Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind Part 8

Eric Reeves was among a group who reached Trier on 9 June before the 51st Division had even surrendered. The journey from Abbeville had exhausted Reeves, bringing him to the point at which he cared little about what was going to happen to him: We marched straight through the town. I can always remember going through the arch. It was a Sunday and all the women were in their best clothes they had hats with flowers in them. We thought they were going to church. But as we marched through they were spitting and shouting things at us. It was degrading but you couldn't feel angry you were like an outcast. We hadn't got a clue what they were shouting but the spitting was enough for us! It was a low point. But we'd reached the point where we didn't care all we were interested in was food. You had to remember that at that stage nothing else mattered no one ever talked about anything else. We'd forgotten about s.e.x, all we concentrated on was food.

Too desperate to care about the hail of spittle and the venom directed at them by the Germans, Reeves and his fellow prisoners pa.s.sed straight through the city: It was the end for us. We'd been through so much. But I'm sure the only thing that kept us going was that we weren't alone. There were about five thousand of us and we were all in the same boat. So you find the strength from somewhere to keep going. Also the biggest fear you have is of appearing afraid. You did everything you could to appear brave you might have been dying inside but you never moaned or let them know. We kept silent. We were unwashed and unshaven I hadn't got any shaving kit anyway. They marched us to a coal yard in a railway siding and that was where we lay for the night.

The celebrations indulged in by the local population as Reeves and his comrades entered the city were not an isolated incident. The prisoners' memories were centred around the physical and verbal torment they suffered. The final days of the march may all have blurred into one another but the experience of reaching Trier remained etched in their minds. The vast, swaying swastika banners, festooned above the baying crowds as they celebrated the subjugation of these remnants of the British and French Armies, all served to heighten their dejection.

It was as if everything had been designed to humiliate the prisoners. Old women spat at them, youths raised their arms in n.a.z.i salutes and mocked the pitiful wrecks that shuffled through the city. Even the stark contrast between the Sunday best worn by the civilians and the filthy attire of the prisoners just served to deepen their misery. As Les Allan trudged through the streets on his way to the railway station, these scenes made a distinct impression upon him: The reception from the civilians was horrendous. The British never kick a man when he's down but they were the opposite. We were being humiliated. It was the period of the march that I shall never forgive them for. They were mostly women and children. You don't expect it from them. They were enjoying their victory. They were on Cloud Nine. But funnily enough, I never lost faith that we would win in the end. That was the one thing that kept us going. We said, 'Keep smiling lads one day we'll get our own back.' And it was worth it in the end.

Also arriving from Abbeville was Ken Willats, who was struck by the scenes: 'The reaction was awful. They were lining the pavements, spitting and swearing. We were presented as hostages of their success. It was a total picture of the n.a.z.i regime. There were big flags hanging across the road. The civilians were at the very top of their enthusiasm venting their hatred of us. They were jeering as if they had been whipped up. We were despairing.'

After just one night's rest, Graham King and his exhausted comrades were raised from their slumbers and marched downhill into the city of Trier. Once again they were given no food and sent on their way with empty bellies. The reception they received as they headed for the railway station was the same as that given to the others who had been greeted by earlier crowds: 'In spite of the early hour, the good German citizens of Trier were lining the streets to welcome us with stones, insults, manure, ordure, eggs (rotten) and anything else that could do us harm, the more serious the better.'

In the last days of June almost a month after the completion of the Dunkirk evacuation and weeks after the first prisoners had pa.s.sed through Trier some of the 8,000 prisoners who had marched from St Valery arrived in the Belgian town of Lokeren. At Lokeren they were relieved to find themselves transported in small, open wagons on a narrow-gauge railway, packed thirty men per wagon. The train moved so slowly that civilians were able to approach and openly hand them food. Gordon Barber recalled being thrown a sweet cake that resembled cold Christmas pudding. In these wagons they crossed into the Netherlands.

When they arrived at their destination they were herded towards a coal barge. After an issue of bread, its surface dry and lined with mouldy cracks, they were crammed on board in conditions that would become familiar to so many of their comrades. Tommy Arnott watched as one group refused to enter the darkness of the hold: 'So the Germans turned their fire hoses on them. When the water and dust subsided they came out like the proverbial "n.i.g.g.e.rs" I shouldn't be using that word nowadays but it was OK then and it fitted the description.'6 Those remaining on deck blessed their good fortune. Those forced into the holds were trapped below in the darkness, since the ladders had been removed to prevent their escape.

Memories of these latter stages of the journey tend to be sketchy. Even those who had faithfully recorded the towns they pa.s.sed through could do nothing once locked inside the holds of filthy coal barges. The journeys by narrow-gauge railway went from either Moerbeck or Lokeren, taking the prisoners to Terneuzen or Walsoorden, both on the River Scheldt. From there they travelled upriver, then through ca.n.a.ls to reach the Rhine.

On the seventeenth day of their march, some of the men captured at St Valery eventually reached the Dutch town of Maastricht. Here they were allowed to receive food from the local branch of the Red Cross. What they received was like manna from heaven. Each man ate as much as he could, desperate to recover a little of the strength he had exhausted in the weeks before.

One of the groups greeted by the Dutch Red Cross reported that the half-inch-thick slice of bread they received was all they had to sustain them on a five-day journey by barge. For the whole of the journey the prisoners, who were so tightly packed they were unable to sit down, were not given any water. Just as on the march, this group noted how the Germans had fed the French prisoners. This led to inevitable friction between the two factions since the British prisoners locked in the holds began to faint due to thirst and hunger.

At Walsoorden on the Scheldt, a group of 1,000 prisoners, including 300 British officers, were marched on to the Dutch paddle steamer SS Konigin Emma to complete their journey into Germany. Once they were all on board there was hardly any room to sit down. Both the holds and the unventilated decks were crammed with men. There was no food available for them except for an issue of mouldy bread. From the Scheldt they steamed through ca.n.a.ls, then into the River Waal, through Nijmegen, then joined the Rhine before disembarking at Hemer forty hours later. The British officers were moved in groups of between twenty and forty men to a building where the rooms gave just enough s.p.a.ce for each man to lie down on the straw-covered floor. For five days they shared the basic toilet facilities with a group of French colonial troops. After that ordeal was over they were sent, without rations, on a thirty-four-hour train journey to the stalag that would become their home.

Another group of 1,000 prisoners that travelled by river spent forty-eight hours in a coal barge travelling between Lokeren and Emmerich. Once again the British were sent in the company of French colonial troops. United Nations war crimes reports later stated that the racial mixing of the British troops with the French Africans was a deliberate attempt to humiliate them. Jim Pearce was one of the prisoners who travelled on a barge that had already been used for transporting men into Germany: 'It was shocking. The French Moroccans had been on it before us, they'd been to the toilet everywhere. It was filthy. It was awful. Then we got the fleas and lice.' Gordon Barber, his spirits lifted slightly by the help received from local civilians, found the next stage of the journey returned him once more to a state of extreme discomfort: 'They loaded us into the hold of this barge. That wasn't a pretty sight 'cause most of us got diarrhoea.'

Jim Charters recalled the toilet facilities being no more than a pole on the edge of the barge: 'By this time some of us were so weak that several of the men fell off the pole into the ca.n.a.l and had to be fished out.' As the boats sailed past watching civilians, they had to drop their trousers, hold on the edge of the boat and do their best to hang on as they emptied their bowels. Cyril Holness remembered his journey from the Netherlands on an old coal barge: 'This was when I started to feel really lousy. They degraded us. You just hung over the side of the barge, whilst people were walking past on the towpath. It was disgusting. We were all in a right state. That was my worst time.'

Fred Gilbert, still nursing the wounds that were wrapped in increasingly filthy bandages, remembered the cramped conditions: They'd certainly forgotten how many people were supposed to go on a barge! There was room for everybody on the barge. A few people even found room to sit down they were lucky. If you got s.p.a.ce to lay down you were extremely lucky. I had my two feet of s.p.a.ce and squatted there. You couldn't leave that s.p.a.ce because someone would take it. Then you'd be stuck standing up. After a while I ambled about a bit and went down below decks. Two lads silly things got up from under a ladder. So I got their s.p.a.ce and sat in that. They came back and saw me sitting there. They said a few things I expect they wanted it back. But I wasn't moving. So I stayed and slept there.

Although the exhaustion of the march had been relieved by the chance to sit down and rest, the question of food was still foremost in the thoughts of the prisoners. d.i.c.k Taylor and his mate Stuart Brown realized it was vital to keep their strength up at all costs: 'We were down below. It was horrible pretty rough. But you put up with it and make the best of things. We got an issue of raw potatoes and some of the lads started to peel theirs. I said to Stuart "Let's collect all the peelings" because I knew that later on we'd get nothing. So as they threw them away we got them and kept them. It was astute because it meant we still had something to eat. It makes the difference between keeping on or going under.' Fortunate enough to be travelling on the upper decks, Fred Coster was able to make contact with the crew of his boat: 'We were lucky to be on a ferry. The captain was Dutch. I had an army watch with a luminous face. I heard he was flogging food so I went up to him and said, "What will you give me for this watch?" He said one loaf of bread. I said, "What about two?" He agreed so I said, "What about three?" But he wouldn't budge. So I got these two loaves and took them downstairs and shared them with my two mates. That was our first food for ages.'

As the barges and ferries made their way through the waterways of Belgium and Germany, the prisoners celebrated these issues of food, however meagre. Dry bread was better than no bread sc.r.a.ps were better than nothing and just to be able to sit down as they ate, rather than devour raw root vegetables as they walked, was blissful. Fred Gilbert remembered the two 'meals' he enjoyed on the Rhine trip: 'We got bread with cheese and even b.u.t.ter. They were tiny pieces, but because we'd had nothing the day before, that was a jolly good meal! The second day we got the bread and b.u.t.ter, but no cheese. That was the daily ration. But it was food hooray!'

As they travelled by boat many of the desperate prisoners began to notice some new companions had joined them. At first they scratched at their filthy bodies and thought it was just a reaction to being so pitifully filthy. Then they started to notice movement in each other's hair. They had lice. This was a new experience; some had known head lice as schoolchildren but it was nothing compared to the invasion of lice that arrived as prisoners of war. Leslie Shorrock, taken prisoner in a hospital beside the Dunkirk beaches, wrote of the lice: 'We were now in the grip of a savage tormenter, for we were all thoroughly lousy. Lice live and breed on the body, biting and drawing blood, invading every part, especially those covered in hair. We constantly scratched and scratched, but these lice concealed themselves in seams of uniforms . . . it would take us almost a year to fully rid ourselves of these vermin.'7 For some, the arrival at their first proper stop in Germany was marked by an ominous greeting the town's air-raid sirens were wailing, and they watched as RAF planes flew overhead and the local population scattered. It served as a warning that as prisoners within Germany they would have to contend both with the violence of their guards and the attentions of the Allied air forces. In time it would become a terrifying combination.

Disembarking from the barges into Germany, many of the veterans of St Valery faced the same treatment that their comrades had faced in Trier. Some recalled how groups of Hitler Youth arrived to goad and beat them. Arriving in Dortmund, where they were sent to a sports stadium, one group recalled the 'devilish torture'8 by guards who seemed to enjoy every chance to humiliate them. Leslie Shorrock wrote of his first experience of being greeted by German civilians: 'As we approached a village the inhabitants were all lined up ready to receive us, nearly all old men, young and old women and detestable children. As we pa.s.sed this unhappy crowd they hissed and spat upon us, tried to kick us, unrestrained in their affectionate welcome by the s.a.d.i.s.tic guards.'9 As Bill Holmes later admitted, he simply resigned himself to being abused and spat at by civilians. Others were less accepting of their fate. Ronald Holme, of the East Surrey Regiment, recalled the abuse heaped on him by Browns.h.i.+rts when he disembarked from the barge in Wesel: 'As our morale got lower our hate for the Germans became more intense.'10 This was a common experience. Jim Charters, who received the same treatment when his barge reached Germany, wrote: 'I would like to have been there in 1944 when the Yankees arrived. I'd like to know if they were trying to kick them!'

One of the groups disembarked from the barges at Emmerich found themselves spat at, washed down with buckets of water thrown by locals, and immediately sent on a sixty-mile (100-kilometre) march to Dortmund. The prisoners could hear church bells ringing in the distance and realized it must be Sunday morning. As they marched Tommy Arnott had a stroke of fortune: As our straggly line of POWs hiked on, we came to a field in which an elderly German lady stood, holding a basket of rye bread. She must have been terrified at the sight of this horrible lot approaching, so she fled as fast as she could, dropping the bread. Now, hunger is a terrible thing. It becomes the survival of the fittest and you do things you never imagined you would. We were starving there was a basket of bread so Ned and I ran over and grabbed a loaf. Other POWs were starving as well and they weren't going to stand by and watch us eat it. I was knocked down in the rush and had my loaf grabbed out of my hand. By now the German guards were getting worried and fired over our heads to bring us back into line.11 At the sports stadium in Dortmund the prisoners discovered there were groups of wounded British officers who had been transported from France without ever having received treatment. Some were allowed inside the stadium while others remained in a field surrounded by barbed wire. The misery of the scene was enhanced by the piles of steel helmets that had been left on the ground outside the fence. French, Belgian and British helmets had been abandoned there since the guards had decreed they were no longer to be worn by the prisoners. As the already dejected prisoners watched, a guard marched around the fence, casually sticking his bayonet into helmet after helmet, piercing them with a deliberate action as if to underline the magnitude of the German victory. Then he reached one particular British helmet. At the first thrust his blade simply slid off the helmet. He tried again and again, until with one almighty thrust steel met steel and his bayonet snapped in two. A great cheer came up from the watching crowds. It was as if this simple act had helped instil some small glimmer of hope for their future.

Following their arrival in the Third Reich, no one bothered to tell the prisoners where they were. All they could do was try to decipher the names they saw on signposts. And n.o.body told them where they were going.

The final stages of the prisoners' journeys were by rail, crammed again into cattle trucks, usually with the stencilled words '40 men 8 horses' on the sides. In place of windows there was a slit running around the top of the wagon that allowed a little daylight to creep in and some air to circulate. Graham King later made light of what was a quite awful experience: 'No horses were travelling on that occasion, so we travelled eighty to a truck.' As many would later recount, in modern Europe there would be angry blockades and boisterous protests if sheep were to be transported in such cramped conditions.

As the first men entered the wagons they had little idea of what lay ahead. Many had already travelled by rail, although on those occasions the army had been careful about how many men were allowed in each truck. Furthermore they had often travelled with the doors open, allowing air to enter as they moved through the French countryside. This was different. When Bob Davies described the experience as 'pretty grim' he was downplaying the reality of what he and his comrades endured. The Germans made no attempt to count how many were going into each wagon. Men who had slumped down on to the floor found themselves trampled on as the s.p.a.ce got increasingly crowded and the doors were slammed shut and bolts drawn across to trap them inside. Eric Reeves recalled the experience: 'They kept pus.h.i.+ng us in and pus.h.i.+ng us in you hear various numbers for how many were crammed in, but no one was really counting. All I know is that once we got in, we sat down with our knees up against our chins. Now, if you had to stand up because you'd got cramp, you didn't sit down for a long time because everybody else had moved to fill your s.p.a.ce.'

Within minutes of the doors being bolted, the interior of the wagons became h.e.l.lish. In the heat of summer it did not take long for the crowded men to feel the temperature rising. It was not too oppressive while the trains were moving but as soon as they came to a stop the prisoners began to suffer. Those strong enough to move through the stuffy crowds to gasp with relief beside the vents did so.

Almost as soon as the men crowded into the wagons and jostled for s.p.a.ce a new and important question arose where would they go to the toilet? As Ernie Grainger remembered: 'On the cattle trucks it was a bad time. At least on the barges there was a plank hanging over the rear!' A few discovered a bucket had been put in with them, but most had nothing. Pages were torn from books, bibles and paybooks and used in place of toilet paper. Some tore the pockets from their battledress and defecated into them. Others used their caps. Some even took their boots off urinated into them, then poured the urine out of the air vents, which was why Gordon Barber had no intention of getting too close to them: 'Heaven forbid if you sat near them. 'Cause if anybody had gone to the toilet they'd throw it out. So if you were near you'd get backdraught and the wind would blow some of it back in.'

Jim Pearce recalled his experiences: 'We were stuck on there we had to try to pour it out of the window. If not you just went down the side of the truck. Everyone got stomach upsets. We just sat in silence. Everybody was absolutely fed up with life. They didn't care if they lived or died. You thought "If I'm going to die, I'm going to die." I thought my life was finished and that was it. That's how it looked.'

Ironically, Fred Coster, who had earlier warned his comrades about the dangers of drinking dirty water, was not immune to the effects of the deprivations: There was only standing room and we were in there for about five days with no food! It was there that I had a bout of diarrhoea. I thought 'Oh G.o.d, what do I do now?' You still had a bit of dignity and self-respect. I said to the boys, 'Sorry but I've got to do.' So they made a s.p.a.ce for me in the corner. I did what I had to do, then threw it out through the window in a handkerchief. It happened two or three times and I felt awful about it. But then it started to happen to the others so I didn't feel so bad. But it was degrading. It was horrible, I can't really describe it. The conditions were inhuman. The Germans were a different breed. They really felt they were the masters of the world. They were the master race and anyone who disagreed with them was to be wiped out.

As the journeys progressed conditions deteriorated. Not all the sick did recover, as Bill Holmes discovered: 'We were on there for three days. We had nothing to eat. Two of our lads died during the journey. We just had to tie up the bodies as best we could. They stayed in the train with us until we reached the POW camp.'

On the first day of his journey, Eric Reeves watched as the doors slid open: 'They pushed in a bucket of water and about three of their big loaves. Well, if you weren't near the door, you didn't get anything. Because you couldn't get over there too many people were in your way.' Despite being too far from the doors to get any food, there was a positive side to the experience even if it did mean continuing starvation: 'Through eating this rubbish all the way, these blokes all got diarrhoea.'

Still without food, Graham King and his fellow prisoners found themselves at halt in the German countryside: Sunday morning and the train stopped about a mile from a country village. In the distance could be heard the tolling of a church bell and we could see the religious people of the Fatherland going to church in their finery, especially those who had minor roles in the administration of the Third and Greater Reich. None spoke to us nor jeered, just looked at us as if we were a new species arriving at the local zoo. Consequently I avoid zoos. To be shut up and stared at by strangers is not pleasant and I wonder if the zoo animals feel as we did.

Their next stop was an altogether more pleasant experience, albeit with unfortunate consequences: The train moved off and slowly chugged through the outskirts of a big city and eventually pulled into the hauptbahnhof of Berlin where the German Red Cross was much in evidence, as were the uniformed civil servants, newsreel crews, shouting officers and grinning master race members. We didn't give a d.a.m.n. The Red Cross was dis.h.i.+ng out extremely thick, hot pea soup, hunks of fresh white bread and lovely, cold water. It didn't last long and we were soon on our way again. The dysentery sufferers, having ignored all advice, had eaten as starving people will and were suffering again and the stench was unbearable but bear it one must.

As the hours then days pa.s.sed, the POWs became increasingly frustrated. Every yard they travelled jolted them, they felt every vibration as the rails pa.s.sed endlessly beneath the wheels. Seated on the bare boards, with their knees drawn up to their chest, their bodies became numb both from the constant shuddering of the trains and the cramped conditions within. Every movement of the man leaning against them was irritating, as if it was a personal attack on their s.p.a.ce.

Gordon Barber, who considered himself both a survivor and well prepared for the harsh life of a prisoner, finally found it pushed him to the brink of mental tolerance: 'That was the only time I can remember despairing. I fell asleep back to back with another bloke. All you could hear was "boompty-boom, boompty-boom" for three days! I thought it was going to drive me mad. You just had to think, it has to finish. We've got to end up somewhere!'

He was right. Their journeys did eventually have to come to an end. As the trains drew to their final halt, the prisoners were completely unaware of where they might be. Some had seen the names of pa.s.sing stations as they rolled through towns and villages but the names were meaningless. The small towns and villages of Germany, Poland and East Prussia meant nothing to men whose horizons had been so limited back in civvy street.

As the wagon doors were finally unbolted, the men inside prepared themselves for the next stage of their ordeal. First the light hit them, cutting through the gloom, hurting the eyes of those who had sat in the dimly lit wagons for days on end. One prisoner described them as appearing like cavemen, who would climb nervously from the dark depths of the train, inching into the light with dark-rimmed eyes and wild hair. As their eyes adjusted, Bill Holmes and his companions had one important job to do, unload the corpses of the two men who had died during the journey.

Next came the strain of standing up and jumping or rather lowering themselves from the wagons. The men who had fought to guarantee the escape of their comrades from the beaches of Dunkirk were transformed into a ragged army of slaves, stinking and starving, defeated and desperate as they dropped down from the filth-filled railway carriages on to the firm ground of the eastern regions of the Reich.

Arriving at the station outside Stalag 20A, Fred Coster recalled the doors finally opening to allow them out: 'They shouted "Raus! Raus!" As we jumped out we all just flopped to the ground. Then we dragged ourselves up to walk into the camp. For me, as I was walking along, it didn't feel like it was me walking it was as if my spirit was pulling me along.'

One group dismounted from their train only to be greeted by the sound of a loudspeaker broadcasting to the local population. It announced that these were the men who had laid down their arms and refused to fight for Churchill. It was crude propaganda, meaning little to the starving men it was supposed to humiliate. Quite simply, such ludicrous boasts meant nothing to the prisoners. Nothing filled their heads more than the distant hope of filling their bellies. Not the war not Churchill not the fall of France. Food and water even just a mouthful became the hope and dream of every man who journeyed to the stalags that summer. As Jim Pearce remembered: 'We were all in a terrible state, and it was in this state that we were put into the POW camp.'

CHAPTER TEN.

The First Year Totally exhausted. Starving. Filthy. Covered in lice.

Jim Reed, Seaforth Highlanders, on life in a POW camp in 1940 All across the Reich the men of the BEF shuffled into captivity. At some stalags the trains carrying the wretched prisoners pulled up directly outside the gates. Other prisoners stumbled out of the trains into fields, then marched towards the barbed wire fences and watchtowers. Elsewhere, the already weakened men were forced to march for miles. At Danzig some of the survivors of the surrender at St Valery dismounted from their cattle wagons, then were marched through the city ready for the next stage of the journey to a POW camp. Gordon Barber remembered the scene: 'There were young Jerry soldiers in the streets flicking their f.a.g ends to our blokes and some of our blokes were grabbing them. The Jerries were laughing. Some of them flicked the f.a.gs then trod on them when our blokes went to grab them. I said to my mate, "The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, I won't pick 'em up. I'll never let them see they've got the upper hand." And we were both smokers!'

Just to see a real live city with its crowded streets seemed bizarre. The bedraggled prisoners shuffled along the cobbled streets like a dirty brown stain. The neat streets and shops horses and carts, trams and buses, people going about their daily business all were a symbol of a respectable world, one to which the prisoners no longer belonged.

The men on display in the streets of Danzig were representative of the thousands making their way into captivity. Their bodies stank of dried sweat, urine and s.h.i.+t. The wounded also gave off the foetid stench of dried blood and pus. Their filthy clothes hung from their bodies. Soldiers. .h.i.tched up their trousers, pulling their belts ever tighter around their shrunken waists. Those without belts searched for lengths of string. On the prisoners' b.u.t.tocks there was no sign of the firm muscles that had been honed on parade grounds and route marches back in Britain. Instead the flesh hung loose and limp where fat and muscle had vanished as their desperate bodies had used up all their reserves of fat to generate the energy to keep them shuffling along.

The Germans were ill-prepared to cope with the size of the influx. The lack of provisions for their journey had seemed like a vicious introduction to life as a prisoner of war. Yet the conditions they faced once within the camps revealed to them that this was to be the limit of their existence for the foreseeable future.

At Schubin, Stalag 21B was little more than a farmhouse, farmyard and some fields surrounded by a hastily erected barbed-wire fence. Yet as the haggard band of prisoners approached the gates an order rang out loud across the field. Eric Reeves remembered the moment: We staggered out of these flamin' wagons. The Germans were pus.h.i.+ng us with their rifle-b.u.t.ts. We were all staggering about. Then a voice shouted, 'Pay attention! You are soldiers of the British Army' he must have been a regular soldier, probably a Warrant Officer 'You will act like soldiers of the British Army. You will fall in, in three ranks, and we will march into this camp with heads high. Now fall in!' And we did. We marched in. The Germans must have been amazed. Then we got into the camp and straight away we all collapsed again!

During his first days within the camp, Reeves found himself physically unable to react to his new environment. Like so many he was too exhausted to do anything: 'We were out in the open all day. Me and these blokes just found this place and sat there, leaning against a wall. If you wanted to get up it was difficult. You could get up so far then you blacked out and fell down again. So you'd have to get other blokes to help you up. Once you were on your feet it was OK. Malnutrition had hit us.' Elsewhere in the camp Seaforth Highlander Jim Reed was trying to adapt to life as a POW: 'It was shocking. Everyone was a bit low. I wanted to get a shower to get deloused, but we got nothing. It was a stinking hole. We slept on shelves 100 on the bottom, 100 on the top. It filled the room. The sergeant in charge was as smart as if he was on parade, but he could do nothing for us. It was the worst place. The food was just rotten potatoes, there was no drinking water and we all had dysentery. It was a rough camp no gra.s.s, just one big yard.'

At Thorn the train arrived directly outside the gates of a vast complex of forts that had been constructed in the nineteenth century, following the Franco-Prussian War. One of the arriving prisoners described his first impressions: My view was dominated by two ma.s.sive gates made of wood, laced with barbed wire. These gates, I then noticed, were the entrance to a vast flat piece of ground which was surrounded by a double fence of barbed wire. I noticed that each corner of this compound held a raised machine-gun post manned by German guards. The two gates were also manned by two guards, one of whom opened the gates on our arrival. We were told to enter whilst the other guard counted us in. It was all so bewildering, especially as I was aware of a commotion inside the compound where there were already many, many POWs settled in.1 The forts were mainly underground with prisoners living in two storeys, in fifty dark rooms, each holding around thirty men, that ran along the rear. At the front of the fort were open courtyards below ground level. Graham King later discovered that the moat contained a surprise: 'It was a dry moat, rather overgrown but, surprisingly, teeming with rabbits. In our early days in this fort we had tried to trap some using snares but were told by the Germans that snares were banned in Germany and the punishment was quite severe.'

The prisoners arriving at Thorn were first sent into tented camps where they went through the process of registration as prisoners of war. This included having their heads shaved, being sent for delousing in steaming shower rooms and being photographed holding their POW identification number. Finally they were issued a small rectangular tag always known as a disc stamped with their identification number, that they would wear every day for the next five years. Though most prisoners felt dejected as they were processed ready for life in a POW camp, there was one bonus. The shaving of their heads removed the breeding ground for the lice that were already making their lives a misery.

Many of the prisoners were searched and all spare clothing was taken away. The imposed clothing shortages would have a severe effect in the months and years that followed. As well as having their names taken, they were asked to fill in Red Cross forms that were to be used to notify the British authorities of their status as prisoners of war. It was a process every prisoner would eventually go through. Eric Reeves remembered the experience: The first morning we were all grouped together. The Germans had a chair and a board. They wrote your number on the board I was 3479, one of the earliest prisoners and they took our photographs holding the board. One of our NCOs said, 'Show them you're not beat give them a smile.' So I did. Then they took your thumbprint and wrote down the colour of your eyes and hair. Years later, I got my registration card back from the Ministry of Defence. There's little me sitting there with a sickly grin above this board with my number on it.

During the period of registration some prisoners found themselves washed down with high-pressure hoses, so strong they had to be controlled by two men, and the strength of the spray knocked the weakened prisoners to the floor. Graham King found himself in a group of prisoners who were ushered down into the cellars of the fort to be prepared for POW life. First they had to strip and were then given a small, rough towel and some soap: Our clothing was taken away and we lined up, starkers, outside the barbers shop. We entered three by three, carefully explaining how we would like our nearly shoulder-length hair cut. Hopes dashed, hand clippers were manoeuvred over the whole body resulting in complete depilation. Then we went into the shower room and stood, three men under each showerhead and the water was turned on, then off! We rubbed the soap over our bodies, leaving a covering of fine pumice and an indescribable body odour. A shouted warning and the water came back on, rinsing the skeletal bodies of the prisoners. Skulls like a phrenologist's dream and the fleshless bodies of the starving no mother would have recognized her darling. We sat outside the room on a hard wooden bench, wriggling in discomfort, the cus.h.i.+oning fat and muscle of our gluteals having disappeared in the fight for survival.

When his clothing came back from the delouser, King noticed how his freshly washed clothing smelt like a damp dog drying in front of a fire. Others noticed the delousing had done nothing to actually kill the lice, which had survived in the seams. Graham King also noticed that the uniforms they received were not their own, rather they were of far inferior cloth. As he recalled: 'they would not have been accepted by any poverty-stricken rag and bone merchant of the thirties, but we were offered no choice'. Dressed in these threadbare clothes, and with his feet soon bleeding from the rough wood of his newly issued clogs, King prepared himself for his first night within the fort sleeping on the straw-covered floor of a subterranean storeroom. The only light came from a bare bulb at the end of the corridor outside the room.

Once cleaned up, the prisoners were sent to Fort 17, which was not actually one of the main subterranean forts but a series of wooden huts in which prisoners were housed while the Germans decided what their fate would be. Living in one of these sheds, which housed 1,000 prisoners, one man recorded: 'So I'm now just gristle and bone, but as hard as iron and in good health, except for diarrhoea which we all suffer from the pumped water . . . we all get the skitters . . . I'm like Gandhi with no hope of getting back any fat on my bones on that diet I'm always hungry.'2 When Jim Pearce entered Fort 17 it seemed life couldn't get much worse. He spent his time shuffling around in straw-filled clogs, thinking of nothing but food and hardly caring whether he lived or died: 'We couldn't care less. We were just wandering around, starving. Nothing mattered. Then a Scottish sergeant major came along and made us get up and walk around. He made us soldiers again. We became men again. Otherwise we'd have gone under.'

For Bob Davies, who had arrived from Calais, Thorn was a difficult place to describe. Quite simply, he spent his time there in a dream. There was little to see or experience within a camp that was built mostly underground. For men who spent their days sprawled on the cold floor of a dark, damp cellar, memory was a luxury there was nothing in their day-to-day lives they wanted to remember. All that mattered was raising enough energy to pull themselves up from the straw-covered floor, then to drag themselves along the corridors to collect their next bowl of soup. Ken Willats recalled the first awful days at Thorn: 'You'd see men sitting on the ground with their s.h.i.+rts off cracking lice between their fingernails. A door led out to a path up the hill where the so-called toilet was. It was two trestles and a long plank over a hole. You perched on that and just hoped for the best.'

The dreadful conditions within Thorn only served to further reduce the prisoners to a state of appalling apathy. One of those who became well acquainted with the stinking latrines was Fred Coster, whose first days in the stalag were spent inside a marquee: They said they were going to serve us soup. I thought good that's the first food we had been given. But, oh my G.o.d, I couldn't get up. Luckily there was a tent post by me so I pulled myself up. I was as dizzy as h.e.l.l. I staggered over and stood in line for hours to get my bit of soup. In mine was a bit of pork fat, floating. I thought 'Lovely!' I polished that off quickly. Then I started being sick. I pulled myself up on the tent post again and tried to stagger off to the latrine. I could feel this saliva flooding into my mouth and I was spitting it out. Then I went back and collapsed again.

Although the very notion of living in subterranean forts appalled even the most exhausted of the incoming prisoners, the alternatives at the other stalags were hardly more appealing. At Stalag 8B in Lamsdorf the prisoners were greeted by a sight that would become common for hundreds of thousands of prisoners in the five years that followed: 'All I can remember is these b.l.o.o.d.y great five-bar wooden gates,' recalled Norman Barnett. 'They were more than six feet high and covered in barbed wire. Then we could see the barbed-wire fence and the machine-gun posts. There were two guards on the outer gates and then a six-foot gap and two more armed guards at the second gate. The Stalag was a ma.s.sive place, it had previously been a barracks.'

When Stephen Houthakker entered Stalag 8B he was immediately struck by the foul smell that hung over the camp and he could see the condition of men who had arrived before him: 'spiritless men were sprawling about, Poles and British, both so starved, it was difficult for them to get up without reeling'.3 It was little wonder they were dispirited. Even in the summer, the stone buildings were cold. Bill Holmes could remember how the guards seemed to be certain of a German victory and wanted to make sure the prisoners knew it. On his first day in the camp he had to queue for a whole day to get his first meal. It was just another annoyance for the prisoners who had, for the most part, already grown to accept that if they could be made to wait, they would be made to wait.

Cyril Holness remembered the guards at Lamsdorf: They could be nasty especially some of the younger n.a.z.i types. They were full of it they wanted us to learn German because they thought they were going to take over the whole world. But the guard in charge of us was OK, he spoke with an American accent. One day he came along with the commandant, he asked us, 'Any complaints, guys?' So we said we wanted more potatoes. He just looked at the commandant, turned to us and said, 'The Kommandant does not believe in fat bellies in Germany.' We had to laugh.

Despite the good nature displayed by that guard it did not ease Holness' mind: 'We had no idea what was going to happen. Stalag 8B was tremendously big. When I first saw the place I thought "What is this? What's happened to my life?" That first year was a bad year. When was it all going to end?'

The new huts that were put up to house the prisoners were also unappealing places. Norman Barnett was moved into one of these barrack rooms: 'I was in hut 35A. It was full of wobbly three-tier bunks.We just had a straw pallia.s.se on bed boards and one blanket. Bang in the middle of each hut was a washhouse, with cold water and concrete sinks.' Most of these wooden and brick-built barrack blocks had bunk s.p.a.ce for nearly 200 men, with little s.p.a.ce between the bunks. It was in these overcrowded rooms that Barnett and his fellow prisoners had to adapt to POW life: 'In the first weeks we just sat around. The only time you got up was when a German officer came in. You were supposed to get up quick, but you couldn't. If you were too slow they had these Polish civilians they were b.a.s.t.a.r.ds; they had these rubber hoses filled with sand who'd clout you. But when you got up the room used to spin round.'

Arriving at Schubin, Jim Reed was struck by how basic the conditions were. Many prisoners slept on straw mattresses in the attic of what had been a reform school. As the camp began slowly to expand, the prisoners moved into new accommodation, filling each hut as it was constructed. While the construction work continued, the prisoners remained in their attics, tents and barns, all the time hoping their new accommodation would be ready before the start of winter. Reed's first POW camp was also the worst conditions he experienced during five years as a prisoner of war: 'When we first saw the camp there was no barbed wire. We thought it had previously been a nunnery. There was one pump in the yard but the water was unfit to drink. But we were only there for about a month. Then we were marched out and put into bell tents. We stayed there until the winter when it started snowing. Then we were moved to a foundry where we slept in the sand for about a week.'

The conditions experienced by the prisoners within the stalags varied in everything but awfulness. If one man found himself in an overcrowded, airless room, another found himself sleeping outdoors in tents that barely kept out the wind and rain. For every man living in a draughty wooden hut, there was another living in gloomy subterranean cellars of Polish forts like those at Thorn and Posen. The first year in captivity saw prisoners sleeping in all manner of locations barns, schoolhouses, stables and cellars. In the fort at Posen, one prisoner decided to record his living accommodation. He lived in the underground rooms of a moated fort. Their beds were within long, dark, tunnel-shaped chambers, with straw-covered floors, that were lit by a single light bulb. From this chamber, he had to walk twenty-four paces to catch a sight of daylight. It was a total of 107 paces for him to get outside into the fresh air. Fred Coster recalled the effect of living and working underground in rooms untouched by daylight or fresh air: It was claustrophobic. I used to do tailoring when I was at school, so I knew how to make a pair of trousers out of two worn-out pairs. So I worked in the machining-room. They used to leave half a dozen of us in there. Then they locked the door. I could feel the claustrophobia rising in me. I thought 'What's happening to me?' I felt that I was going to go to pieces. But I had to fight the feeling back. In the end I got used to it I beat it. But you can imagine what it would've done to a weaker person it would have sent him off his head.

At Thorn, Graham King described the accommodation shared by thousands of the British prisoners: 'the rooms contained beds, the same design as those seen in pictures of concentration camps. Three shelves were against the wall, about six and a half feet wide with a gap of one metre between the bottom shelf and the middle, and between the middle and the top. The best position was the top because there was more light and there was no one tossing and turning above you, vomiting or suffering loss of bladder control. In each room there were about thirty men living.' The rooms themselves: 'they were like semi-tunnels; all the ceilings were arched to give strength. The perpendicular walls were about three metres high and the height to the arch's top was about five metres. The width of the room was five metres and the length about fifteen. Three-tiered wooden bunks provided sleeping s.p.a.ces and thirty-two men would sleep, eat, argue, smoke, fart, cough, snore, groan, moan, play cards, have nightmares and read in each of those rooms.' Each room had two small windows over which blackout blinds had to be fitted every night. These allowed no ventilation: 'By the end of the night the air was solid and everyone would have a headache due to oxygen starvation.'

There were already considerable numbers of British prisoners of war within the camps. Some were those who had been captured during the Norwegian campaign. Others had been taken in the very early days following the German a.s.sault. Among these were a number of senior NCOs, some of whom made a less than favourable impression upon the incoming men. With the army having been so heavily defeated, and with a defeatist mentality having crept into their way of thinking, plenty of the soldiers were not impressed by any idea of military discipline.

The efforts of some to instil discipline met with immediate and vocal resistance. At Thorn, Jim Charters arrived at the camp to find his group confronted by a British Army major dressed in a perfectly pressed uniform, complete with a polished Sam Browne belt. The officer did not care that they had marched hundreds of miles, then travelled in the holds of coal barges and within stinking cattle wagons. He told them: 'You people are filthy, you get nothing to eat till you get cleaned up.' The reaction of the prisoners was immediate. Some of the senior NCOs told the officer what they would do to him if his threats were carried out.

At Thorn one particular NCO paid the ultimate price for his behaviour, as David Mowatt remembered: I can't remember entering the camp. All I can remember was a Welsh Sergeant Major. He was trying to get us to march up and down after all the way we'd walked! I couldn't do it. I collapsed and ended up in hospital. That sergeant eventually w.a.n.gled his way on to a repatriation s.h.i.+p. On the boat on the way home he vanished. Someone got him and dumped him over the side. It was someone who'd remembered him from Thorn and thought 'I'll have him one day!' The senior NCOs of the King's Royal Rifles were in charge when we arrived at Thorn. They were as fit as fit could be. They'd taken over the POW camp, whilst we'd still been fighting in the rearguard!

During the period following registration and entry into the camps, the prisoners continued to lose weight rapidly. Although they were no longer marching, the deprivations they had suffered, combined with the extreme food shortages, ensured they were fit for little more than collapsing to the ground in exhaustion. Once again they faced the problem of only being able to collect food if they had a receptacle for it. Those with mess tins or the gla.s.s jars and discarded tin cans they had found during the march blessed their good fortune. Those without again cursed their luck and once more offered up their filthy, cupped hands to collect whatever was available. So continued the desperate search for anything that could hold food. E. Vernon Mathias, captured at Calais, later described the physical effects of all he had endured: 'It was a near starvation form of diet which dominated our physical health as well as our character. Physically I had lost weight in a rapid and alarming manner and the side effects were weakness, an outbreak of skin sores, loss of some teeth and, worst of all, one's weakness encouraged the infestation of body lice which practically made one's life unbearable.'4 What little food the prisoners received made an awful impression upon them indeed food was their only thought at the time. It was difficult to forget the rancid sauerkraut, thin pea soup, stinking cheese and ersatz coffee that was keeping them alive. Jim Charters remembered mouldy bread and potatoes so black that 'pigs would turn their noses up at them'. For others the rations seemed to be nothing more than a handful of potatoes covered in eyes. If potatoes weren't available they got black bread that seemed to have been bulked up with sawdust. Some prisoners remembered potato bread, in which the bottom of the loaf was thick with what seemed to be rotten potato. As Norman Barnett recalled: 'When you cut it, it stank. But it was edible.' Elsewhere prisoners were fed barley soup mixed with cattle blood. One man recalled receiving a bowl of dirty spinach. Before he could consume it he had to drain off the water and pour away the sand that had settled on the bottom of the bowl. Some of the prisoners made efforts to clean whatever they could before consuming it. Some burnt potatoes in a fire, charring the outsides, before boiling them, in the hope of killing off bacteria. Others toasted all their bread, for fear of infected flour.

The appalling rations meant that those who retained the energy to move still spent all their waking hours dreaming of food. They mustered up what little remained of their strength to drag themselves up to cookhouses just to take in the smell of whatever weak stews were being prepared for them. Graham King recorded his daily rations in the early weeks at Thorn. The day began at 6 a.m. with coffee made from roasted acorns. For lunch they received a litre of vegetable soup, with no meat or fat. At 4 p.m. they received a 1,500-gram loaf of black bread, one between five men. With this they received a little margarine, honey, jam or, very occasionally, liver sausage. He recalled that, after the deprivations of the journey from France, so much food seemed like a feast. That said, it was still not enough to help them recover: 'Each individual collected his own soup from the kitchen, which was downstairs for our group. I found that I did not have the strength to carry my soup upstairs, so sat on the bottom stair and ate it there, every delicious drop, eventually getting enough strength to climb up to the room.'

In the initial months of captivity there were few differences between the treatment of officers and other ranks. The officers lived in segregated camps or in enclosures away from the men. However, like the men, they survived on appalling rations. At Oflag 4D the officers reported they were too weak to take advantage of the exercise facilities in their camp and instead they had to lie down for most of the day. Just like the other ranks, the officers also had had their heads shaved when they entered the camps. Some later commented that their individual personalities disappeared along with their hair, noting that for the first few weeks each officer became a nonent.i.ty. Only later did their individual characters re-emerge as their hair began to grow back.

Despite the differences between the POW experience as endured by officers and other ranks, the officers did not live in better conditions. Peter Wagstaff later wrote of an unexpected encounter within a fort at Posen: 'I will never forget one day turning a corner in a pa.s.sage and being confronted by something sitting up on its hind legs. It was the size of a large rabbit but I knew it could not be. In the next instant I suddenly realized it must be a rat! We managed to kill one later from head to tail it must have been 24 inches.'5 Considering the squalid conditions the prisoners were forced to live in, most were amazed that they seldom saw rats within the main stalags. Looking back, they realize why this was. It was quite simple there was no food for rats and thus no reason for them to be there. Or as some commented, any rats that did appear would probably have been caught, killed and cooked. As Norman Barnett recalled: 'What were they going to eat? There were no sc.r.a.ps for them to eat. Men were fighting over sc.r.a.ps. I've seen them fighting over potato skins. When they dished out potatoes from these boxes, men would fight over what you could sc.r.a.pe from the inside of the box.' The starving men had learned that to turn down any food was tantamount to suicide. There was no vegetable too rotten, no meat too high, that they did not think it was worth consuming.

As they had begun to realize, it did not take proud men long to adapt to life-threatening conditions. E. Vernon Mathias later wrote: 'This period of physical and mental stagnation was causing great harm to the morale within the camp. Our movements were lethargic and our mental reactions had slowed down. Our self-respect suffered and groups of POWs would congregate near the waste bins sifting through the rubbish for potato peelings or anything edible. These were the dark days when we had to adapt our body and mind to a much lower standard of living than we had experienced before.'6 Sickness became rife within all the POW camps. While some of the weakest men just gave up and died, hundreds found themselves so weak they could barely move. To do anything was an effort. To stand up, to walk, to talk all seemed beyond them. One soldier later reported that he had been forced to jump up to salute a German officer. As soon as he did so he immediately collapsed to the ground since the movement had been too sudden. Others reported seeing spots before their eyes whenever they bent over, with one man reporting that he had fainted as he attempted to reach down to tie his bootlaces.

It seemed that life continued to revolve around dreaming of food and then rus.h.i.+ng to the stinking latrines as the men were gripped by stomach cramps and diarrhoea. One prisoner later recalled how he had seen a man reading a book. He asked if he might be allowed to borrow it but the man refused. He explained that he was using it page by page as toilet paper and that it was a race between his intellect and his bowels as to to which finished the book first. As Norman Barnett, trying to adapt to life at Stalag 8B, later recalled: 'I don't think anyone did a solid c.r.a.p the whole time they were prisoners.' At Thorn, Graham King recalled queues of men waiting for the foul latrines, which consisted of just six places for over 1,500 prisoners, large numbers of whom had been struck by dysentery: 'After reaching the head of the queue and performing, it was necessary to go and queue again for the next gut-gripping attack.'

Everything seemed to be designed to humiliate the prisoners, and attempts to elevate morale were hard work. Eric Reeves remembered the efforts of one of his fellow POWs: 'His name was Arthur Briton. He was a lay preacher and he got a church service going. That was on about the third day at Schubin. We sat there in the dirt and said our prayers and sang the hymns. He was brave to do that amongst all us hairy, hard old soldiers. He used to complain about our bad language. He was a nice man.'

Despite such efforts, Reeves couldn't help but notice the psychological turmoil within the stalags: 'There were so many of us that we never knew if people were starving to death blokes were falling sick and disappearing, we never knew what happened to them. But others were dying. One man tried to hang himself, another cut his throat. They got to the point where they couldn't cope.' The depths to which the prisoners sank during that first year at Lamsdorf were recalled by Ernie Grainger: 'The first nine months was my lowest point. I'd dropped from twelve stone to just sixty pounds in weight. We had these big tummies and matchstick legs. The last thing I'd ever expected to be was a prisoner of war. I'd never expected to be in a strange country, surrounded by these evil-looking blokes. I thought "What the h.e.l.l's going on here?" It was awful. Some people went mental. The rest of us thought we'll just do the best we can.'

The mental and physical stagnation within the stalags saw morale collapsing as the prisoners struggled to survive. Prisoners were pitted against one another as the slightest incidents became blown up out of all proportion. Jim Pearce recalled those bitter days: The atmosphere was terrible. There were arguments all the time. What little bit of food you got you had to watch it closely otherwise someone would pinch it. Gosh yeah, there were fights over food! I remember one time I got some food and cigarettes from the Red Cross. So I slept on it. I woke up the next morning and the food and cigarettes had gone. They tickled you in your sleep so you'd move, so they could pinch them. They'd pinch everything. We got piles of swedes for food during the week. Once they'd gone we'd get nothing else for the week. So we had to take turns guarding them, so no one pinched them. Chaps lost all respect, they didn't care. It was dog-eat-dog. There was a lot of bitterness, it's not like they show in films and on TV.

While every prisoner was happy to steal from the enemy, only a few were prepared to steal from their comrades. Every former prisoner can recall stories of food being stolen the most repeated being the tale of men going to sleep with a loaf as their pillow only to awake to find the ends of the loaf cut off. Though such scenes sound comical there was nothing humorous about the loss of rations. Nor was the punishment of thieves anything to laugh about. The punishments for those caught stealing were extreme. Thieves were beaten violently by men who had been their friends. One man was even strapped to a table then whipped for stealing food. The beatings were followed by banishment, leaving the offenders without friends as they struggled to survive. There were even dark rumours, about which few former POWs ever openly talk, of men who were killed for daring to steal food from their comrades. In the overcrowded camps it was easy for men to disappear, as Ernie Grainger remembered: 'There was an unwritten law about stealing. We had this static water tank in the camp and they found a dead prisoner in there one night. No one owned up to it, but everyone knew he'd been stealing.'

The prisoners willing to demean themselves in front of the Germans in exchange for food or cigarettes also got short shrift. At Stalag 20B two men who gave the n.a.z.i salute to German officers in exchange for bread were thrown into a cesspit by their disgusted comrades. Elsewhere a soldier who posed for photographs giving the n.a.z.i salute, receiving cigarettes as a payment, was beaten up by the rest of the prisoners.

Although the prisoners attempted to police themselves, there were some occasions when gangs formed and took over life within the compounds. Descriptions of the gangs vary but most describe them as racketeers, wideboys or 'fly charlies' who had 'nothing to learn from Chicago'.7 Accounts tend to identify the worst offenders as being from the slums of large industrial cities like Glasgow, London and Liverpool. Many were described as 'cosh boys' or veterans of the razor gangs that had terrorized some inner-city areas in the pre-war years. In some camps, Stalag 8B being a particular case, the gangs could dominate by stealing food. By ensuring their own food supply, and thus depriving others, the gangsters provided themselves with enough food to ensure they remained physically stronger than their victims.

Stephen Houthakker at Stalag 8B later wrote of this period: Fights amongst the starving men were frequent, and thieving rife during those first weeks. However, there sprang up a comrades.h.i.+p between the downtrodden or poor of the camp, who were in the majority by far . . . The racketeers somehow or other continued to thrive. The soup queues and the potato queues presented freefights daily. Men reduced to starvation, though weak physically, fought with tremendous zest to prevent the next from obtaining a larger share. Gangs were formed and there was often war between combatant and non-combatant forces.

The prisoners discovered the supply of food was controlled not by the Germans but by elements from within the British Army who had been able to get into positions of authority. The Germans, who accepted military discipline and the privileges of rank, were prepared to pa.s.s power into the hands of senior British NCOs. While many were dedicated to looking after their men, there were plenty of others who inspired fury for their efforts to make their own lives more comfortable. These cliques of senior sergeants and warrant officers took over the control of food supplies and clothing, enriching themselves at the expense of the ma.s.s of prisoners who held such behaviour tantamount to treason. In the post-war period many made official complaints about the behaviour of NCOs. At Fort 8 in Posen, three 'rotten' Guards NCOs appointed themselves cooks and kept stocks of food for themselves. At Thorn, Ken Willats recalled lying on the ground in a state of virtual starvation while being able to smell meat being cooked by the men in charge of the rations. As Norman Barnett explained: 'The cooks always used to look healthy. But wouldn't you? If you were in the cookhouse and you were starving, the first thing you'd do is get a bit extra. It's human nature.'

In later years many former prisoners noted how the offenders tended to be long-serving senior NCOs who had a tendency to band together, just as they had done when the army had begun its rapid expansion during the late 1930s. Then they had stuck together to preserve their position and once behind the barbed wire of the stalags they reverted to type and continued the process.

Considering the threadbare uniforms in which the prisoners had entered the stalags, there came a desperate need to reclothe the men. However, the Germans did not have any stocks of British uniforms available for 40,000 ragged men. They even made the prisoners share out the clothing they had. But they did have vast stocks of captured uniforms from the defeated nations of Europe. Consequently the new prisoners found their battledress replaced with all manner of kit. There were trousers, overcoats and tunics from France, Belgium and Poland, cavalry breeches that were worn without riding boots, leaving the wearer with ridiculous bare calves, tall peaked Polish Army ceremonial caps and Great War overcoats designed to be worn while riding a horse. Arriving at Lamsdorf, Bill Holmes remembered how the new kit was issued: 'They'd throw you stuff you had to be quick. You'd either get something that was too big or too small nothing ever fitted. I got a Polish overcoat by the time that was on you could only just see my eyes. If you were lucky you got a good coat, if not, that was your bad luck.'

Some of the uniforms had come out of warehouses, smelt of mothb.a.l.l.s or were creased and damp with age, yet these were far preferable to the alternatives. Some prisoners found themselves issued with uniforms that had come straight