THE Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes hung like coloured victory bunting over the grim spiked gateway to Stalag' 357. They had hung like that for four days, ever since Churchill tanks of the 8th Hussars, 7th Armoured Division, had churned up the miserable grey Hanoverian earth and plunged triumphantly through on to prison soil.
There had been a battle along the Aller. At Stalag 357 the British and American prisoners
knew it. It was no great surprise, then, when they heard the crash of heavy guns, and, delightedly, the stutter of
small-arms fire and saw German equipment and refugees begin to stream back along the road past the barbed wire.
Lined along the spiked enclosure fences, nearer than they had before dared to go on pain of death, elated P.O.Ws watched the final short sharp skirmish for Fallingbostel village. It was easy meat for the tanks and then the culminating moment came-a tank plunged through the entrance of Stalag 357, a crowd of ex-P.O.Ws surrounded it in a shouting, milling, cheering mob, a couple of Hussars bobbed up in grinning acknowledgment, and time began again for several thousand Allied soldiers and airmen.
"It was a few minutes after 9 a.m. on April 16," said Warrant-Officer Jack Connelly, a Mosman (N.S.W.) schoolteacher, when the first Australians from outside drove in a few days later. He and several hundred Australians were still there, with hundreds of Allied
ex-P.O.Ws, awaiting transport back to England. "'None of us will ever forget the time or the
date." he continued. "We lined the fences and cheered and yelled like a football crowd. I'd
often tried to figure out how it would come, but I never imagined it would be like that. I bet
£24 that our armies would be 6o miles east of the Rhine by the end of March. I guess I won that bet, but I didn't think they'd have us out so quickly."
The visitors had driven all the afternoon over bad roads through flat, sandy,
poor looking Hanoverian countryside which had the patchy imprint of recent war. There were fresh graves by the roadside, British berets and German steel helmets hanging grimly from clean new wood crosses. Abandoned petrol
jerry cans and ammunition cases littered the fields where tank tracks made a fantastic
criss-cross pattern across young crops or grey ploughed fields. Already villagers were at work, here a man ploughing across the tank tracks, there a woman trying to hoe them over, children behind ploughs and harrows, women and girls planting potatoes. The prison camp was on a bleak upland amidst scrubby fir woods, in summer a hot and dusty waste, in winter a windswept sea of mud.
Stalag 357 was typical in its drab inhospitality of hundreds of other prison camps scattered throughout Germany at this time, some liberated, others waiting for liberation, and the stories told there were typical of hundreds of similar stories that could have been told by the men set free by the tide of Allied victory, whether flowing in from the east or the west. Originally, most of the prisoners had been British and American, but the disorganization caused by the rapid Allied advances inside Germany had led to the utmost confusion. Prisoners were marched out and prisoners were marched in, and by the
time the British armour arrived, Stalag 357, where most of the remaining Australians were, had a mixed and picturesque population of many nationalities, including Russians and Poles.
With the sound of artillery as a rumbling background the Australian ex-P.O.Ws spent the first few nights of their liberation waiting for repatriation. Most of them had moved to what had been the administrative quarters of the camp, but were still sleeping on P.O.W. beds, wooden tier arrangements with slats across, and straw palliasses. Their blankets, however, were good British issue and not the inadequate ersatz German coverings, and their rations for the first time in many months actually satisfied their hunger.
They had moved from dark, brick, barn-like dormitories, which had housed over seventy to a hut , warmed by inadequate wood stoves which the prisoners had to fuel themselves. Under
so-called reprisals they had for nearly six months been deprived of all but six of the wooden bed slats, nor were they allowed straw palliasses, tables or stools. In addition, the library was closed, and all organized entertainments were banned. Their food, for the last couple of months, had consisted of two bowls of thin swede-and-potato soup a day, two or three slices of black bread, and a little ersatz coffee.
This is the story of Stalag 357 as it affected the lives of several Australians and a Canadian. There were plenty of others who could have told equally adventurous tales. Most of them even at that early stage of their freedom were bright, alert, remarkably resilient considering the privations they had suffered and despite their great fear that somehow the life of a "kriegie" (from the German "kriegsfangener", meaning prisoner of war) had affected their outlook and that in some
indefinable way they were not as other people. The fear that they might not be able to adjust themselves
to normal life was persistent with many ex-P.O.Ws. A few weeks under the excellent care organized for them at the R.A.A.F. reception camp at Brighton usually changed their outlook entirely. Their physical appearance, too, underwent a remarkable change. Jack Connelly, for instance, increased his weight from
10 stone 8½ pounds to 12 stone 4 pounds after one week in England.
Warrant-Officer Jack M. Stephenson, of Camberwell (V.), was shot down in May 1942. An Me.110
raked his bomber down the right-hand side from behind. The pilot was badly hit, but stuck to the controls long enough for the others to get out. Stephenson was captured and shifted about various prison
camps in Germany before he arrived at Stalag 357 about nine months before the liberation. In that time he had experienced pretty well every degree of prison treatment except extreme physical brutality.
"The average Jerry guard wasn't too bad," he said. "They were all mostly older men, weary of the war, ready to do little things for us if suitably rewarded with cigarettes, but frightened to death of their officers. The guards we had at the Stalag Luft (a P.O.W. camp for Air Force personnel only) were the worst we had; they pounced on us for anything."
The routine of life in the Stalag was left largely to the prisoners themselves, except that the Gestapo had periodical parades when they ransacked the prisoners' quarters and possessions, looking for secret wireless sets and forbidden literature, taking whatever they fancied. While this was going on the prisoners were kept standing in the open, often in bitter cold.
Despite their periodical Gestapo blitzes and the presence of "ferrets" (guards whose job it was to roam around the barracks spying on the prisoners) the kriegies kept in touch with the outside world and followed the progress of the war through B.B.C. broadcasts. Minute wireless sets were made by the technically clever and concealed in places the
ex-P.O.Ws are still reluctant to talk about as they may be useful to prisoners of war at other places and in other times.
Conditions at Stalag 357 were reasonably good by German prison camp standards until the middle of January 1945. Then the authorities introduced what they called "reprisals" for the alleged conditions in a German P.O.W. camp in Egypt. Prisoners, however, noted that the bad conditions
coincided with news of a big Russian break-through on the Eastern front. Besides removing bed boards and tightening up discipline, the Commandant stopped all organized entertainment and closed
the library. Before that the P.O.Ws had put on plays, arranged gramophone record symphony concerts and organized other forms of amusement. Many of them, too, had been doing more serious study than ever before.
On March 5, following the other reprisal measures, the prison rations were cut by 20 per cent. The official allowance before the cuts was meagre enough. Flight-Sergeant A. G. Davison, of Mosman (N.S.W.), kept a note of it.
- Here it is:
- 535 grammes of potatoes a day (this was reduced to 340 grammes);
- 3.7 pounds of fresh vegetables a week;
- 6 ounces of dried vegetables a week;
- 2.4 ounces of cooking fat a week;
- 2.6 ounces of rye flour a week;
- 4.2 ounces of fresh meat a week;
- 2.6 ounces of dried peas a week;
- 2.6 ounces of millet a week;
- 300 grammes of bread a day;
- 5 ounces of margarine a week;
- 4.7 ounces of ersatz coffee a week;
- 2 ounces of salt a week;
- 6. 1 ounces of sugar a week;
- 6.1 ounces of jam a week;
- 1.1 ounces of cheese a week;
- 4. 16 ounces of sausage a week.
"This was poor enough, even if we got it all," Davison said. "If it hadn't been for Red Cross parcels we couldn't have lived on the food provided. On March ~, for instance, the bread was cut from
1,800 grammes a loaf to 1,500 grammes and we were allowed one seventh of a loaf on six days a week and one-eighth of a loaf on the seventh day. All the other food was cut
by 20 per cent. And, at this time, Red Cross 'parcels were so infrequent, because of transport difficulties, that we had hardly anything, sometimes nothing, to supplement the official ration."
Close friend of the Australians in Stalag 357 was a Canadian soldier, Sergeant R. J. Duncan, of Windsor, Ontario, who had experienced the extremes of Nazi brutality as well as the privation of short rations and the discomfort of hard living conditions. Taken prisoner after the Dieppe raid in August 1942, he was among the Canadians shackled by the Germans in reprisal for an alleged Allied order for the binding of German P.O.Ws taken in the raid.
"We were paraded, told what it was supposed to be all about, and then some young S.S. troopers bound our hands with cord in front of us," he said. "We were supposed to stay like that twenty-four hours a day but
about 2 a.m. on the first morning we were awakened and told that by the special clemency of the German Government we would be untied at night. After that, for two months, our hands were tied between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. At meal times we helped each other, one man holding the bread with his two hands, for instance, and another using two hands to cut it.
"After two months of that we were put in chains. That sounds worse but, actually, it was easier, because the chains were linked between iron bracelets and we had some freedom of movement. After a time the whole thing became purely formal. The chains were put on every morning, but we soon found how to take them off promptly by using a nail file or a piece of wire. Consequently, as soon as they were put on we had them off again. Although the guards could see us about the compound without the chains nobody ever did anything about it. In all, that sort of thing went on for a year."
On April 16, ten days before Stalag 357 was liberated, the Germans began to move the British prisoners east, marching them out in drafts of about 1500. Several of these drafts were marched back again before the liberation, but others were scattered about the countryside for days before linking up with Allied reception depots. Right up to VE-day some Australian ex-P.O.Ws were living a nomadic or semi-nomadic life in Germany in requisitioned cars, with Allied military units or at various sorts of transit camps. Those who were in Stalags when these were liberated, however, were soon provided for by the excellent ex-P.O.W. reception and dispatch organization and from the beginning of the Allied advance until after VE-day a steady stream of ex-P.O.Ws was flowing back to England, mostly by air.
Jack Stephenson was with one of the earlier parties but escaped, spent six days in the woods, was recaptured by S.S. guards on the front line and sent back to the prison camp in time to welcome the British forces. "We started to march about 6 p.m. and I broke column about 9.30 p.m. and hid in the woods," he said. "It wasn't very difficult to do, as the guards were pretty apathetic. In the woods I met another Australian, Flight-Sergeant V. W.
Dellit, of Brisbane (Q.), and we were together for six days, keeping under cover by day, moving about at night.
On the sixth day we found ourselves between the British an~ the German lines, with tanks on both sides shooting over our heads. We were scared that we'd be caught in the British barrage or, if we moved at night, that a guard would shoot us. Then a couple of S.S. men saw us right on the front line and took us in charge. We had one scary few seconds when they told us to walk towards a hole which was just big enough for two bodies and we heard their
rifle bolts click behind us. But it was only their idea of fun and they took us to frontline headquarters from where we were sent back to the prison
camp."
Warrant-Officer Bernard Lewis, of South Brisbane (Q.), marched from Pomerania to Stalag 357 and half-way back again before being released at a small village of Zarrentin on the Elbe just before the capitulation of the German armies in north-western Europe to Field-Marshal Montgomery's 21st Army Group. Lewis was shot down in July 1943, returning in a Wellington to his base in North Africa after a bombing raid on Naples. "One engine failed and we had to ditch," Lewis said. "We were in the dinghy for a day and were picked up by the Italian navy off the shores of Sicily. We were prisoners in Italy for three months and, when the Italians capitulated, we were moved into Germany by train. While the train was at a station near the Czechoslovakian border some of us made a bolt for it and were in the forest for two days before being recaptured. We lived on a few large Italian biscuits and raw potatoes."
After three weeks living on bread and water Lewis was eventually. shifted to Stalag Luft 6 in East Prussia and kept there until the Russian push in July 1944, when he was shifted with other prisoners into Pomerania, first by train to Memel, then by boat to Swinemunde and finally by train to Stalag Luft 4, in Pomerania. "There they let us loose to run
the gauntlet from the station to the camp through lines of young marines who chased us along with prods from their bayonets and set police dogs at our heels. We were chained together in pairs to prevent escape while travelling.
One chap had forty-two nicks, scratches and minor wounds as a result of this treatment. As soon as we arrived at the camp we were stripped, searched and everything we had was taken from us. It was a bad camp, even by
German standards, but clean, which was a help."
When the Russian advances continued, the prisoners were marched out of the camp and
for the next three months they were on the road, sleeping in barns, sheds, or disused
factories, living on totally inadequate rations, or on what they could scrounge from the
German civilians. They averaged 12 or 14 miles a day, but in one forced march they covered
35 miles. The sick were expected to march with the well. On one occasion a
barn in which they were resting was strafed by R.A.F. aircraft and two of the prisoners were
killed. They were at Stalag 357 when news of the rapid British advance came through.
It meant the road again for most of them, and Lewis was among one of the early
1,500 prisoner drafts to leave Fallingbostel heading back along the roads he had come only a few
days before.
"It was a rest day when the British caught up with us," he said. "We were just messing about in the little village of Zarrentin
cooking some stuff we'd scrounged, when a couple of armoured cars arrived. There was no fighting that we saw. At one minute we were prisoners on the march, and the next, everyone in the village was hanging out white flags. There were about
1,400 of us at Zarrentin when we were liberated. It was May 2, and, with several other Australians, including an old school friend, Warrant-Officer Bernard G. Mulcahy, a Spitfire pilot from Nanango, Queensland, we made our way to an ex-P.O.W. camp near Lauenburg to await repatriation.
Forward troops who liberated P.O.Ws in this manner had no means of sending them
back to transit centres. In the case of Stalag 357 the liberated prisoners were told to stay
where they were and the Army soon had an organization to look after them and arrange
repatriation. Armoured spearheads, however, could do nothing but show the ex-P.O.Ws the
way to the nearest centre, give them some
rations and send them on their way. Lewis, Mulcahy and their fellow Australians had no
intention of walking. Armed with a Tommy gun they stopped the first German staff car they saw, ordered the officers to get out and drove off themselves towards Lauenburg.
At this time the battle front was in a process of
disintegration. Whole divisions of the German army were giving themselves up and at times the roads presented a comic-opera spectacle of released P.O.Ws, civilian refugees moving west from the advancing Russians, wandering dispossessed persons (mostly slave workers of various nationalities) and German soldiers mixed up in indescribable confusion with American jeeps and British
transport doing their drivers' best to dodge through the crowds.
From the Stalags and transit depots the ex-P.0.W's were regularly shifted to airfields and flown straight to British reception camps. By the middle of May most of the released men were in England. R.A.F. Bomber Command shifted nearly
60,000 between April 26 and May 16, and Dakotas of Transport Command carried 35,000
in the same period. Plans for this work were completed six months before the war ended. In theory, the transporting of prisoners had seemed relatively
easy, but the Continental airfields were in a worse state than had been expected.
In many cases the Germans had been thorough in their demolitions, and even where the strips had been repaired the heavy and constant
traffic involved in ex-P.O.W. transport soon wore through the new surfaces. Consequently, there were a number of minor accidents, which caused unforeseen delays. On one occasion an urgent message was received for twenty-four
spare wheels. Within an hour or two of these arriving twenty of them had been used.
Some R.A.A.F. ex-P.O.Ws and evaders got back to England through Odessa, after being released by the Russian advance into Germany. One of the evaders was Flight-Lieutenant A. H. Hammet, D.F.M., a wireless air gunner from Mildura (V.). He was shot down on the night of August 17, 1944, on his way back from a supply-dropping mission to Warsaw from Foggia, in Italy. That night
the R.A.F. lost eighty-seven aircraft of the smallish force sent out. To supply the
hard pressed Polish Home Army fighting in Warsaw, the R.A.F. Liberators had to go in at under 200 feet at a speed of
150 miles an hour to drop their supplies on an aiming point indicated by lights in the form of a cross of Lorraine. Hammet's Liberator was shot down by a German night fighter about
20 miles South-cast of Krakow.
"I was in the wireless cabin and saw nothing," Hammet said. "All I know is that the aircraft was suddenly riddled with bullets and set on fire. The pilot ordered everyone to bale out. I was hit in the hand, arm, leg and right side, but managed to leave the blazing bomber safely and came down without further injuries in a potato field. The only other Australian in the crew, Squadron-Leader L. Liversidge, of Melbourne (V.), was killed. Immediately I landed I scratched a hole in the ground and half-buried the parachute, heaping potatoes over the spot."
Hammet's arm and leg wounds were superficial, but the bullet wound in his side was fairly painful. Nevertheless, he kept moving all that
night and for the next two days and nights, travelling north-west and hoping to get into liberated Poland. He kept himself going by eating raw potatoes and fruit.
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Finally, he sought help at a large farm-house and, although none of the people there spoke English or French, he managed to make himself understood. They tore up a sheet and dressed his wounds, besides giving him food and drink.
Then two Red Cross nurses took him to a Polish partisan doctor who was hiding in a nearby forest. Here his wounds were dressed and he was given an anti-tetanus injection. |
During the following two weeks Hammet moved continuously from village to
village hidden in horse-drawn waggons covered with hay, staying each night in a different peasant hut and using a different waggon each day for his journey. Throughout, the Polish peasants were extremely helpful and kind. As he lay hidden in their cottages
many visitors came to see him. Often they brought presents of flowers or cigarettes. On many occasions, too, he saw groups of German soldiers, and was even hiding in a village when the local German authorities made a check-up to discover if there were any escapees of the many British bombers shot down, but they failed to locate Hammet.
"All this time my wounds were healing, but the continuous moving was pretty exhausting," Hammet said. "Finally, I was taken to a Polish partisan group in a forest and there I was able to stay quietly in bed for twenty days, after which I was fit to move around. The group I had Joined consisted of about 200men and women living in forest huts some 40 or 50 miles north of
Krakow. They were armed with a small supply of weapons dropped by the R.A.F. and with anything they could capture from the Germans, mainly machine guns, grenades and rifles."
Hammet became a fighting member of the group and began his partisan services with a lot of unwilling drill. Then he took part in night patrols and guard duties and finally in bigger raids. He was given a forged identity card which stated that his name was Stefan Erbee and that he was a deaf mute. He also had a forged letter purporting to come from the Gestapo Chief at
Krakow saying that he had been involved in a serious road accident, which deprived him of his speech and hearing. Finally he was given a card saying that he was a railway photographer-a job entitling him to free travel on the railways-and a German labour card to go with it. Although the entries were all forged, the cards themselves were genuine, stolen from the German authorities by the Poles.
"One of the first partisan raids I did was on an alcohol convoy moving from the local alcohol factory into Germany," Hammet said. "The partisans ambushed the convoy, hurtling hand grenades in among the escort, killing or demoralizing them, then disarmed and stripped the survivors (the German clothes were of immense value to the group for disguises) and drove the alcohol vats into the forest. These alcohol raids were very popular with the partisans, who were thirsty people. They drank the alcohol in a mixture of sugar and crushed fruit, which was very good. Owing to the
complete unity of the Polish attitude to the Germans the partisans always had all the information necessary for timing their raids."
During his month in the forest Hammet made several sorties behind the German lines to see if there was any way of crossing safely to the Russians. Eventually, however, he decided it was hopeless and planned to make his way north in the hope of getting into Sweden. He had heard that an Australian fighter pilot and an Englishwoman were doing magnificent work in Warsaw and decided to make this city his first objective. Provided with new identity cards and travelling by horse and waggon he got within fives miles of Warsaw and then hid in a room just outside the city and waited, but the state of insurrection there made it impossible to get inside, so he returned to the partisan camp in the forest.
"On my return I found two other Britishers with the group, English privates who had escaped from a P.O.W. camp," Hammet said. "The three of us worked out a plan for
crossing to the Russian lines and early one night set out with a patrol from the partisan group. We rode
40 kilometres then joined up with a party of Polish workmen conscripted to dig trenches at the German front. Moving forward with these men we got within 50 yards of the German positions, but were held up at a river where there was a sentry. To pass the sentry would have meant showing identity cards and my two companions had only makeshift forgeries which would have been worse than useless. We went back into the woods, intending to attempt a crossing at night without passes. When darkness fell we tried to slip across but were seen by the sentries, who fired into the trees after us."
Returning to the partisan group Hammet and the two Englishmen became active fighters again and took part in their biggest engagement, a reprisal raid by the Germans to punish the Poles for shooting down a Fieseler-Storch reconnaissance plane sent out to find a radio transmitter which the partisans were operating in the forest. The Storch came over the camp at tree-top height and was shot down by an amazing volley from every sort of small arms the Poles possessed. A vicious reprisal raid nearly always followed any such particular success on the part of the partisans.
These reprisals were usually carried out by Ukrainians fighting
with the Germans.
"On this occasion the Ukrainians descended on the district about two o'clock and violent fighting went on for two hours," Hammet said. "Partisans from another group joined ours and we discovered later that there were five Englishmen among them. Two of the Englishmen and six partisans were killed. The partisans continued their raids even after this and we generally took part. Both the Englishmen were
magnificent fighters and one must have accounted for about eighty Germans."
At this time the Germans, desperate for man-power, were going through Poland conscripting Poles for all sorts of war service. To stop this, an agreement was reached between the partisans and the
Germans. The partisans agreed not to interfere with the occupation if the Germans left the Poles alone. During this time there were
several fights between the partisans and parties of stray Poles, and others known to the district as "bandits", who raided the homes of wealthy Polish landowners and ransacked them for anything of value. The partisans tried to protect the landowners and fighting frequently flared up. The Poles, however, were so united against the Germans that the landowners never called on the
German authorities to protect them.
"About the end of January 1945 the Russians reached the district and we three Britishers started on our way home," said Hammet. "We were walked under Russian escort to Russian Brigade Headquarters at Zloty,
40 kilometres away. Here we picked up two more Englishmen and moved to Miechow, still on foot, although it was 30 degrees below zero. From Miechow, we walked to Silesia and from there some 14o kilometres north to Czenstchow, a big town in Poland. I was in Czenstchow about a month during which the British Mission in Moscow put me in command of the escaped Allied troops released from
prisoner of-war camps. Gradually about 800 men gathered in the town and it was a strenuous job looking after them. The Russians were friendly and anxious to help, but had nothing, and, to save ourselves from starving, we were obliged to billet men on Polish householders. Thanks to the kindness of these Poles our troops were kept going. Finally, we travelled by truck to
Krakow and from there moved in cattle trucks to Odessa en route for home."
FLIGHT-LIEUTENANT NORMAN BARTLETT |
