Glen Mill in Oldham, where an SS private was shot dead by a guard in February 1945. As the war progressed and the threat of invasion receded, the number of German prisoners on British soil was allowed to increase, including at Eden Camp, which housed Germans from 1944–49. D-Day and its aftermath saw the numbers skyrocket: by March 1945, 70,000 German PoWs were at work in Britain; in September 1946, with the dust finally settling on the conflict, the figure peaked at 402,200. “The numbers, when considered as a whole, are mind-boggling,” says Moore. “A world war is in many ways a mass migration. PoWs – whether shipped out via the Cape to the Canadian prairie, or bundled back to Britain in returning D-Day troopships – were a considerable component in the Second World War global transit networks of men, materiel and resources.” Eden Camp originally comprised 45 huts, 18 of which served as housing (64 men per building), with the remaining huts serving as workshops, kitchens, mess and recreation halls, and even a hospital. Conditions, although basic, were generally acceptable. “Both sides of the war knew that breaches of the Geneva Convention might be met with retaliation, so prisoners were treated pretty fairly,” says Moore. “For Germany, the question was more acute in respect of its increasingly brutal war with the Soviet Union: Germany’s war of annihilation on the eastern front led to the deaths of 2 million Soviet PoWs in 1941–42, which would have made the Germans aware of what could happen if the tide of war turned.” In Britain, although prisoners were put to work, they weren’t especially overworked. Six days a week, working nine to five, was usual, in line with a normal working week for a British labourer. Hut 10 showcases an array of handicrafts and memorabilia whittled, sculpted, painted and polished by inmates in their free time. Other diversions included lectures, theatre and sport – Bert Trautmann, a paratrooper, found his way from internment at Camp 50 near Wigan to footballing glory with Manchester City. But it wasn’t all fun and games. British authorities deemed it important to ‘re-educate’ – that is, de-Nazify – German captives, prior to their repatriation. “At one level, this involved the deployment of intelligence officers to weed out the most fervent or influential Nazis,” says Moore. “At another, it saw an increase in the fraternisation permitted between PoWs and local people – a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign designed to build bridges between Britain and the new Germany that was to take shape in the postwar years.” Not all German PoWs were ready to give up their extremist political beliefs, though. A woman whose family had taken in a German prisoner to work in the gardens of their home on the south coast told her local newspaper that he seemed a very nice young man – at least until the spring after his relocation, when the daffodils sprouted and the flowers were seen to spell out the words ‘HEIL HITLER’. “In fact,” says Moore, “the authorities identified a clear generational divide among the Germans: the older PoWs, who could remember a Germany before Nazism, tended to be more amenable to re-education. But those who had never known anything other than Adolf Hitler’s Reich and the non-stop indoctrination of Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine were often beyond reach.” From camp to chicken shed Today the bustling canteen does a roaring trade in burgers and cappuccinos, a far cry from the rations doled out to PoWs. A typical prisoner would have made do with bread, margarine and tea for breakfast, pork and potatoes for dinner, and a supper of milk, soup and bread. Over a cup of tea Moore tells me how modern historians treat the history of our PoW camps. It seems that it’s sometimes overlooked in popular narratives of the war. How and when did the Second World War end? “Social historians don’t like it because it’s about people in uniforms,” he comments, “and military historians don’t like it because it’s about losers. Another problem is that few camps remain intact in any form. Most passed back into private ownership after the war, and either reverted to whatever they’d been before or were put to new commercial uses (as chicken sheds, in one instance).” Eden Camp did time as an agricultural holiday camp, and was earmarked as the site of a potato-crisp factory, before the owner was persuaded to turn it into a museum. Today the mossed brick and corrugated iron huts of Eden Camp tell a story of their own – and it’s one we aren’t told often enough. Bob Moore is professor of 20th-century European history at the University of Sheffield. Words: Richard Smyth This article was first published in the April 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine
5 myths of the Second World War's Great Escape
One night in late March 1944, 76 Allied airmen escaped through a tunnel from their prisoner of war camp deep in occupied Poland. Their aim was not only to get back to Britain and rejoin the war, but also to cause as much inconvenience for the German war machine as possible. Guy Walters, author of a book on the famous breakout from Stulag Luft III, dispels some popular misconceptions about the events
One night in late March 1944, 76 Allied airmen escaped through a tunnel from their prisoner of war camp deep in occupied Poland. Their aim was not only to get back to Britain and rejoin the war, but also to cause as much inconvenience for the German war machine as possible. Within a few days, all but three of the escapees were recaptured, having been hampered by incorrect papers, bad weather and bad luck. The escape so infuriated Hitler that he ordered 50 of them to be shot. Memorably depicted in the famous 1963 movie The Great Escape (itself based on former PoW Paul Brickhill’s 1950 book), the breakout from Stalag Luft III has become an iconic event of the Second World War, enshrining both Allied bravery and Nazi evil. But how much of what we know is true? Myth: Allied airmen had a duty to escape from their PoW camps One of the most enduring myths about the Great Escape is that the PoWs had a duty to escape. Indeed, the myth is so persistent that even some former prisoners maintain they had an obligation to break out of their camps. The short answer is that there was none. When they were shot down, Allied airmen were indeed expected to avoid being captured, but once they were in the hands of the enemy, there was no formal expectation that they should try to escape. Instead, as one former PoW has said: “There was a kind of corporate policy of intent that it was part of our duty to play a part in escape arrangements.” Read more: British PoW camps The British soldiers who fought for Germany in the world wars In other words, the duty to escape was an expectation of how airmen should behave – rather like the expectation that they should be brave – and there was nothing in the King’s Regulations that stipulated that the men had to escape. Indeed, surprisingly, two-thirds of PoWs had little or no interest in breaking out, and regarded escape activities with wariness – an attitude that is certainly at odds with the common celluloid depiction of Allied PoWs all being desperate to escape. Many were glad not to have to fight anymore, and felt that they had ‘done their bit’, and had no wish to risk their lives once more. Others felt that they lacked the necessary escape skills – such as languages or simple physical ability – and that their time could be better spent studying or improving themselves. In fact, there was often hostility between the ‘stayers’ and the ‘goers’. In one camp, it grew so bad that one PoW threw over the wire a tin containing a note which informed the Germans that there was a tunnel being built. Read more: 7 must-see Second World War films Monopoly maps: the history of MI9’s secret Second World War escape programme Myth: The Great Escape took place in beautiful weather In the movie The Great Escape, the action is played out in glorious spring sunshine that really shows off the use of coloured film stock. However, in reality, the escape took place in unseasonably bad conditions, with the temperature hovering around zero, and a thick layer of snow on the ground. According to one PoW, it was the coldest winter that that part of Poland had suffered for 30 years, and it was these conditions that did more to hamper the efforts of the escapees than anything else. Many were equipped with totally unsuitable clothes, such as lightweight trousers that would normally only be issued in the desert, and boots quickly became waterlogged as the escapees tramped through woods and streams. Many came close to suffering from frostbite, and were forced to sleep in obvious shelters such as barns, which only increased the likelihood of them being captured. Read more: The forgotten first Great Escape of 1918 Podcast: Prisoners of war Myth: The escape opened up a new front inside Germany One of the supposed objects of the Great Escape was that it would help the war effort by wasting German time and manpower – resources that would otherwise be used on the frontline. Unfortunately, such thinking was misguided. When the Germans searched for the escapees, they only used whatever existing capacity they had within the Reich. They certainly did not requisition fighting men for the hunt. The escape actually helped the German war effort, as during the large-scale hunts, thousands of other escaping PoWs, regular prisoners, and absent foreign workers were rounded up in the dragnet. In fact, as a result of the Great Escape, the Nazis tightened the Reich’s internal security, and thus made it harder for other Allied prisoners of war also trying to escape. Therefore, the idea that the Great Escape somehow ‘opened a front’ inside Germany is simply wishful thinking. Myth: The Great Escape was unique It wasn’t. Throughout the war, there were plenty of mass escapes organised by Allied PoWs. There were some 11 ‘great escapes’ carried out by British prisoners alone before March 1944. One example is the March 1943 escape from the PoW camp at Szubin, Poland, in which 43 Allied airmen tunnelled out. All the men were recaptured, apart from one, who sadly drowned. The Germans ridiculed mass breakouts, dismissing them as futile acts of bravado – and the resulting increase in security made mass escapes less likely to succeed. In fact, in Stalag Luft III, one German advised PoWs to escape in twos and threes to improve their chances of getting home! Read more: Saving food, saving lives: rationing in the Second World War Reporting on Hitler: how foreign correspondents in Nazi Germany battled to expose the truth <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/11/ReportingOnHitlerMAIN-8d42e36-6b46371.jpg" width="413" height="413" alt="Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring on the balcony of the Reichs Chancellery, Berlin. One British journalist recalled how, in 1933, Göring began an attack against the foreign press unlike any he had previously witnessed. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)" title="Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring on the balcony of the Reichs Chancellery, Berlin. One British journalist recalled how, in 1933, Göring began an attack against the foreign press unlike any he had previously witnessed. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)" /> Myth: There was a motorbike chase Of all the scenes in The Great Escape, that of Virgil Hilts, played by Steve McQueen, trying to jump over the border wire on his motorbike while being chased by hundreds of Schmeisser-toting Germans is the most memorable. It’s certainly a thrilling sequence, but it has no basis in truth. None of those who escaped from Stalag Luft III even used so much as a bicycle to get away. The motorbike scene is so gross a misrepresentation of the true escape that former PoWs booed it when they were shown the movie! Hilts’s nationality also flags up another myth about the escape – that Americans were part of the breakout. Although US airmen watched out for patrolling Germans during the tunnel’s construction, the commandant moved them to a different compound a few months before the escape. As The Great Escape is an American film, it is unsurprising that the hero is an all-American boy complete with baseball glove and ball. But, in reality, there was no Virgil Hilts. To read more about the first Great Escape, which took place in July 1918… This article was first published in the July 2012 issue of BBC History Magazine
The Sumatran Railway: the forgotten death railway
Forced marches, savage guards, skeletal PoWs, and a death toll in the tens of thousands. The construction of the Sumatran Railway from 1943–45 may live in the shadow of its notorious counterpart in Thailand and Burma. But, says Lizzie Oliver, that doesn't stop it being one of the darkest episodes of the Pacific War
At 4.15pm on 18 September 1944, the British submarine HMS Tradewind torpedoed a Japanese steamship off the western coast of Sumatra. To a crew commissioned with destroying cargo ships in the waters surrounding the Dutch East Indies, the Junyo Maru – a 400ft, 5,000-ton steamer – appeared a valuable target. But what the Tradewind's captain did not know was that Junyo Maru's cargo consisted of more than 6,000 captives of the Imperial Japanese Army: 4,200 Javanese slave labourers (known as romusha) and 2,300 Allied prisoners of war. The ship sank within an hour of being hit, and more than 5,000 of its passengers were lost to the waves. It was one of the deadliest maritime disasters of the Second World War. Conditions on board the Junyo Maru, which had set off from Batavia (today's Jakarta) two days before it was torpedoed, had been dire. Prisoners were crammed into the hold without food or water, and they found themselves gasping for air without room to move. "The fetid, stifling hold was like a black stinking oven," wrote Willem Wanrooy, a Dutch survivor of the sinking. Only 200 romusha are thought to have survived the Tradewind's attack; eyewitness accounts relate how, unable to swim, most of the Javanese captives huddled in groups on the ship's deck and sang together as it plunged into the water. The Japanese plucked 680 military PoWs from the sea the following day but they gave these survivors no time to rest or recuperate. The Junyo Maru had been carrying the PoWs to a series of camps nestled deep in the Sumatran jungle – and the Japanese were determined that the journey should continue without delay. Once they arrived in Sumatra, the PoWs joined a vast railway construction project that lasted until Japan's surrender almost a year later. That project would expose them to beatings, starvation, a cocktail of diseases and, all too often, death. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/08/download-2_cmyk_State-Library-of-Victoria-9a171ac.jpg" width="1024" height="1400" alt="Former PoWs walk along the Sumatra Railway line in September 1945. They had been tasked with laying 130 miles of track, connecting Sumatra's mines with its main ports. (Photo by State Library of Victoria)" title="Former PoWs walk along the Sumatra Railway line in September 1945. They had been tasked with laying 130 miles of track, connecting Sumatra's mines with its main ports. (Photo by State Library of Victoria)" /> The idea of a railway running across Sumatra had been first mooted by the island’s Dutch colonists in the late 19th century. The Dutch revisited the idea more than once before abandoning it for good in the 1930s, concluding that the island’s treacherous swamps, mountains and dense jungle simply made the project too dangerous and too expensive to undertake. But with a cheap supply of labour, these challenges did not deter the Japanese, who had seized the island in March 1942 as their forces swept across south-east Asia following their dramatic entry into the Second World War. To them, the benefits of the railway were clear. By 1943, with American embargoes beginning to bite, the Japanese were experiencing a chronic shortage of fuel. Sumatra, rich in natural reserves of coal and oil, offered a potential solution. But the Japanese had a problem: and that was how to transport these resources from Sumatra’s mines to its main ports without sending their shipping out into the waters around the island, where they were vulnerable to Allied attack. The answer, they concluded, was a cross-island railway. Forced labour This wasn’t the first time that the Japanese had ordered the construction of a massive railway in their newly conquered territories. The building of the ‘Death Railway’, which connected Thailand to Burma, is surely one of the most notorious episodes of the entire Pacific War. Working in horrendous conditions, around 100,000 forced labourers, 12,000 of whom were Allied PoWs, lost their lives building the railway, victims of disease, starvation and maltreatment. No sooner had that project been completed than a team of Japanese engineers – some of whom had masterminded the Thai-Burma Railway – arrived in Sumatra tasked with repeating the job. Their brief was to design a 130-mile railway that traversed the island, connecting Pekanbaru in the east with an existing line at Moeara that ran on to the city of Padang on Sumatra’s western coast. It was a mammoth undertaking, and the romusha, the first group of forced labourers to arrive on the island, were to bear the heaviest burden. In March 1943, they were designated the brutal task of manually excavating the foundations of the line before military PoWs started laying the track. Construction methods were primitive and monotonous: the labourers dug out the foundations using spades, sledgehammers, and wood-boring augurs called dassies; they transported vast amounts of earth in flimsy wicker baskets; and they heaved huge sleepers, bricks and rails into position by hand. Worse still, they did so under relentless – often violent – pressure from the guards. They had very few rest days, and often worked 24-hour shift rotations. And their work wasn’t confined to laying foundations for the track. The labourers had to build several shunting yards and switching points. What’s more, each of the 17 camps that have so far been identified near the construction sites were built by the prisoners as they progressed along the railway. In May 1944, four months before the sinking of the Junyo Maru, 5,000 military PoWs began their arduous task of laying the track. Most had already been held captive for 27 months, and were suffering the impact of hard labour and tropical disease on a starvation diet. They worked in no more than a makeshift thong, with the blazing heat of the equatorial sun searing their skin. If a man stumbled, the hammer missed, or the rail went down clumsily, recalled former PoW Kenneth Robson, "a screaming voice penetrates the mists, and as you straighten up from putting the peg straight, a fist, a piece of wood, a rifle… hits you on the side of the face, and... down you go". The PoW working parties were predominantly made up of Dutch and Indonesian captives, but also included just over a thousand Britons, Australians and New Zealanders. In total, 673 military PoWs died during the construction, while a further 1,796 drowned as a result of two 'friendly fire' incidents (one the sinking of Junyo Maru; the other when a ship called the Van Waerwijck was attacked in June 1944). But the death toll among military PoWs was dwarfed by the number of romusha who lost their lives during the project. The Javanese captives experienced appalling conditions. Sanitation was poor, tropical diseases spread quickly and, unlike their European counterparts, they had no organised system of camp administration, rationing and medical care to draw upon. The results were catastrophic. The Dutch historian Henk Hovinga has established that more than 80,000 romusha died during the building of the Sumatra Railway. They lie buried in unmarked mass graves along the route of the track. Cooking snakes and rats According to War Office records, the most common cause of death among PoWs was disease. Malaria and dysentery were rife, as were conditions caused by severe malnutrition, such as pellagra and beri-beri. Typical rations tended to consist of no more than 300 grams of rice, 300 grams of tapioca, and jungle vegetables foraged during the day. Meat was a rarity, although men would try to supplement their rations by killing and cooking snakes and rats. The arrival of a bullock in camp was cause for great celebration; an attempt to eat an orangutan was not repeated – the animal’s carcass had seemed too human for PoWs to stomach. With disease rife, medical officers quickly became the most important figures in the camps. This was not just for the treatment that they could provide, but for their attempts to secure an increase in rations and medical supplies from the guards. They were also best placed to impose strict hygiene protocols and stem the spread of disease. The hospital was a leaky bamboo hut with very little in the way of medication. To be sent here was “a virtual death sentence” John Wyatt, a Royal Navy surgeon, was part of the first contingent of PoWs to arrive at Pekanbaru. He was tasked with setting up a hospital at Camp Two – though “to call it a hospital was a euphemism”, he later recalled. In reality, the hospital was a leaky bamboo hut with very little in the way of medical instruments, supplies or medications. To be sent to this camp was – in the words of former PoW John Boulter – a “virtual death sentence”. There were no bedpans, meaning that men suffering dysentery still needed to use latrines outside. Supplies of medicine were minimal. Medic Robert Braithwaite noted in his postwar reports that large quantities of quinine were held back by guards – only to be discovered in stores upon liberation. Tropical infections To save lives, doctors had to use their initiative. They boiled old pieces of clothing and used them as dressings for wounds and ulcers. They drained latex from the bark of rubber trees to provide adhesive for dressings and to close wounds. They obtained a solution rich in vitamin B (known as dodek) from the husks of rice to help treat severe malnutrition. They scraped out tropical infections with spoons, or syringed them with boiling water. They contained an outbreak of diphtheria by isolating the patient and his nurse, and they performed surgery without anaesthetic on a perforated duodenal ulcer. And they constantly placed themselves in great danger. Patrick Kirkwood, a trained doctor and member of the Indian Medical Service, was among a group of 500 men force-marched from the northern province of Atjeh to join construction work on the jungle railway. It was a gruelling 80-mile journey, completed in just 81 hours, in many cases barefoot. Kirkwood is reported to have helped PoWs with blistering, injured feet, despite suffering from amoebic dysentery himself. For his troubles, he was subjected to repeated beatings for not marching quickly enough. Against such a desperate backdrop, PoWs found ingenious ways to maintain morale. In Camp Three they formed a concert party, putting on shows for campmates, including a performance of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Meanwhile a four-man band played in the evenings after the working parties' return to the camps. Other PoWs saved precious scraps of paper to make notes, or created artwork to record their experiences. Where men did not have access to reading material, they would recite memorised passages or share lists of the books that they one day hoped to read. Such distractions strengthened bonds of friendship, and offered PoWs a sense of escapism – however fleeting – from the horrors of the camps. Living in the shadows “Their skins withered and shrunken… They were spectres from a haunted world.” That was Major Gideon Jacobs’ chief impression of the PoWs found on Sumatra in September 1945, after Japanese forces on the island surrendered. Flying over Sumatra, Jacobs, commander of liberating forces, had seen rows of huts in forbidding jungle: railway camps hitherto unknown to Allied intelligence. At that point, nearly 900 military PoWs required urgent hospital care. The most desperate stretcher cases were flown out first. One of those men was my grandfather, Stanley Kay Russell. He had been beaten severely, and was in Camp Two when liberation came. Airlifted from Pekanbaru, he was treated in Bangalore before travelling home. Since the end of the war, the experiences of these PoWs and romusha in Sumatra have received little coverage. With paper so precious and the secreting of documents a dangerous endeavour, records of the Sumatra Railway are scant, as are surviving PoW diaries. The Red Cross was not permitted to inspect the camps, which meant that no official news seeped out during the conflict. Most postwar reports from the Dutch East Indies make no reference to a railway on Sumatra either. What’s more, the sheer scale of the Thai– Burma Railway has inevitably dominated popular histories of captivity that have emerged from south-east Asia since the Second World War. I found that former PoWs like my grandfather received a common response to their stories: “No mate, you were in Burma.” Some former Sumatra PoWs felt as if quite enough had already been written about the Thai–Burma ‘Death Railway’, and that there was no appetite from the public to hear their experiences of a different one. Yet such was the suffering of the thousands of men who worked on the Sumatra Railway that this is a story that demands to be told. It’s high time that this grim episode in the Pacific War emerged from the shadows. Dr Lizzie Oliver is the chair of the Researching FEPOW History Group, an independent research organisation that focuses on far east PoW and civilian internee history. She is the author of Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway: Narratives of History and Memory (Bloomsbury, 2017). This article was first published in the September 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine
Clare Makepeace explores the experiences of British soldiers who spent time in POW camps in World War Two
Historian Clare Makepeace joins us to discuss her new book Captives of War, which draws on first-hand testimonies to examine the experiences of British soldiers who were confined in POW camps in World War Two.
The British soldiers who fought for Germany in the world wars
Not all British soldiers fought for their home cause in the two world wars of the 20th century. Here, Jem Duducu explores the ways in which German forces sought to exploit unrest in both conflicts, and shares the varied stories of men from around the British empire who joined the Germans to fight…
British fascist John Amery (right) was given access to PoW camps to recruit British soldiers for the British Free Corps during the Second World War. Photographed here c1936, arriving at Palais de Justice, Paris. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images) In Jem Duducu’s first historical novel Silent Crossroads, the main protagonist is Harry Woods, the only British soldier to serve on both sides in both world wars. While Harry Woods is fictional, there were rare instances in both world wars of British soldiers siding with the Germans after they were captured. Here, Jem explores this aspect of the wars that is seldom discussed… In both world wars, the German forces were always short of men and looked for ways to recruit others to their cause. During the First World War, they developed plans to spread unrest in the wider world, a strategy designed to distract the Allied forces from their efforts on the western front and to (hopefully) win recruits in the process. To that end, the Ottoman empire, which was then a German ally, declared a military jihad (holy war), intended to cause all the Muslims under British rule to rise up in a move that would paralyse the British empire. Unfortunately for the Axis powers, except for a minor uprising in Singapore, nobody in the Muslim world paid any attention. 10 surprising facts about First World War uniforms How was Germany able to afford the astronomical cost of rearmament in the 1930s? King George V at war (podcast) In a deliberate move to mix nationalism with the wider war, German forces next targeted Irish soldiers, approximately 200,000 of whom fought in the war. Sir Roger Casement, who had been knighted by George V for his humanitarian work, was also an ardent Irish nationalist and, in a bid for Irish independence, Casement conceived the idea of asking the Germans to help him incite an uprising against the British empire in Ireland. The Germans saw a chance to sow dissent in the empire and allowed Casement to meet Irish prisoners of war held in German camps. Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement conceived the idea of asking the Germans to help him incite an uprising against the British empire in Ireland. (Photo by George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images) The plan was to recruit Irish soldiers and return with them to Ireland to foment rebellion. Casement managed to get only some 50 men to join him, which showed that whatever the perceived wrongs of British rule, the soldiers likely thought that being armed by the Germans and returning to Ireland to start an uprising in the middle of a war was disloyal. Yet, by building on the perennial resentment of British rule in Ireland, the Germans helped to mastermind the Easter Rising in 1916. On 24 April 1916, around 1,500 armed Irish nationalist rebels, allied with Germany, marched into Dublin. The soldiers, some of whom had been recruited by Casement, were armed by the Germans with 20,000 rifles and 1,000,000 rounds of ammunition, but the uprising ended in bloody failure. Casement took no active part in the uprising: he had already been caught, and was tried for treason and sentenced to hang in August of the same year. Meanwhile, Britain’s draconian response, including the execution of more than a dozen ringleaders, was a factor that contributed to a free Ireland after the war. A barricade of cars and bicycles on Prince's Street, Dublin, Ireland, during the 1916 Easter Rising, which ended in failure. Britain executed more than a dozen ringleaders of the rebellion. (Image by De Agostini Picture Library / Getty) British soldiers fighting for the Nazis? Surely no British soldiers would have fought for the Nazis? Yet the reality was that some British soldiers joined the German army, and others even joined the Waffen SS, the armed corps of the Nazi SS. Similar to the First World War idea that the Germans could use Irish PoWs to create mayhem in Ireland, Indian PoWs formed the German Free India Legion. Much of India wanted to be free of British imperial rule, so some Indian soldiers were persuaded to join forces with Britain’s enemy in a bid to win freedom for their country. Members of the Free India Legion, an Indian armed unit attached to the German Wehrmacht, c1943. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) As recruitment propaganda, it worked. Around 2,500 Indian soldiers joined the legion (along with a few students who had been in Germany at the start of the war). While they weren’t deployed to the front lines, they were instead used in support and administrative roles. From 1942-44, the Tiger Legion (as it became known) was part of the German army, and in the final year of the war it became part of the Waffen SS. That the ‘pure Aryan’ SS force was now rubbing shoulders with decidedly non-European allies shows the level of desperation for manpower that affected the Nazi forces in the closing months of the war. The Legion of Saint George and John Amery Strange as all of this may seem, there was another group that might seem far more bizarre in the story of British soldiers turning to the Third Reich. The Legion of Saint George, later called the British Free Corps, was a very small section of the Waffen SS, comprised of British and white men from Dominion Territories who had been captured during the conflict. The British man responsible for the formation of this corps was a fascist called John Amery. Amery came from a distinguished family. He was the son of the Conservative MP Leo Amery, who later became a cabinet minister under Winston Churchill, while his mother was a Hungarian Jew. He was a difficult child who left Harrow at the age of 16 and became a violent young man, known in Mayfair circles for his drinking, debts and debauchery. When he reached his twenties, he went from being an ardent anti-communist to a pro-fascist. This turned into active military service, which involved gun-running and working in intelligence for General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War, before later settling in Vichy France. Amery met with Hitler’s approval when he made a number of English-language radio broadcasts in support of the Nazis. His style was dull but the messages were strangely poetic. “A crime is being committed against civilisation,” one intoned. “Not only the priceless heritage of our fathers, of our seamen, of our empire builders is being thrown away in a war that serves no British interests, but our alliance leader Stalin dreams of nothing but the destruction of that heritage of our fathers.” By late 1942, his pro-fascist and anti-communist passions melded with the idea of getting British PoWs to form an anti-Soviet unit in the Nazi forces to fight on the eastern front. Hoping to create something similar to the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism, which had 5,500 members by the end of the war, Amery went to Berlin to seek permission to form the British Free Corps, in essence a British SS force, to operate within the German army. British fascist John Amery in Paris with his fiance actress Una Wing, August 1932. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Amery was given access to PoW camps (just as Casement had done, a generation earlier) where he told British prisoners from all over the empire that they would not be considered traitors if they fought, as they would not be fighting the British. Instead, they would fight on the eastern front in an effort to push back the communist threat. His initial recruitment drive yielded not a single person. By the middle of 1943, that number had improved to two, although one man backed out before enlistment. The British Free Corps Amery was later embroiled in a scandal when his French mistress died choking on her own vomit after the two had gone on a drunken binge. While narrowly escaping a trial for manslaughter, he faded from the story of the British Free Corps when both the Waffen SS and the Goebbels propaganda machines began to develop the idea beyond Amery’s personal ambitions. Instead of individual meetings with small groups, there followed a concerted effort to encourage enlistment through leaflet distribution and the official PoW camp newspaper, Camp, distributed via the Nazi propaganda department to all prisoners of war. The group was described as “a thoroughly volunteer unit, conceived and created by British subjects from all parts of the empire who have taken up arms and pledged their lives in the common European struggle against Soviet Russia". Even after all this, the maximum number of enlistees in the British Free Corps was just a few dozen men. They were trained for about four months by the SS in a facility near Dresden and were sent to fight on the eastern front in March of 1945. The plan to find a suitable British officer to lead the group never succeeded, because no suitable British officer came forward. Instead the corps was led mainly by German SS Hauptsturmführers (a rank equivalent to a captain). It was part of the 11th SS Volunteer Panzergrenadier Division Nordland, a unit mainly comprised of Scandinavian volunteers who numbered around 300 men; the members of the British Free Corps didn’t make up even ten per cent of the force, which shows what a tiny and inconsequential result had come from all the efforts to enlist British PoWs. Heinrich Himmler, who was head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS, inspects a PoW camp in Russia, c1940. (Courtesy of the National Archives/Newsmakers) The 11th Nordland saw action in the final battle of Berlin, where at one point the men of the British Free Corps was forced to fight in the trenches with oncoming Soviet troops, but the unit was so small as to make no difference on the battlefield. The final two members of the unit surrendered to American troops of the 121st Infantry Regiment on 2 May 1945. A few of the members of the British Free Corps were tried after the war, and at the time it was big news. These men (including two New Zealanders as well as those from the British Isles) had turned their backs on the British empire and had joined an evil regime. Most were given custodial sentences. Meanwhile, John Amery had left Germany and in the last days of the war had been working with Mussolini’s fascists in northern Italy. From there he continued to broadcast fascist propaganda, similar to that of the more infamous Lord Haw Haw [the nickname of fascist radio personality William Joyce] until he was captured by Italian partisans, who handed him to the British captain Alan Whicker (yes, the famous broadcaster and journalist) to be returned to Britain. Unsurprisingly, Amery was tried for high treason. There was an initial argument from his defence that Amery was mentally ill. His brother tried desperately to prove that he had become a Spanish national before the war so couldn’t have committed treason, but Amery eventually pleaded guilty to eight counts of high treason. His trial lasted just eight minutes and while there could be an argument against the indecent haste of the court, there could be no doubt that he was guilty. Amery was hanged in December 1945 at the age of 33. A rare change of sides So, while it was exceptionally rare to find those who changed sides from the British army to the German one in either world war, it wasn’t unheard of. There is a postscript to the story of ex-SS men from other countries: members of the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism were offered incentives to re-enlist in the early 1950s in order to fight France’s war in French Indo-China (now Vietnam). Details are sketchy but it appears that although they were an effective fighting force, the group had to be disbanded (again) due to a preponderance of acts of brutality. John Amery was an ignoble individual motivated by fanaticism. In my book, Silent Crossroads, Harry Woods explores the concept of loyalty, why a man would turn his back on his country in a time of war, and what he must do to live with his choices. Silent Crossroads by Jem Duducu takes place during the terrible events of the first half of 20th century, seen through the lens of one family, shattered by war but united in love. The book is available on Amazon.
Gavin Mortimer tells the story of three men who found themselves in the Second World War's equivalent of hell on Earth – a Nazi concentration camp...
This article was first published in the September 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine Bombardier Alf Jones was one of the ‘old sweats’ of the 23rd Field Regiment, Royal Artillery. He’d enlisted in 1931, aged 17, and served three years in India before joining the reserve list in 1938. Returning to his native Port Talbot, Jones worked in the tin mines but he re-enlisted on the outbreak of war. A few weeks later, at the end of September 1939, Jones and his regiment sailed for France and were ordered to dig-in close to the Maginot Line. When the Nazi war machine rolled through the Low Countries into France in May 1940, Jones was one of scores of artillerymen captured. But not for long. The enterprising Welshman made his escape in Belgium while being transported to Germany. It was the start of a flight that would eventually end more than four years later with his execution in Mauthausen concentration camp. History has, for the most part, overlooked those unfortunate few Britons who were sent to the Nazi death camps. Most were members of Special Operations Executive (SOE), captured on missions to occupied Europe. But there was also a handful of soldiers and civilians transported to places whose names have become bywords for wickedness, for no other reason than the Germans found them too hard to handle in ordinary camps. German wrath Anthony Faramus didn’t look like a trouble-maker. Charming, good-looking and a popular figure in Jersey, the 21-year-old was working in the island’s Miramar Hotel when the Germans invaded in July 1940. He didn’t take well to the occupation, incurring the wrath of the Germans to such an extent that in late 1941 he was deported to Fort de Romainville on the French mainland as ‘an undesirable’. Faramus spent the next two years incarcerated in Romainville prison. But by the winter of 1943/44 the Germans needed all the manpower they could muster to help in their war effort, so Faramus was sent to Buchenwald in central Germany. Gone was the relative comfort of Romainville. Instead, recalled Faramus, “we slept sardine-like, overwhelmed by the smell of human excreta and diseased bodies… throughout the long nights, voices cried out in hunger, in fear, in pain”. The days were a living hell. Inmates were set to work in the camp’s stone quarry or sent to the subsidiary camps to help in the manufacture of munitions. Many dropped dead from exhaustion; others killed themselves on the electrified fence, and those too weak to work further were garroted in the camp’s ‘strangling room’. In December 1944 Faramus was sent from Buchenwald to Mauthausen, situated in Upper Austria. By now he had learned that British inmates were often singled out by the guards, so on arriving, he passed himself as a Frenchman. It was a prudent move. Three months earlier Alf Jones had arrived at Mauthausen. No longer the fit and feisty Welshman, he had been in German hands since his capture in Brussels in 1941. Interned first in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Jones was classified as a ‘political prisoner’, the authorities believing him to be a British agent and not, as he presumably told them, an intrepid soldier who had passed himself off as a Belgian for more than a year. He was used as a human guinea pig, forced to march up to 15 miles a day testing the durability of prototype army boots. After a spell in Allach, one of Dachau’s sub-camps, Jones was transported to Mauthausen in September 1944. By now suffering the effects of malnutrition, the Welshman was not fit for slave labour, so on 9 November Jones was taken to the camp’s execution room and shot in the back of the neck. “Le bandit Hopper” At some point on his grisly journey through Nazi depravity, Jones might well have encountered Ian ‘Johnny’ Hopper, a 30-year-old Englishman who for two years had waged a guerrilla campaign against the Germans. Hopper’s family had moved to Normandy when he was a child, and he later married and went into business as a wireless repairman. When war came Hopper, assisted by his French wife, began attacking German targets, setting fire to oil depots or blowing up railway lines. In time he became bolder, assassinating enemy soldiers and French policemen. In its edition of 17 September 1941, the newspaper Le Journal de Normandie told its readers there was a reward of 10,000 francs leading to the capture of “le bandit Hopper”. He was caught in Paris the following year during a shoot-out with soldiers in which his wife, Paulette, lost her life. (Hopper fired the bullet that killed the already seriously wounded Paulette to prevent her capture and torture at the hands of the Gestapo). Sent to Neue Bremm torture camp, Hopper was beaten by the guards after every RAF bombing raid on Germany. Eventually he was taken to Mauthausen to work in the granite quarry. “It had 186 steps up which we used to carry those big rocks on our shoulders,” he recalled. “The rule was that anyone who fell down on the steps would be beaten till he got up or he died. If he died, they threw him back down into the quarry, and they had a horse and a cart that came every afternoon and… collected the bodies.” Hopper was lucky. Unlike Jones his health never broke and he survived Mauthausen, as did Faramus, who died in 1990, the same year as he published his memoirs. “Strangely, however, I was not embittered by my years in captivity,” Faramus concluded. “The isolation, the prejudice, the intimidation and the defiance at camps Buchenwald and Mauthausen proved to be an important education for me.” Gavin Mortimer is an author whose books include The Men Who Made the SAS: The History of the Long Range Desert Group (Constable, 2015).
"How I fell captive to the Germans": the experience of First World War PoWs
British officers taken prisoner during the First World War were, on their repatriation, required to explain how and why they fell into enemy hands. Their testimonies, says AD Harvey, offer a fascinating insight into the brutality of trench warfare...
This article was first published in the February 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine “My platoon was put in an exposed position on a flank to prevent surprise. The enemy were in front and to our left. After a few minutes another machine gun opened on us from the right so that we were swept with fire on showing ourselves. I was hit by a sniper’s bullet through the back of the head and fail to remember anything further until I saw Germans standing over me telling me to march if I could.” This is how 2nd Lieutenant Frank Gordon Marsden, of the 9th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment, describes being taken prisoner at Sebourg, near Valenciennes on 4 November 1918. Lieutenant Marsden was one of around 200,000 British military personnel to fall into German hands during the First World War. Thousands more Britons suffered this fate in 1914–18 than during the Second World War. Yet, as the millions who’ve thrilled to the sight of Steve McQueen and Richard Attenborough defying the Nazis in 1963’s iconic blockbuster The Great Escape will testify, the experiences of Second World War prisoners are much more celebrated than those of the earlier war. Held to blame On repatriation at the end of the First World War, army officers (that is, those in authority, as opposed to the rank and file) who had been taken prisoner were required to submit a written explanation of the circumstances of their capture: these explanations were later added to their personal files. Around 70 per cent of these files survive in the National Archives, Kew – and the insights they give us into how the soldiers accounted for their capture are fascinating. Officers were not informed beforehand how far they would be held to blame for allowing themselves to be taken prisoner. The three former brigade commanders assigned to process these statements sometimes summoned ex-PoWs to the War Office to clarify details in a face-to-face interrogation, or they wrote to former commanding officers for corroboration. On at least one occasion the former brigade commanders resolved themselves into a Court of Inquiry, which might have led to court-martial charges. However, not all the ex-PoWs were able to remember very much about their capture, as Frank Marsden’s dramatic account shows. Generally, these statements give far more tactical detail, and more precise information about injuries, than would have seemed appropriate in letters written from the trenches to family members, or in postwar memoirs. You may have read any number of first-hand accounts of fighting in the First World War, but probably none as cold-bloodedly – and authentically – graphic as this report by Captain Gerard Orby Sloper, MC, of the 1st Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers, of being taken prisoner by the Germans at Bellewaarde, near Ypres on 16 June 1915. “At 4.15am the 9th Brigade attacked. As machine-gun officer I went with the first wave to choose positions for the guns. When I reached a sunken road I found that a Boche machine-gun, which had been reported as laid on the road, had not been silenced. I was hit in the left hand. Across the road I turned to the left and was hit in the nose by a piece of grenade. I stumbled into a sap [a section of trench dug at right angles to the main trench and leading in the direction of the enemy lines] and silenced the gun and shot three of the team. “Presently a following party came down the trench from my right – which I joined. About five minutes later I was hit on the back of the neck by a piece of shrapnel shell. I went up to the second line of trenches, collected about 20 men of the Liverpool Scottish under an officer and one of my machine guns and proceeded to the third line. I collected and sent back to the OC 9th Brigade all papers in the trench with a memo stating that the trenches on my left had not been taken and asked for 200 men to do it with. I then placed the machine gun in position to cover my left flank and just as I had arranged this a piece of heavy shell hit me on the top of the head.” ‘Boches’ in the trench Sloper now had four separate wounds – and one is struck, in this as in other accounts, at how officers often continued to push their men forward even when themselves injured. He continued: “Owing to my wounds I am rather vague about the subsequent proceedings until a sergeant of the Liverpool Scottish came to report that his officer said the Boches were in the trench on his right and that he would have to retire. I went to fix things up and found that he had retired. Instead of sending a message for him to come back again I took the machine gun back to the second line. I now consider that was a mistake although our left flank was in the air but I was not in a fit state to decide at the time. “The next event I remember was a message being passed up that I could not have the men I asked for but that the 7th (I think) Brigade would attack. I therefore considered it my duty to hold on until the attack began although my left flank was still in the air and we were suffering losses. Soon after this the Boches counter-attacked. We held them off until a bombing party came up to the communication-trench from my left rear.” [A bombing party was a team of men armed with grenades, backed up by other soldiers with rifles at the ready: ‘bomb’ was then a common term for a hand grenade. “I was then hit by a grenade that burst behind me, while I was trying to collect a party to drive them out, and wounded me in the back and left arm and cut a large blood-vessel in my neck. I lost a great quantity of blood but managed to squeeze the blood vessel below the cut and the next thing I remember is a Boche kicking me on the head at the other end of the trench.” Errand of mercy Sometimes the former prisoners’ accounts reveal young men simply out of their depth, as is the case with this report by 2nd Lieutenant John Montford Stotesbury, 1/2 Battalion London Regiment, of being captured near Angreau. “On the 6th Nov 1918 my batt[alion] were taking part in an attack East of Valenciennes towards Mons. The attack started at 5.30am and I was captured about 6.30am in company with CSM [Company Sergeant Major] Harper of my own company. “The attack got held up owing to difficult country and a counter attack by the Germans on the left where our forces got further forward at the start. The CSM and myself went forward to reconnoitre through a wood to the railway and found ourselves on the railway with Germans each way. Owing to the CSM not being able to recognise them as Germans after I had done so he was wounded in the thigh for his curiosity and appealed to me to bind him up. I consented to do this, and it was whilst engaged on this errand of mercy I was surrounded from the rear and taken prisoner. I have sent an explanation of my capture to my commanding officer in France.” Stotesbury, a clerk in an insurance office in civil life, had been commissioned only in June 1918 after serving three and a half years in the ranks. The fact that the company sergeant major accompanied him on his reconnoitre suggests that either Stotesbury or the CSM thought he needed someone to hold his hand. Because of the readership they were intended for, the ex-PoWs’ accounts rarely struck a personal note, though one officer at least sat down to write his self-exculpation with what seems to have been a degree of disenchantment with the military system. Lieutenant Henry William Allason, MC, was with the 13th Battalion East Surrey Regiment, most of which was taken prisoner at Fleurbaix, near Armentières as a result of the collapse of a neighbouring section of the front manned by a Portuguese division. “About 04.00 hours on the morning of 9 April 1918, the artillery liaison officer Lt RH Booth came to my bunk in battalion headquarters and asked me whether the bombardment which had just started was on our front. “At 05.00 hours I proceeded to make out my daily report from my own observations on the previous day, the reports from the companies, and those of my snipers. News came through that Lieut Webb, who was in charge of ‘A’ Coy [Company] in the front line, in the absence of Capt WG Price (who was living at battalion headquarters), had been wounded, and about 06.30 hours I received orders from Major West to go to the front line (‘A’ Coy) and find out what was happening. This I did accompanied by a runner, and found that except for a heavy bombardment on the communication trenches and on the line, all was quiet; the sentries were on the outlook but there was a thick mist on. Lt Webb was lying wounded in the dug out and 2nd Lt Oakes appeared to be in command of the company. “I returned to battalion headquarters and reported. I then proceeded to my quarters to carry on with my report. Whilst doing this I was informed that during my absence up the line, a big shell had come over and wiped out all my snipers including Sergt Hines, in a trench near battalion headquarters.” Shelling the mess Note the deadpan manner in which Allason refers to the demise of the battalion sniper team, which he was in charge of and which comprised men who he had hand-picked, trained and got to know quite well, and who might have been with him when they were killed if he had not been relatively safe in a dug-out doing paperwork. “I continued my report to brigade until another shell hit the mess to which my quarter adjoined and the debris tore holes in the papers on the table on which I was writing. There was only wooden planking overhead and a hole in the roof caused by the shell. I then entered the Elephant Dug-out [a dug-out with curved sheets of corrugated iron serving as a ceiling and walls, like a miniature underground Nissen hut] of battalion headquarters which was adjoining and continued to write up my report, having shewn the torn pieces of paper to the officers there, Major West (in command) Capt Ainger, and Capt WG Price as evidence of my narrow escape. “Whilst writing my report a man came in from the Welsh Regiment (to the best of my recollection) and a cyclist runner from brigade and it was stated in my hearing that the Germans had broken through the Welsh. After completing my report to brigade, I waited to receive orders from Major West as to his plan of action but received none. “The firing was heavy and there were plenty of gas shells about. The elephant dug-out was closely packed, as the doctor brought in a stretcher case. I heard a Lewis gun firing which appeared to be coming closer, as if retiring from the Germans. I heard no orders given by Major West and received none myself, when suddenly I heard a voice cry Heraus! [‘out!’] and Major West walked out of the dug-out holding up his hands. Capt Ainger, Capt Price and myself and others followed after him. “Being furthest from the door and occupied in destroying my report to brigade, I was the last to leave the dug-out. “Before going out, Battalion Sergt Major Lee turned to me and said: ‘Well Sir, we have held out to the last.’ I was thoroughly disgusted at not having had a fight for it and replied: ‘Yes and never fired a shot.’ I then went outside with my hands in my pockets and found the Germans outside the dug-out. I was disarmed and taken prisoner.” This last paragraph must have annoyed the three former brigade commanders at the War Office, but since Allason was with three officers senior to himself when the dug-out was overrun, there could be no official grounds for finding fault with his tone. Henry Allason’s report is confirmed by officers captured with him – and it seems to contradict his commanding officer, Major William Gerald West’s explanation that “no information as to what was happening reached me from any source. While endeavouring to get in touch with my Coy commanders, I was rushed and taken prisoner by a German ‘mopping up’ party.” This seems intended to give the impression that West was gallantly making his way between his battalion headquarters and the command post of one of the four infantry companies of his battalion. Allason, however, claims that West was with his staff in the dug-out sheltering his headquarters. Bitter lessons A third officer, Lieutenant Louis William Pinnick, appears to support Allason’s version of events, reporting that the Germans arrived at the very moment that Pinnick was reporting the loss of the telephone switchboard to Major West. The three former brigade commanders at the War Office seem not to have noticed the discrepancy. Some officers seem to have fudged certain embarrassing aspects of their incarceration. The poet FW Harvey, for example, explained, “I was captured on patrol”, implying that he was leading an authorised patrol, which would normally consist of several men. However, a more elaborate account, which he published in 1920, shows that, though he had been ordered to lead a patrol that night, he had decided on his own initiative to slip across the lines during the afternoon to reconnoitre the intended patrol route, a piece of foolishness that led him into German hands. It has become the fashion in recent years to claim that, having digested the bitter lessons of the Somme, Passchendaele and the great German offensives of spring 1918, the British Army by late 1918 was a finely honed instrument of war. Yet this was clearly not always the case, as is shown by this account by 2nd Lieutenant Frank Oliver Rideout, 1st Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment, of being taken prisoner near Gouzeaucourt. “Three companies of my battalion, ‘B’ ‘C’ and ‘D’, attacked the above position at 5.15am on Sept 10th 1918. On our right should have been the 17th Division, on our left should have been the 38th Division, but to the best of our knowledge the battalions of these divisions failed to arrive at the jumping off point by zero time. However we attacked and a fair proportion of us succeeded in gaining the objective. An immediate counter-attack, however, found the majority of our rifles useless as they were covered in mud. “The men were new recruits almost to a man and those who were not killed or wounded by enemy fire failed to stick to it and attempted to get back to our lines. I personally held on to my portion of the trench until I had no men left and I had expended my ammunition. I then attempted – too late – to follow the remains of the company who I presumed would have gathered in a shallow trench some little distance in the rear. I was, however, held up in the wire and completely surrounded by the enemy who had gone forward.” One might have expected, after four years of trench warfare, that troops would not advance with rifles so clogged with mud that they could not fire. However, it is precisely details of this sort, not generally available elsewhere, that make the explanations by repatriated prisoners of war in Kew’s National Archives so compelling. British prisoners of war in Germany Just over 7 million soldiers were taken prisoner of war from 1914–18. Germany held around 2.5 million of them, including 200,000 British military personnel who were housed in some of the scores of PoW camps dotted around Germany. The largest and most celebrated British PoW breakout took place at Holzminden Camp in Lower Saxony in 1918. On the night of 23/24 July, 29 men escaped through a tunnel, 10 of whom made it to neutral Netherlands and, from there, on to Britain. As the Allied blockade of Germany bit ever deeper, British PoWs increasingly relied on rations sent to them from home. By the end of the conflict, 9 million food parcels and 800,000 clothing parcels had been despatched to British prisoners overseas. A number of German officers were accused of mistreating Allied prisoners during the First World War, and were put on trial in the Leipzig War Crimes Trials in 1921. During the war, German kaiser Wilhelm II gave one British PoW, Capt Robert Campbell, permission to return home to visit his dying mother in Kent, on condition that he return to his camp in Magdeburg, north-east Germany. Campbell kept his promise, but soon after attempted to escape from the camp. AD Harvey’s books include Collision of Empires: Britain in Three World Wars 1793–1945 (Continuum, 1993) and Body Politic: Political Metaphor and Political Violence (Cambridge Scholars, 2007).