I've transcribed the key narrative pages from Dad's diary on the PAGES menus but here is a summary of his experiences as a POW.
Dad enlisted voluntarily on the 15th of April 1940 in the RASC ( Royal Army Service Corps) in Reading.
Following training he progressed through the ranks to become a Sergeant and in September 1941 he was part of an ACC
( Army Catering Corps) unit attached to the 1st Armoured Division en route to North Africa.
The convoy landed at Durban in South Africa on 11th November 1941, from there the convoy proceeded to Port Tawfik on the Suez Canal. The long round trip being necessary due to Italian and German action in the Mediterranean and North Africa.
Within days of landing at Suez he was in a combat area in North Eastern Libya just in time to be caught up in a Rommel's second offensive which proceeded to roll the British back some 300 + miles.
Dad along with many others was captured at Antelat a small desert town and sent on to Tripoli into the crowded poorly organised holding camps..
From there he was put in the hold of an old boat, the SS Ariosto which had a cargo of scrap metal already in its hold.
Unfortunately a British submarine was lying in wait for the convoy and the ship was torpedoed late on the night of February 14th 1942, sinking the next day.
The Italian crew abandoned the ship and my father with many others broke out of the hold to find no usable lifeboats.
Being a good swimmer Dad was able to swim away from the sinking ship.
Fortunately, despite teh darkness he was picked up by an Italian destroyer and taken to Trapani in Sicily where there was a grim, tented, transit camp, Campo 98.
Whilst there he compiled the list of survivors of the Ariosto, his tally being 146 survivors out of 300.
I think a few more did survive as I have seen a figure of 138 casualties.
Italian SS Ariosto
British submarine P38
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At the end of March he was transferred with others to mainland Italy and Campo 65 at Gravina which had better facilities including the comfort of sheets, blankets and a straw paliasse to sleep on.
In his account the rations that they were getting at the time were a third of the standard British rations for soldiers, one could only imagine the hunger suffered by the exhausted POWs.
After being sent to Bari Hospital to have his eyes examined in August of 1942 he was sent further north to Campo 21 at Chieti. Later paperwork shows him to have been functionally blind in one of his eyes due to his experiences in combat or on the crossing to Sicily and submarine attack.
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Bracelet made in camp of scrap with dates and places over the three years
Whilst at Chieti Dad assisted in the escape of a Captain John Meares and was duly punished for this with tiem in the camp clink.
Compared to other Italian POWs camps Chieti had a particularly harsh regime as well documented in Brian Lett's excellent book An Extraordinary Italian Imprisonment which also gives details of Captain Meares' escape.
In September 1943 an armistice was agreed with the Italians giving hope that the POWs would soon be free but for reasons which have been much debated an order had gone out earlier in 1943 to the effect that British POWs should stay put in the camps.
The Germans rushed and parachuted large numbers of troops into Italy to hold back the Allied advance and also take control of the camps including Chieti which was bizarrely guarded by British POWs, the Italian guards having 'escaped' their own POW camp.
The Germans proceeded to move the prisoners from Chieti to a small camp in Sulmona, Campo 78.
From there the POWs were trained to Rome on the way to Germany.
Dad along with three companions made his escape from a train in transit from Sulmona.
He spent a month in the mountains of the Abruzzo National Park before being recaptured by a German officer in a small town called Pescasseroli. Taken from there to a railway station, Colleferro, where he had his second experience of friendly fire being bombed, probably by the American Air ForceThen, after the bombing, on to Rome continuing out of Italy through the Brenner pass into what was then the greater German Reich.
The first German Camp he was sent to was Moosburg Stalag 7A in Southern Bavaria, it was a large camp, operating as a transit camp where prisoners were processed on their way to other camps.
Ironically in Moosburg there were also some of the many Italian soldiers taken prisoner by the Germans after the armistice.
From Moosburg he went on to Oflag VIIIF at Marisch Trubau (now Moravská TÅ™ebová in the Czech Republic) this was an officer camp with other ranks included to perform various duties. In Dad's case in the cookhouse.
Whilst at Oflag VIIIF he was sent to an eye clinic in Breslau for a further check on his eyesight, it was important as it could have led to him being repatriated but for reasons unknown repatriation was denied. The original documents relating to this are all on
Misc - Repatriation.
POW ID card at Marisch Trubau Oflag VIIIF
With the Allies, particularly the Russians closing in, Marisch Trubau was closed and the prisoners transferred to Oflag 79 at Braunschweig / Brunswick in central Germany.Lamsdorf, Stalag VIIIB is also mentioned in the diary though it may have been only a short stopover on the way to Brunswick Whilst in Oflag 79 on 24th Aug 1944 dad was subject to the third and final attempt by his own side to kill him when American planes bombed the camp ( see Friendly Fire ).
Oflag 79 Bunks Exercise Yard American Jeeps - Liberation
In common with many veterans of war, warfare and imprisonment Dad very rarely spoke about his experiences, one particular time he did he referred to an incident not recorded in his diary.
He spoke of having to, in his words 'put his friends head back together', my recollection from what he said was that his friend after having alerted a german guard in a watchtower and gaining the ok, had retrieved a football that had strayed over the inner perimeter wire, for whatever reason the guard opened fire and shot him in the head splitting his skull.
Dad had to deal with the grisly aftermath.
This one chilling revelation conveys some of the trauma that he in common with his fellow POWs endured and is a counter to the image that has been conveyed in some films of jolly chaps with handlebar moustaches playing pranks on the comic book Kraut guards.
I can't be certain but reckon this incident occurred either at Marisch Trubau or Brunswick and perhaps reflects the increasing desperation of the Germans who were very much losing the war at this point.
It's no excuse but it would have been the case that guards would be losing comrades and family members in the battles and widespread bombing towns and cities in their homeland. Tensions were undoubtedly running high as the end of the war drew near prisoners and guards alike wondering whether they would live to see the end of the war.
Freedom finally arrived in the shape of the American army when jeeps from the 12th Infantry Division of the 9th American army turned up at the camp on the 12th April 1945 (see photo above right).
The end for Dad of just over three years in at least eight POW camps, spread from the tip of Italy to the North of Germany.
An intelligent man who sadly had to leave school aged 15 he made good used of the limited opportunities for self advancement whilst in the camps. The reading list he recorded in his diary is evidence of this and in particular the medical books reflect the fact that when younger he had plans to study medicine.
In an era when very few people even had passports Dad had been on an incredible journey.
Rural England to South Africa, Suez , North Africa, Sicily, Italy, over the Alps into Bavaria, Czechoslovakia and then Germany. All, though, taken in the most desperate of circumstances and about as far away from anyone's idea of a tourist itinerary as you could imagine.
One might perhaps imagine that the returning POWs would have been met with a hero's welcome back in England but in fact most returned quietly with no fanfare, no parades, no banquets. My father bitterly remembered stepping off a ship on the south coast and being handed a sandwich and a wallet with nothing in it as his welcome back to England ceremony.
No official medals were issued for POWS.
As a child I was fascinated by a faint blue mark under the skin of dad's right arm, it was a piece of shrapnel that the battlefield surgeons had left in place, it being considered riskier to remove than leave there. He seemed unperturbed by it.
There were though, I'm sure, deeper wounds left within him from his wartime experiences. far less visible than the shrapnel and harder to live with than that faint blue mark.
War is the making of some people and the breaking of many others. For my dad I think both statements would hold true.
The plain fact of surviving the ordeal, the comradeship, making do with very little, taking immense risks, dodging death several times gave him the elements of grit, determination and humanity he was capable of demonstrating.
The injustice, pain, grief, boredom, deprivation and plain bad luck experienced over his three years imprisonment 'in the bag' inevitably also shadowed less happy aspects of his post war life.
As a 50s born child growing up in England it is a sobering thought, as I look back, that most of the adults I knew growing up had been involved in some way with a war which had ended so recently. Now I know, that for many of them, the war did not end with victory celebrations and street parties.
As a curious postscript to my fathers grim experiences as a POW in Germany he returned there soon after the end of the war to run the Berlin Officers Club in the British sector of the occupying powers.
For a while living a life no doubt unimaginable to him whilst he thought of his future in the many camps where he was held captive.
See - Misc - Post War Berlin