Chapter 11 Was it a phantom raider?; Came to Cossacks; Wet as scrubbers.

CAME THE COSSACKS

FOR a background to this tale imagine a drab, square mile of German prison camp containing, within its rusted wire fences, a life that was a seemingly endless routine of cold, mud, slush, ever-increasing hunger and disease, grey boredom, dull hatred and then, as liberation loomed nearer, frequent periods of mingled fear, tension and exhilaration as Allied bombing and strafing mounted in tempo and came closer.

Superimpose on that background nearly 20,000 prisoners of war from Britain and the dominions, the U.S.A., the U.S.S.R. and every German-occupied country in Europe and you have Stalag IVB, Muhlberg-on-Elbe, Saxony, as it was on that muddy, windy, spring morning in April 1945.

On that morning the entire cosmopolitan melting-pot of 20,000 souls was officially liberated by four dour, unshaven Cossacks who cantered in through the eastern gate looking for all the world like four Australian boundary riders who had been living in the saddle for months and somehow had managed to festoon themselves with Tommy guns, automatic pistols and tightly packed bandoliers.

After shouting monosyllabic confirmation of the liberation to their ex-captive compatriots amongst us, the Cossacks cantered leisurely but purposefully out through the western gate and carried on with their share of the mopping up behind the Soviet tanks which had lumbered past the camp before dawn and were now fighting north and south along the Elbe to link up with the Americans.

Thereafter the game -as the saying goes- was on.

The first move was made by more than a thousand Russians and Italians who had staggered into the camp the previous evening after a week's forced march from Silesia on black bread and water. They came in ahead of the rapidly approaching eastern front.

They simply trampled their double barbed wire fences into the mud and converged on the Stalags sole remaining store of potatoes which had been stacked in neat rows in an adjacent field.

I climbed a windmill in the camp just to witness this remarkable spectacle. It looked just like a Test cricket match crowd rushing to view the wicket after the end of play. Beyond the straw-littered, trampled lines of potato stacks a great column of Russian cavalry and horse-drawn infantry jogged sedately across the flat Saxon plain towards what was left of the war. Behind and below me the P.O.W.-elected camp leaders of the more community-minded nationalities were blasphemously and sadly shaking their heads over this disruption of their carefully laid plans to cope with the state of emergency expected on liberation.

By afternoon of liberation day the camp's jubilant excitement was tinged by hunger and the realization that the Stalags remaining stocks of potatoes-our sole meagre source of food-were now bulging the ragged pockets of the more enterprising elements.

As the German camp personnel had prudently departed en masse during the night, the British took over the kitchens and boiled and issued the potatoes stored there. There was no bread. There had been none for weeks. The last truck load of the black, ersatz, much maligned stuff had been disintegrated on the way up from the village by a burst of cannon fire from a zealous and enthusiastic American Mustang fighter pilot. But as we had been on a 24-hour ration of an inch-thick slice per man we had not missed it much.

Following exhortations from our camp leader-a lean and perpetually worried Canadian air navigator-the British element stuck nobly to its diet of half-rotten potatoes while eyebrows were raised at the undisciplined conduct of "other nationalities". No one, we

were instructed, was to leave the camp; but by late afternoon the rumour went round that the hastily posted volunteer police were allowing parties out for walks. Soon the first of the walkers were returning, with chickens, fresh meat and eggs-real eggs!

My mid-upper gunner and I exchanged glances, but said little, over our meal of boiled potatoes.

By nightfall I was back with a basket of preserves, jams and fresh vegetables. Bill had done better. He had fresh pork, bacon and sausage. Not so much as a pfennig had changed hands. That night we had the finest, biggest meal of our lives. So did the rest of the boys in the dark and crowded barracks of the camp. And nearly all of us were almost immediately violently ill.

By next afternoon the little village by the pine woods just outside the wire, which had been abandoned by its terror-stricken inhabitants the might the Soviet tanks had come, was stripped of everything edible. Even the vegetable plots behind the neat little homes were just squares of ransacked, trampled and uprooted Saxon earth.

A Russian officer had taken over the camp. At the gates the flags of the United Nations fluttered benevolently and bravely. But of organization there was none. The only alternative to starving was looting.

Day by day the 20,000 liberatees fanned out, like the proverbial locust plague, over the flat fields and clustering villages of a suddenly war-desolated Saxony.

North, south and west of us the war exploded, crackled and smoked in an uneasy requiem for the death of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. To the east, towards Silesia and Poland, lay the unhealthy silence of defeat broken only by the rumble of the Red Army moving up men and materials in an inexorable tide which, even for us, had something of the terrifying atmosphere of the unknown.

A Yorkshire air gunner disappeared eastward; in which direction we had so often jestingly sniffed for the aroma of vodka. Days later he returned, much to the pessimists' surprise, with glowing stories of monstrous mud-splattered tanks and riotous parties with cigar-smoking, whisky-gulping, back-slapping Russian officers.

An ex-London undertaker, who had been a prisoner of war for five years, found dolorous satisfaction in commencing his rehabilitation to civilian life by roaming the woods and fields and burying the corpses of Germans and Russians left, apparently, to the ministrations of Providence.

From behind the safety of a farmyard wall I watched a pal of mine being pursued by a Russian soldier too drunk to aim the rifle which he had cocked to fire. I was relieved to see that my friend did not drop the plump chicken for which the rest of us had been stoking the farmhouse stove.

Bedraggled hausfitauen wept into their aprons as every liberated nationality played tag with squawking fowls and honking ducks. The once-tranquil villages were shrill with the death cries of slaughtered live-stock.

From the Stalag fresh-trodden paths radiated out through the green, spring corn to every village in sight. Every day at sunset long lines of men staggered back through the wire laden with food and linen and cutlery. While the bomb-laden fanatic remnants of the Luftwaffe racketed overhead at night seeking concentrations of Soviet troops, the compounds in the camp were carelessly ablaze with fires as the food-crazy liberatees roasted whole pigs.

The camp's primitive sewage disposal system which had previously been operated by the long-suffering Russian prisoners with cart-tankers hauled by oxen, had ceased to exist as from the day of liberation. Wells became polluted. The very air became foul and tainted with the odours of refuse, offal and decay.

The Russian prisoners, from whose compounds typhus epidemics had so often spread through the camp, were gone. Following some earthy peasant instinct they had started to walk home across Europe and, perhaps, half of Asia, to their homes in mother Russia. The roads stretching eastwards were littered with cast-off filthy rags of clothing, every garment of which had been stamped by the Germans with a big red "S" for Soviet. Like strange, grey, metallic autumn leaves, German-issued prisoner of war identity tags lay in the grass where the Russians had thrown them.

Sometimes you'd find laggard remnants of this primitive migration sleeping with their muddied boots on in the once-spotless beds of the comfortable farms or stirring great saucepans of steaming food while outside in the barns the former Aryan occupants sat, too dazed to be bitter. There were Britishers and Americans living like that too. With no post-liberation system of organization there was no alternative. We had ceased to be prisoners of war and were now very displaced persons.

As the area became denuded of live-stock and food it became necessary to go further and sleep where night found you. It was unpleasant if not dangerous to do this alone. One English boy, "Curly", walked into an apparently deserted farm and found it occupied by Nazi S.S. troops, armed and grimly waiting for the inevitable Cossack patrol. They let him go but only after the S.S. captain had explained that he assumed an immediate search would be made for "Curly" if he were missed.

One pleasant, drowsy afternoon I walked into a farmyard in search of eggs. The air was sweet with the scent of stacked hay. From the barn came the promising sound of fowls clucking and scuffling. But in the centre of the dung-stained, cobble-stone yard lay the body of a German civilian with green glinting blow-flies crawling on the upturned face. I didn't bother about the eggs; it was not so much the fact of the corpse as the dark silence of the barn in which I would have had to search alone.

In the Stalag a typhus epidemic threatened as a wave of hot weather brought swarms of flies to breed on the disrupted sanitation system and the growing heaps of carelessly dumped food waste.

Rumours came and went as did Russian officers who were prone to take over the camp with casual gusto, issue confusing and conflicting edicts, and then airily vanish westwards and southwards into the chaos of fast disintegrating Central Germany.

A Russian colonel said that the Americans are coming to truck us out. An American patrol in the village said that the British are going to fly us out from a temporary strip outside the wire. So went the rumours. But the days went by and the situation became more vague than ever. Groups gathered mournfully around the once-secret camp radio and found slight solace in the august, impersonal news bulletins of the B.B.C. in London.

The more enterprising struck out for England by the simple process of walking there. One party started off southwards to Dresden which, it was rumoured, the Americans had captured. But the Red Army was apparently still contesting ownership with the Wehrmacht because the hikers were enthusiastically dive-bombed and strafed by a roving Stormovik on the outskirts of the city. Another party reached the banks of the Elbe a few miles west of the camp only to find that the country on the other side was not occupied by the Americans, despite their historic link-up at Torgau a few days earlier with the Red Army several kilometres north along the river. In fact it harboured fanatical bands of Nazi S.S. trying to fight their way up to Berlin against the even more obstinate Red Army.

The diminishing amount of locally available food was at last augmented by the arrival of strictly rationed Russian bread, spongy and sour.

A British brigadier and an American colonel arrived in a jeep, delivered an enthusiastically received oration and then vanished whence they had come, leaving behind them a trail of fresh rumours and blighted hopes. An adventurous patrol jeep of the American Army bounced triumphantly into the camp and received the delirious plaudits of the impatient British and Americans before it, too, was swallowed UP again in the war which had briefly spawned it forth.

Out in the villages and deserted farms strange, bitter little battles were being fought by Indians, Serbs, Italians, Poles and ourselves for possession of victuals and shelter.

In Muhlberg, the neighbouring village, the Red Army units quartered there put away their looted schnapps bottles and established martial law but not before my partner had removed a sack of sugar and three dozen cans of condensed milk from a warehouse. We ate half the sugar in two days and consumed the milk in five.

One day the American contingent amongst us, on its own initiative, departed as an organized body for Torgau, fifteen miles down the Elbe, where they intended crossing into the American zone.

A Russian pilot in a wired and strutted biplane that looked like a left-over from World War I landed next morning outside the wire and disembarked an army nurse. Flushed with drink, and with one piece of glass missing from his flying goggles, he opened his throttle and took off into a gawking, seething mass of ex-prisoner European peasants and artisans who never before had been so close to an aeroplane. Miraculously, nobody was hurt and the Russian put on an aerial one-man rodeo such as Hollywood had never seen.

A few days later the Russians said that the British ex-prisoners had to move out of the area, and move we did with all the food we could carry on the twenty-mile walk up the Elbe to Riesa. When we arrived there we found the Americans who had so optimistically left the camp to cross the Elbe at Torgau. The former German army barracks allotted us by the Russians were already overcrowded so my particular sufferers in liberation found a flat. Or rather a Russian soldier found it for us by battering open the door with the butt of his rifle. I will never forget the expressions on the faces of the old janitor and his frau. The daughter's expression we did not see because she was hiding in the coal cellar.

In this town the Russians provided a diet on which it was possible to live and under the circumstances it was praiseworthy, but we found it necessary to make the usual excursions to farms out in the country.

As our flat had been vacated, apparently precipitately, by a Nazi party official and his family-including a son in the S.S.-we had no compunction in outfitting ourselves from the well-stocked wardrobes. For a week of glorious living we slept in clean linen and comfortable beds, cooked our daily scroungings in the bright snug kitchen and had our meals off the finest of china from near Dresden. This idyllic existence was shattered one morning at 2 a.m. when we were awakened by what appeared to be a small-scale war raging around us.

With thoughts of desperate S.S. unit fighting a rear-guard action through our part of the town we just lay on the floor near the wall and waited for the dawn. We listened to tank guns, hand-grenades and the inevitable Tommy guns racking the night. When day dawned we discovered that the uproar had been caused merely by the Red Army following Stalin's order to celebrate the just released news of VE-day by expending as much ammunition as happened to be available.

As the town was occupied by two Russian divisions completely armed for combat- an armoured division-the pseudo-war was the result. On second thoughts, though, it was not so pseudo because every round, whether from a tank, a flak gun or an automatic pistol, was live.

For the next week the once-placid German town was more like a gold-rush town in a Goldwyn epic featuring a gigantic cast of friendly but trigger-happy Russian extras. Not being adventurously inclined at this stage of the war to the point of appreciating the humour of hand-grenades being tossed out of upper windows into emergency water tanks in courtyards below, our little group decided to make a break for the American zone, although this was forbidden by the Russians.

Acquiring a Frenchman's hand-cart we piled it with clothing and food including a five-gallon can of jam removed from a warehouse, and began the fifty-mile trek to Leipzig through the refugee-cluttered countryside.

It was no dramatically conceived autobahn we tramped along, just an average bitumen road jammed with displaced persons, Russians and Poles heading east, and everybody else including Germans making their way westwards to the American and British zones.

From every window of every house in every village fluttered surrender tokens of sheets, napkins, table-cloths and white flags.

That night we commandeered a flat occupied by a hausfrau who wept continuously while her children laughed and played as children will. Hastily refusing her offer of a revolver for use if the Russians came during the night we parked the hand-cart on her hall carpet, as it would have been stolen had it been left outside till morning. She cheered up slightly next morning when we presented her with a quarter of a loaf of bread tinged with blue mould. She even waved good-bye.

The traffic thickened as we neared the zone demarcation line. A convoy of U.S. Army trucks passed us once. They were going to Riesa to repatriate all British and American personnel there. We learned later that, for some mysterious, bureaucratic reason, the Russian commander of the area refused permission for this and the trucks returned empty.

Most of the displaced persons, from grandparents down to grandchildren, were walking. Their entire possessions were piled precariously in wheelbarrows or small hand-carts. Some families travelled in comparative luxury in creaking oxen waggons. Groups of young men impatient for their first glimpse in five years of the sky-lines of their native Paris or Antwerp or Brussels rode bicycles that grated along on the bare wheel rims.

As we had been forbidden by the Russians to leave their zone we almost slunk down the steep narrow streets of Wurzen to the banks of the Mulde. Beyond lay the American zone with all the delights of "K" rations and cigarettes and, above all, people who spoke our own language and who would give us
priority in repatriation. Our hopes were blasted when the Russian sentry on the road bridge halted us. It appeared, however, that he merely wished to indicate that the bridge had been blown up and was unsafe and that it might be worth trying the less-efficiently destroyed railway bridge.

The helpful Ruski was quite right. The great viaduct sprawled across the river like an angular switchback railway. The German army engineers had done their best here to halt the Red Army. But the lower girders were black with displaced persons slowly moving east and west to their respective homelands. I joined a queue that wound up on the bridge and found myself between a Lyons-bound Frenchman who had been captured in the Maginot Line debacle and a German sailor who had never been to sea and was now walking from the Baltic to Cologne in the Rhineland, where he had last seen his family. (Later, while flying past devastated Cologne on my way to England, it occurred to me that the sailor would be more than lucky if he could identify even his home suburb, much less his house.)

As we had our hand-cart stacked with all our food and spare clothing and we still had a long walk to Leipzig we paused to consider how much gear we could carry across the wrecked bridge. Pondering thus, I heard above the babble of foreign curses and complaints a rich Texan voice enunciating: "Amurrican and British prisoners of war only-this way, this way." Looking up I found myself almost rubbing chins with a U.S. Army provost colonel. It appeared that there were trucks waiting on the other side of the river to collect and take all strays like ourselves into Leipzig. "You'd better git movin' buddy," drawled the colonel. We moved.

On the other side we found the trucks. Before we climbed into them we started to ration out the five gallons of jam to a group of Russians, Poles and Germans. But the convoy had to move, and us with it, so we left the can on the ground and shouted "Share it" in German. Before the trucks had started rolling, a struggling mob had surrounded the can with people crawling out from underneath each other with handfuls of the ersatz stuff and licking it as it oozed through their fingers.

They were the last displaced persons we ever saw.

Watching them as the trucks gathered speed we wondered briefly about their grim and hopeless destiny.

"They ain't seen nuthin' yet," commented a Canadian. "Wait till the snow comes. Yep, the snow."

GEOFF TAYLOR, R.A.A.F.

WET AS SCRUBBERS

WHICHEVER of the fighting services we did our time in, each had its share of "types", whose physical or mental abnormalities made them stand out from the rest.

When a bunch of ex-service men gather, almost invariably after the initial exchanges the conversation turns to: "I wonder what became of - - - ?" "Do you remember the time when - - - ? " And once again the adventures of the "types" are retold.

The Navy was rich in them. They were all "wet", defining "wet" kindly as "eccentric in behaviour".

I remember when the war was still a pup. In late '39 and early '40 it was still far away from Australia and pleasure craft-yachts, motor launches, dinghies and canoes-were thick on Sydney Harbour during fine weekends.

His Majesty's Australian Ships swinging at their buoys attracted the smaller craft, which revolved around each warship like moths around a lamp.

The duty watch leaned on the rails and ran connoisseur's eyes over the shapely limbs of the young lasses reclining carelessly in the pleasure boats.

Most came within a boat hook's length of the towering grey steel sides of the cruisers, where the rows of open scuttles of the main and lower decks invited a look inside. When the little ships were thickest, Mammie put on his act.

Suddenly a flour-whitened face with dishevelled hair and staring eyes appeared at one of the scuttles.

"Help! Help!" screamed Mammie. "You've got to help me! I can't stand it any more. They're killing me. Help!"

Then a pair of hands belonging to Mammie's supporting player came into view grabbing Mammie round the neck.

"Aaaaaaaah! " screeched Mammie, putting everything he had into a blood-curdling yell as, seeming to struggle frantically, he was dragged back into the gloom of the cruiser's interior.

But that wasn't all. The climax, beautifully timed, came in the shape of Mammie's hand, which appeared at the scuttle as if imploring aid, then the fingers closed slowly on the rim of the scuttle, stayed there a moment, and slid from sight.

The act really wowed 'em. Giggles and small talk on the little craft stopped as if turned off with the flick of a switch. Goggle eyed girls and gulping youths stared horrorstruck while the dreadful scene was played out.

As soon as the climax came the yachts and motor boats who witnessed it, shot away from the cruiser as if jet-propelled. On a good afternoon Mammie put on his act half a dozen times, always with the same devastating effect.

If the powers that be only knew it, Mammie's little performance was the best anti-naval recruiting propaganda ever devised, and I'm willing to bet that not many of those sunburned youths in their little boats believed a word on the posters that implored them to "Enlist Now" for an adventurous war in the Senior Service.

Nobby was another "wet" type whose act, like Mammie's, needed an audience to keep it alive. When it was decreed that ships could no longer be open to visitors because of the war-time ban, Nobby's act died, but it is still affectionately remembered.

His stage was the flag-deck and the Signal Distributing Office which looked on to it. When the ship was opened to visitors on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, Nobby waited until a sufficiently large group had congregated on the flag-deck.

At appropriate moments Nobby, with a handful of paper torn from a signal pad, rushed out of the S.D.O. door, grabbed the handles of the mechanical semaphore arms or

a pair of hand flags, and spelled out a lot of gibberish at a very fast speed. Then, dropping everything, he scuttled back into the S.D.O., leaving a party of open-mouthed civilians deeply impressed at having seen the Navy sending signals.

If the situation warranted it and he felt he had his audience "with" him, Nobby Lave his encore. It was known as the "S.D.0- lift routine".

The S.D.O. was part of the bridge superstructure and was shut by a sliding door. With the door closed and the deadlight down, it was completely dark inside. Hard by the door inside was a handle which controlled the pneumatic tube for carrying signals to and from the Alain W/T Office below.

While the visitors clustered round the flag deck, Nobby slid back the door and said in a professional lift-driver's monotone: "S.D.O. lift going down. Stopping all decks to the bilges. Any more going down?"

Naturally enough the visitors always crowded in through the invitingly open door.

"That's the limit," said Nobby, sliding the door to. "Take you down next trip."

With the door closed and the place in darkness, Nobby pushed the handle over, and there came a loud pumping sound from the tube.

"Main-deck, galley, sick bay, chief and petty officers' messes, foretop and fo'c'sle mess decks, canteen and chain locker. Aft to wardroom galley, officers' cabins, wardroom and aft-deck sentry."

Shutting off the pumping noise with the handle, Nobby slid the door open and stood back. The eager visitors, surging out with much excited chatter, found themselves in bright daylight-still on the flag-deck.

While it was still dawning on them that they had been well and truly "had", Nobby, straight-faced and solemn, intoned: "Going up. Chart-house, wheel-house, port and starboard lower bridges; plotting room, fore-bridge and crow's-nest."

Perhaps Mammie and Nobby were "wet" as wet as scrubbers-but it was all harmless fun. There must have been scores more like them, each with his own specialty.

Old John, for example. He was a hypochondriac who sacrificed half his kit to make room for the dozens of bottles of pills and potions which filled his locker. The Service ruled John's life, even on the few occasions he was home. His large family was organized into red, white and blue watches, and every day of John's leave he posted up a watch bill with each child's duties detailed for the next twenty-four hours.

His eldest daughter worried him. "Not a bit like other kids. Never goes ashore when she has a make and mend. Stays aboard in the W/T office and works routines until they shut down!" Translating, John's daughter preferred staying inside the house listening to the wireless instead of joining the other children at playtime. John's whole speech was couched in naval terms. Even a potato boiled in its jacket was "a spud in tropical rig".

John was never seen without his cap and boots. He wore them everywhere. To see him climb out of his hammock to go on watch was an experience seldom eclipsed.

The gaunt figure clad in "slops" pyjamas hit the deck. On went the cap and boots, then over to his locker for a session with the pills and potions. Followed the clinking of medicine glasses, gargles, grunts and swallows. Then John dressed and went on watch.

Leo was yet another type. He was short and powerfully built, hairy of chest and arm, with a bald head fringed with bright red hair that stuck out stiffly at either side. It gave him the appearance of an over-sized and sandy koala bear.

From ship to ship, or ship to shore base, Leo always took his Indian clubs, false whiskers and collapsible opera hat.

There was Clarrie, who owned only one blue serge suit at a time. When the bottoms of his trousers began to fray, he trimmed the ragged edges with a pair of scissors. Slowly but inevitably, with repeated trimmings, the length of his trousers decreased.

When at last the officer of the watch made pointed remarks about his half-mast pants, Clarrie bought a new suit and threw the old one away, and the cycle started again.

There was Harold who barked like a dog without provocation at all sorts of odd times; Sam and Arthur, inseparables who played cowboys and Indians through the mess decks at sea, each armed with a loaded water-pistol.

Where are they all now? Some, I know, are dead. Mammie went down in H.M.A.S. Parramatta. Arthur was drafted to Sydney on the day she sailed for her last voyage. Some are still in the Navy.

Some, like myself, are "outside". But where ever they are and whatever they are doing, you can bet your bottom dollar they are putting on the act-still "as wet as scrubbers".

GEOFF WAYE, R.A.N.