Ersatz Krieg: A True Story of Men Captured, But Not Conquered

By Alban Snape

'Ersatz Krieg'. The true story of Alban Snape, aged just 18 he was taken prisoner whilst on a scouting mission soon after the Normandy Landings in June 1944. This 'Churchill gangster' was transported to Stalag VIIIC in Poland and sent to work for the Germans in a sugar factory. The story tells of Alban's attempted escape, the sabotage of the sugar factory and the long march west that followed. For five months they were marched and starved with the harsh central European winter as the backdrop to this epic tale. This book gives a dramatic insight to the tyranny and horror that was Nazi Germany, where a single Red Cross parcel was worth killing for and where men fought a continual struggle to stave off death from a plethora of causes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alban Snape
• Release date: Oct 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465788948

Book preview

ERSATZ KRIEG

A TRUE STORY OF MEN CAPTURED, BUT NOT CONQUERED

ALBAN SNAPE

co-written by BENJAMIN CANN

Written 1990, Updated 2011, 2013

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 R Snape

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Foreword

This is an epic tale of one man’s experiences during his time spent as a prisoner of war. It takes you from the Normandy Landings in June 1944 to the prison camps of Germany and Poland and tells of the bitter struggle of this man and his fellow prisoners to survive the long, cold central European winter of 1945.

I can relate to his story, as I was a prisoner of war myself for a long period. Many stories have been written about prisoners of war, they have been varied and have been largely glamorised for the consumption of the public. This is a stark story of a prisoner of war who experienced the hunger, cold and psychological battering of the Long or Black March as it was so aptly called. The march started in mid-winter, January 1945 in temperatures between 15 and 30 degrees below freezing and ending in the spring of 1945 only a few days prior to the end of the war in Europe. Many of our comrades fell by the wayside suffering from lack of food, dysentery, frostbite and the extinguishment of their human spirit. Many prisoners of war were injured and killed by German soldiers in cold blood or by Allied air power in the confusion of battle in the last desperate months of the Third Reich; we who survived still take time to remember them all from time to time.

Apart from the authors own particular experiences concerning the time he spent in captivity working in a sugar factory, (and the incidents which he and others in the group were involved in) all of us who survived can relate to the authors description of the Black March. All one has to do is multiply the numbers, from the many stalags and working parties in eastern Europe the prisoners of war were marched away from the Russian front as the Red army’s relentless advance overran Poland in the winter of 1944-45. I am led to understand that under the Geneva Convention all prisoners of war must be moved away from the active front, but in hindsight it was likely many of the POW lives could have been saved had the Germans let the Russians take over the stalags and camps. A number of prisoners escaped from the columns with the aid of Polish partisans and made it to the Russian lines to be sent home via the port of Odessa on the Black sea.

The route taken by the author was one of many that zigzagged and weaved its way across Eastern Europe in those desperate and bleak times. Some columns followed the battle coast from Danzig, others through Poland to Czechoslovakia or into Germany. All prisoners on the march suffered without exception but it was worse to be witness to the awful, cruel treatment dealt out to the groups of Jews and Russian prisoners which the author so vividly and chillingly describes. It was ironical to all prisoners of war that the emblem on the buckle of the Wehrmacht soldier read God with us. One wonders how to explain who was right or who was wrong when all nations went to church and prayed to God. One should read this book and bear in mind that this was one more episode in the example of the cruelty and brutality that was the Second World War.

On behalf of all those prisoners of war that I contacted during my captivity and those I have met since, I wish to give thanks to the British and International Red Cross which sent out some 20 million parcels during the conflict without the receipt of which thousands more prisoners may have died.

My hope is that the present generation and those of the future will read this book and realise that the glory of war is a fiction and should be read as gory and to remember that there will always be as much suffering away from the war zone as on it.

Many people say forget the things that happened during the past two world wars, but I cannot and do not consider it wise for anybody to forget. The generation that forgets will make the same errors that we made in our time and the results will be still more horrific than ever before. To forgive is another matter and must remain up to the judgement of the individual.

Frederick John Barrett

Ex-Gunner 51st Anti-Tank Regt

POW No. 18113

(Chairman Ex-POW Postal Club)

Preface

In August 1944 a contingent of POWs from Stalag VIIIC near Sagan, Germany (now Zagan, Poland) were dispatched as a working party to a sugar factory at Maltsch near Breslau, I was one of them.

Dubbed Churchill’s Gangsters by the German guards our treatment was particularly brutal and the food was barely at subsistence levels. In the sugar factory, Polish slave labour on short reprieve from their inevitable fate at nearby concentration camps allied themselves with us in a retaliation campaign of sabotage, injury and death of the German guards. They assisted two of us to escape and ultimately in the destruction of the factory.

During the retaliation one POW was thrown from a first floor landing by the guards and his back broken, we hit back immediately by adding oil, grease and paint to the guard’s soup vat (two POWs worked in the cookhouse) in consequence the whole guard contingent were put out of action and replaced with Volkssturm (Home Guard). Laboratory samples were doctored with urine, sauerkraut and Polish jam, we drowned one German guard in the syrup steam vats and put another to death by tipping a barrow of red hot ash over him and others perished in the burning down of the factory.

On 1st January 1945 we were marched out just ahead of the Russian bombing and shelling into arctic weather conditions, poorly clad and with no provisions. The experiences on the Long March which lasted four and a half months and ended at Fallingbostel are many; we were forced into wandering many miles over the same route, refused entry into Stalags everywhere, exposed to bombing, shelling and machine gunning from Russian and Allied forces continuously. Casualties were heavy and acute, frostbite added to them as we slept in the snow or in deserted hay barns, frequently going unfed for days and with no medical facilities, regardless we still retaliated.

The blackness of starvation, cruelty of the climate and the atrocities practiced by the German guards were marched off by the unyielding determination of POW other ranks. Many of these exploits of survival in extreme circumstances are recalled in tribute to those who fell unnecessarily by bomb, bullet, frostbite or starvation.

Alban Snape

POW No. 70033

Chapter 1

As I returned to consciousness, the pain in my body began to seep through to my brain again. Looking around I saw the rest of my patrol. I was lying down on a hard and uneven bed of potatoes. There were other prisoners, about a dozen altogether and most of them were unfamiliar to me. The shrapnel wounds in my right thigh and left elbow had not been tended to. I then began to recall the events that had led up to my capture in the Normandy Bocage country, and thus how I came to be in this French farmhouse I now found myself in.

It was clear in my mind as I regained full consciousness that the first two days of the Normandy landings has been a very touch and go affair. The foothold won by the invading allied armies around the five invasion beaches of Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Utah has been precarious; the success of the landings had long been in doubt. To quote the Duke of Wellington, it had been A damn close run thing. The German defences, latterly strengthened in the Normandy area on the orders of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, had a depth of at least twenty miles from the beachhead. The Germans had made every advantageous use of the difficult orchard country of Calvados in the construction of their defensive strategy.

In the British sector, the wisdom of using a spearhead of experienced Divisions proved to be sound, although all involved realised that the invasion was something of a gamble. The 7th Armoured Division, the 51st Highland Division and the 50th Tyne-Tees Divisions, had fought under Montgomery and others as part of the Eighth Army in North Africa, and had crushed Rommel’s Africa Korps in that theatre. More recently they had been part of the amphibious assaults on Sicily and Italy. We had been pulled out of Italy and brought back to England, and under Montgomery’s command had been re-formed into 30 (XXX) Corps. I was in the 1st Battalion of the Rifle Brigade; part of the 7th Armoured Division. The forces had been re-equipped for the purpose of leading the British landings to gain a foothold in Normandy and to permit a massive build up of second front forces, whose role was to then break out and overwhelm the Germans in a general advance through France and on into Germany itself.

Lying on the potatoes in the farmhouse I recalled how I had felt as the Landing Craft neared the French coast. I felt only that I was following in my father’s footsteps, for he too had fought in France during the First World War. I was in the same Regiment as well; I even carried the same weapon, the short Lee Enfield rifle. My role was to be a scout, coming from a farming family I was used to woods, fields, hedgerows and all the natural countryside pursuits. These natural instincts were to serve me well. I was reasonably confident in my role as first scout, I didn’t need to see danger I relied on my inbred instincts. I could move around day or night, providing that I didn’t yield to impulse. I find it difficult to explain, perhaps only a blind man would fully understand movement by instinct, although others with perfectly good vision must, I imagine, have similar instincts too.

A typical example of this instinct in action was when I was scouting ahead of a fighting patrol at Villiers Bocage. I entered what appeared to be a deserted farmyard; my instincts registered nothing hostile until I passed a low doorway under the granary steps. I stopped and listened very patiently, there were no sounds, but my mind and senses knew that something was in there. I threw in a grenade and was greeted after the explosion by a blizzard of duck feathers, it was a duck cote, and inside were two dead German soldiers complete with field telephone. I assumed that where there had been two there were likely to be more and signalled the Bren gun carrier crew to spray the covered veranda while I crossed the yard to the farmhouse door. All the plants hanging from the veranda plummeted to the ground. I sprinted across and fired my Sten gun, although all I could see through a window was a shadow. I discovered later that the shadow was caused by the sun shining on the brass dial of a magnificent grandfather clock which lay before me in ruins. This had been an unnecessary act on impulse by me, and I had made a point of remembering it for the next patrol.

The next patrol in any case was a recce, not a fighting patrol. We were ordered to collect information and prisoners. On a recce time doesn’t matter so much, what is important is to move around undetected. The flavour of disadvantage or gambling had made patrols more and more necessary. Expensively gained experience had shown that tanks were virtually impotent in the orchard country. The combination of seemingly innumerable minefields and anti-tank gun emplacements made the tank a liability rather than an advantage. In any case, our tank crews had little experience of fighting in such terrain, being used to open country warfare in the North African desert. Here the tanks were sitting ducks until we had identified the location of the opposition, that factor more than anything else accounted for the fierce hand-to-hand fighting which characterised so much of the first few days of the invasion. Firstly, the fighting patrols had to eliminate the machine gun nests covering the anti-tank emplacements, and then we had to deal with the 88mm anti-tank guns themselves.

I remembered the Canadian Brigade de Chaudières to our left encountering similar problems. They were murderously carved up by the cleverly situated self-propelled 88mm anti-tank guns, the density and the depth of the deployment of shocked us all. The British and the Canadians in fact lacked the advantages of the Americans on our right who were gifted with open country ideal for tanks, and the ‘rapid dash’ tactic of General Patton.

Our opponents were the veteran 19th and 21st Panzer Divisions, they were formidable opponents and especially so in such terrain as the Normandy Bocage. The first few days were certainly difficult and it would have been far harder if not for the efforts of the 1st Airborne Division to our front, and behind enemy lines the French Partisans and the non-stop air superiority achieved by the allied air forces. I thought even then that without the combined effort that orchard country could not have been overcome. In any case, my time on the front had seen a plentiful supply of danger and confusion. Once we had pierced the frontal defences or moved into the unorthodox German front line we lived by the minute on taut nerves, instinct and fast movements. The dense, low, orchard trees hindered visibility and concealed a whole network system of head height trip wires and anti-personnel and anti-tank mines. To touch one trip wire meant triggering mines over a hundred square yard area. I saw myself a de Chaudières tank squadron demolished in this way. We learnt that thorough, patient scouting soon paid dividends, but it was clear why our tanks whose crews had acquired experience in desert warfare, depended so heavily on following rather than leading.

My mind then skipped to the last recce where I had been captured. The